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Agency, Appropriation and Rhetoric Under the Gallows: Puritans

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Agency, Appropriation and Rhetoric Under the Gallows: Puritans The Past and Present Society Agency, Appropriation and Rhetoric under the Gallows: Puritans, Romanists and the State in Early Modern England Author(s): Peter Lake and Michael Questier Source: Past & Present, No. 153 (Nov., 1996), pp. 64-107 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/651136 . Accessed: 04/09/2014 18:51 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Oxford University Press and The Past and Present Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Past &Present. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 206.87.171.161 on Thu, 4 Sep 2014 18:51:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions AGENCY,APPROPRIATION AND RHETORIC UNDER THE GALLOWS: PURITANS,ROMANISTS AND THE STATE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND The ritesand ceremoniessurrounding public execution and the "last dyingspeeches" that often attended them have become the subjectof a gooddeal of controversy of late.On theone hand,we haveJ. A. Sharpe'sdecidedly Foucauldian reading of the event as a theatreof punishment,involving not merely the inscription of the powerof the stateon the body of the felonbut also, and perhapsmore importantly, a public admission of guilt and expres- sionof repentance on thepart of the victim. Here, on thepoint of death,felons, by admittingtheir guilt, acknowledged the justice of theverdict and thelegitimacy of theauthority that was about to dispatchthem. In Foucault'swords, the victim should "consec- rate his own punishmentby proclaimingthe blacknessof his crimes".Sharpe understands the English phenomenon of the last dyingspeech as an attemptby the secularauthorities (aided by theclergy who often attended the executions, elicited the confes- sionsand sometimespublished accounts of the proceedings)to bolstertheir power through ideological means. What was at stake here,Sharpe claims, was notmerely a demonstrationthat crime did notpay, but rather a moresophisticated underpinning of that ideologicalcontrol to whichcontemporary regimes aspired.' But whereSharpe sees a species of state-sponsoredmind- control,with the criminaljustice system and the ritualsand religiousobservances attendant upon it operatingquite straight- forwardlyas ideologicalstate apparatuses, Tom Laqueur sees a genuinelypopular, carnivalesque celebration of totalinversion, leftlargely unscripted by thestate.2 The presentpaper seeks to " 1 J.A. Sharpe, 'Last DyingSpeeches': Religion, Ideology and Public Execution inSeventeenth-Century England", Past and Present, no. 107(May 1985), pp. 144-67; M. Foucault,Discipline and Punish, trans. A. Sheridan(New York, 1977), p. 66. 2 T. Laqueur,"Crowds, Carnival and the State in English Executions, 1604-1868", in A. Beier,D. Cannadineand J. Rosenheim(eds.), The FirstModern Society (Cambridge,1989), pp. 305-55;P. Lake, "Deeds againstNature: Cheap Print, Protestantismand Murder in Early Seventeenth-Century England", in K. Sharpeand P. Lake (eds.), Cultureand Politicsin Early StuartEngland (London, 1994), pp. 257-83. This content downloaded from 206.87.171.161 on Thu, 4 Sep 2014 18:51:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions PURITANS, ROMANISTS AND THE STATE 65 mediatebetween these two starkly opposed interpretations - in part by problematizingsome of the key terms("the state", "religion") in whichthey are couched. We want to do this primarilyby viewingthe processesexamined by Sharpe and Laqueur fromthe perspectiveprovided by the executionsof Catholicsfor treason. Here, where the Protestant state confronted its Romanistsubjects in themost overt and coherentideological strugglein earlymodern England, the ritesof executionwere surelyintended to operateas instrumentsof ideologicalcontrol in preciselythe way envisaged by Sharpe.But at the verypoint where,in Sharpe'smodel, a Foucauldianmonarchical power, as it torturedand destroyedits victims'bodies, either succeeded absolutelyby compelling their abject repentance and ignominious surrenderor failedabsolutely as theyrefused point-blank to participateat all, we see a farmore complex dialectic between severalcompetitive ideologies. Both Foucaultand Sharpeare quite awarethat the veryact whichexpressed sovereign authority could also generateand expressresistance to thatauthority. Execution might be intended to vindicatethe justice and powerof thestate, but it mightalso serveto glorifythe criminal. Foucault and Sharperead thisas a malfunctionof prevailingauthoritarian structures. As Foucault putsit, "in thewake of a ceremonythat inadequately channelled thepower relations it soughtto ritualize"there emerged a "mass of discourses",some of whichdetracted from the majestyof monarchicaljustice.3 But whilewe wantto stressthat the very powerfulsymbols, the social and ideologicalenergies released by therites of state violence enacted on thegallows, could be glossed and appropriatedin a varietyof differentways, we do notseek to explainthe consequentmultivocality of the eventsimply in termsof administrative weakness, the failure of the state properly to controlthe workings of its own criminal justice system. Rather, we wantto see the potentialfor a wholerange of gesturesand counter-gestures,a serious set of exchanges between state, victim and audience,as inherentin this essentiallytheatrical way of dispatchingthe felon and embodyingthe power of thestate. We arguefurther that where this conflict touched English Romanists it canno longerbe viewedthrough the paradigms of a nineteenth- centuryhagiographical tradition, nor even through the somewhat 3 Foucault,Discipline and Punish, p. 68; Sharpe,"Last DyingSpeeches", pp. 154-5. This content downloaded from 206.87.171.161 on Thu, 4 Sep 2014 18:51:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 66 PASTAND PRESENT NUMBER 153 differentperceptions of the revisionisthistoriography of post- ReformationEnglish Catholicism - in bothof which, papists are regardedsimply as the objectsof the hostileideological and physicalattentions of thestate. For theCatholic victims of state powerwere also agents,the initiatingsubjects of a strugglefor the controlof some of the centralideological, rhetorical and materialweapons mobilized by thestate against them. The aura of spiritualpower and personalcharisma that attended the last dyingspeech and thegallows conversion, together with the com- plexitiesand contradictionsinherent in the ascribedidentity of the Catholic"traitor", opened spaces for Catholicagency and speech at the verycentre of the persecutorystate which was supposedlycrushing Catholic treachery into silence and oblivion. Throughan analysiscentred on the exchangesbetween the Protestantstate and itsCatholic victims on thegallows, we hope to call into questionthe stabilityand coherenceof the terms "state", "religion"and "ideology"as theyfigure both in the argumentsof Sharpe and Laqueur and in thewider historiography of theEnglish Reformation. None of theseentities or categories was stableor monolithic.Each was continuallybeing constituted and reconstitutedin termsof the other in waysthat preclude any simpleunidirectional account of the flow of power between state, felonand religiousideology. We intendto offerhere a more complexpicture of the natureand operationsof statepower centredon theactivities of different ideological groups or fractions competingto commandand deploycommon and verypotent symbolsand tropesfor their own polemicalpurposes before a variouslyconstituted popular audience. I CATHOLICISM, RELIGION AND THE STATE The clashbetween the Protestant establishment and itsRomanist subjectsconfronts us withthe paradoxesof earlymodern state powerin theirmost extreme form. In traditionalaccounts of the riseof themodern state in earlymodern England the assault on thepapacy has playeda centralrole, and in theimmediate post- Reformationera and beyondit has now becomea commonplace thatthe great unifying Other for the English state and nationwas popery.And yet,as morerecent revisionist writing has sought to accentuatethe relative weakness and decentralizeddiversity of This content downloaded from 206.87.171.161 on Thu, 4 Sep 2014 18:51:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions PURITANS,ROMANISTS AND THE STATE 67 theEnglish polity, the residual Catholicism and conservatism of thebulk of the population has come to standas a symbolof the limitedcapacity of the stateand of elite Protestantculture (increasinglyequated by the Elizabethan authorities with civility andloyalty) to affectthe beliefs and practices of "the people".4 Therelative impunity with which Catholics, and in particular lay Catholics,went about their business, the allegedly chaotic, corrupt anduneven administration ofthe recusancy statutes, and indeed the ideologicaland politicaldisagreements and incoherences whichlay behind both the drafting and theenforcing of those laws,take us closeto thecentre of that weakness in "thestate" thathas been such a featureof recent revisionist writing on the period.And yet the gruesome deaths on the gallows visited upon manypriests reveal the sheer power and calculatedlyarbitrary violenceof which
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