CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THOMAS BILSON AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM AT PAUL’S CROSS

Ellie Gebarowski-Shafer

Attacks on Roman Catholic beliefs and practices featured widely in orally- delivered sermons, their printed versions, and associated controversial literature for several decades, beginning with John Jewel’s Challenge ser- mon of 1559.1 By the 1580s, anti-Catholicism had diminished in scale as a specific focus in Paul’s Cross sermons, yet it still featured as an occasional topic, and a frequent aside, in the common combination of doctrine, exhortation, and confutation.2 The printed text rather than the pulpit had by the 1580s become the primary medium by which to wage inter-religious warfare. By then, verbal battles at Paul’s Cross were being fought between supporters of the Elizabethan Episcopal establishment and puritans, many of them advocates of a Presbyterian form of church government. Consequently, bishops preaching from the Cross, such as Thomas Bilson Bishop of Winchester, often borrowed polemical techniques from anti- popery sermons and literature to use in arguments against their puritan opponents. Bilson does this in his 1597 Paul’s Cross sermon on Christ’s descent into hell, where he treats a contentious doctrine found in the Apostles’ Creed and disputed by many puritans with allusions to anti- Popery, even though his real opponents are radical puritans.3 There are interesting connections here as well to the Rheims New Testament contro- versy of the 1580s, with which Bilson was involved, and to revisions made

1 The Challenge sermon was delivered twice at the Cross and an additional time else- where. Indeed the best evidence of Paul’s Cross sermons comes from manuscript notes of sermons from May 1565 to 1566, of which 18 were confutational sermons, and an additional four treated anti-Catholic subjects on the side. 2 Mary Morrissey, Politics and the Paul’s Cross Sermons, 1558–1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 175. 3 See Thomas Bilson, The effect of certaine sermons touching the full redemption of man- kind by the death and bloud of Christ Iesus wherein besides the merite of Christs suffering, the manner of his offering, the power of his death, the comfort of his crosse, the glorie of his resur- rection, are handled, what paines Christ suffered in his soule on the crosse: together, with the place and purpose of his descent to hel after death: preached at Paules Crosse and else where in London, by the right Reuerend Father Thomas Bilson Bishop of Winchester. With a conclu- sion to the reader for the cleering of certaine obiections made against said doctrine (London:

290 ellie gebarowski-shafer in the King James Bible of 1611, in which he had a hand as a member of the final review committee. Thomas Bilson was born in 1547 and educated at Winchester school and New College, Oxford, where he would have been during ‘the great contro- versy’ of the 1560s.4 He became prebendary of Winchester in 1576, received his Doctor of Divinity degree in 1581, and was regarded by his student Thomas James, the first librarian at Oxford’s Bodleian Library, as ‘one of the profoundest scholars’ England had produced.5 This explains, in part, why he was chosen to serve on the final revision committee of the autho- rized King James Bible in the months leading up to its publication in 1611.6 Before becoming a bishop in the 1590s, he was involved in the Rheims New Testament controversy. This was sparked by the appearance in 1582 of the Catholic translation of the New Testament by Gregory Martin of St John’s College, Oxford then licentiate in theology at the English College at Rheims, France. Following in the Counter-Reformation tradition of Catholic polemical Bibles dating back to Luther’s early catholic oppo- nents, this version of the New Testament included not just a vernacular translation from the Latin Vulgate but also copious annotations denounc- ing Protestant heresies, alleging that false and heretical corruptions had been deliberately made in Protestant English translations of the Bible. In the same year, also from the pen of Gregory Martin, a treatise on the sub- ject was published under the title A Discoverie of the Manifold Corruptions of the Holy Scriptures by the Heretikes of our Daies.7 The Rheims New Testament and A Discoverie formed a companion set of sorts and in con- junction with the arrival of Jesuit priests in England, and Edmund

Peter Short for Walter Burre, and are to be sold in Paules Churchyard at the signe of the Flower deluce, 1599). 4 At Oxford, he received aid from the benefaction of Robert Nowell (brother of Alexander, dean of St Paul’s), made on his death in 1569. William Whitaker was another beneficiary of the Nowell trust. James McConica, ‘The Collegiate Society’, in idem (ed.), The History of the University of Oxford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), III, 725. On the ‘great controversy’ see Angela Ranson’s discussion of John Jewel’s Challenge Sermon in Chapter Eight above. 5 ‘Thomas Bilson’, ODNB, quoted by Gordon Campbell in Bible: The Story of the King James Version (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 292–3. 6 ‘He had also been too ill to serve on a translation committee,’ says Campbell, Story of the King James Version, 47, 64. 7 Gregory Martin, A discouerie of the manifold corruptions of the Holy Scriptures by the heretikes of our daies specially the English sectaries, and of their foule dealing herein, by par- tial & false translations to the aduantage of their heresies, in their English Bibles vsed and authorised since the time of schisme. By Gregory Martin one of the readers of diuinitie in the English College of Rhemes (Rheims: Iohn Fogny, 1582).