Richard Deurden Inventing Politics How the Earliest Puritans Created Grassroots Activism House of Learning 412 (Season 4, Episode 12) OFFICIAL TRANSCRIPT Produced by the Harold B. Lee Library At Brigham Young University Thursday, April 6, 2005 INVENTING POLITICS Thank you Brian very much. And thanks to you who have come. My students know that on occasion and most of them within the last week or so are asked to take their work, share it with each other, argue about it and see what works. Well, today is my test shot and I’m here to see if these ideas hold up by submitting them to your judgment. Well, let’s start with identifying with scenario. When the tyranny and depression became unbearable a small group of devoted reformers gathered to ask what was to be done. And they chose one or two resolved and courageous young men to write a manifesto. A declaration of the ills they had suffered and the reforms that were needed. That manifesto shook the powers of England and convinced an anxious monarch and the monarch’s counsel that these zealots intended to erect a system of governing by the people. Who fits this description of whom am I speaking? Marx and Engles. Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams. Maybe? But we can go earlier and Thomas Paine, John Lilburn. Before any of these, and in a direct way their practical ancestor was the radical reformer and Elizabethan puritan John Field. This dedicated and tireless but almost unknown reformer wrote the first book to issue from a secret press in England. He stepped from prison to become the organizer and secretary of what appears to be the first concerted propaganda campaign by private individuals in England. He was the ring leader of a clam destined network which the government repeatedly tried to suppress, he helped to organize and record private country wide efforts to survey and document corruptions and the need for reform. He solicited the favor of the powerful but also of commoners. He organized petitions with parliament and appears to have helped to write legislations which friendly members of parliament could sponsor. And he went to his grave believing that the reform for which he labored would finally be put into effect not by the crown, church, or parliament, but by the people themselves. Now, political activism isn’t a novelty for people like us. This week we have seen thousands upon thousands of high school students in the streets in America, many of them not even US citizens making their voice heard about the kind of immigration reforms that they think congress should or should not enact. I myself have marched myself have marched in a lot of lust causes. If Saint Jude ever retires I am probably next in line for his job. But I digress, for us political activism is benign, safe, expected. Grass roots political agitation is a remarkable anomaly in the sixteenth century. Its sudden emergence, fully developed requires an explanation. Tutored England was not an age with rights to assemble and petition. Freedom of speech could not be guaranteed even in parliament and a private citizen who expressed criticism of the monarch could be summarily hauled to prison or worse. Legal and political theorists of the day do not write of political activism, they call it sedition. Even the most genial of them like Sir Francis Bacon. There are tutored theories of resistance, but they are theories of passive not active resistance. They envision the martyrdom, and not the success of resistors. The prevailing view is not that social change is desirable. From Ford Escue to Sir Edward Cook the prevailing view is that legal and social change is undesirable and maybe even impossible even for parliament, that’s the point of J.G.A. HAROLD B. LEE LIBRARY PRESENTS THE HOUSE OF LEARNING LECTURE SERIES 2 INVENTING POLITICS Pollock’s major work that most thinkers of the 16th and 17th centuries held that English law and social order rested on custom from time in memorial. The official ideologies or tutored England conserved the status quo. John Field and the others in his movement expressed a shift in consciousness which changes everything, and it all begins with two emergent attitudes. First, a shift from descriptive to normative views of the social order, that is a shift away from the belief that whatever is, is right, toward a sense of an ideal which the political community ought to be like. Second, Field’s work evidence is a shift in authority, and the emergence of the assumption that a private person without position could envision and organize social change. Where did they get the idea that the social order could be otherwise? And where did they get the authority that the social order changed? Both of these new attitudes came from the experience of a vanacular Bible. A Bible in English first printed and available to the English from about 1527 on left an impact on its culture not only doctrinal but also social, cultural, and yes even political. First, an English Bible provided a way of thinking otherwise and a vision of what social and ecclesiastical organization might be better. Second, scripture provided a source of authority, and over the course of the 16th century, that authority passed from the church to the monarch to the clergy and finally to the people. William Tyndale, to whom we probably owe the Bible in English not only gave his life for the translation, he foresaw the social as well as the individual impacts of moving a cultural authority like scripture out of the hands of its previous possessors and into the hands of very reader. That metaphor of possession and disappropriation is in fact explicit. In the first book he writes after publishing and English New Testament, “The obedience of a Christian man” in 1528. Insisting that the scripture is gods and there that believe and not the false prophets. By act of translation, Tyndale rests scripture from the control of the church. The next to translate the bible was Miles Coverdale, who probably had worked with William Tyndale himself and who reiterates Tyndale’s pattern marking a transfer of authority. “Rome” he says, “has lost the right of scripture through suppressing it.” His act of translation reappropriates scripture, and so he offers it to bolster the authority of the king. What enables this symbolic transfer of authority is a sense of scripture that treats it not merely as a collection of dogmas, but as a power, an agent, a cause of every good. Committing such a potent force into the care of the king symbolically empowers the king. Iconigraphically this is represented on the title page, in other words, you know about the links between, uh biblical authority and the monarchy before you have even begun to read the book. The title page to Coverdale’s bible of 1535 shows the descent of truth and of authority from God, through the old covenant and the new covenant on the left and on the right hands. And culminate in the bestowal of a Bible on or is it the bestowal of a Bible by Henry the eighth in the bottom frame, and when the bible became licensed to circulate in England, the official ideologies of monarchical power and biblical authority became even more boldly intertwined. In the great bible, the first official English bible of 1539, Henry’s crown rests quite literally on the bible. That is the central panel and there, from there, now he dispenses both to the lords of the church on the one hand and the secular lords on the other, who fulfill their duty of disseminating the doctrines of HAROLD B. LEE LIBRARY PRESENTS THE HOUSE OF LEARNING LECTURE SERIES 3 INVENTING POLITICS scripture to the populous who are organized and gathered in the bottom frame and circling if you look carefully a very slender tree upon which rests the pedestal which supports Henry’s crown. The authority that Henry receives from the bible and the tenuousness of that authority are iconigraphically represented. If scripture can authorize and empower the monarch, than why can’t it authorize the ministers of the word and give them authority even to advise monarchs. That is precisely what the most talented, the wittiest, the funniest, and perhaps one of the most dedicated preachers of the 16th century believed, that kings, emperors, magistrates are bound to obey God through scripture. And because of that, they are bound to not only to obey God’s book but also the minister of the same. In his last sermon face to face with the young king Edward the 6th, Ladimer preached “In God’s behalf I speak, there is neither king nor emperor be they never in so great a state, but they are subject to God’s word.” The implications of that are preachers are a kind of magistrate with the spiritual sword, that they are authorized to speak not only to doctrine, but also to social issues. From the ministers, that sense of scriptural authority passes finally to every reader of scripture. Bible reading instigates a sense of empowerment in its readers. It disseminates authority. John Field provides us with a locus, because the transition between the authority of the ministry and the authority of every bible reader. As a minister of the word, he assumes authority to advise the realm and he also recognizes an authority in the people which he can marshal. The cause for which field worked over 400 years ago was the further reformation of the church, especially of the church in England.