Content provided in partnership with
Ballads and brags: free speech and recusant culture in Elizabethan England
Criticism, Summer, 1998 by Phebe Jensen
Writing to a friend in 1586, the English Catholic exile Sir Francis Englefield described the attempt to reconvert England to the old faith: "In stede therfore of the sword, which we cannot obtayne, we must fight with paper and pennes, which can not be taken from us."(1) Although the Counter-Reformation in England is usually characterized by those few dramatic episodes of violence--the Rising of the Northern Earls, the Spanish Armada, the Babington and other conspiracies to assassinate Elizabeth--which were successfully used by the government to galvanize public opposition to Catholicism, in fact the Catholic assault on England was primarily, as Englefield's letter suggests, linguistic rather than violent. Certainly the most radical fringe of the movement, the seminary priests, fought "with word & not with sword."(2) According to traditional understandings of Elizabethan attitudes toward Catholicism, we could assume that most of the Queen's subjects responded to the invasion of Catholic writings rolling secretively from mobile, hastily erected presses or smuggled from continental sources as Spenser clearly means his audience to react to the "bookes and papers" comprising the vomit of the hideous monster Error in Book I of The Faerie Queene: with instinctive loathing and disgust. We could also assume widespread popular support for the series of acts and proclamations controlling seditious speech, writing, books, and libels.
- Most Popular Articles in Arts
- Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
- Free-standing cardboard sculpture
- What makes a successful business person? Business people who are tops in ...
- Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your ...
- Tino Sehgal at the ICA
- More »
But if we analyze some of the public events that comprised this Catholic invasion along with the language of contemporary pamphlets, ballads, and polemic involved in promoting and resisting the English Counter-Reformation, a sense of deep cultural contradiction emerges. For alongside increasingly draconian attempts to control both theological and political Catholic writings was a cultural ideology that championed the idea of freedom of religious thought--including the principle that open disputation and debate was the best way to arrive at religious truth. The contradiction between practice and ideology, between censorship on the one hand and the principle of freedom of conscience on the other, is one way to understand the Elizabethan government's need to claim that it prosecuted Catholics for treason, not religion. For in the face of the powerful cultural idea that denying subjects freedom of conscience in religious matters was wrong--an idea born largely out of the Marian prosecutions of the 1550s--the government had to provide an alternative explanation for the executions of seminary priests, secular priests, and lay recusants that took place throughout the 1580s and '90s.(3)
As the outlaw publications surrounding the execution of Edmund Campion in 1582 particularly suggest, the paradoxes of a culture in which censorship is accompanied by rhetoric championing freedom of thought helped open up a conceptual space in Elizabethan culture within which could develop the principle of free speech. Such a broad claim for the political efficacy of ideas originating in Catholic practice can only be made in the wake of recent studies that have underlined "[t]he relative impunity with which Catholics went about their business, the allegedly chaotic, corrupt and uneven administration of the recusancy statutes, and indeed the ideological and political disagreements and incoherences which lay behind both the drafting and the enforcing of those laws."(4) In the light of recent scholarship, Catholicism can no longer be dismissed as "the great unifying Other for the English state and nation."(5) Rather, it must be seen as one source of the political language which comprised the "strands of thoughts, congeries of concerns, catchwords and symbols in and through which contemporaries could view, describe and shape their political experience."(6) Trained by the official rhetoric of the government, Elizabethans in the last two decades of the reign may have distrusted Catholicism, hated the pope, and despised the Jesuit seminary priests, but some of the ideas produced by the peculiar situation of recusants in England were nevertheless congenial to the broader political culture.
In words and actions, Elizabethan Catholics made the argument that they asked only the "liberty" to engage in open debate and disputation on matters of religion.(7) Especially during the events surrounding the arrival of Campion and Parsons in England in the early 1580s, Catholic writers attacked censorship, in almost Miltonic language, as an obstacle to the discovery of God's will in the world. Of course these arguments were self-interested, but they also packed a cultural punch, largely because they fed into the claims of other constituencies (some equally self-interested) urging the right of freedom of expression. As Frederich Siebert argued in 1952, Catholic pleas for freedom of "the press" circulated in Elizabethan England alongside very similar claims being made by Peter Wentworth in Parliament, by printers interested in the economic fruits of less tightly controlled printing, and by the Godly. Together the rhetoric of these groups creates, by the end of the Elizabethan reign, a cultural climate within which could flourish a widespread belief in the value of free expression.(8)
