Ballads and brags: free speech and recusant culture in Elizabethan England

Protestants, Puritans, Printers, and the Free Speech Principle

The 1587 Holinshed engineers a significant juxtaposition between the prosecution of Elizabethan Catholics, the trial of Campion, and another contemporary political event, one which occasioned an equal amount of governmental concern about printed opposition to official policy:

At the same sessions were brought from the Fleet, the Gatehouse,

Newgate, and the Counters, sundrie prisoners, indicted

for refusing to come to church; all which being

convicted by their owne confession, had judgement according

to the statute, to paie twentie pounds for every moneth of

such wilfull absence from the church. The first of November,

monsieur Francis duke of Anjou, the French kings brother,

and other nobles of France (having lately arrived in Kent)

came to London, and were honorably received, and retained

at the court with banqueting, and diverse pleasant shows and

pasttimes, of whom more hereafter in place convenient.

On mondaie being the twentieth of November, Edmund

Campion, Rafe Sherwin, Lucas Kerbie ... were brought unto

the high barre at Westminster....(50)

Although chronology might have determined the proximity of Monsieur and Campion in this passage, because the main description of the French visit is deferred there seems no pressing narrative need to sandwich it here between two different legal actions taken by the government against Catholics. The effect of this seemingly gratuitous juxtaposition is powerfully ironic, because it underscores that foreign policy imperatives were leading the Queen close to marriage with a Catholic duke even as Catholics on the domestic front were being defined as enemies of the English state. Since these marriage negotiations sparked a series of unwelcome written attacks from Protestants, in the early 1580s the mechanism of censorship was being used simultaneously against adversaries from opposite ends of the religious spectrum.

To what extent were the ironies of this fact widely observable by contemporary Elizabethans? In light of similar restrictions on freedom of debate experienced by both English Catholics and opponents of the Anjou marriage, did these groups, in many ways adversarial, perceive any affinity on the issue of censorship? It is true that those pressing for freedom of expression in the Elizabethan reign--Puritans, printers, Parliamentarians, and Papists--did not generally extract "intellectual principles of freedom" from their own singular claims for free expression: "their attacks were directed not against the theory underlying the restrictions but against the application of these restrictions to themselves."(51) But the absence of such statements of principle is hardly surprising given the treatment accorded those few who did express them: Peter Wentworth, for example, who claimed that only through free inquiry could "falsehood and all subtilties that should shadow and darken [Truth] be found out," wasimprisoned in the Tower for these opinions even though they were spoken in the relatively privileged venue of the House of Commons.(52)