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

Some of the evidence for the claim that Catholic attacks on the curtailment of debate resonated widely in Elizabethan society have already been suggested: the Protestant ballad which urged open disputation with the Jesuits from a Protestant point of view; the anecdotal evidence of men who were appalled by the government's treatment of Campion in the Tower debates; the attempts of the government throughout the reign to create the illusion of free debate and claim the existence of freedom of conscience, despite evidence to the contrary. The possibility of solidarity between Catholics and Protestants on the issue of censorship in the 1580s is also richly suggested in the clues we have of the relationship between Sir Philip Sidney and Campion, two men who can represent the two constituencies most touched by governmental restrictions on debate in the early 1580s. Sidney almost certainly knew Campion in the 1560s and early 1570s, since Campion had been under the protection of his uncle Leicester in England and his father Sir Robert in Ireland; he also probably encounteredthe older man at Oxford, both at the state visit of Elizabeth in 1566 and when Sidney was an undergraduate and Campion one of the university's intellectual luminaries. At any rate, Sidney certainly visited Campion in Prague in 1.577 during his European tour.(53) As Katherine Duncan-Jones has observed, Sidney biographers have gone to great lengths to dismiss Campion's description of Sidney as a "wavering soul," "most eager" to hear the conversation of a Catholic. But if we loosen our grip on both the traditional image of Sidney "as a Protestant hero, whose whole life supposedly declared his commitment to the Reformed faith" and on the belief that Catholics and Protestants shared few common assumptions about politics and religion, it becomes possible to see in Sir Philip's receptivity to Campion an adherence to the principle of informed debate and disputation. As Duncan-Jones argues, Sidney's attitude toward free debate is congenial with Campion's; reared in the same academic culture, the two had had instilled in them a similar belief in "[c]hallenge and disputation, conducted on lines partly academic, partly chivalric."(54) Certainly Sidney acted in accordance with this belief when, in the early 1580s, he wrote an unpublished but widely circulated letter to the Queen objecting to the match with Anjou. Since the letter resulted in his temporary loss of favor at court and banishment to Wilton, Sidney felt firsthand the frustrations occasioned by censorship. In writing and delivering the letter, Sidney seemed to register his own belief in the importance of disputation; the visit to Campion suggests Sidney extended this belief in the value of open debate to include the views of Jesuits.

The censorship of opposition to the Anjou marriage represented restrictions on the speech of mainstream Protestants; the more radical religious reformers constituted another group whose experiences with censorship led them to denounce the Elizabethan government. In the 1570s, the controls on Catholic books inaugurated by the March 1569 Proclamation was expanded to target Puritan opposition as the government took aim against the authors of the Admonition to Parliament.(55) From this point on, Puritan printers operated as the Catholics did, using secret and often transported presses, surreptitiously distributing hastily assembled publications. In the early 1590s, by a political irony that was lost neither on the Elizabethan authorities or religious nonconformists, the participants in the Martin Marprelate affair were prosecuted under laws first enacted to hinder the publication of Catholic writings. By this time the Godly were apparently capable of expressing solidarity with recusants on theissue of freedom of thought and expression. When Morris Udall was examined in Star Chamber by Solicitor Egerton he admitted political kinship with Catholics who also claimed freedom of conscience: