In a rare agreement Eamon Duffy and Patrick Collinson concur that the Elizabethan church failed in its mission to convert and minister to the English nation, and that “high on the list” of reasons for that failure was “the loss of confession on the catholic model without the gain of effective protestant discipline.”1 Duffy considers that both Elizabethan Protestants and Counter-Reformation Catholics were in the business of evangelization. He argues that
The decisive advantage was the harnessing of the centuries old obligations of confession into the service of a newer and more demanding style of Christian commitment. The confessional was the ultimate weapon of the Counter-Reformation, the perfect forum for the meeting and integration of routinization and the zeal of conversion, and Protestantism had nothing to rival it.2
For Duffy parochial ministry was the key to the conversion of England. He acknowledges that itinerant preaching established “islands of Protestant conviction, but without a base in parishes [it] could hardly sustain the community thereby brought into being.”3 The loss of sacramental confession meant the loss in parishes of opportunities for instruction, personal contact between penitent and priest, and local church discipline on a regular basis.
Collinson’s response to Duffy in this instance was that
The loss of confession as part of a sacrament did not necessarily mean the lack in post- Reformation England of an effective pastoral ministry, rather than simply a preaching ministry. It was, it must have been, that pastoral ministry, not expounding sermons to the empty air or to unwilling hearers, which made the Long Reformation “the howling success” which even Eamon Duffy believes it to have been.4
However, in an earlier essay he had acknowledged the deleterious effect of the loss of the sacrament on discipline:
1
Patrick Collinson, “Shepherds, Sheepdogs and Hirelings: the Pastoral Ministry in Post-Reformation England”,
Studies in Church History 26 (Oxford 1989), eds. W J Sheils and Diana Wood, p. 219.
2 Eamon Duffy, “The Long Reformation: Catholicism, Protestantism and the Multitudes”, England’s Long
Reformation, ed. N Tyacke,(London 1998), p. 64.
3
Ibid., p. 37.
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Anglican rather than Calvinist discipline was closer to coercive social control than to the genuinely pastoral and restorative cure of souls. It was capable of imposing conformity but not completing and complementing the preacher’s work of conversion.5
This was in marked contrast to discipline in the kirk in Scotland. There “public confession of sin and demonstration of repentance ... arguably became the central ritual act of protestant worship.”6 When the congregation accepted the contrition of the penitent, it absolved him and received him back into the community.7 However for Collinson the problem of discipline was more than a penitential rite or even a Calvinist consistory, it also related to how
preaching was received. He argues that
It was left to the individual and self-selecting groups to decide on the basis of general exhortation whether they were morally fit, or could be bothered, to conduct themselves as fully communicant members of the Church or not. How they responded to that challenge, and to the Gospel itself, depended upon the preacher, the effectiveness of the sermon and the response of the hearers, that variety of soils on which English exponents of the Parable of the Sower had so often commented.
He concludes that “the Parable of the Sower was not a suitable foundation on which to erect a national church.”8 Christopher Haigh has gone even further by arguing that preaching itself could be counter-productive. He argues that “godly” preaching was mainly about
predestination. This he sees as divisive and considers that it left many uncertain about their salvation. His claim is that lay people wanted pastors rather than preachers and that “the Calvinist Reformation was contained and domesticated by consumer resistance as much as by conforming bishops and Arminianizing theologians.”9
Not everyone has regarded Protestant attempts to replace the sacrament of penance as a failure. Eric Carlson responded to Haigh’s claims by stating that “godly Calvinist ministry was self-consciously pastoral and needed no prompting from the laity in this regard.”10 He credits this to the influence of Martin Bucer during his time in England, and rejects the idea of a dichotomy between preaching and pastoral ministry. He also makes the point that few sermons preached in parish churches have survived from the sixteenth century but “the evidence that exists suggests there was very little predestination in parish preaching, which
5 Collinson, “Shepherds, Sheepdogs and Hirelings”, p. 219. 6
Margo Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (Yale 2002), p. 129.
7 Ibid., p. 402.
8 Collinson, “Shepherds, Sheepdogs and Hirelings“, pp. 219-220.
9 Christopher Haigh, “The Taming of the Reformation: Preachers, Pastors and Parishioners in Elizabethan and
Early Stuart England”, History 85 (2000), p. 572.
181 was principally about repentance11. In fact as we will see preaching was principally about repentance because reformers saw it as compensation for the absence of the sacrament of confession and it was the preaching of God’s word that enabled penitents to know how their sins were forgiven. Neil Ennsle has also pointed out that in the Elizabethan church “every minister had an obligation to call parishioners to repentance of their sins”12 since, although mandatory auricular confession had been abandoned, repentance remained a gospel
imperative. Preaching was not the only means of compensating for the pastoral opportunities lost by abandoning the sacrament. Penance had been associated with teaching the faith and the gap left by the demise of the confessional was largely replaced by catechisms. Ian Green has noted the very large number of catechisms published in England in the second half of the sixteenth century. He sees this multiplicity as the product of “persistent attempts to improve new techniques of religious instruction to compensate for the loss of older techniques such as the use of visual aids and confession.”13
There is therefore no clear consensus among historians about whether the Elizabethan church created adequate substitutes for the sacrament of penance and auricular confession. This thesis argues that Carlson is right and that preaching and pastoral care frequently went hand in hand, as was seen in the ministries of Greenham and Perkins, and in this way succeeded in persuading their flocks to regard themselves as Protestants.14 It also concurs with Collinson in noting the lack of a genuinely pastoral form of discipline. Issues of preaching, pastoral ministry and discipline merit careful examination.
The wider European context for these issues is highlighted in Penitence in the Age of
Reformations, a collection of essays published in 2000. It shows that categories of discipline and consolation were present in Catholic, Lutheran and Reformed traditions revealing “the importance of continuity with the penance of the Middle Ages.”15 Katharine Lualdi
challenges John Bossy’s hypothesis that there was a fundamental move from a social to an individualised sense of sin in the West in the early modern period, by showing both Catholics and Protestants monitoring social discipline. Taken together the essays reveal, in fact, that
11 Ibid., p. 426.
12 Neil R Innsle, “Patterns of Godly Life: the Ideal Parish Ministry”, Sixteenth Century Journal 28 (1997), p.
27.
13
Ian Green, The Christian’s ABC. Catechisms and Catechising in England c.1530-1740 (Oxford 1996) p. 558.
14 Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and Their Audiences 1590-1640 (Cambridge 2010), p.
241.
15
Thomas Tentler, “Postscript”, Penitence in the Age of Reformations, eds. K J Lualdi and A T Thayer (Aldershot 2000), p. 242.
182 discipline was increasingly important across the European churches, and although the
Reformed tradition emphasised it from the start, “reformers in that tradition carried an even stricter discipline to New England”16 in the next century. In a concluding essay, Thomas Tentler shows how the rights and demands of conscience, whether in Catholic casuistry or Reformed “cases of conscience” are examples of continuity since they are “inseparable from the medieval theology and practice of auricular confession.”17 The collection, however, includes only one essay relating to the English church: “Richard Greenham’s ‘Spiritual Physicke’: the comfort of afflicted consciences in Elizabethan pastoral care.” The
examination in this chapter of Protestant penitential practices in England will look at how far the English situation confirms the Lualdi/Thayer thesis that matters of discipline were of increasing significance, and how far the English situation was distinctive.
Although some have minimised the extent of change, others have argued that the loss of auricular confession had even more deep-seated ramifications for the religious culture of Elizabethan England. The Geneva Bible (1560) frequently used and heavily annotated the phrase “afflicted conscience.”18 This “afflicted conscience” sometimes led to an obsession with self-examination and self-abasement, which became a “mental seam” running through Puritanism as part of its spiritual and cultural identity. Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales are, as a consequence, tempted to suggest that “Puritanism should be seen as one response to the Protestant abolition of the Catholic sacrament of auricular confession, since for many individuals this had proved a very effective safety valve for feelings of guilt and fear.”19 They admit that it was not only Puritans who experienced spiritual anxiety and indeed, not all Puritans experienced such a degree of mental strife. It was however
theological and pastoral attempts to deal with such problems that became known as “practical divinity.”
It is the argument of this chapter that reformed penitential teaching was conveyed through preaching, supported by catechisms and practical divinity. Other forms of communication also had an impact, such as the liturgy, metrical psalms and even religious ballads with their focus on repentance. All these played a part in eventually winning over the nation to
Protestantism. Nevertheless the lack of discipline was undoubtedly a serious problem for
16
Ibid., pp. 249, 247.
17 Ibid., p. 253.
18 Jason Yiannikkou, “Protestantism, Puritanism, and Practical Divinity in England 1570-1620 (unpublished
Cambridge Ph.D. 1999), p. 18.
19
The Culture of English Puritanism 1560-1700, eds. Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales (Basingstoke 1996), p. 13.
183 reformers. Patrick Collinson even sees “the religious plurality and secularity of modern Britain its ultimate consequence and legacy.”20 Many of the leaders of the church had been influenced by Peter Martyr or Martin Bucer at the universities. Some had experienced reform on the continent in the ministries of the likes of Bullinger and Calvin. They expected further reform to bring the English church more in line with the continental reformation. Elizabeth ensured that the reform they wanted never came.
Sacramental confession played a complex role in the social and intellectual revolutions of the sixteenth century.21 Reformers in England did not always agree on how the consolation and discipline provided by the sacrament might be replaced but they saw that something was needed. Part 1 of this chapter looks at what was lost by the rejection of the sacrament, the anxieties caused by that, and how Elizabethan Protestants, up to Hooker, considered preaching as the right replacement. This will be examined along with the practical divinity and catechisms which supplemented the preaching. It will also look at the wide range of attitudes to the replacement of the sacrament of penance held by conformists and anti- Calvinists as well as Puritans, within the Elizabethan church. Issues around penitence were common concerns, and this is a perspective on the Elizabethan church that historians have previously not considered in sufficient detail. With the rejection of the Roman penitential system, Puritans felt that the church lacked an adequate discipline, and they were not the only ones. They did not accept that the church courts met that need and their own attempts to meet it with a presbyterian system of church discipline were thwarted. Meanwhile the business of the church courts increased. While Part 1 considers Protestant penitential
thought and prescriptions for the loss of the sacrament of penance, in Part 2 the focus will be how all this worked out in the parishes and the response, as far as we can know, of the ordinary man in the pew. Consideration will be given to participation in parish life and the liturgy and whether the listening to sermons and the singing of metrical psalms may have had an impact in helping him/her see the importance of repentance and as a means of assurance of God’s forgiveness. Religious ballads, plays, and cheap print often stressed the importance of repentance and God’s providence. Since these were commercial constructs their sale suggests those who purchased them had some level of empathy with their ethos. Penitence was so much part of the church’s approach to reform and evangelism that it impacted on the wider culture.
20
Collinson, “Shepherds, Sheepdogs and Hirelings”, p. 220.
184