A Short History of Freethought, Volume 2 1 – Robertson · Library Across
Freethought · History of freethought
A Short History of Freethought, Volume 2 1The Rise of Modern Freethought—(Continued) (part 1)
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Freethought · History of freethought
A Short History of Freethought, Volume 2 1
The Rise of Modern Freethought—(Continued) (part 1)
RobertsonEnglish
§ 4. England
While France was thus passing from general fanaticism to a large measure of freethought, England was passing by a less tempestuous path to a hardly less advanced stage of opinion. It was indeed a bloody age; and in 1535 we have record of nineteen men and five women of Holland, apparently Anabaptists, who denied the "humanity" of Christ and rejected infant baptism and transubstantiation, being sentenced to be burned alive--two suffering at Smithfield, and the rest at other towns, by way of example. Others in Henry's reign suffered the same penalty for the same offence; and in 1538 a priest named Nicholson or Lambert, refusing on the King's personal pressure to recant, was "brent in Smithfield" for denying the bodily presence in the eucharist. The first decades of "Reformation" in England truly saw the opening of new vials of blood. More and Fisher and scores of lesser men died as Catholics for denying the King's "supremacy" in religion; as many more for denying the Catholic tenets which the King held to the last; and not a few by the consent of More and Fisher for translating or circulating the sacred books. Latimer, martyred under Mary, had applauded the burning of the Anabaptists. One generation slew for denial of the humanity of Christ; the next for denial of his divinity. Under Edward VI there were burned no Catholics, but several heretics, including Joan Bocher and a Dutch Unitarian, George Van Pare, described as a man of saintly life. Still the English evolution was less destructive than the French or the German, and the comparative bloodlessness of the strife between Protestant and Catholic under Mary and Elizabeth, the treatment of the Jesuit propaganda under the latter queen as a political rather than a doctrinal question, prevented any such vehemence of recoil from religious ideals as took place in France. When in 1575 the law De hæretico comburendo, which had slept for seventeen years, was set to work anew under Elizabeth, the first victims were Dutch Anabaptists. Of a congregation of them at Aldgate, twenty-seven were imprisoned, of whom ten were burned, and the rest deported. Two others, John Wielmacker and Hendrich Ter Woort, were anti-Trinitarians, and were burned accordingly. Foxe appealed to the Queen to appoint any punishment short of death, or even that of hanging, rather than the horrible death by burning; but in vain. "All parties at the time concurred" in approving the course taken. Orthodoxy was rampant.
Unbelief, as we have seen, however, there certainly was; and it is recorded that Walter, Earl of Essex, on his deathbed at Dublin in 1576, murmured that among his countrymen neither Popery nor Protestantism prevailed: "there was nothing but infidelity, infidelity, infidelity; atheism, atheism; no religion, no religion." And when we turn aside from the beaten paths of Elizabethan literature we see clearly what is partly visible from those paths--a number of freethinking variations from the norm of faith. Ascham, as we saw, found some semblance of atheism shockingly common among the travelled upper class of his day; and the testimonies continue. Edward Kirke, writing his "glosses" to Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar in 1578, observes that "it was an old opinion, and yet is continued in some men's conceit, that men of years have no fear of God at all, or not so much as younger folk," experience having made them skeptical. Erasmus, he notes, in his Adages makes the proverb "Nemo senex metuit Jovem" signify merely that "old men are far from superstition and belief in false Gods." But Kirke insists that, "his great learning notwithstanding, it is too plain to be gainsaid that old men are much more inclined to such fond fooleries than younger men," apparently meaning that elderly men in his day were commonly skeptical about divine providence.
Other writers of the day do not limit unbelief to the aged. Lilly, in his Euphues (1578), referring to England in general or Oxford in particular as Athens, asks: "Be there not many in Athens which think there is no God, no redemption, no resurrection?" Further, he complains that "it was openly reported of an old man in Naples that there was more lightness in Athens than in all Italy ... more Papists, more Atheists, more sects, more schisms, than in all the monarchies in the world"; and he proceeds to frame an absurd dialogue of "Euphues and Atheos," in which the latter, "monstrous, yet tractable to be persuaded," is converted with a burlesque facility. Lilly, who writes as a man-of-the-world believer, is a poor witness as to the atheistic arguments current; but those he cites are so much better than his own, up to the point of terrified collapse on the atheist's part, that he had doubtless heard them. The atheist speaks as a pantheist, identifying deity with the universe; and readily meets a simple appeal to Scripture with the reply that "whosoever denieth a godhead denieth also the Scriptures which testifie of him." But in one of his own plays, played in 1584, Lilly puts on the stage a glimpse of current controversy in a fashion which suggests that he had not remained so contemptuously confident of the self-evident character of theism. In Campaspe (i, 3) he introduces, undramatically enough, Plato, Aristotle, Cleanthes, Crates, and other philosophers, who converse concerning "natural causes" and "supernatural effects." Aristotle is made to confess that he "cannot by natural reason give any reason of the ebbing and flowing of the sea"; and Plato contends against Cleanthes, "searching for things which are not to be found," that "there is no man so savage in whom resteth not this divine particle, that there is an omnipotent, eternal, and divine mover, which may be called God." Cleanthes replies that "that first mover, which you term God, is the instrument of all the movings which we attribute to Nature. The earth ... seasons ... fruits ... the whole firmament ... and whatsoever else appeareth miraculous, what man almost of mean capacity but can prove it natural." Nothing is concluded, and the debate is adjourned. Anaxarchus declares: "I will take part with Aristotle, that there is Natura naturans, and yet not God"; while Crates rejoins: "And I with Plato, that there is Deus optimus maximus, and not Nature."
It is a curious dialogue to put upon the stage, by the mouth of children-actors, and the arbitrary ascription to Aristotle of high theistic views, in a scene in which he is expressly described by a fellow philosopher as a Naturalist, suggests that Lilly felt the danger of giving offence by presenting the supreme philosopher as an atheist. It is evident, however, both from Euphues and from Campaspe, that naturalistic views were in some vogue, else they had not been handled in the theatre and in a book essentially planned for the general reader. But however firmly held, they could not be directly published; and a dozen years later, over thirty years after the outburst of Ascham, we still find only a sporadic and unwritten freethought, however abundant, going at times in fear of its life.
Private discussion, indeed, there must have been, if there be any truth in Bacon's phrase that "atheists will ever be talking of that opinion, as if they ... would be glad to be strengthened by the consent of others" --an argument which would make short work of the vast literature of apologetic theism--but even private talk had need be cautious, and there could be no publication of atheistic opinions. Printed rationalism could go no further than such a protest against superstition as Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), which, however, is a sufficiently remarkable expression of reason in an age in which a Bodin held angrily by the delusion. Elizabeth was herself substantially irreligious, and preferred to keep the clergy few in number and subordinate in influence; but her Ministers regarded the Church as part of the State system, and punished all open or at least aggressive heresy in the manner of the Inquisition. Yet the imported doctrine of the subjective character of hell and heaven, taken up by Marlowe, held its ground, and is denounced by Stubbes in his Anatomie of Abuses (1583); and other foreign philosophy of the same order found religious acceptance. A sect called the "Family of Love," deriving from Holland (already "a country fruitfull of heretics"), went so far as to hold that "Christ doth not signify any one person, but a quality whereof many are partakers"--a doctrine which we have seen ascribed by Calvin to the libertins of Geneva a generation before; but it does not appear that they were persecuted. Some isolated propagandists, however, paid the last penalty. One Matthew Hamont or Hamond, a ploughwright, of Hetherset, was in 1579 tried by the Bishop and Consistory of Norwich "for that he denyed Christe," and, being found guilty, was burned, after having had his ears cut off, "because he spake wordes of blasphemie against the Queen's Maiistie and others of her Counsell." The victim would thus seem to have been given to violence of speech; but the record of his negations, which suggest developments from the Anabaptist movement, is none the less notable. In Stow's wording, they run:--
"That the newe Testament and Gospell of Christe are but mere foolishnesse, a storie of menne, or rather a mere fable.
"Item, that man is restored to grace by the meere mercy of God, wythout the meane of Christ's bloud, death, and passion.
"Item, that Christe is not God, nor the Saviour of the world, but a meere man, a sinfull man, and an abhominable Idoll.
"Item, that al they that worshippe him are abhominable Idolaters; And that Christe did not rise agayne from death to life by the power of his Godhead, neither, that hee did ascende into Heaven.
"Item, that the holy Ghoste is not God, neither that there is any suche holy Ghoste.
"Item, that Baptisme is not necessarie in the Churche of God, neither the use of the sacrament of the body and bloude of Christ."
There is record also of a freethinker named John Lewes burned at the same place in 1583 for "denying the Godhead of Christ, and holding other detestable heresies," in the manner of Hamond. In the same year Elias Thacker and John Coping were hanged at St. Edmonsbury "for spreading certaine bookes, seditiously penned by one Robert Browne against the Booke of Common Prayer"; and "their bookes so many as could be found were burnt before them." Further, one Peter Cole, an Ipswich tanner, was burned in 1587 (also at Norwich) for similar doctrine; and Francis Kett, a young clergyman, ex-fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, was burned at the same place in 1589 for heresy of the Unitarian order. Hamond and Cole seem, however, to have been in their own way religious men, and Kett a devout mystic, with ideas of a Second Advent. All founded on the Bible.
Most surprising of all perhaps is the record of the trial of one John Hilton, clerk in holy orders, before the Upper House of Convocation on December 22, 1584, on the charge of having "said in a sermon at St. Martin's-in-the-Fields that the Old and New Testaments are but fables." (Lansdowne MSS. British Museum, No. 982, fol. 46, cited by Prof. Storojenko, Life of Robert Greene, Eng. tr. in Grosart's "Huth Library" ed. of Greene's Works, i, 39, note.) As Hilton confessed to the charge and made abjuration, it may be surmised that he had spoken under the influence of liquor. Even on that view, however, such an episode tells of a considerable currency of unbelieving criticism.
Apart from constructive heresy, the perpetual religious dissensions of the time were sure to stimulate doubt; and there appeared quite a number of treatises directed wholly or partly against explicit unbelief, as: The Faith of the Church Militant, translated from the Latin of the Danish divine Hemming (1581), and addressed "to the confutation of the Jewes, Turks, Atheists, Papists, Hereticks, and all other adversaries of the truth whatsoever"; "The Touchstone of True Religion ... against the impietie of Atheists, Epicures, Libertines, Hippocrites, and Temporisours of these times" (1590); An Enemie to Atheisme, translated by T. Rogers from the Latin of Avenar (1591); the preacher Henry Smith's God's Arrow against Atheists (1593, rep. 1611); an English translation of the second volume of La Primaudaye's L'Académie Française, containing a refutation of atheistic doctrine; and no fewer than three "Treatises of the Nature of God"--all anonymous, the third known to be by Bishop Thomas Morton--all appearing in the year 1599.
All this smoke--eight apologetic treatises in eighteen years--implies some fire; and the translator of La Primaudaye, one "T. B.," declares in his dedication that there has been a general growth of atheism in England and on the continent, which he traces to "that Monster Machiavell." Among English atheists of that school he ranks the dramatist Robert Greene, who had died in 1592; and it has been argued, not quite convincingly, that it was to Machiavelli that Greene had pointed, in his death-bed recantation A Groatsworth of Wit (1592), as the atheistic instructor of his friend Marlowe, who introduces "Machiavel" as cynical prologist to his Jew of Malta. Greene's own "atheism" had been for the most part a matter of bluster and disorderly living; and we find his zealously orthodox friend Thomas Nashe, in his Strange News (1592), calling the Puritan zealot who used the pseudonym of Martin Marprelate "a mighty platformer of atheism"; even as his own and Greene's enemy, Gabriel Harvey, called Nashe an atheist. But Nashe in his Christ's Tears over Jerusalem (1592), though he speaks characteristically of the "atheistical Julian," discusses contemporary atheism in a fashion descriptive of an actual growth of the opinion, concerning which he alleges that there is no "sect now in England so scattered [i.e., so widely spread] as atheisme." The "outward atheist," he declares, "establishes reason as his God"; and he offers some sufficiently primitive arguments by way of confutation. "They follow the Pironicks [i.e., Pyrrhonists], whose position and opinion it is that there is no hell or misery but opinion. Impudently they persist in it, that the late discovered Indians show antiquities thousands before Adam." For the rest, they not only reject the miracles of Moses as mere natural expedients misrepresented, but treat the whole Bible as "some late writers of our side" treat the Apocrypha. And Nashe complains feelingly that while the atheists "are special men of wit," and that "the Romish seminaries have not allured unto them so many good wits as atheism," the preachers who reply to them are men of dull understanding, the product of a system under which preferment is given to graduates on the score not of capacity but of mere gravity and solemnity. "It is the superabundance of wit," declares Nashe, "that makes atheists: will you then hope to beat them down with fusty brown-bread dorbellism?" There had arisen, in short, a ferment of rationalism which was henceforth never to disappear from English life.
In 1593, indeed, we find atheism formally charged against two famous men, Christopher Marlowe and Sir Walter Raleigh, of whom the first is documentarily connected with Kett, and the second in turn with Marlowe. An official document, preserved by some chance, reveals that Marlowe was given--whether or not over the wine-cup--to singularly audacious derision of the received beliefs; and so explicit is the evidence that it is nearly certain he would have been executed for blasphemy had he not been privately killed (1593) while the proceedings were pending. The "atheism" imputed to him is not made out in any detail; but many of the other utterances are notably in keeping with Marlowe's daring temper; and they amount to unbelief of a stringent kind. In Doctor Faustus he makes Mephistopheles affirm that "Hell hath no limits ... but where we are is hell"--a doctrine which we have seen to be current before his time; and in his private talk he had gone much further. Nashe doubtless had him in mind when he spoke of men of "superabundance of wit." Not only did he question, with Raleigh, the Biblical chronology: he affirmed "That Moyses was but a juggler, and that one Heriots" [i.e., Thomas Harriott, or Harriots, the astronomer, one of Raleigh's circle] "can do more than he"; and concerning Jesus he used language incomparably more offensive to orthodox feeling than that of Hamond and Kett. There is more in all this than a mere assimilation of Machiavelli; though the further saying "that the first beginning of religion was only to keep men in awe"--put also by Greene [if not by Marlowe], with much force of versification, in the mouth of a villain-hero in the anonymous play of Selimus --tells of that influence. Marlowe was indeed not the man to swear by any master without adding something of his own. Atheism, however, is not inferrible from any of his works: on the contrary, in the second part of his famous first play he makes his hero, described by the repentant Greene as the "atheist Tamburlaine," declaim of deity with signal eloquence, though with a pantheistic cast of phrase. In another passage, a Moslem personage claims to be on the side of a Christ who would punish perjury; and in yet another the hero is made to trample under foot the pretensions of Mohammed. It was probably his imputation of perjury to Christian rulers in particular that earned for Marlowe the malignant resentment which inspired the various edifying comments published after his unedifying death. Had he not perished as he did in a tavern brawl, he might have had the nobler fate of a martyr.
Concerning Raleigh, again, there is no shadow of proof of atheism, though his circle, which included the Earls of Northumberland and Oxford, was called a "school of atheism" in a Latin pamphlet by the Jesuit Parsons, published at Rome in 1593; and this reputation clung to him. It is matter of literary history, however, that he, like Montaigne, had been influenced by the Hypotyposes of Sextus Empiricus; his short essay The Sceptick being a naïf exposition of the thesis that "the sceptick doth neither affirm neither deny any position; but doubteth of it, and applyeth his Reason against that which is affirmed, or denied, to justifie his non-consenting." The essay itself, nevertheless, proceeds upon a set of wildly false propositions in natural history, concerning which the adventurous reasoner has no doubts whatever; and altogether we may be sure that his artificial skepticism did not carry him far in philosophy. In the Discovery of Guiana (1600) he declares that he is "resolved" of the truth of the stories of men whose heads grow beneath their shoulders; and in his History of the World (1603-16) he insists that the stars and other celestial bodies "incline the will by mediation of the sensitive appetite." In other directions, however, he was less credulous. In the same History he points out, as Marlowe had done in talk, how incompatible was such a phenomenon as the mature civilization of ancient Egypt in the days of Abraham with the orthodox chronology. This, indeed, was heresy enough, then and later, seeing that not only did Bishop Pearson, in 1659, in a work on The Creed which has been circulated down to the nineteenth century, indignantly denounce all who departed from the figures in the margin of the Bible; but Coleridge, a century and a half later, took the very instance of Egyptian history as triumphantly establishing the accuracy of the Bible record against the French atheists. As regards Raleigh's philosophy, the evidence goes to show only that he was ready to read a Unitarian essay, presumably that already mentioned, supposed to be Kett's; and that he had intercourse with Marlowe and others (in particular his secretary, Harriott) known to be freethinkers. A prosecution begun against him on this score, at the time of the inquiry concerning Marlowe (when Raleigh was in disgrace with the Queen), came to nothing. It had been led up to by a translation of Parsons's pamphlet, which affirmed that his private group was known as "Sir Walter Rawley's school of Atheisme," and that therein "both Moyses and our Savior, the Old and the New Testaments, are jested at, and the scholars taught among other things to spell God backwards." This seems to have been idle gossip, though it tells of unbelief somewhere; and Raleigh's own writings always indicate belief in the Bible; though his dying speech and epitaph are noticeably deistic. That he was a deist, given to free discussion, seems the probable truth.
In passing sentence at the close of Raleigh's trial for treason in 1603, in which his guilt is at least no clearer than the inequity of the proceedings, Lord Chief Justice Popham unscrupulously taunted him with his reputation for heresy. "You have been taxed by the world with the defence of the most heathenish and blasphemous opinions, which I list not to repeat, because Christian ears cannot endure to hear them, nor the authors and maintainers of them be suffered to live in any Christian commonwealth. You know what men said of Harpool." If the preface to his History of the World, written in the Tower, be authentic, Raleigh was at due pains to make clear his belief in deity, and to repudiate alike atheism and pantheism. "I do also account it," he declares, "an impiety monstrous, to confound God and Nature, be it but in terms." And he is no more tolerant than his judge when he discusses the question of the eternity of the universe, then the crucial issue as between orthodoxy and doubt. "Whosoever will make choice rather to believe in eternal deformity [=want of form] or in eternal dead matter, than in eternal light and eternal life, let eternal death be his reward. For it is a madness of that kind, as wanteth terms to express it." Inasmuch as Aristotle was the great authority for the denounced opinion, Raleigh is anti-Aristotelean. "I shall never be persuaded that God hath shut up all light of learning within the lantern of Aristotle's brains." But in the whole preface there is only one, and that a conventional, expression of belief in the Christian dogma of salvation; and as to that we may note his own words: "We are all in effect become comedians in religion." Still, untruthful as he certainly was, we may take him as a convinced theist of the experiential school, standing at the ordinary position of the deists of the next century.
Notably enough, he anticipates the critical position of Hume as to reason and experience: "That these and these be the causes of these and these effects, time hath taught us and not reason; and so hath experience without art." Such utterance, if not connected with professions of piety, might in those days give rise to such charges of unbelief as were so freely cast at him. But the charges seem to have been in large part mere expressions of the malignity which religion so normally fosters, and which can seldom have been more bitter than then. Raleigh is no admirable type of rectitude; but he can hardly have been a worse man than his orthodox enemies. And we must estimate such men in full view of the low standards of their age.
The belief about Raleigh's atheism was so strong that we have Archbishop Abbot writing to Sir Thomas Roe on Feb. 19, 1618-1619, that Raleigh's end was due to his "questioning" of "God's being and omnipotence." It is asserted by Francis Osborn, who had known Raleigh, that he got his title of Atheist from Queen Elizabeth. See the preface (Author to Reader) to Osborn's Miscellany of Sundry Essays, etc., in 7th ed. of his Works, 1673. As to atheism at Elizabeth's court see J. J. Tayler, Retrospect of Relig. Life of England, 2nd ed. p. 198, and ref. Lilly makes one of his characters write of the ladies at court that "they never jar about matters of religion, because they never mean to reason of them" (Euphues, Arber's ed. p. 194).
A curious use was made of Raleigh's name and fame after his death for various purposes. In 1620 or 1621 appeared "Vox Spiritus, or Sir Walter Rawleigh's Ghost; a Conference between Signr. Gondamier ... and Father Bauldwine"--a "seditious" tract by one Captain Gainsford. It appears to have been reprinted in 1622 as "Prosopoeia. Sir Walter Rawleigh's Ghost." Then in 1626 came a new treatise, "Sir Walter Rawleigh's Ghost, or England's Forewarner," published in 1626 at Utrecht by Thomas Scott, an English minister there, who was assassinated in the same year. The title having thus had vogue, there was published in 1631 "Rawleigh's Ghost, or, a Feigned Apparition of Syr Walter Rawleigh to a friend of his, for the translating into English the Booke of Leonard Lessius (that most learned man), entituled De Providentia Numinis et animi immortalitate, written against the Atheists and Polititians of these days." The translation of a Jesuit's treatise (1613) thus accredited purports to be by "A. B." In a reprint of 1651 the "feigned" disappears from the title-page; but "Sir Walter Rawleigh's Ghost" remains to attract readers; and the translation, now purporting to be by John Holden, who claims to have been a friend of Raleigh's, is dedicated to his son Carew. In the preface the Ghost adjures the translator (who professes to have heard him frequently praise the treatise of Lessius) to translate the work with Raleigh's name on the title, so as to clear his memory of "a foul and most unjust aspersion of me for my presumed denial of a deity."
The latest documentary evidence as to the case of Marlowe is produced by Mr. F. S. Boas in his article, "New Light on Marlowe and Kyd," in the Fortnightly Review, February, 1899, reproduced in his edition of the works of Thomas Kyd (Clarendon Press, 1901). In addition to the formerly known data as to Marlowe's "atheism," it is now established that Thomas Kyd, his fellow dramatist, was arrested on the same charge, and that there was found among his papers one containing "vile hereticall conceiptes denyinge the divinity of Jhesus Christe our Saviour." This Kyd declared he had had from Marlowe, denying all sympathy with its view. Nevertheless, he was put to the torture. The paper, however, proves to be a vehement Unitarian argument on Scriptural grounds, and is much more likely to have been written by Francis Kett than by Marlowe. In the MSS. now brought to light, one Cholmeley, who "confessed that he was persuaded by Marlowe's reasons to become an Atheiste," is represented by a spy as speaking "all evil of the Counsell, saying that they are all Atheistes and Machiavillians, especially my Lord Admirall." The same "atheist," who imputes atheism to others as a vice, is described as regretting he had not killed the Lord Treasurer, "sayenge that he could never have done God better service."
For the rest, the same spy tells that Cholmeley believed Marlowe was "able to shewe more sound reasons for Atheisme than any devine in Englande is able to geve to prove devinitie, and that Marloe told him that he hath read the Atheist lecture to Sir Walter Raleigh and others." On the last point there is no further evidence, save that Sir Walter, his dependent Thomas Harriott, and Mr. Carewe Rawley, were on March 21, 1593-1594, charged upon sworn testimonies with holding "impious opinions concerning God and Providence." There was, however, no prosecution. Harriott had published in 1588 a work on his travels in Virginia, at the close of which is a passage in the devoutest vein telling of his missionary labours (quoted by Mr. Boas, art. cited, p. 225). Yet by 1592 he had, with his master, a reputation for atheism; and that it was not wholly on the strength of his great scientific knowledge is suggested by the statement of Anthony à Wood that he "made a philosophical theology, wherein he cast off the Old Testament."
Of this no trace remains; but it is established that he was a highly accomplished mathematician, much admired by Kepler; and that he "applied the telescope to celestial purposes almost simultaneously with Galileo" (art. Harriott in Dict. of Nat. Biog.; cp. art. in Encyc. Brit.). "Harriott ... was the first who dared to say A=B in the form A - B = 0, one of the greatest sources of progress ever opened in algebra" (Prof. A. De Morgan, Newton, his Friend and his Niece, 1885, p. 91). Further, he improved algebraic notation by the use of small italic letters in place of Roman capitals, and threw out the hypothesis of secondary planets as well as of stars invisible from their size and distance. "He was the first to verify the results of Galileo." Rev. Baden Powell, Hist. of Nat. Philos. 1834, pp. 126, 168. Cp. Rigaud, as cited by Powell; Ellis's notes on Bacon, in Routledge's 1-vol. ed. 1905, pp. 674-76; and Storojenko, as above cited, p. 38, note.
Against the aspersion of Harriott at Raleigh's trial may be cited the high panegyric of Chapman, who terms him "my admired and soul-loved friend, master of all essential and true knowledge," and one "whose judgment and knowledge, in all kinds, I know to be incomparable and bottomless, yea, to be admired as much as his most blameless life, and the right sacred expense of his time, is to be honoured and reverenced"; with a further "affirmation of his clear unmatchedness in all manner of learning."
The frequency of such traces of rationalism at this period is to be understood in the light of the financial and other scandals of the Reformation; the bitter strifes of Church and dissent; and the horrors of the wars of religion in France, concerning which Bacon remarks in his essay Of Unity in Religion that the spectacle would have made Lucretius "seven times more Epicure and atheist than he was." The proceedings against Raleigh and Kyd, accordingly, did not check the spread of the private avowal of unbelief. A few years later we find Hooker, in the Fifth Book of his Ecclesiastical Polity (1597), bitterly declaring that the unbelievers in the higher tenets of religion are much strengthened by the strifes of believers; as a dozen years earlier Bishop Pilkington told of "young whelps" who "in corners make themselves merry with railing and scoffing at the holy scriptures." And in the Treatise of the Nature of God, by Bishop Thomas Morton (1599), a quasi-dialogue in which the arguing is all on one side, the passive interlocutor indicates, in the process of repudiating them, a full acquaintance with the pleas of those who "would openly profess themselves to be of that [the atheistic] judgment, and as far as they might without danger defend it by argument against any whatever." The pleas include the lack of moral control in the world, the evidences of natural causation, the varieties of religious belief, and the contradictions of Scripture. And such atheists, we are told, "make nature their God."
From Hooker's account also it is clear that, at least with comparatively patient clerics like himself, the freethinkers would at times deliberately press the question of theism, and avow the conviction that belief in God was "a kind of harmless error, bred and confirmed by the sleights of wiser men." He further notes with even greater bitterness that some--an "execrable crew"--who were themselves unbelievers, would in the old pagan manner argue for the fostering of religion as a matter of State policy, herein conning the lesson of Machiavelli. For his own part Hooker was confessedly ill-prepared to debate with the atheists, and his attitude was not fitted to shake their opinions. His one resource is the inevitable plea that atheists are such for the sake of throwing off all moral restraint --a theorem which could hardly be taken seriously by those who knew the history of the English and French aristocracies, Protestant and Catholic, for the past hundred years. Hooker's own measure of rationalism, though remarkable as compared with previous orthodoxy, went no further than the application of the argument of Pecock that reason must guide and control all resort to Scripture and authority; and he came to it under stress of dispute, as a principle of accommodation for warring believers, not as an expression of any independent skepticism. When his pious antagonist Travers cited him as saying that "his best author was his own reason" he was prompt to reply that he meant "true, sound, divine reason; ... reason proper to that science whereby the things of God are known; theological reason, which out of principles in Scripture that are plain, soundly deduceth more doubtful inferences." Of the application of rational criticism to Scriptural claims he had no idea. The unbelievers of his day were for him a frightful portent, menacing all his plans of orthodox toleration; and he would have had them put down by force--a course which in some cases, as we have seen, had in that age been actually taken, and was always apt to be resorted to. But orthodoxy all the while had a sure support in the social and political conditions which made impossible the publication of rationalistic opinions. While the whole machinery of public doctrine remained in religious hands or under ecclesiastical control, the mass of men of all grades inevitably held by the traditional faith. What is remarkable is the amount of unbelief, either privately explicit or implicit in the higher literature, of which we have trace.
Above all there remains the great illustration of the rationalistic spirit of the English literary renascence of the sixteenth century--the drama of Shakespeare. Of that it may confidently be said that every attempt to find for it a religious foundation has failed. Gervinus, while oddly suggesting that "in not only not seeking a reference to religion in his works, but in systematically avoiding it even when opportunity offered," Shakespeare was keeping clear of an embroilment with the clergy, nevertheless pronounces the plays to be wholly secular in spirit. While contending that "in action the religious and divine in man is nothing else than the moral," the German critic admits that Shakespeare "wholly discarded from his works ... that which religion enjoins as to faith and opinion." And, while refusing the inference of positive unbelief on the poet's part, he pronounces that, "Just as Bacon banished religion from science, so did Shakespeare from art.... From Bacon's example it seems clear that Shakespeare left religious matters unnoticed on the same grounds." The latest and weightiest criticism comes to the same conclusion; and it is only on presupposition that any other can be reached. One of the ablest of Shakespearean critics sums up that "the Elizabethan drama was almost wholly secular; and while Shakespeare was writing he practically confined his view to the world of non-theological observation and thought, so that he represents it in substantially one and the same way whether the period of the story is pre-Christian or Christian."
[Prof. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 2nd ed. p. 25. In the concluding pages of his lecture on Hamlet, Professor Bradley slightly modifies this statement, suggesting that the ghost is made to appear as "the representative of the hidden ultimate power, the messenger of divine justice" (p. 174). Here, it seems to the present writer, Professor Bradley obtrudes the chief error of his admirable book--the constant implication that Shakespeare planned his plays as moral wholes. The fact is that he found the ghost an integral part of the old play which he rewrote; and in making it, in Professor Bradley's words, "so majestical a phantom," he was simply heightening the character as he does others in the play, and as was his habit in the presentment of a king. In his volume of lectures entitled Oxford Lectures on Poetry (1909), Professor Bradley goes more fully into the problem of Shakespeare's religion. Here he somewhat needlessly obscures the issue by contending (p. 349) that it is preposterous to suppose that Shakespeare was "an ardent and devoted atheist or Brownist or Roman Catholic," and makes the most of the poet's sympathetic treatment of religious types and religious sentiments; but still sums up that he "was not, in the distinctive sense of the word, a religious man," and that "all was, for him, in the end, mystery" (p. 353).]
This perhaps somewhat understates the case. The Elizabethan drama was not wholly secular; and certainly the dramatists individually were not. Peele's David and Bethsabe is wholly Biblical in theme, and, though sensual in sentiment, substantially orthodox in spirit; and elsewhere he has many passages of Protestant and propagandist fervour. Greene and Lodge give a highly Scriptural ring to their Looking-Glass for London; and Lodge, who uses religious expressions freely in his early treatise, A Defence of Poetry, Music, and Stage Plays, later translated Josephus. Kyd in Arden of Feversham accepts the Christian view at the close, though The Spanish Tragedy is pagan; and the pre-Shakespearean King Leir and his Three Daughters (1594), probably the work of Kyd and Lodge, has long passages of specifically Christian sentiment. Nashe, again, was a hot religious controversialist despite his Bohemian habits and his indecorous vein; Greene on his repentant deathbed was profusedly censorious of atheism; Lilly, as we have seen, is combatively theistic in his Campaspe; while Jonson, as we shall see, girds at skeptics in Volpone and The Magnetick Lady, and further wrote a quantity of devotional verse. Even the "atheist" Marlowe, as we saw, puts theistic sentiment into the mouth of his "atheist Tamburlaine"; and of Doctor Faustus, despite incidental heresy, the dénouement is religiously orthodox. Thomas Heywood may even be pronounced a religious man, as he was certainly a strong Protestant, though an anti-Puritan; and his prose treatise The Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels (1635) exhibits a religious temperament. The same may be said of Dekker, who is recorded to have written at least the prologue and the epilogue for a play on Pontius Pilate, and is believed to be the author of the best scenes in The Virgin Martyr, in which he collaborated with Massinger. He too uses supererogatory religious expressions, and shows his warm Protestantism in The Whore of Babylon, as he does his general religious sentiment in his treatise The Seven Deadly Sins. Chapman was certainly a devout theist, and probably a Christian. In the "domestic" tragedy, A Warning for Fair Women (1599), which is conjecturally ascribed to Lodge, the conclusion is on Christian lines, as in Arden; and the same holds of The Witch of Edmonton, by Dekker and others. Of none of these dramatists could it be said, on the mere strength of his work, that he was "agnostic," though Marlowe was certainly a freethinker. The others were, first or last, avowedly religious. Shakespeare, and Shakespeare alone, after Marlowe, is persistently non-religious in his handling of life. Lear, his darkest tragedy, is predominantly pagan; and The Tempest, in its serener vein, is no less so. But indeed all the genuine plays alike ignore or tacitly negate the idea of immortality; even the conventional religious phrases of Macbeth being but incidental poetry.
In the words of a clerical historian, "the religious phrases which are thinly scattered over his work are little more than expressions of a distant and imaginative reverence. And on the deeper grounds of religious faith his silence is significant.... The riddle of life and death ... he leaves ... a riddle to the last, without heeding the common theological solutions around him." The practical wisdom in which he rose above his rivals no less than in dramatic and poetic genius, kept him prudently reticent on his opinions, as it set him upon building his worldly fortunes while the others with hardly an exception lived in shallows and miseries. As so often happens, it was among the ill-balanced types that there was found the heedless courage to cry aloud what others thought; but Shakespeare's significant silence reminds us that the largest spirits of all could live in disregard of contemporary creeds. For, while there is no record of his having privately avowed unbelief, and certainly no explicit utterance of it in his plays, in no genuine work of his is there any more than bare dramatic conformity to current habits of religious speech; and there is often significantly less. In Measure for Measure the Duke, counselling as a friar the condemned Claudio, discusses the ultimate issues of life and death without a hint of Christian credence.
So silent is the dramatist on the ecclesiastical issues of his day that Protestants and Catholics are enabled to go on indefinitely claiming him as theirs; the latter dwelling on his generally kindly treatment of friars; the former citing the fact that some Protestant preacher--evidently a protégé of his daughter Susannah--was allowed lodging at his house. But the preacher was not very hospitably treated; and other clues fail. There is good reason to think that Shakespeare was much influenced by Montaigne's Essays, read by him in Florio's translation, which was issued when he was recasting the old Hamlet; and the whole treatment of life in the great tragedies and serious comedies produced by him from that time forward is even more definitely untheological than Montaigne's own doctrine. Nor can he be supposed to have disregarded the current disputes as to fundamental beliefs, implicating as they did his fellow-dramatists Marlowe, Kyd, and Greene. The treatise of De Mornay, of which Sir Philip Sidney began and Arthur Golding finished the translation, was in his time widely circulated in England; and its very inadequate argumentation might well strengthen in him the anti-theological leaning.
A serious misconception has been set up as to Shakespeare's cast of mind by the persistence of editors in including among his works without discrimination plays which are certainly not his, as the Henry VI group, to which he contributed little, and in particular the First Part, of which he wrote probably nothing. It is on the assumption that that play is Shakespeare's work that Lecky (Rationalism in Europe, ed. 1887, i, 105-106) speaks of "that melancholy picture of Joan of Arc which is perhaps the darkest blot upon his genius." Now, whatever passages Shakespeare may have contributed to the Second and Third Parts, it is certain that he has barely a scene in the First, and that there is not a line from his hand in the La Pucelle scenes. Many students think that Dr. Furnivall has even gone too far in saying that "the only part ... to be put down to Shakespeare is the Temple Garden scene of the red and white roses" (Introd. to Leopold Shakespeare, p. xxxviii); so little is there to suggest even the juvenile Shakespeare there. (The high proportion of double-endings is a ground for reckoning it a late sample of Marlowe, who in his posthumously published translation of Lucan had approached that proportion. Cp. the author's vol. on Titus Andronicus, p. 190.) But that any critical and qualified reader can still hold him to have written the worst of the play is unintelligible. The whole work would be a "blot on his genius" in respect of its literary weakness. The doubt was raised long before Lecky wrote, and was made good a generation ago. When Lecky further proceeds, with reference to the witches in Macbeth, to say (id. note) that it is "probable that Shakespeare ... believed with an unfaltering faith in the reality of witchcraft," he strangely misreads that play. Nothing is clearer than that it grounds Macbeth's action from the first in Macbeth's own character and his wife's, employing the witch machinery (already used by Middleton) to meet the popular taste, but never once making the witches really causal forces. An "unfaltering" believer in witchcraft who wrote for the stage would surely have turned it to serious account in other tragedies. This Shakespeare never does. On Lecky's view, he is to be held as having believed in the fairy magic of the Midsummer Night's Dream and the Tempest, and in the actuality of such episodes as that of the ghost in Macbeth. But who for a moment supposes him to have had any such belief? It is probable that the entire undertaking of Macbeth (1605?) and later of the Tempest (1610?) was due to a wish on the part of the theatre management to please King James, whose belief in witchcraft and magic was notorious. Even the use of the Ghost in Hamlet is an old stage expedient, common to the pre-Shakespearean play and to others of Kyd's and Peele's. Shakespeare significantly altered the dying words of Hamlet from the "heaven receive my soul" of the old version to "the rest is silence." The bequest of his soul to the Deity in his will is merely the regulation testamentary formula of the time. In his sonnets, which hint his personal cast if anything does, there is no real trace of religious creed or feeling. And it is clearly the hand of Fletcher, a no less sensual writer than Peele, that penned the part of Henry VIII in which occurs the Protestant tag: "In her [Elizabeth's] days ... God shall be truly known."
While, however, Shakespeare is notably naturalistic as compared with the other Elizabethan dramatists, it remains true that their work in the mass tells little of a habitually religious way of thinking. Apart from the plays above named, and from polemic passages and devotional utterances outside their plays, they hint as little of Christian dogma as of Christian asceticism. Hence, in fact, the general and bitter hostility of the Puritans to the stage. Even at and after Shakespeare's death, the drama is substantially "graceless." Jonson, who was for a time a Catholic, but reverted to the Church of England, disliked the Puritans, and in Bartholomew Fair derides them. The age did not admit of a pietistic drama; and when there was a powerful pietistic public, it made an end of drama altogether. To Elizabeth's reign probably belongs the Atheist's Tragedy of Cyril Tourneur, first published in 1611, but evidently written in its author's early youth--a coarse and worthless performance, full of extremely bad imitations of Shakespeare. But to the age of Elizabeth also belongs, perhaps, the sententious tragedy of Mustapha by Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, first surreptitiously published in 1609. A century and a half later the deists were fond of quoting the concluding Chorus Sacerdotum, beginning:
O wearisome condition of humanity,
Born under one law, to another bound;
Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity;
Created sick, commanded to be sound:
If nature did not take delight in blood,
She would have made more easy ways to good.
It is natural to suspect that the author of such lines was less orthodox than his own day had reputed him; and yet the whole of his work shows him much pre-occupied with religion, though perhaps in a deistic spirit. But Brooke's introspective and undramatic poetry is an exception: the prevailing colour of the whole drama of the Shakespearean period is pre-Puritan and semi-pagan; and the theological spirit of the next generation, intensified by King James, was recognized by cultured foreigners as a change for the worse. The spirit of free learning for the time was gone, expelled by theological rancours; and when Selden ventured in his History of Tythes (1618) to apply the method of dispassionate historical criticism to ecclesiastical matters he was compelled to make a formal retractation. Early Protestants had attacked, as a papal superstition, the doctrine that tithes were levied jure divino: Protestants had now come to regard as atheistic the hint that tithes were levied otherwise.
Not that rationalism became extinct. The "Italianate" incredulity as to a future state, which Sir John Davies had sought to repel by his poem, Nosce Teipsum (1599), can hardly have been overthrown even by that remarkable production, which in the usual orthodox way pronounces all doubters to be "light and vicious persons," who, "though they would, cannot quite be beasts." And there were other forms of doubt. In 1602 appeared The Unmasking of the Politique Atheist, by J. H. [John Hull], Batchelor of Divinitie, which, however, is in the main a mere attempt to retort upon Catholics the charge of atheism laid by them against Protestants. Soon after, in 1605, we find Dr. John Dove producing a Confutation of Atheisme in the manner of previous continental treatises, making the word "atheism" cover many shades of theism; and an essayist writing in 1608 asserts that, on account of the self-seeking and corruption so common among churchmen, "prophane Atheisme hath taken footing in the hearts of ignorant and simple men." The orthodox Ben Jonson, in his Volpone (1607), puts in the mouth of a fool the lines:--
And then, for your religion, profess none,
But wonder at the diversity of all;
And, for your part, protest, were there no other
But simply the laws o' th' land, you would content you.
Nic Machiavel and Monsieur Bodin both
Were of this mind.
But the testimony is not the less significant; as is the account in The Magnetick Lady (1632) of
A young physician to the family
That, letting God alone, ascribes to Nature
More than her share; licentious in discourse,
And in his life a profest voluptuary.
Such statements of course prove merely a frequent coolness towards religion, not a vogue of reasoned unbelief. But the existence of rationalizing heresy is attested by the burning of two men, Bartholomew Legate and Edward Wightman, for avowing Unitarian views, in 1612. These, the last executions for heresy in England, were results of the theological zeal of King James, stimulated by the Calvinistic fanaticism of Archbishop Abbot, the predecessor of Laud.
James's career as a persecutor began characteristically in a meddlesome attack upon a professor in Holland. A German theologian of Socinian leanings, named Conrad Vorstius, professor at Steinfurth, had produced in 1606 a somewhat heretical treatise, De Deo, but had nevertheless been appointed in 1610 professor of theology at Leyden, in succession to Arminius. It was his acceptance of Arminian views, joined with his repute as a scholar, that secured him the invitation, which was given without the knowledge that at a previous period he had been offered a similar appointment by the Socinians. In his Anti-Bellarminus contractus, "a brief refutation of the four tomes of Bellarmin," he had taken the Arminian line, repudiating the Calvinist positions which, in the opinion of Arminius, could not be defended against the Catholic attack. But he was too speculative and ratiocinative to be safe in an age in which the fear of spreading Socinianism and the hate of Calvinists towards Arminianism had set up a reign of terror. Vorstius was both "unsettling" and heterodox. His opinions were "such as in our own day would certainly disqualify him from holding such an office in any Christian University"; and James, worked upon by Abbot, went so far as to make the appointment of Vorstius a diplomatic question. The stadhouder Maurice and the bulk of the Dutch clergy being of his view, the more tolerant statesmen of Holland, and the mercantile aristocracy, yielded from motives of prudence, and Vorstius was dismissed in order to save the English alliance. Remaining thenceforth without employment, he was further denounced in 1619 by the Synod of Dort, and banished by the States General. Thereafter he lived for two years in hiding; and soon after obtaining a refuge in Holstein, died, worn out by his troubles. In England, meantime, James drew up with his own hands a catalogue of the heresies found by him in Vorstius's treatise, and caused the book to be burned in London and at the two Universities.
On the heels of this amazing episode came the cases of Wightman and Legate. Finding, in a personal conversation, that Legate had "ceased to pray to Christ," the King had him brought before the Bishop of London's Consistory Court, which sentenced the heretic to Newgate. Being shortly released, he had the imprudence to threaten an action for false imprisonment, whereupon he was re-arrested. Chief Justice Coke held that, technically, the Consistory Court could not sentence to burning; but Hobart and Bacon, the law officers of the Crown, and other judges, were of opinion that it could. Legate, accordingly, was duly tried, sentenced, and burned at Smithfield; and Wightman a few days later was similarly disposed of at Lichfield.
Bacon's share in this matter is obscure, and has not been discussed by either his assailants or his vindicators. As for the general public, the historian records that "not a word was uttered against this horrible cruelty. As we read over the brief contemporary notices which have reached us, we look in vain for the slightest intimation that the death of these two men was regarded with any other feelings than those with which the writers were accustomed to hear of the execution of an ordinary murderer. If any remark was made, it was in praise of James for the devotion which he showed to the cause of God." That might have been reckoned on. It was not twenty years since Hamond, Lewis, Cole, and Kett had been burned on similar grounds; and there had been no outcry then. For generations "direness" had been too familiar to men's thoughts to admit of their being shocked by a judicial murder or two the more. Catholic priests had been executed by the score: why not a pair of Unitarians? Little had gone on in the average intellectual life in the interim save religious discussion and Bibliolatry, and not from such culture could there come any growth of human kindness or any clearer conception of the law of reciprocity. But, whether by force of recoil from a revival of the fires of Smithfield or from a perception that mere cruelty did not avail to destroy heresy, the theological ultima ratio was never again resorted to on English ground.
