The place was a warren of concealment. Walls were false, every room had a trap door or access to secret stairs. Many of the chimneys had double flues, one for the smoke, the other in which a priest could hide. The place was betrayed, the house searched and then occupied by government agents, who waited for the priests they guessed were hidden within its walls. Only after eight days, on Monday 27 January i6o6, did Garnet and his companion Father Oldcorne emerge from their hiding place. They looked half-dead and their appearance terrified the men who were there to arrest them. The hole they had been crouching in was too small for either of them to stand up, and Garnet's legs in particular were horribly swollen. One of the women of the house had given them sweet hot liquids through a straw that perforated the walls of the hole and they had some marmalade they had taken in there with them. But there was no means of drainage in the tiny closet; it was the smell of their own accumulating faeces which had finally driven the men into the open air. Their only option now was to put themselves in the hands of the Jacobean state, which would humiliate, torture, try and then kill them. Mr Henry Garnet, as the officials of the English state insisted on calling him, was deemed guilty of knowing about the conspiracy beforehand without reporting the plotters to the authorities. Those authorities did not accept that the secrecy of the confessional could not be abused. The conflict between his du t\ as a Catholic priest and his duty as an English citizen they considered no conflict at all. His was a treacherous, unreliable, seditious and above all a lying heart. Among the papers and books of Francis Tresham, one of the plotters, had been a manuscript written by Garnet entitled A Treatise on Equivocation. In it Garnet had elaborated on the circumstances in which the Jesuits considered it lawful not to tell the whole truth. A priest, for example, could say, when asked, that he was not a priest because he was not a priest of Apollo; or that he had never been over the seas, because he had never been over the Indian seas. These desperate measures were the product of scruple: only because Roman Catholics considered it a sin to lie, and only because the intolerance of the English church and state made it necessary for them to lie were they forced to descend to this kind of Jesuitical equivocation.
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Christian IV King of Denmark and Norway was coming to visit his sister and her husband, newly elevated from the exigencies of Scotland- James himself was something of a drinker, but there was no keeping up with Christian and the Danes. They scandalized even the Jacobean court with the depth of unbuttoned drunkenness they unleashed on the capital.
Nothing was too much for the Danish revels. An artificial oak tree, full size, was bedecked with leaves made of taffeta on each of which was written the word 'WELCOME'. Drink flowed, men and women wallowed 'in beastly delights'. It was, according to Sir John Harington, a vision to match Wlahomets paradise'. But, for a measure of how far court life stood outside the sort of regulated strictness which Puritan and God-fearing Englishmen believed in, nothing can quite match the events of the evening at Theobalds on which the masque of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba was performed....
Faith, Hope and Charity then appeared one by one to make their speeches. Faith was so drunk she couldn't get a word out; Hope couldn't stand upright and had to withdraw; only Charity, clearly the greatest of these, could say what she had to say — that Christian IV already had all the gifts that heaven could bestow and so there was nothing more she could give him — before returning to the lower hall where she found both Hope and Faith 'sick and spewing.' It isn't difficult to share the reaction of Puritans to such a world, particularly when the costs are considered. The royal household in the last year of Elizabeth's reign had cost £47,000. By 1606, that had risen to over £100,000. Other costs were dropping: the end of the war in Ireland saved £300,000 a year, the Spanish peace still more on ships and men, but even those savings couldn't counteract the gush of Jacobean largesse. The royal debt had stood at £422,749 on the death of Queen Eliza-beth. By Michaelmas 1606, it had gone up by a third to £550,331. And still the fountain poured, £3,000 here, another £2,000 there. A handsome courtier called Sir Henry Rich, known as Harry, the younger son of the Earl of Warwick, was standing in White-hall and saw £3,000 in coins being carried past him to the office of the Keeper of the Privy Purse, the royal household's finance director. Harry Rich whistled at the sight and muttered half to himself that he wished he had that much money. The king over-heard him muttering, asked what he had said, and on hearing the reply, said 'Marry, shalt thou, Harry', and ordered the money to be taken to Rich's rooms. 'You think now you have a great Purchase,' the King said. 'But I am more delighted to think how much I have pleasured you in giving this money, than you can be in receiving it.' It was, as so often with James, a winning remark and betrays the instinct at the heart of all his extrava-gance: money was a love vehicle, a bond of patronage and grati-tude, part of the dream of one nation in which the glory of royal riches bound the people to the throne.
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`Puritan': what did the word mean? It was of course an insult, a slur-word; no one would have claimed it for himself and its meaning was shifting, sometimes applied to extremists, some-times to what was clearly the moral majority of Jacobean Eng-land. Puritanism, in short, was in the eye of the beholder. `Concerning the name,' Giles Widdowes wrote in The schysnzati-call puritan, 'it is ambiguous and so it is fallacious.' The difficulty is made worse because 'Puritanism' spreads effortlessly into so many different areas of seventeenth-century life: it could be said to involve daily habits and styles of dress; attitudes to the place of ceremonial in worship, and the relation of word to ceremony; fiercely held beliefs about the constitution of the church, what it should be, what it must not be, and the relationship of church to state; the question of what were called 'things indifferent' —those parts of Christian practice, such, as the use of the surplice, which some might like and others abhor; and beliefs about the nature of God's universe, the place of man within it and, cru-cially, the role of pre-destination. Had God designated some people for heaven and some for hell from the beginning of time? Would their own behaviour on earth have any effect on that destiny? Surely not, it was suggested, if all was pre-ordained? Why then should anyone behave well? If our destiny was settled, and our destination neither a punishment nor a reward for hoW we had lived, then what should stop us behaving as wickedly as we liked? What purpose could there be in good works or a good life? The Bible itself was the answer to all those questions. It was the word of God, an enormous, direct, vastly complicated, infinitely interpretable account of what God meant by and for his creation. It was accessible to the people as a whole either through the lessons read to them every Sunday in church, or through ser-mons, or, to the literate minority, through reading the good book themselves. In the mid-sixteenth century, perhaps 3o per cent of the English gentry had been illiterate. By the 162os, that figure had dropped effectively to zero. Lower down in society, the figures were worse — 55 per cent were illiterate among small yeoman farmers in the 164os, and as much as 95 per cent among labourers at the same time — but at all social levels, the trend towards literacy was upwards, particularly among men and par-ticularly in London, soon stretching far ahead of the rest of Europe. This increasingly word-orientated section of the popu-lation was the seed-bed in which the highly intellectual, question-ing and quizzing form of religion we know as Puritanism had its beginnings. A puritan ate and drank the word of God. That word was his world. If the Bible authorised anything, by defi-nition that was in concordance with God's will and so by defi-nition should be followed. Anything explicitly denied or disapproved of by the Bible should not be indulged. So, for example, Samuel Hieron, the Puritan pamphleteer and one of the organisers of the Millenary Petition, maintained that the Bible provided for the head of each household, 'direction for his apparel, his speech, his diet, his company, his disports, his labour, his buying and selling, yea and for his very sleep'. Most people would have probably accepted that. The difficulty came in deciding on the lawfulness of religious behaviour and belief that were not mentioned in the Bible. If something wasn't mentioned, did that mean God had no view on it? Or if it wasn't mentioned, did that mean that God did not approve of it? That was certainly the understanding of the holy Separatist Henry Barrow, a view for which he died. Fasting in Lent, clergy appointed by the state, or by any grandee who held no place in the church, any ceremonies that were not explicitly authorised by scripture: all of these Barrow considered unlawful. Other Separatists and Presbyterians, or even reformists who wished to remain within an improved Church of England, considered fasting, holy days, kneeling at communion, most church officials (certainly bishops and archbishops), the baptising of infants who didn't know what was happening to them, the churching of women after childbirth, getting married with a ring, all unlawful. Bancroft had an answer for them. There were no Christian kings mentioned in the Bible. Did that mean that Christian kings were unlawful? Didn't religion have to change, at least in its relatively inessential practices, as the habits and practices of society changed? If the king, whose authority was essentially divine and who was God's agent on earth, required it, then was it not the duty of every good man to obey, whatever the Bible said? The surplice was not mentioned in the Bible but the king wanted surplices to be used. It was obvious to Bancroft and the king that every God-fearing minister should therefore wear them. This was the territory across which the insult 'Puritan' would fly. 'A puritan is such a one', the London lawyer John Man-ningham wrote in 1602, 'as loves God with all his soul, but hates his neighbour with all his heart.' Anyone who took a stricter line on the demands of scripture than the person speaking could be labelled a Puritan. The critical division between extreme and moderate was on the question of royal authority: moderate Puri-tans accepted the authority of the church, and of the king as its head, even if they cavilled over points of doctrine; radical Puritans denied the authority of that state and would in the end rather separate themselves from the royal church than accept doctrines which they loathed. It was not the conventional modern conflict of freedom against authority, nor even a struggle for freedom of conscience or belief. This was not the age of toleration: it was a conflict of different visions of authority. 'Let them chant what they will of prerogatives,' Milton would write much later, 'we shall tell them of Scripture; of custom, we of Scripture; of Acts and Statutes, still of Scripture, till . . . the mighty weakness of the Gospel throw down the weak mightiness of man's reasoning.' That was written in the heat of the Civil War, but if not so polarised, at least in embryo, that division between the rival claims of divine and worldly authority is appar-ent in the first decade of the century. It was a difference of emphasis that split the 'Puritans'. It was the very fissure which James and Bancroft quite deliberately and very adroitly managed to deepen in the first years of the reign, when they expelled those eighty or so Puritans from the church between 1604 and 1606. For James, it was effective and practical politics: a means of achieving unity and uniformity in the church by excluding a small proportion of extremists.
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This extraordinary and passionate atmosphere is one of the governing qualities of the time. The age was at ease with un-bridled but apparently quite unsexual love between men. Even Cecil, discussing the intimate relationship between the king and his principal adviser, wrote to a friend: `As long as any matter of what weight soever, is handled only between the prince and the secretary, those counsels are compared to the mutual affection of two lovers, undiscovered to their friends.' That sense of closeness, of the possibility and richness of an unmediated intimacy, plays a shaping role in the translation. Among the many wonderful books of the Old Testament which Chaderton's company translated was the Song of Songs, or the Song of Solomon, the great love lyric of the Bible. Some six-teenth-century reformers had been keen to exclude it, on the grounds of its immodesty and its fleshliness, but others, drawing
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0 lett me bosome thee, lett me preserve thee next to my heart
on a long Jewish tradition, read it as an account of God's love for his people and his church. That is how the luscious verses of the song are annotated in the King James Version: `A bundle of myrrhe is my welbeloued vnto me,' the girl sings; `he shall lie all night betwixt my breasts.' And her lover replies, `Behold, thou art faire, my loue: behold, thou art faire, thou bast doues eyes.' Chaderton calmly annotates: 'The Church and Christ con-gratulate one another.' The lover continues: `Thy two breasts, are like two yong Roes, that are twinnes, which feed among the lillies.' (Chaderton: `Christ setteth forth the graces of the Church.') 'Thy lips, 0 my spouse! drop as the hony combe: hony and milke are vnder thy tongue, and the smell of thy garments is like the smell of Lebanon. (Chaderton, inscrutable to the last: `Christ sheweth his loue to the Church.') That aching gap, between the ecstatic sexuality of the poem and of the rather helpful and interesting notes which the Trans-lators provide, might make us smile now, but it was clearly not a comic effect that the Jacobean Translators were after. The modern reaction to their binding of the religious and the erotic experience is a measure of what Eliot called the `dissociation of sensibility' that occurred to English consciousness at some time later in the seventeenth century. We can no longer imagine that erotic passion and religious intelligence can be bound together into one living fabric. All we see in the commentary of Chaderton's company is what looks like their prudishness, their refusal to see the erotic and the passionate for what it is. But in doing that, we patronise them, we assume they were trying to conceal what they were so clearly and so consciously mak-ing vital and present. The Sancroft—Bonnest correspondence, Andrewes's private prayers, Donne's sermons and sacred sonnets, the poetry of Herbert, Vaughan and Traherne, all show that a profoundly open `passionality' is completely and immediately available to these men. Their lives and works are largely moti-vated by a frame of mind in which emotion, intellect, spirituality and desire do not exist in isolated compartments but feed and nourish each other.
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