Chapter XIII
THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT—(Continued)
§ 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.[1] 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.[2] 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[3] and Elizabeth, the treatment of the Jesuit propaganda under the latter queen as a political rather than a doctrinal question,[4] 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.[5] 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.”[6] 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,”[7] 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”;[8] and he proceeds to frame an absurd dialogue of “Euphues and Atheos,” in which the latter, “monstrous, yet tractable to be persuaded,”[9] 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.”[10] 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”[11]—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.[12] Elizabeth was herself substantially irreligious,[13] and preferred to keep the clergy few in number and subordinate in influence;[14] 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,[15] taken up by Marlowe, held its ground, and is denounced by Stubbes in his Anatomie of Abuses[16] (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”),[17] 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;[18] but it does not appear that they were persecuted.[19] 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.”[20] 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,[21] they run:—