The Nag's Head Story.
As Canon Estcourt, in his enumeration of sources of evidence (p. 11), remarks, “A story that has passed from person to person merely by verbal tradition, even if names are quoted as authority, but without written testimony, cannot be accepted as evidence, nor allowed to have weight as an argument, even it considered probable as an historical fact.” Now, it is notorious that the Nag's Head story depends merely upon hearsay testimony, without a particle of documentary evidence. Whatever vague rumors may have been current, there is no proof that the story ever assumed a “questionable shape” until F. Holiwood (Sacrobosco) published it in 1604. Stapleton, one of our most learned and vigorous controversialists, in a work published only five years after the date assigned to the Nag's Head consecration, does not mention it; and, moreover, says in so many words that the Anglican bishops were consecrated according to the rite of Edward VI. Neither has Saunders a word of it among all his well-merited vituperation of the “Parliament bishops,” in his Clavis Davidica; nor Rischton, the continuator of his De Schismate. These writers certainly lacked neither information nor courage. It is true that when once the Nag's Head story was brought out, controversialists on either side were apt to interpret the expressions of the earlier Catholic writers as referring to this particular charge; but when we turn to them, we find nothing more than the general charge of invalidity.[102]
Dr. Champneys, who wrote in 1616, relates the story upon the authority of F. Bluett, a prisoner in Wisbech Castle, who said he had it from Mr. Neale, the eye-witness. This last-named person, being at the time Bishop Bonner's chaplain, was sent by him, so the story runs, to inhibit Kitchen of Llandaff from consecrating, and thus witnessed the whole irregular proceeding. All the threads of tradition—with one exception, which we shall notice further on—appear to centre in F. Bluett. He told Dr. Champneys; he told, so says Dr. Champneys, F. Holiwood, who printed the story, in a condensed form, in 1604. Dr. Kenrick thought he had discovered from Pitts[103] another mouth-piece of Neale's in Neale's friend, Mr. Orton; but it is not so. Pitts, in his biographical notice of Neale, after stating that various particulars, which he gives, are upon the authority of Orton, proceeds to say of Neale: “This was the very same man who was sent by Bonner,” etc., emphatically marking off the Nag's Head story as not being one of the things he had heard from Orton, though otherwise sufficiently notorious.
Of Bluett nothing is known, except that he was for a long while prisoner for the faith, which of course speaks volumes for his honesty. But a lengthened imprisonment is not unfavorable for delusions, especially of a religious character. When we come to consider the character of the reputed first-hand in the line of tradition, Mr. Thomas Neale, we find ourselves upon very different ground. If F. Bluett's lengthy imprisonment is deservedly reckoned in his favor, what shall we say of a man who was able, on the accession of Elizabeth, after having been Bishop Bonner's chaplain, to take a public professorship in Oxford, and who, on his giving this up, was in a position to build [pg 470] himself a house opposite Hertford College, long known by the name of Neale's Buildings? These facts, admitted on all hands, sufficiently bear out Anthony à Wood's account of him: that his religion “was more Catholic than Protestant,” that he dreaded being called in question “for his seldom frequenting the church and receiving the sacrament.” À Wood is certainly not writing with a controversial purpose, and this is hardly the line that a Protestant depreciation of a hostile witness would take. The defenders of the Nag's Head story have had to meet the objection that Bonner dared not, whilst a prisoner, have taken the bold step ascribed to him, by an appeal to his notorious fearlessness. On the other hand, every one admits that Neale was an arrant coward; “of a timorous nature,” says à Wood; “of a nature marvellously fearful,” says Pitts. Now, if Bonner showed his courage by inhibiting, what must have been the courage of the man who ventured into the lion's den to execute the inhibition, and stood doggedly by to see how far it was obeyed? Surely we should have reason to be surprised if, after such an exhibition of courage, Neale had been afraid to put the matter on paper, or to breathe a word of it except to F. Bluett.
It has been attempted to establish the Nag's Head story upon another line of tradition, independent, not only of Bluett, but of Neale. Mr. Ward, in his Nullity of the Protestant Clergy, when mentioning the well-known examination of the Lambeth Register, in 1614, by certain Catholic priests then in confinement, at the request of Archbishop Abbot, continues: “But Mr. Plowden, yet living, does depose that he had it from F. Faircloth's own mouth, with whom he lived many years an intimate friend, this ensuing answer of F. Faircloth's to Abbot: My lord, said he, my father was a Protestant, and kept a shop in Chepeside, and assured me that himself was present at Parker's and the four Protestant bishops' consecration at the Nag's Head in Chepeside,” etc. This is mere hearsay, but we confess that we see no grounds for doubting that F. Faircloth made just the answer attributed to him. He was doubtless a firm believer in the Nag's Head story as related by Bluett, and his father, who had been a shopkeeper in Chepeside, was able to tell him that the Nag's Head Inn was no myth; nay, that there had been a meeting of bishops there; that he, Faircloth senior, had seen them. Who does not know how often and how honestly ocular evidence for an unimportant item is accepted as evidence of the whole? If old Faircloth had been able to give any real confirmation of the story, surely more would have been made of him.
Even if it be admitted that a consecration of some sort did take place at the Nag's Head, there is an important discrepancy in the versions given by Holiwood and Champneys of the Neale and Bluett story, which is fatal to it as an accurate account of what took place. Holiwood says that Scory “caused John Jewell to rise up Bishop of Salisbury, and him that was Robert Horn before to rise up Bishop of Winchester, and so forth with all the rest.” If this is to be taken as an exact account of what took place, no specific form at all was used; and F. Fitzsimon follows to precisely the same effect: “Scory orders them all to kneel down; then, taking the hand of Parker, says, ‘Rise, Lord Bishop of Canterbury’; in like manner to Grindal, ‘Rise, Lord Bishop of London,’ ” etc. But, according to Dr. Champneys, “Having the Bible in his hand, they all kneeling [pg 471] before him, he laid it upon every one of their heads or shoulders, saying, ‘Take thou authority to preach the word of God sincerely’ ”—a very distinct form indeed, however invalid.
We reject, then, the Nag's Head story, 1st, as lacking all but hearsay evidence, and hearsay evidence is at the command of any cause; 2d, as exhibiting various notes of intrinsic improbability; 3d, as wholly irrelevant, in the present aspect of the controversy, to the question of Anglican orders. It is irrelevant, because, whatever was or was not done at the Nag's Head, it is quite clear that the parties concerned, the government, and the bishops were no more satisfied with it than Catholics would have been, but continued to move for Parker's consecration precisely as if nothing had been done. At the same time, we protest against the notion that the Nag's Head story was a gratuitous lie. For, first, it is admitted that the bishops did meet at this identical inn for purposes convivial or otherwise, and to such meeting—viz., the confirmation dinner—both Fuller and Heylin, Strype and Collier, trace the story.[104] Secondly, the well-known disbelief in orders prevailing amongst the Protestant party; their repeatedly shrinking from the Catholic challenge to produce their proofs; their insistence, when speaking of their episcopacy, that ordination by a priest was valid, when taken together, justified Catholics in the growing suspicion that there was a terrible flaw somewhere, an irregularity which even an Elizabethan conscience stickled at. No one who reflects upon the genuine horror and contempt which the sight of the hen-pecked bishops of England, with their woman-pope, excited throughout Christendom, can regard the Nag's Head story as an extravagant or gratuitous outcome of Catholic imagination.
The principal interest of the fable lies in the fact that it fairly got through the Anglican skin, and forced the production of the Lambeth Register. All the denials of their orders by controversialists like the Jesuit Harding, all Saunders's taunts about petticoat government, affected them no whit. Orthodoxy and honesty might go to the winds, but one virtue they did set store by, and that was Christian gravity; and this tavern-story so stung them that they could keep their counsel no longer.