I/we note that:
Erasmus wrote, in his Enchiridon that, ‘the torments of hell…are nothing but the perpetual anxiety of mind that accompanies habitual sin (and later qualified this statement under pressure so as to give it a non-Universalist ‘spin’).
The Family of Love taught that there is nothing to the pains of hell other than the torments of an unquiet conscience.
In the Parliament of 1584 – 8, just after the crisis period for the Family of love -1580 – 82 - had peaked and passed,
Elizabeth seemingly spoke against the teaching that there is ‘no Hell but a torment of conscience’ in Parliament, therefore seemingly condemning the teachings of the Family.
What are we to make of this? Well I cannot unpack the significance at a stroke – but be patient and things will become clear.
Christopher Marsh’s intriguing and exhaustive study of the primary sources on the Family reaches a number of conclusions that overturn the ideas of Christopher Hill (it’s a shame they are both named Christopher!!!).
There is no evidence to suggest that the Family of Love ever constituted a radical underground in Elizabethan society.
Their numbers were in the hundreds rather than the thousands – perhaps as few as two hundred. They were drawn mainly from the gentry rather than from the artisan class (the gentry were composed of families who had been freed from serfdom by their feudal lords during the Middle Ages, and were small land owners of modest wealth who often represented the common people in the House of Commons).
There is no evidence that the Family were involved in antinomian practices. They were accused of these by their Calvinist detractors in the early 1580’s but there is no evidence that the accusations were grounded in fact.
Members of the Family outwardly and peacefully conformed to the Anglican faith. ‘Recruitment’ was done with great care and in secret. They practised Nicodemean dissembling to cover up their true beliefs. They were non-confrontational and often highly respected members of their local communities with some holding public office as Justices of the Peace.
Despite their Nicodemean dissembling, the Family were well known about by the Queen and others but left alone because of their peaceable conformity.
In the early 1580s the Calvinists began to publish works against the Family demanding their prosecution as heretics. This coincided with a period of panic in Calvinist quarters. Their hopes of further Reform of the Church of England were on the wane as Elizabeth began appointing Bishops and senior clergy who were not sympathetic or even accommodating to their cause. It also seemed that Elizabeth was allowing herself to be wooed by a French Catholic Prince, the Duke of Anjou (although she was probably just playing at one of her diplomatic games). They badly needed a scapegoat for their anxieties.
The pattern of persecution of Family members- and of others- varied considerably in England (although it never amounted to much with the Family because of their gentle outward conformity). The idea that is was a good thing to persecute dissenters was commonsense– i a hundred years later or so this view had been reversed (a remarkable shift in the history of human sentiments) but it was still the common sense view during Elizabeth’s reign. However, the will to persecute varied from place to place.
• Some communities were too religiously lukewarm to bother with persecution.
• Some communities, in which the orthodox and the dissenters lived and worked closely together, had little stomach for persecution because of shared neighbourliness.
• A strong Calvinist presence helped stir up persecuting zeal – or ‘charitable hatred’ as it was then termed. Elizabeth did not ‘make windows into men’s souls’ but, as the old saw has it, ‘Calvin’s Geneva was a City of Glass’ in which the committees of Elders kept a close watch on people’s behaviour and were anxious to police the thoughts of their hearts. So the Calvinist need to investigate people’s thoughts and behaviour always fuelled persecution.
• Any conflict already present in a community – due to recent plagues of humans or cattle, or land disputes, or family feuding – also helped fuel persecution.
Christopher Marsh (not Christopher Hill) writes that -
**‘…it can also be suggested, tentatively at first, that criticism of the Family was to a certain extent something rather like displaced criticism of Elizabeth herself. There were, arguably, significant points of contact between the Queen and her Familist guardsmen. Elizabeth’s attitude to religious conformity was, for example, very similar to that of the Family. She and they both held that, from a magisterial point of view, an individual subject’s loyalty, obedience and outward conformity ought not count for more that his or her profound acceptance of authorised theology.
Elizabeth I is often associated with a reluctance to make windows into the souls of men, though the words were not originally hers (as I have stated in previous post, that the aphorism comes from her courtier Sir Francis Bacon). The Familists argued in self defence that persecution of one person by another for any case touching conscience was ‘not Christian like’. They urged that matters which only God could judge should not be dealt with by mere mortals, and they lamented the ‘stretching and strayning’ currently being applied to force the consciences of ordinary people. The puritans who wrote and preached against the Family of Love despised this attitude, and expended much energy and ink in countering it.**
(Marsh - The Family p.118)
So what did Elizabeth have to say In the Parliament of 1584 – 85 – just after the crisis period for the Family of Love had peaked and passed? Yes she did seemingly speak against the teaching that ‘there is no Hell but a torment of conscience’, and therefore seemingly condemned the teachings of the Family. For this, of course, she earned Christopher Hill’s implicit Marxist condemnation as an aristocratic tyrant.
But whoa – hold the horses here; I’ve checked Hill’s source - J.E. Neale’s ‘Elizabeth I and her Parliaments 1584 - 1601’ (p. 70) and something very different seems to be going on. Hansard did not exist at this time – Hansard being the record of all speeches in Parliament made verbatim by a clerk – and Elizabeth’s speeches were jotted down from memory by her MPs if they seemed particularly memorable; so Neale’s sources are not 100% certain – but the context of Elizabeth’s remembered words suggest that she meant something rather different than condemning the teachings of the Family. Neale tells us that she is reported as saying the following , obviously in a very great huff –
**‘Again’ – and now her diatribe once more embraced the Puritans – ‘you suffer many ministers to preach what they list and to minister the sacrament according to their own fancies, some way one, some another, to the breach of unity: yea, and some of them so curious in searching matters above their capacity as they preach they wot (know) not what – that there is no hell but a torment of conscience.’ **
It would be wrong to completely identify the Calvinists with the Puritans – but the Calvinist made up the major portion of Puritanism at this date, certainly in Parliament. Elizabeth appears to be speaking here against both the Calvinist subversion of Royal Decrees on Holy Communion, and against the Calvinists tradition of holding ‘Prophesyings’ – un-programmed, inter-active sermons whose content had not been vetted by her Bishops (and Christopher Hill would also have seen this as evidence of the Queen’s aristocratic tyranny). However, there was no prospect at this date of a Calvinist going soft on the doctrine of Hell – this was the Calvinist’s charge against the Family of Love (along with antinomianism). I feel that Elizabeth must surely have had an ironic, bitingly sarcastic intent in her words to the ‘Puritans’ here.
In my next and final post on the Family – before moving on to the Anabaptists and Catholics – I would like to say something in more detail about their beliefs and the influence of the Humanist and Anabaptist Spiritual traditions on these.
Thanks for sticking with me.
All the best
Dick