RALEIGH'S SCHOOL OF ATHEISM

The proclamation dated 18 October 1591 and titled A Declaration of Great Troubles Pretended against the Realme by a Number of Seminarie Priests and Jesuists expresses open hostility towards English seminaries financially supported by Philip II, the King of Spain, and deep concern about ‘a multitude of dissolute young men’ who had gathered together to ‘become fugitives, rebels, and traitors’. This proclamation is presumed to have been drawn up by William Cecil, who uses harsh and sardonic words throughout the text. One of the passages in which we can detect his bitterness is where he condemns the seminaries as a hotbed of sedition:

Cecil is particularly furious with ‘the heads of these dens and receptacles’, whom he assumes have recently motivated Philip to renew his war against England by assuring him that a multitude of young Catholics would be ready to assist his invasion. Cecil specifies two of the ringleaders, with heavy sarcasm: ‘a schoolman named Parsons, arrogating to himself the name of the King Catholic's Councilor’ and ‘another scholar called Allen, now for his treasons honored with a cardinal's hat’. While his malicious wording may seem peculiar, it shows how wary he was of these institutions. He imagined discontented students debating the key issues for sedition under the guidance of a headmaster who was well versed in the methods and teachings supporting treason.

Although we do not know why Cecil coined the phrase ‘school points of sedition’, he might have picked up the expression from Martin Marprelate. In 1589, Martin published the broadsheet Certain Mineral and Metaphysical Schoolpoints, which he possibly designed on the model of the Cambridge ‘act verses’: the set of briefly propounded theses that were circulated by those taking part in public disputations as acts for degrees, to offer a mock academic debate. However, it is more likely that Cecil was responding to William Allen's defence of English Catholic semi-naries on the continent as ‘the noblest Schooles in Christendom’.