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Clerical Marriage and the English Reformation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 January 2014
Extract
The abolition of clerical celibacy in England was, according to its first great modern student, Henry Charles Lea, “a process of far more intricacy than in any other country which adopted the Reformation.” Since Lea wrote, historians have come to accept an outline of that process. According to this standard view, it was Henry VIII, acting out of his own personal conservatism, who retained and defended mandatory celibacy in the first stage of the English Reformation. Once the king had died and his leaden foot was removed from the brake, the clergy were able to overwhelm ineffective conservative opposition in the Edwardian government and legalize clerical marriage. The gains of the Edwardian years gave way before the reaction of the Marian period, and they were not reinstated after Mary's death because of the anticonnubial tastes and religious conservatism of Elizabeth I. Throughout this period, so the story goes, the clergy (a majority of them, at least) struggled for the right and privilege of marriage, only to find royal resistance (except briefly under Edward VI) impossible to overcome.
This traditional outline is misleading in several respects. Elizabeth I's attitude toward the marriage of the clergy is far more complex than has been recognized. Specific regulations of such unions developed from her desire to establish an ordered church worthy of popular respect and cannot simply be ascribed to a general, almost pathological, personal distaste for marriage or quirky personal religious views.
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References
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39 This is not an exhaustive treatment of promarriage treatises. William Turner is actually an exception to the rule I have noted: a married deacon who wrote in defense of clerical marriage also. His discussion of the subject is buried in his two treatises against Gardiner, Stephen, written while he was in exile: The huntyng andfyndyng out of the Romishe fox (1543)Google Scholar, and The seconde course of the hunter at the Romishe fox (1545). They are discussed in Hughes, Celia, “Two Sixteenth-Century Northern Protestants: John Bradford and William Turner,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 66 (1983): 122–38Google Scholar; and Jones (n. 24 above), pp. 150–65. George Joye, also in exile, produced a translation of Melanchthon's defense of clerical marriage, which had been written specifically for Henry VIII in 1539. Joye also wrote (under the name James Sawtry) The defence of the marriage of Priests against Steven Gardiner, which focused on the opponents of marriage in the parliament that passed the Six Articles. The majority had been deceived by the lords spiritual (especially Gardiner and Repps). They had lied about the justification for celibacy because secretly they preferred using other men's wives; it was cheaper than marriage and brought no responsibilities: “For well know these idle, soft shaven sects what cares, charges and incommodities there follow and chance to true chaste and honorable wedlock.” Most of all, the bishops feared the financial responsibilities of family life, for which “their jolly peacock tails [would] be plucked.” See Sawtry [George Joye], esp. fols. A5–B2v, B8v, C1–C8v; Butterworth, Charles C. and Chester, Allan G., George Joye, 1495?–1533 (Philadelphia, 1962)Google Scholar. In 1549, the future bishop John Ponet published A defence for manage of priestes by scripture and aunciente wryters, which was also largely concerned with the fornication that resulted from mandatory celibacy.
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43 Although written in 1546, this was not published until 1567 (Crowley, Robert, The opening of the wordes of the Prophet Joell, in his second and third Chapters, rehersed by Christ in Mathewe.xxiiii. Marke.xiii. Luke.xxi. and by Peter Actes.ii. concerning the Signes of the last day [1567]Google Scholar, fol. F8r).
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49 Hughes and Larkin, eds. (n. 8 above), no. 460. Note that this procedure was not necessary for a valid marriage. Marriages made without proper license were punishable but not voidable.
50 O'Day, Rosemary and Berlatsk, Joel, eds., The Letter Book of Thomas Bentham, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, 1560–1561, Camden Society, 4th ser., vol. 22 (1979)Google Scholar, no. 22 (October 28, 1560).
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54 BI, PRY-J1, fol. 20v. I am grateful to Claire Cross for this reference.
55 EDR, G/2/18, fols. 46r, 86r, 90v, 123v, 126v, 155r, 162v, 166v, 167r, 174v, 190r, 194v.
56 BI, HC.AB.7, fols. 50r–51r, 66v, 75v–77r, 79v.
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58 Foster, , ed., State of the Church, pp. xxi–xxiiGoogle Scholar: cases of George Meriton (June 26, 1599) and Thomas Banks, vicar of South Elkington (March 7, 1602/3). Meriton married the daughter of the archdeacon's commissary, presumably a fit bride. See Fallow, T. M., “Some Elizabethan Visitations of the Churches Belonging to the Peculiar of the Dean of York,” Yorkshire Archaeological Journal 18 (1904–1905): 339Google Scholar: Wardens of Pickering v. Edward Mills, vicar (August 10, 1602). For an early case, see Willis, A. J., ed., Church Life in Kent (London, 1975), p. 13Google Scholar, no. 93 (Sir Thomas Langley, Parson of Boughton Malherbe presented for marrying a woman pregnant during the reign of Queen Mary, whose first husband was believed to be alive, without banns and without certificate from the J.P.s).
59 BI, HC.CP.1588/2; HC.AB.11, fol. 137v.
60 BI, HC.AB.4, fol. 84r, 94, 95v–96r, 115r, is a particularly striking incidence of that. James Layton, vicar of Helmsley had two children with Isabelle Richardson, which he confessed. When he and Richardson told the court that they intended to marry to avoid further sin and scandal, the judges “well [liked] this” and suspended their penance on proof of solemnization. Yet, Aylmer's visitation in 1586 inquired whether any minister had knowingly married a woman who was not a virgin.
61 EDR, B/2/5, pp. 199–200; BI, HC.AB.6, fol. 34r; EDR, B/2/20, fol. 35v.
62 BI, HC.AB.12, fol. 135r, 166r.
63 In 1592, Matthew Sutcliffe wrote, “I know of [no clergymen] which marrieth, but such as have allowance sufficient of their choice. If they have not, let the offenders be corrected, and not innocents be disgraced for others' offence” (An answere to a certaine libel supplicatorie, or rather Diffamatory, and also to certaine Calumnious Articles, and Interrogatories, both printed and scattered in secret corners, to the slander of the Ecclesiasticall state, and put forth under the name and title of a Petition directed to her Maiestie [London, 1592], pp. 129–30Google Scholar).
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66 BI, CP.G.2302.
67 EDR, B/2/14, fol. 187v; BI, D/C.CP.1583/2; BI, HC.AB.5, fol. 148r–149r, 189v–190r.
68 EDR, D/2/10a, fol. 32v. She left Leverington and returned to her husband (fol. 49r).
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75 EDR, G/2/18-19.
76 John Veron addressed this in his contemporaneous work, A strange defence of the maryage ofpryestes agaynste the pope Eustachians made dialogue wise (pre-1563). He said that ministers without the gift of chastity ought to marry, and that if they did not, “Godly magistrates ought to compel them … lest by their incontinent living they be an offense and stumbling block unto the church and a slander unto the doctrine that they have taught and set forth” (fol. C2). See also Trigge, Francis, A Touchstone, whereby may easilie be discerned which is the true Catholike faith, of all them that professe the name ofCatholiques in the Church of Englande, that they bee not deceived (London, 1599), pp. 235–38Google Scholar. Trigge noted that the wives of the clergy brought the clergy into disrepute, and if the clergy expected anyone to listen to them, they had best put their own houses in order first. If the clergy had virtuous wives, he concluded, no one would speak ill of clerical marriage. In a letter to Robert Cecil, Archbishop Hutton noted that “the common cause of religion … hath received some disgrace” from the marital problems of the Archbishop of Limerick (Matthew Hutton to Robert Cecil, PRO, SP 12/270/75).
77 LP, vol. 14, pt. 1, no. 844. One of Mont's great skills was convincing the Germans that Protestantism had a future in England: Hildebrandt, Esther, “Christopher Mont, Anglo-German Diplomat” Sixteenth Century Journal 15 (1984): 287Google Scholar.
78 Based on: Berlatsky, Joel, “Marriage and Family in a Tudor Elite: Familial Patterns of Elizabethan Bishops,” Journal of Family History 3 (1978): 6–22Google Scholar; Prior (n. 26 above), pp. 118–48; White (n. 70 above).
79 Barnes, Blethin, N. Bullingham, H. Cotton, Cox, Fletcher, Godwin, Middleton, Overton, Sandys, Still, and Young married twice; Goldsborough and Hutton, three times; see Prior (n. 26 above), pp. 135, 147, n. 100.
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83 His cringing protest to Cecil, Robert (Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Honorable the Marquis of Salisbury, preserved at Hatfield House, Hertfordshire 2:106–7)Google Scholar is in sharp contrast to the tone of Cox's to Cecil's father. A scathing poem, “On the Marriage of Lady Mary Baker to Richard Fletcher, Bishop of London,” has recently been attributed to Sir John Davies (Krueger, Robert, ed., The Poems of Sir John Davies [Oxford, 1975], pp. 177–79Google Scholar).
84 Hutton had been ordered by the queen to dispense Thornborough to marry again. He wrote to Cecil that although he believed that the law of God allowed pars innocens to marry again, it was “flat contrary to Her Majesty's ecclesiastical laws of this land and much misliked by most of the clergy of this realm” (PRO, SP 12/270/75). See Rowse, A. L., “Bishop Thornborough: A Clerical Careerist,” in For Veronica Wedgwood These, ed. Ollard, R. and Tudor-Craig, P. (London, 1986), pp. 89–108Google Scholar.
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91 See Sandys's lavish provisions for his children, e.g., BL, Lansdowne MS 50.34. Another complaint was that they ignored their traditional responsibilities, “And … it is thought that divers of the clergy, now being married and having wives and children do overmuch alienate their minds from the honest and careful duty which they ought to bear towards the maintenance of good hospitality” (PRO, SP 15/24/8). On the expectation of hospitality, see Heal, Felicity, “Hospitality in Early Modern England,” Past and Present, no. 102 (1984), pp. 66–93Google Scholar.
92 PRO, SP 12/259/47: “To move her majesty's compassion towards the poor orphans of the late bishop of London.” See also BL, Additional MS 33,410, fol. 13, a letter from the Privy Council to the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1591 in favor of the wife and children of the queen's chaplain, Dr. Tomson, who pursued the “advancement of the Gospel” at the expense of his material advancement “so as thereby his wife and poor children are left in distressed estate” with £300 debts and no provision. The Privy Council asked Whitgift to provide for them.
93 London, Inner Temple, Petyt MS 47, fol. 373.
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95 Cecil to Parker, August 12, 1561, Inner Temple, Petyt MS 47, fol. 372.
96 The dean and chapter of Worcester were reportedly melting down the organ to provide dishes and bedsteads for the prebendaries' wives (Barstow, A. L., “The First Generation of Anglican Clergy Wives: Heroines or Whores?” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 52 [1983]: 11Google Scholar). This quixotic crusade was clearly not entirely, if at all, her own idea. In July 1561, Elizabeth was petitioned to take even more drastic action than she did (PRO, SP 15/11/24). See also BL, Lansdowne MS 487/7.
97 Richard Cox to Matthew Parker, n.d., Inner Temple, Petyt MS 47, fol. 378. In a ballad from the same period, a Cambridge student lamented that love and marriage had ruined his university life, and as he prepared to leave, he prayed that his fellows might be kept safe from beauty “whose bait hath brought me to my bain, and caught me from my books” (Robinson, Clement, A Handefull of Pleasant Delites, ed. Kershaw, Arnold [London, 1926], pp. 21–24Google Scholar).
98 Parker to Cecil, n.d., Inner Temple, Petyt MS 47, fol. 374.
99 Inner Temple, Petyt MS 47, fol. 372.
100 Haugaard, p. 204. Archbishop Young enjoined obedience to the order in his visitation of the cathedral in 1563 (Bodleian Library Ashmole MS 862, pp. 198–99). It cannot have been observed. One of the minster clergy, Anthony Blake, had been married since the reign of Edward and was a residentiary canon from 1565–70. Thomas Atkinson, another of the minster clergy, was also married during his tenure (Cross, Claire, ed., York Clergy Wills, 1520–1600:I. Minster Clergy, Borthwick Texts and Calendars [York, 1984], 10:110, 112Google Scholar). See also her “Priests into Ministers” (n. 27 above), pp. 203–25.
101 BI, HC.AB.5, fol. 190r.
102 BI, HC.AB.10, fol. 54r.
103 BI, HC.AB.11, fol. 51r.
104 BI, HC.AB.13, fol. 231 v; see the 1586 case of Anne Grecyan, cited in Dickens, A. G., Lollards and Protestants in the Diocese of York (London, 1982), p. 187Google Scholar.
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117 Dry Drayton original parish register, Cambridge, County RO; Dictionary of National Biography 8:528Google Scholar, s.v. “Greenham, Richard.”
118 Clarke, Samuel, The Lives of Thirty-Two English Divines, 3d ed. (London, 1677), p. 13Google Scholar.
119 Rylands MS 524, fol. 38r.
120 Rylands MS 524, fol. 16v. In order to avoid concupiscence, Greenham suggested “a continual examination of yourselves by the law; a reverent and daily meditating of the word; a painful walking in our honest calling; an holy shaming of ourselves, and fearing of ourselves before our friends; a continual temperance in diet, sleep and apparel; a careful watching over our eyes and other parts of our bodies; a zealous jealousy to avoid all occasions of persons, times and places which might nourish in us concupiscence; a godly frequenting of times, persons, and places which breed in us mortification, together with an humbling of ourselves, with the shame of sins past, with the grief of sins present, and with the fear of sins to come. Lastly, a careful use of fasting, prayer and watching … are means to come to mortification herein, which being wisely and some convenient time used, with a moderate motion and exercise of the body, if they do not prevail, it is like the lord doth call a man to the holy use of marriage” (fol. 21v). For Greenham's pastoral counseling activities, see Carlson, Eric Josef, “Pastoral Ministry in Elizabethan Cambridgeshire” (paper presented to the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies, March 1989)Google Scholar.
121 Herbert, George, A Priest to the Temple, or The Countrey Parson His Character, and Rule of Holy Life, in The Works of George Herbert, ed. Hutchinson, F. E. (Oxford, 1941), chap. 9Google Scholar.
122 Henson's letters are quoted in Howatch, Susan, Glittering Images (New York, 1987), pp. 23, 41Google Scholar.
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