The use of social media to influence political opinion has become a contentious issue in the past few years. However, there’s nothing new about the basic concept of politicians trying to shape popular perceptions to their own advantage, as Dr Paul Hunneyball of our Lords 1558-1603 project explains…
In March 1559, Elizabeth I’s government had a serious problem on its hands. The first Parliament of the reign had been meeting for two months, but the crown’s flagship legislation to bring back Protestantism had run into trouble. With some difficulty, a bill had been passed to restore the royal supremacy over the Church, but the powers granted fell short of what Elizabeth wanted, while plans for reviving Protestant worship had stalled. The House of Commons was broadly in favour of these changes, but in the Lords, where committed Protestants were in the minority, the Catholic bishops were very effectively obstructing the government programme. As the Protestant observer John Jewel reported on 20 March:
the bishops are a great hindrance to us; for being … among the nobility and leading men in the upper House, and having none there on our side to expose their artifices … they reign as sole monarchs in the midst of ignorant and weak men, and easily overreach our little party, either by their numbers or their reputation for learning. (Zurich Letters ed. H. Robinson (Parker Society, 1842), 10-11)
By this point, the situation was so bad that Elizabeth was seriously contemplating an early dissolution of Parliament, so that she could use her new powers to deprive the existing bishops and appoint new Protestant ones, before pressing on with the reform programme. In the event, the queen decided against this course, but action was clearly needed to weaken the bishops’ hold over the lay peers.
The government’s solution was to arrange a public conference or disputation between two panels of Catholic clergy and Protestant divines. According to a subsequent official account of this exercise, the objective was to thrash out differences of opinion about religion, and reach agreement on the best way forward for the Church. In reality, the government’s objective was to discredit the bishops, and sway public opinion in favour of Protestantism. From the outset, everything possible was done to place the Catholic participants at a disadvantage. Their leader in the Lords, the widely respected Nicholas Heath, archbishop of York, was appointed to help preside over the disputation in his capacity as a privy councillor, a move which would effectively sideline him during the debates. Similarly, the three propositions which the Privy Council selected for discussion were all designed to win support for the government’s reform programme: that church services should be conducted in the vernacular tongue rather than in the traditional Latin, which most congregations didn’t understand; that national Churches had the power to alter the format and content of services; and that the Catholic doctrine of the sacrificial mass was not based on the teachings of the bible.
There’s some confusion over exactly how many people took part in the disputation, though there seem to have been eight or nine men on each side. The Catholic camp comprised a mix of bishops and other senior clergy, while the Protestant delegation was made up almost exclusively of clerics who had spent Mary I’s reign in exile on the continent. In effect, they represented the existing and prospective hierarchies of the English Church. The Catholics wanted to debate in Latin, which would have made it harder for the audience to follow the arguments, but the government insisted on proceedings being conducted in English, and selected the spacious Westminster Abbey as the venue, to allow as many people as possible to attend. As expected, a substantial number of lay peers turned up, precisely the individuals whom the government most wanted to influence.
Perceiving that the odds were stacked heavily against them, the Catholic camp looked for ways to sabotage the debates. The Privy Council had ruled that each side should prepare a written statement on each proposition, which would be circulated in advance to the opposing group, and read out on the day. The Protestants seem to have stuck to this format, but the Catholics chose not to cooperate. Invited to open debate on the first day of the conference, 31 March, they claimed that they’d misunderstood the rules, and therefore didn’t have a written statement to present. Instead, Henry Cole, dean of St Paul’s cathedral, launched into a violent and colourful diatribe against Protestantism in general, before finally sketching out the Catholic position on the correct language for worship, essentially defending the use of Latin by appealing to tradition. Once Cole had finished, his opponent Robert Horne read out a learned argument in favour of the local vernacular, with copious references to the bible and early Christian writings. Horne prefaced his remarks with a lengthy prayer appealing to God to reveal the true way forward. As this prayer was introduced, all the privy councillors present except Archbishop Heath fell to their knees, further demonstrating which side the government favoured. Once Horne had finished presenting the Protestant case, the Catholic disputants asked to respond, but were told to wait until the next debate, three days later.
When the conference resumed on 3 April, the Catholic camp tried to pick up where they’d left off, but were informed that they must first set out their arguments on the second proposition, concerning the power of national churches to modify their liturgies. However, the bishops began to complain that they were being treated unfairly, and the conference rapidly descended into a row over the format of the disputation. Recognising that if the Protestants always spoke second, their arguments were likely to carry more weight with the audience, the Catholics called for the order of debate be switched around. When this demand was rejected, the bishops again tried to change the topic, asserting that they represented the true Church, and attacking their opponents as schismatics. At length, once it became clear that the Catholics had no intention of addressing the second proposition, the disputation was brought to a premature close.
Predictably, Catholic commentators on the conference, such as the Spanish ambassador, the Count de Feria, maintained that the bishops had trounced the Protestant divines. John Jewel, who had been present as one of the Protestant disputants, took a rather different view: ‘It is altogether incredible, how much this conduct has lessened the opinion that the people entertained of the bishops; for they all begin to suspect that they refused to say anything only because they had not anything to say.’ (Zurich Letters, 16)
Whether or not Jewel himself was exaggerating, the conference had a decisive impact on developments in Parliament. The five bishops who participated in the debates were all charged with contempt of the crown for failing to follow the agreed format. Two of them, the bishops of Winchester and Lincoln, were imprisoned in the Tower of London until after the end of the session. This unsurprisingly served to dampen opposition in the Lords to the government’s programme. Several staunchly Catholic lay peers suddenly decided to absent themselves, while others dropped their objections to the Protestant legislation. The bill for the royal supremacy was duly revised, though the measure to reintroduce the Book of Common Prayer still only scraped through the upper House by three votes. Without the Westminster conference, it might not have passed at all. The disputation strategy was clumsy and underhand, but it weakened the Catholic cause, broke the parliamentary deadlock, and helped pave the way for the Elizabethan religious settlement.
PMH
Further reading:
N.L. Jones, Faith by Statute (1982)
G. Burnet, History of the Reformation of the Church of England ed. N. Pocock (1865), vol. 5
The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe ed. S.R. Cattley (1839), vol. 8
Biographies of all the clerics mentioned above will appear in due course in our volumes on the House of Lords 1558-1603.
