Sermons, Separatists, and Succession Politics in Late Elizabethan England
Abstract In late 1599 the population of York was able to witness a fairly extraordinary sight. In York Castle, the Catholic prisoners of conscience, as they saw themselves (though others regarded them as dangerous political dissidents), were being compelled to listen, once a week, to a Protestant sermon. These sermons were preached at them by a slate of godly ministers. This exercise was something the prisoners actively contested by murmuring, blocking their ears, shouting, and attempting to rush out of the hall. The prisoners' antics provoked the authorities into increasingly coercive measures to make them hear the Word of God. This outwardly rather ridiculous and unseemly charade went on, week after week, for nearly a year, at which point the whole business was abandoned by the lord president, Lord Burghley, as a waste of time. However, by decoding the extant manuscript narrative that we have of the sermon series and by looking at who was involved in this business and why, and what political messages were being sent during the course of it, we can say something about the popular politics of late Elizabethan England. In particular, we can comment on the strategies adopted by those who were anticipating the moment, surely not far off, when Tudor power would be extinguished and Elizabeth's crown would pass to her successor.
The Politics of Religious Conformity and the Accession of James I
The issue of conformity in religion is crucial for historians who want to describe how religion worked politically in the English Church during the period of the Reformation. This article takes one aspect of conformity—the struggle by self-consciously Protestant authorities to force Catholics in the North of England to conform before and after the accession of James'VI in their country. It appeared to some Protestants (as well as to some Catholics) that James’s accession might lead to changes in the established order of religion in England. Some papists in the North were very enamoured of James. Protestants tried to cool their ardour in part by using statutory conformity to emasculate their political activism. Yet some Catholics who expressed their hatred of the Elizabethan regime by and in separation from its Church became less determined to stand out against conformity when James’s accession seemed assured. The very mechanism by which papists were to be controlled no longer worked as Protestant activists intended. In short, the politics of conformity explains many of the puzzling features of Catholicism (particularly of ‘church papistry’) at this time and in this region—why some people moved between nonconformity and compliance, and why strict recusancy might not always be an article of faith even for the most belligerent of Roman dissidents.
Continents of Liberty: Emerson and Gerald Vizenor’s Chair of Tears
Ralph Waldo Emerson protested what came to be known as the Trail of Tears in a public letter to President Martin Van Buren in 1838. Th e Cherokee Nation, he argued, had been cheated by a “sham treaty” (Emerson, “Letter” 50), the will of the people ignored, and a false acquiescence to removal written into law. In making a passionate appeal to the highest “chair” of the land, Emerson underscored the great political and moral stakes involved: