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ABSTRACT
Between 1581 and 1610 Master of the Revels Edmund Tilney (c 1536–1610) was authorized to license plays. The only evidence we have of his actual practice is the Book of Sir Thomas More, several pages which are thought to be in the hand of William Shakespeare. This essay is concerned with Tilney’s suppression of the twenty-four lines in which More and Rochester refuse to sign articles sent to them by the king. Tilney’s censorship can be better understood from the views he expresses in the confidential intelligence manual he wrote for Elizabeth I. It includes a humanist history of the papacy that reveals his understanding of the Reformation. While Tilney was a sophisticated enough courtier to allow a play on the controversial subject of More’s career, he would not allow a passage that might be interpreted to undermine the constitutional right to overrule papal objections that Henry VIII claimed in the 1533 Act in Restraint of Appeals. As Tilney’s research showed, that right derived from Constantine the Great, the half-British King of Britain who as emperor legitimized Christianity and became patron of the primitive Church and the Bishop of Rome.
Notes
1 John Jowett, ed., Sir Thomas More, The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. (London: Methuen, 2011), 18–22, 437–53.
2 Jowett, ed., Sir Thomas More, 26–29, 356–62.
3 For a survey of studies on dating the play see Jowett, ed., Sir Thomas More, 424–33. On the controversy about dating the play using stylistic versus historical evidence see Jowett, ed., Sir Thomas More, 424, and Lawrence Manley and Sally-Beth MacLean, Lord Strange’s Men and Their Plays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 114–20. For studies on the censorship of the play see T. H. Howard-Hill, ed., Shakespeare and Sir Thomas More, Essays on the Play and its Shakespearean Interest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
4 Jowett, ed., Sir Thomas More, 273–75.
5 W. R. Streitberger, Edmond Tylney … A Descriptive Index to his Diplomatic Manual on Europe (New York: AMS Press, 1986), 75–120. Parenthetical references in this essay refer to the Illinois MS.
6 Intelligencing is an emerging field of study. General histories of the subject include Christopher M. Andrew, The Secret World: A History of Intelligence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), and Sir Christopher Meyer, Getting Our Way: 500 years of Adventures and Intrigue, The Inside Story of British Diplomacy (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2009).
7 Elizabeth Williamson, Elizabethan Diplomacy and Epistolary Culture (London: Routledge, 2022), 57–91. Paul E. J. Hammer’s “Essex and Europe: Evidence from Confidential Instructions by the Earl of Essex, 1595–6,” English Historical Review 111, no. 441 (1996): 357–81, is a study of the secretariat and networks of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex (1565–1601), which illustrates how the production and control of intelligence was integral to Elizabethan politics.
8 Nicholas Popper, Walter Raleigh’s History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 4–5.
9 Tilney almost certainly counted on the influence of his cousin and patron Charles Howard (1536–1624), Earl of Nottingham, Lord Admiral in presenting it. Howard was the patron of at least one other effort in the intelligence genre: Robert Tanner, A Mirror for Mathematiques (London: I. Charlewood, 1587), STC 23674. There is no evidence that the manuscript was presented.
10 Bartolomeo Platina, Lives of the Popes, ed. and trans. Anthony F. D’Elia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), xii – xiii. Stefan Bauer, The Censorship and Fortuna of Platina’s Lives of the Popes in the Sixteenth Century (Brepols, Tournhout, Belgium .: 2006), 233. It is likely that Tilney consulted Platina’s Lives in one of the modern Latin versions edited by Onofrio Panavini whose Historia B. Platinae de vitis Pontificum Romanorum (Leuven, 1572) continued the biographies up to Pius V (r. 1566–72) and also included Panavini’s Pontificum Romanorum Chronicon which numbered the popes and provided the dates of their pontificates See Stefan Bauer, The Invention of Papal History: Onofrio Panavino (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). From some of his entries it appears that Tilney consulted both Panavini’s and Meredith Hanmer’s chronologies. He records, for example, that Eleutherius was the “12 or 14 Bishoppe of Rome”. Hanmer lists him as the twelfth pope; Panavini as the fourteenth. On Hanmer, see note 19, below.
11 The first sixteen books of Storia d’Italia were published in 1561; the last four in 1564. The work circulated in Italian, French, Dutch, Spanish, and English. See Peter Burke and R. Po-chia Hsia, ed., Cultures of Translation in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 132.
12 Vincent Luciani, Francesco Guicciardini and his European Reputation (New York, 1936), 31–2, 223–8, lists the manuscripts in circulation and the sources of the deleted material.
13 Two Discourses of Master Frances Guicciardin, which are wanting in the thirde and fourth bookes of his Historie (London: William Ponsonby, 1595). STC 12462.
14 Two Discourses of Master Frances Guicciardin, 63. The History of Italy by Francesco Guicciardini, trans. Sidney Alexander (New York: Macmillan, 1969) i142, 149.
15 The Works of Gabriel Harvey, ed. A. B. Gossart (London, 1864), i.191. Gabriel Harvey’s Marginalia, ed. G.C. Moore-Smith (Stratford Upon Avon, 1913), 21. Jean Bodin, Methodus (1566), quoted by Luciani, European Reputation, 150, 319–20.
16 The Historie of Guicciardin, trans. Geoffrey Fenton (London: Thomas Vautroullier, 1579) (STC 12458), fol. Iiijv.
17 Euan Cameron, “Primitivism, Patristics, and Polemic in Protestant Visions of Early Christianity,” in Sacred History: Uses of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World, ed. Katherine van Liere, Simon Ditchfield, and Howard Louthan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 27–51 (32–36).
18 Cameron, “Primitivism, Patristics, and Polemic,” 31–32. Two English Protestant histories of the papacy had already been written on this model before Tilney began his. Robert Barnes’s Vitae Romanorum Pontificum (1536) published with a preface by Martin Luther, and John Bale’s Acta Romanorum Pontificum (1559) both blamed doctrinal corruption in the medieval church on the steady increase in papal power. See Korey D. Maas, The Reformation and Robert Barnes: History, Theology, and Polemic in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, UK, 2010). Rosamund Oates, “Elizabethan Histories of English Christian Origin,” in Sacred History, ed. Van Liere et al., 165–85 (168).
19 In The Great Bragg and Challenge of M. Campion (STC 12745) and The Jesuits Banner (STC 12746) (both London, 1581), Hanmer argued the widely held Protestant notion that the religious conflict in contemporary Europe was part of a great battle waged throughout history between adherents of the true faith and those who corrupted it. He regarded the Jesuits as part of a historical continuum of the enemies of the true faith from Judaic times to the present – the latest in a long line of false teachers and heretical sects. The Auncient Ecclesiastical Histories of the first six hundred years after Christ (London: Thomas Vautroiller, 1577) (STC 10572), the earliest English translation of these church histories, also includes the account attributed to Dorothea of the Prophets, Christ, the Apostles, and the seventy Disciples. Hanmer’s edition remained the standard for almost a century, going through six editions between 1577 and 1663.
20 Hanmer was motivated because while he was able to find “catalogues of kings, recitall of Bishops, pedegrewes of our gentries, with other private and particular summaries” available in English, he found “not extant in our mother tongue … the generall Antiquitie” of church historical events. Angela Andreani, Meredith Hanmer and the Elizabethan Church: A Clergyman’s Career in 16th Century England and Ireland (New York: Routledge, 2020), 68. Auncient Ecclesiasticall Histories (1577), vol. ii, Aijr.
21 Andreani, Meredith Hanmer, 77. For Hanmer’s chronography see Auncient Ecclesiasticall Histories (1577), vol. ii.
22 Tilney paid very close attention to Hanmer’s chronography particularly for details of the papacy from the time of Eleutherius to Sylvester I. For examples of verbal echoes see The Auncient Ecclesiasticall Histories (1585) (STC 10573), 572 [“sent preachers to Brittaine, so that Lucius the king and his people receaved the faith”], Tilney, 8v [“sente Preachers into greate Britaine to convert king Lucius and his people vnto the Christian faith”]; Ecclesiastical Histories (1585), 574 [“for which cause he was reprehended of diuers, but sharply by Irenaeus”], Tilney 9r [“for the which he was muche reprehended by Diuers … but most sharply by Ireneus”]; Ecclesiastical Histories (1585), 145 [“with open contumelie and hatred”], Tilney, 9r [“the tenth and last persecution/ being the greatest and worthily Inflicted for the greate contumely, and hatred vsed by Churchmen”]; Ecclesiastical Histories (1585), 581 [“when Constantine offered him a golden scepter he refused it, as thing not fitt for the priestly function”], Tilney, 9v [“Constantine offred vnto Bishoppe Siluester, a Septer of Golde which was refused by him, as a thinge vnfitt for the Priestly ffucntion”.]
23 Auncient Ecclesiasticall Histories (1577), vol. i. 409. The “altogether” he refers to is the apocalyptic course of history. He imagined himself living in an age that would witness the second coming of Christ: “the season requireth that we watche and pray and continewally wayte for the Lords comminge. All is nowe in the extreme”.
24 STC 11222–11225. See Rosamund Oates, “Elizabethan Histories of English Christian Origins”, in Sacred History, ed. Van Liere et al., 178–79.
25 Two Discourses of Master Frances Guicciardin, 7, 9–11. The History of Italy, Francesco Guicciardini, trans. Sidney Alexander (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 141–42.
26 Foxe characterized the earliest period as “the suffring tyme” of the church. The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online or TAMO (The Digital Humanities Institute, Sheffield, 2011). Available from: http://www.dhi.ac.uk/foxe (1583), i. 24, 53–188.
27 Lives of the Popes, ed. D’Elia, 19.
28 John Bale, Acta Romanorum Pontificum, fols. 1r – 12v dwells on the uncertainty of the evidence that survives from the early church, concluding that it is insufficient to confirm that Peter was in Rome for an extended period of time and that there is none to show that he was bishop. Foxe follows Bale by denying “that Peter the Apostle was ever bishop … of Rome”. On the length of Peter’s residence in Rome see The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online (1583), xi.1825.
29 On the subject of historians using disparaged sources or doctoring evidence see Anthony Grafton, “Church History in Early Modern Europe: Tradition and Innovation” in Sacred History, ed. Van Liere et al., 3–26 (5–7).
30 Foxe cites Matthew 16:18 (“you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it”), interpreting the verse to mean that the “church should be mightily be impugned” but that “notwithstanding the uttermost of the devil and all his malice, [the church] would continue. The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online (1583), i. 38.
31 Tilney’s choice of the term “Catholike” to describe the early church echoes Foxe’s explanation that this was the proper term to refer to the primitive church: “so long was it, and rightly might so be called, the catholic church. Having in it truth unity, universality, and free consent”. The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online (1583), i. 25.
32 According to Foxe he “first brought in the title [of Pope] AD 314, which was never in such ample wise before publicly enacted, and received publicly in the church of Rome.” The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online (1583), i. 25.
33 F. J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, 1967), 83.
34 Holinshed’s Chronicles, England, Scotland, and Ireland in six volumes, ed. Sir Henry Ellis (London, 1807– 8), i. 528–30.
35 Ibid., 528.
36 Anglica Historia in Polydore Vergil’s English History, ed. Sir Henry Ellils (London, 1846), i.98–99. Camden, Britain, or A chorographicall description of the most flourishing kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland, tr. Philemon Holland (1610) (STC 4509), i.40.
37 “yt is sayed that he became a Christian by Reuelation from Heauen, in which he debated with himselfe whether he soulde contynue the Persecutions of Dioclesian, or turn a Christian. In which tyme the signe of the Cross appeaed to him, in the Elements with these words (In hoc singo vinces) & that afterwarde Christ appeared to him in his sleepe, he was Commaunded to carry the signe before him in [t]he battaile aginst Maxentius” (77r).
38 Holinshed, Chronicles (1807–08), i. 40.
39 On the legend of King Lucius see Felicity Heal, “What Can King Lucius do for you? The Reformation and the Early British Church,” English Historical Review 120 (2005): 593–614.
40 A time when there was no “universal pope above all churche and councils … neither any name or use of the mass … Neither then any transubsantiation heard of … Neither were there any images of saints departed set up in churches”, and it was then lawful for priests to marry. The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online (1583), i. 129–31. Nevertheless Foxe would not concede that Lucius asked to be converted. Both he and William Harrison argue that the letter was a request for an explanation of Roman rules and ceremonies.
41 Auncient Ecclesiasticall Histories (1577), i. sig. [vr].
42 Tilney’s source is Auncient Ecclesiasticall Histories (1585), 590. Tilney uses the now obsolete sense of “challenge” to mean “To assert one’s title to, lay claim to, demand as a right, claim for, arrogate to oneself.” See OED, “challenge,” verb, def. 5.
43 Tilney misidentifies this pope as Boniface IV. Foxe and Hanmer get it right. The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online (1583), i. 143.
44 Following John Bale, Foxe dates the birth of the prophet Mohamed to the year 666 AD and specifically connects it to the number of the beast in Revelation 13:18. The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online (1583), i. 147.
45 The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online (1583), i. 26. ii. 116–136. iv.199.
46 The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online (1583), ii.25. Foxe objects to the fact that the pope bought in a “rable of Monkes and Friers … [who] corrupted and obscured the sinceritie of Christes doctrine and maners also.”
47 Because Philip IV of France refused to submit to the Pope’s authority, Boniface deposed him and “gave his kingdome to Emperor Albartt II (13v)”. See also J. N. D. Kelly, The Oxford Dictionary of Popes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 209–10.
48 The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online, 1583, v. 469. Foxe claims that in frustration with this confusion John Wycliffe declared that since the time of Urban VI (r. 1378–89) “No faythfull man ought to follow neither the Pope himself” or any other holy man except as he follows Christ.
49 Guicciardini notes that the removal of the papacy also sent Rome into decline. “Rome without the presence of the Pope is much more like a desert than a city”. History of Italy, trans. Alexander, 332.
50 The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online (1583), v. 422: “to begin wyth the yeare of our Lord. 1360 … we are come now to the time wherin the Lord, after long darknes beginneth some reformation of hys Churche.”
51 This argument was set out in the massive Protestant history, the Magdeburg Centuries, and in Flacius’s Catalogus testium veritatis (1556). Flacius was a Lutheran reformer and professor of Hebrew at Wittenberg who drew up an annotated list of those institutions and individuals who had anticipated modern reformers, such as Martin Luther. Andreani, Meredith Hanmer, 67.
52 The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online (1583), ii: 356, 372, 377–81. Oxford Dictionary of Popes, 177, 189. The massacres continued under popes Honorius III (r. 1216–27) and Gregory IX (r. 1227–41).
53 According to Tilney, pressure from the Cardinal of Lorraine [Charles of Guise, Duke of Chevreuse, 1524–74] and “certain other principal Romanists” led to this declaration.
54 Guicciardini, History of Italy, trans. Alexander, 107, had observed that in ancient times popes did effect temporal victories in this way. “But since there was now lacking that reverence and majesty which the sanctity of the popes’ lives had aroused in men’s hearts, it was ridiculous to expect similar effects”. See also Aislinn Muller, The Excommunication of Elizabeth I: Faith, Politics, and Resistance in Post-Reformation England, 1570–1603 (Leiden: Brill, 2020).
55 In this instance Tilney quotes an anecdote that he had heard. It is unlikely that this indicates that he personally subscribed to Lutheran doctrines. The only other instance in which he uses the term in this history is to describe the Reformation in France at mid century: “aboutt this tyme the Lutheran profession, In matters of Religion, somewhat more Refined by certayne other learned, and zealous men, was soe settled in ffrance, vnder the title of the reformed Religion/ that yt hath continued thir to this Daie” (17r). The term Tilney usually uses to describe religion in England is the “Reformed Religion’. On Lutheranism in England during this period see Alec Ryrie, “The Strange Death of Lutheran England,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 53 (2002), 64–92.
56 Virginia C. Gildeersleeve, Government Regulation of the Elizabethan Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908; rpt. 1961), 1–2. Frank Fowell and Frank Palmer, Censorship in England (London, 1913), 79.
57 Janet Clare, Art Made Tongue-Tied by Authority: Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship (New York: University of Manchester Press, 1990, 1999). 236. Anabelle Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Condition of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984).
58 Jowett, ed., Sir Thomas More, 501–3; Howard-Hill, ed., Shakespeare and Sir Thomas More; William B. Long, “The Occasion of The Book of Sir Thomas More,” in Howard-Hill, ed., Shakespeare and Sir Thomas More, 45–56; Scott McMillin, “The Book of Sir Thomas More: The Dates and Acting Companies,” Howard-Hill, ed., Shakespeare and Sir Thomas More, 57–76.
59 Richard Dutton, Mastering the Revels: The Regulation and Censorship of Early Modern Drama, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 57, 79, 346.
60 See 26 Hen. VIII c.1, in Statutes of the Realm. Printed by command of his majesty King George the Third, 11 vols. in 12 (London, 1810–28; reprinted Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1963); and Jonathan Gray, Oaths and the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
61 Winifred Mulligan, “The British Constantine, an English Historical Myth,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 8 (1978), 257–79 (266–68).
62 24 Hen 8. c 12, in Statutes of the Realm; see also Antonia Harbus, Helena of Britain in Medieval Legend (Cambridge: DS Brewer, 2002), 121–30.
63 STC 12995.
64 Margaret Dowling, “Sir John Hayward’s Troubles over his Life of Henry IV,” The Library, series 4, xi (1930): 212–24 (213).
65 1 Eliz. 1. c. 1, in Statutes of the Realm; This was amended in 1588 clarifying that she was Supreme Governor, rather than Supreme Head, of the Church.
66 STC 24076.