Introduction

This chapter introduces the book as a whole, tracing the history of protestant iconoclasm and ruin creation across the long reformation, from the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s to the disestablishment of the English protestant church in the 1650s. It focuses attention on the poet George Herbert, whose poems, in The Temple (1633), on aspects of church interiors bear witness to the sanctioned iconoclasm of successive Tudor governments—iconoclasm that had broken altars, upended statues, and whitewashed church walls. Herbert was a protestant minister whose poetry celebrates the church established under Elizabeth I, defining its reformed appearance as a middle ground—‘Neither too mean, nor yet too gay’—between Genevan Calvinism and Roman catholicism. But Herbert’s poetry also reveals anxieties about the future of English protestantism—besieged not only by catholic plots but also by puritan and presbyterian clamours for further church reform. Herbert’s anxieties over this twofold threat to the English church are at once anti-catholic and anti-iconoclastic. Although Herbert celebrates the protestant reforms that had dissolved monasteries and destroyed catholic shrines, his poetry also attacks puritans, whose dissatisfaction with the half-hearted reforms of the Elizabethan settlement sought in Herbert’s eyes to ruin the church from within. Herbert’s paranoid poetry provides a keynote for this study’s exploration of the ruined churches and monasteries represented in early modern English literature—ruins, the study argues, that betray similar anxieties about the consequences of catholic plots and puritan iconoclasm for the fate of the English church in its formative century.

Cloistered Virtue

This chapter focuses on Marvell’s Upon Appleton House (c.1651) and explores how Marvell uses the ruins of Nun Appleton Priory in this poem to meditate on the ruination of state-run religion during the puritan revolution of the mid-seventeenth century. The chapter sets the poem’s representation of Marvell’s patron—Thomas, third lord Fairfax—against the backdrop of the Scottish invasion of England in early August 1651, arguing that despite Fairfax’s decision the previous summer to resign his role as lord general of the parliamentary army, the poem nevertheless envisages a role for Fairfax in the military defence of northern England in August 1651, as governor of the important garrison town of Hull. Scotland, however, was not the only threat facing England in summer 1651. For the Fairfaxes, and other English presbyterians, the English church was a garden paradise overrun by the weeds of sectarianism, and it was English sectarianism that presbyterians on both sides of the border blamed for the outbreak of England’s war with Scotland in 1650. The chapter explores how Marvell gives voice in Upon Appleton House to presbyterian anxieties over the rise of sectarianism in the early 1650s, focusing on the poem’s representation of Nun Appleton’s meadows, garden, and priory ruins. In these catholic ruins, the chapter argues, Marvell sees English protestant sins reflected, and thus the poem’s remembrance of the dissolution of the monasteries is also an opportunity for a presbyterian meditation on the iconoclasm of English sectarians in the early 1650s.

Conclusion

This chapter opens with a case study, assessing the impact of a century of protestant reforms on the layout and liturgy of the parish church of All Saints’, Bolton Percy, in the early 1650s—a time when both the poet, Andrew Marvell, and his patron, the former lord general of the parliamentary army, Thomas, third lord Fairfax, were parishioners. The chapter explores how Thomas Fairfax had helped preserve the stained glass and other features of Bolton Percy church, in spite of parliamentary ordinances directing the destruction of church idols and images, including those in windows. Yet Fairfax’s distaste for forms of protestant iconoclasm nevertheless co-existed with his presbyterian beliefs—a conjunction that may seem surprising, were it not for the fact that this study has uncovered a similar ambivalence towards religious violence and ruin creation in other avowedly puritan writers, from Spenser to Marvell. The chapter goes on to explore the Laudian apologist, Peter Heylyn’s identification with the religious conservatism of the Elizabethan church, arguing against the conventions of reformation historiography by suggesting that it was by no means only Laudians who sought to slow the pace of reformation and return the seventeenth-century church to the sobrieties of the Elizabethan settlement. The ambivalence of writers across the early modern period towards forms of reformation violence points rather to an anti-iconoclastic tradition that was indigenous to English protestantism in its formative century—suggesting that Laudian opposition to protestant iconoclasm was less ‘avant-garde’ than reformation historians have hitherto suggested.

Warriors and Ruins

This chapter explores Shakespeare’s response to the ‘bare ruined choirs’ of dissolved churches and monasteries, focusing on Cymbeline (c.1610) and showing how this play’s language of ruin works to remind Shakespeare’s contemporaries of the potential for anti-catholic intolerance to incite further acts of religious violence in early Stuart England and Wales. Cymbeline conveys a double vision of Wales, the site of Britain’s heroic victory over Rome, but also the scene for Welsh acts of savagery and rebellion that coalesce around the image of Cloten’s headless corpse, described by Lucius in the play as a ‘ruin … that sometime | … was a worthy building’ (4.2.353–4). The chapter shows how Shakespeare uses this language of ruin to reflect anxieties over the role of Welsh catholics in the Essex rising (1601) and Gunpowder Plot (1605), in which demands for greater toleration of catholics were a recurrent concern. Cymbeline condemns these acts of catholic rebellion, but the chapter argues that it also questions the merits of England’s Jacobean culture of intolerance towards catholics—an intolerance that, as Shakespeare hints, must also take some measure of responsibility for catholic acts of rebellion in the early seventeenth century. Shakespeare’s emphasis on the need for toleration of catholic loyalism need not, however, imply Shakespeare’s own sympathies for catholic beliefs and practices. The chapter shows how Shakespeare remembers the monastic ruinations under Henry VIII in order to reflect on the continuing cycles of religious violence that this originary moment of reformation iconoclasm unleashed.

‘Where ruine must reforme’?

Chapter 4 sets John Denham’s response to the renovation of St Paul’s Cathedral in light of widening religious divisions among English protestants in the 1630s and early 1640s, reading Denham’s Coopers Hill (1642) alongside Denham’s other works from 1641–2, including his play, The Sophy. The chapter establishes that Denham’s ‘anger’, in Coopers Hill, at the monastic dissolutions under Henry VIII is best interpreted in light of Denham’s reaction to the threatened dissolution of cathedrals under reforms proposed by the Long Parliament in 1641. Denham’s anger at the monastic dissolutions has been dubbed Laudian, even ‘anti-Protestant’, but the chapter argues that his reaction is in fact a characteristically protestant response to the excesses of reformation iconoclasm, as first practised under Henry VIII, and, in the early 1640s, under Long Parliament presbyterianism. The chapter roots Denham’s pity for the monasteries within an English reformation tradition—stretching back through Herbert to Spenser—that was at once anti-catholic and anti-iconoclastic, and it shows how Denham’s praise for Laud’s cathedral restorations is derived from his understanding of the Caroline church as the rightful heir of the sobrieties of the Elizabethan religious settlement, as this settlement had been lauded by Spenser, Herbert, and other writers before him. Denham therefore uses ruined abbeys and restored cathedrals to represent two possible futures for the established church, at once celebrating the status quo and demonstrating the ease by which the violence of the early reformation could turn inwards, against the edifice of English protestantism that Laud had laboured to restore.

Spenser, the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and the Decline of the Preacher’s Plough

This chapter focuses on Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579) and View of the Present State of Ireland (c.1598), showing how both use the language of medieval rural complaint to attack greed among the protestant owners of former monastic lands. Beginning with the Calender’s September eclogue, the chapter brings new evidence to bear on previous identifications of the shepherd, Diggon Davie, with the Elizabethan bishop of St David’s, Richard Davies, tracing the influence of Davies’s Funeral Sermon (1577) for Walter Devereux, first earl of Essex, into Diggon’s language in ‘September’. The language of medieval complaint had blamed unscrupulous abbots for enclosing ploughlands, but in his own writing, Richard Davies argues that post-dissolution landowners were having an even more detrimental impact on the religious life of rural Wales, not only refusing to free up former monastic lands for ploughing but also hindering the work of the ‘church-ploughing’ preacher, because refusing to pay preaching ministers a proper wage. The chapter shows how Spenser uses the pseudo-Chaucerian Plowman’s Tale to turn Davies’s local response to the situation in St David’s diocese into a general complaint against unscrupulous farmers of church livings across England and Wales. It concludes by exploring Spenser’s similar attitude in A View towards Adam Loftus and other protestant farmers of church livings in late Elizabethan Ireland, arguing that Spenser here evokes the ruins of churches and monasteries in order to return to his comments in The Shepheardes Calender on the greed of post-dissolution landowners and their neglect of the preacher’s plough.

Wondering at Ruins

This chapter explores Spenser’s ambivalence towards the violence of reformation, and its ruination, not just of medieval monasteries, but the lives and legends of saints in monastic manuscripts. It offers a comparative analysis of two texts—William Vallans’s A Tale of Two Swannes (1590) and Spenser’s Ruines of Time (1591)—both written in the aftermath of the 1588 Spanish armada and with England’s war with Spain in the Low Countries ongoing. The chapter shows how both poets use a chorographical focus on the ruins of Roman Verulamium as a frame for their patriotic praise of Anglo-British heroism across history. Yet while both use historical examples of heroism to counter contemporary invasion anxieties in the early 1590s, both poems also reveal British history itself as a battleground between competing catholic and protestant versions of the past. These are tensions foregrounded by each poet’s respective approach to the life of St Alban, Verulamium’s most famous citizen. Vallans follows the medieval, monastic accounts of Alban’s life that are dismissed by John Foxe as ‘Abbeylike additions’ in his post-dissolution, protestant rewriting of Alban’s life in Actes and monuments, and this echoes Vallans’s interest in monastic history and monastic ruins elsewhere in his poem. If St Alban is the site of controversy in A Tale, he is a figure conspicuously absent from Spenser’s poem. The chapter argues for Alban’s shadowy presence in The Ruines of Time nonetheless, pointing to Spenser’s hitherto unacknowledged indebtedness to Gildas’s sixth-century De excidio Britonum and other ‘Abbeylike’ accounts of Alban.