The Devil in Tudor and Stuart England E-Book

Darren Oldridge

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

The Devil was a commanding figure in Tudor and Stuart England. He played a leading role in the religious and political conflicts of the age, and inspired great works of poetry and drama. During the turmoil of the English Civil War, fears of a secret conspiracy of Devil-worshippers fuelled a witch-hunt that claimed at least a hundred lives. This book traces the idea of the Devel from the English Reformation to the scientific revolution of the late seventeenth century. It shows that he was not only a central figure in the imaginative life of the age, but also a deeply ambiguous and complex one: the avowed enemy of God and his unwilling accomplice, and a creature that provoked fascination, comedy and dread.

Leseprobe

The

Devil

To K the bad angel

The

Devil

IN TUDORAND STUART ENGLAND

Darren Oldridge

First published in hardback entitled ‘The Devil in Early Modern

England’, 2000

This fully revised edition first published in 2010

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2011

All rights reserved

© Darren Oldridge, 2007, 2010, 2011

The right of Darren Oldridge, to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 7642 1

MOBI ISBN 978 0 7524 7641 4

Original typesetting by The History Press

CONTENTS

PREFACE

1 INTRODUCTION

2 THE DEVIL AND THE ENGLISH REFORMATION

3 LIVING WITH THE ENEMY: PROTESTANT EXPERIENCES OF THE DEVIL

4 THE DEVIL IN POPULAR CULTURE

5 WOMEN AND THE DEVIL

6 POSSESSION AND EXORCISM

7 WITCHCRAFT

8 THE CHANGING FACE OF SATAN

APPENDIX: SELECTED SOURCES

NOTES AND REFERENCES

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

PREFACE

In a comic ballad published in 1736, a lovelorn young man made a pact with a demon. In return for his heart’s desire, the man was obliged to find a never-ending task for the wicked spirit to perform. The task of writing a history of the Devil in Tudor and Stuart England would have probably sufficed. The Devil infiltrated so many aspects of religion and culture in this period that a comprehensive study of the subject is impossible in a single volume: indeed, ideas about Satan were almost as rich and complex as ideas about God, with the consequence that each chapter (and possibly each section) of this text could be expanded to a book-length study. The present volume attempts to survey the broad contours of English thought about the Devil from the Reformation to the civil war, and suggests some of the implications of this thought. It is hoped that future researchers will flesh out, and challenge, the picture that is briefly sketched here.

This book is a revised and updated edition of The Devil in Early Modern England, which was originally published in 2000. Readers familiar with the earlier text will notice several changes. The new version is more sensitive to the continuities between late medieval demonism and the understanding of Satan that emerged during the Reformation, while maintaining that a distinctively ‘Protestant Devil’ can be identified. For this and other insights, I am indebted to numerous studies that have been published since the first edition of the book, and notably Nathan Johnstone’s excellent The Devil and Demonism in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2006). The areas in which my interpretation departs from Johnstone’s are identified in the text.

Like the original edition, this book is written for general readers as well as scholars in the field. For this reason, as well as the desire to provide an overview of the subject, I have assumed a broad continuity of assumptions about the Devil among English Protestants. (The extent to which these assumptions varied between different elements within the church is one topic that awaits further investigation.) I have used the word ‘godly’ to indicate those men and women who placed the practice of the new faith near to the centre of their lives: those whom contemporaries described as the ‘hotter sort’ of believers, and some historians have identified as ‘experiential’ Protestants. I have used the word ‘puritan’ in a similar sense, but more sparingly to avoid the impression that such people constituted a discrete block of opinion within the church.

On a point of demonic terminology, I have given the Devil a capital D to distinguish him from the multitude of infernal spirits that was recognised in Tudor and Stuart England. Contemporary writers often conflated wicked angels with their master, so that individual demons frequently morphed into Satan himself. I have adopted a more consistent approach that is, I hope, more useful to modern readers. I have also retained the lower case ‘devil’ in those instances where the sources appear to refer to an individual spirit.

The intellectual debts I have accumulated in writing this book are huge, and I have tried to acknowledge them fully in the pages that follow. I am especially grateful to those critics who identified lacunae and shortcomings in the previous edition. Many of these have now been addressed; but I have no doubt that many remain. As the master of ‘crafty persuasions, deceitful and false illusions’, the Devil is an elusive but tantalizing quarry. I hope this book will encourage others to take up the chase.

1

INTRODUCTION

THE DYING ROOM

In the late Middle Ages the monastic hospital of St Wulfstan in Worcester kept a room for the dying. Attended by carers and spiritual advisors, the men and women who were taken to this room were encouraged to make peace with their world and preparations for the one to follow. As they contemplated their final surroundings, they viewed painted images designed to help them with this task: a depiction of the Trinity on the ceiling, and on the walls frescos of Christian martyrs, offering models of patient resolve in the face of pain. Perhaps the most potent image was a scene of judgment (see plate section). This painting, which remains on the wall, portrays the archangel Michael holding a set of scales, with a human soul suspended in one of its pans. Standing at his side and facing the viewer, St Mary drapes a set of rosary beads on the balance to tip the judgment in favour of mercy. Clinging to the other pan, a demon seeks to drag the balance towards damnation. As they reflected on this spectacle, its original viewers may have gained some reassurance concerning their own impending fate. Mary stands shoulder to shoulder with the angel and is clearly his equal. The demon, in contrast, is a verminous ‘imp’: it has to stretch itself upright to keep hold of the pan, and already its exertions seem futile.1

The quiet drama of the dying room conveys themes that are fundamental to our understanding of the Devil in Tudor and Stuart England. Most simply, it provides a reminder that individuals engaged personally with demonic powers: Satan and his minions were not abstract ideas cut off from the world of lived experience. Nor, for the great majority of people, were they metaphors for other things, such as human wickedness or worldly injustice. While the Devil was intimately involved in the myriad sufferings of earthly life, he remained a living presence with a real character: a personality with whom men and women were obliged to contend. The image of judgment in the hospital also illustrates the highly integrated nature of pre-modern religion: the Devil belonged to a much larger scheme of belief, which comprehended the origins and destiny of humankind, the purposes of God, and – as the dying viewers of the painting were reminded – the weighing of individual souls. Satan occupied a central role in the scheme of salvation and damnation in sixteenth-century England, but his part made sense only in the context of this greater story.

Anyone viewing the paintings in St Wulfstan’s hospital today will notice another quality that documents the religious conflicts of the Tudor age. The faces of the figures that populate the walls have been removed, leaving only spectral impressions of their personalities. St Michael and the Virgin are featureless ghosts. The defacing of the images was an act of censorship initiated by Protestant reformers determined to erase the Catholic past. The Reformation abolished the power of saints and denounced religious art in strict compliance with the commandment not to make ‘graven images’; more deeply, it repudiated the whole system of belief that once sustained the men and women in the dying room. The Devil retained his central position in the new vision that replaced it. Indeed, he acquired a new status – in many ways more dreadful and intimate than the image on the hospital wall – in the religious life of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. The idea of Satan that emerged influenced many aspects of culture and politics, with effects that were sometimes profound and often contradictory. This book charts the rise of the Protestant Devil, and attempts to recover the experiences of those individuals who, stripped of the protection of the saints, were obliged to take up a lonely struggle against the personification of evil.

THE CHANGING DEVIL

‘A belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary’, wrote Joseph Conrad in 1911, as ‘men alone are quite capable of every wickedness’. Few would deny the second part of Conrad’s assertion, not least because of the industrialized violence that characterized the decades that followed his statement; but the concept of a personal Devil remains remarkably strong. For many millions of twenty-first-century westerners, the idea that a personal force lies behind the suffering and cruelty in the world seems a viable possibility; many others accept it as a matter of fact. To those who believe in the Devil, his presence is a constant and unchanging reality, and the historical approach of this book may seem challenging. After all, historians examine the construction and development of ideas over time, with the implicit assumption that these ideas are mutable and respond to the political and social circumstances in which they appear. Indeed, this book will argue that a distinctive – and distinctively modern – understanding of Satan emerged in the Tudor age. Such a historical approach is necessary, however, as it offers both believers and skeptics the best way to understand the Devil. This is because direct knowledge of Satan is unobtainable: even the most devout Christian (or talented necromancer) cannot possess it. As Jeffrey Burton Russell has argued, it is only through studying the idea of the Devil in human culture that we can understand him at all. ‘The Devil is what the history of his concept is. Nothing else about him can be known.’2

The idea of the Devil has been strikingly variegated. Indeed, few figures in history have possessed so many diverse and overlapping identities. The various names for the Devil illustrate this tendency. The Old Testament character of Satan – originally an angel loyal to God who was permitted to test the faith of His servants – was transformed into God’s enemy in Jewish apocalyptic literature in the centuries before Christianity. The Greek word for ‘adversary’ – the original Hebrew meaning of Satan – was rendered in Greek as ‘slanderer’ or ‘accuser’, and subsequently Latinized as diabolus, giving rise to the English ‘devil’. The fallen angel whose starry descent from Heaven inspired the name Lucifer, or ‘giver of light’, derived from apocryphal books of the Old Testament familiar to early Christian writers. This figure was conflated with Satan in the New Testament: in Luke’s gospel, for instance, Jesus ‘beheld Satan as lightning fall from Heaven’. By the sixteenth century, the names Lucifer, Satan and the Devil were used interchangeably. More broadly, these names could also be used to describe a host of lesser demons, whose identities frequently merged with that of their infernal master.3

The many names of the Devil were matched by his multiple and sometimes contradictory attributes. Satan was both the enemy of goodness and the punisher of sinners – and in this latter role he appeared to enforce the will of God. Only the Devil’s wickedness was relatively constant, though even this was sometimes challenged in ‘merry tales’ that portrayed him as a comic or likeable figure. As the ancient opponent of goodness, the Devil was defined more often by what he was not than by what he was, and his representation was correspondingly pliant: in the phrase of the art historian Luther Link, he was a ‘mask without a face’. Link observes that no stable iconography of the Devil emerged in medieval culture: he could be represented as a dragon-like monster, a rebel angel, a corrupted version of Pan, a man, or an ‘evil microbe’. Rather than a fixed identity, the Devil was a loose assembly of images united by their negative relationship to God; he was more an abstraction than a real character. Such diversity was probably useful. The sheer range of the images and qualities attributed to Satan made him an exceptionally adaptable figure: in his various guises, he could be pressed into the service of storytellers, artists, politicians and theologians of very different stripe.4

Tudor and Stuart representations of the Devil illustrate these variations. Satan was often depicted in grossly physical terms, not least in printed ballads describing the fate of evildoers. In this spirit, some of the earliest English versions of the legend of Johann Faust, a magician who traded his soul with the Devil, ended in a riot of carnage: the Devil ripped Faust’s ‘arms and legs in pieces’ and smashed his head ‘against the wall’. At the other extreme, some Protestant writers such as the Kentish gentleman Reginald Scot portrayed the Devil as a wholly immaterial presence: a ‘secret force or power’ that impelled individuals to wickedness. In the vision of many preachers and devotional writers, Satan was a mighty spirit whose power extended over all but those redeemed by Christ, and who continued to torment even these fortunate individuals. A parallel tradition in cheap literature depicted him as a crafty but fallible trickster, frequently gulled by resourceful peasants or beaten by fierce housewives.5

This array of images suggests that no single understanding of the Devil achieved complete dominance in Tudor and Stuart England. Nonetheless, it is possible to discern a consistent picture of the ancient enemy that emerged in the work of English theologians during the Reformation, and which can be described as the ‘Protestant Devil’. To create this distinctive image, Protestant thinkers drew selectively from the well of ideas about Satan that existed in the late Middle Ages, emphasizing some and neglecting others. Most notably, they stressed the spiritual nature of Satan. The Protestant Devil was preeminently a creature of the mind: an interior presence encouraging falsehood and sin. This internalised idea of the Devil – a dark counterpoint to the personal experience of God – diminished the importance of Satan’s physical manifestations. As Nathan Johnstone has observed, English Protestants elevated the Devil’s role as a tempter to the ‘single most important aspect of his agency’, and in this process they relegated his more fleshly attributes to secondary and largely theoretical phenomena. ‘Whilst they did not deny the Devil’s power to manifest physically’, Johnstone writes, ‘it is striking that they virtually ignored the possibility in their theological and devotional works’.6

The internalised view of Satan associated him with all forms of falsehood and temptation. As a consequence, he expressed himself most powerfully in his mastery of individuals, and his influence in the world appeared to rise or recede with the tide of false belief and irreligion. In 1652 Thomas Morton, the former Bishop of Durham, observed that Satan’s title of ‘prince of this world’ (John 12:31) described his lordship ‘of the generation of the wicked in this world’. As such, the extent of his kingdom was measured by the number of enemies of the gospel, whom the Devil possessed ‘in the heart’. Such an outlook did not necessarily magnify Satan’s power; but it meant that his influence seemed pronounced whenever sin and falsehood abounded. The early reformers struck a blow against the Devil by rescuing the gospel from Roman ‘superstition’; but later generations discovered that his empire of deceit was resilient. Conflict over the true form of Christianity tended to amplify Satan’s influence by focusing attention on his deluded adherents. At the same time, the reform of the church itself stripped away many of the rites and holy objects that had once shielded the faithful from his spite, as well as the saints that interceded on their behalf. Men and women had to face the Devil’s temptations alone, often in the belief that they held sway over the greater part of humankind.7

English reformers, then, crafted from the traditions of medieval Christianity a concept of Satan that was both intimate and powerful. This concept was presented to a wide audience in sermons, devotional literature, chapbooks and ballads, including cheap broadsheets such as Stand up to Your Beliefe (1640), which presented the ‘combat between Satan tempting and a Christian triumphing’ as a lively dialogue between a humble believer and the enemy. The appeal of this message depended on the disposition of individual listeners and readers, and was not confined to any one section of the population. Devout Protestants were a minority in Tudor and Stuart society, however. In part, this reflected the fact that religious devotion in any culture tends to be a minority pursuit. Reformed Christianity was also more demanding than late medieval Catholicism, as the latter was based as much on the performance of ritual as the understanding of theological precepts. With its intense emphasis on scripture, Protestantism certainly required a fairly high degree of literacy in a predominantly oral culture. This helps to explain the relatively rapid spread of the new faith in urban areas, and especially London, where both education and print were most widely available. These factors ensured that committed Protestants remained a self-conscious minority in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though they were well represented among the political elite. The rest of the population, characterized by the Essex preacher George Gifford as ‘the common sort of Christians’, retained many conservative religious assumptions and correspondingly ‘unreformed’ ideas about the Devil.8

This book examines the rise of the Protestant Devil in Tudor and Stuart England. Chapter two argues that the godly minority diminished the more physical and often comic representations of Satan that belonged to the common inheritance of the Middle Ages, and abandoned the belief that men and women could overcome the ancient enemy by their own efforts. The reformed image of Satan imposed considerable psychological demands on those who took it seriously, and these are considered in chapter three. The rest of the book is concerned largely with the effect of these ideas on English society as a whole. It suggests that Protestant theologians largely failed to convince ordinary people of their case, and much broader attitudes towards the Devil continued to flourish. Their efforts were not, however, entirely in vain. Some Protestant assumptions did achieve widespread acceptance, resulting in a partially reformed view of the Devil in popular culture. These developments were shaped by a coalition of theological, social and psychological factors, the effects of which are surveyed below.

SATAN, PROVIDENCE AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

If God did not exist, according to Voltaire’s maxim, it would be necessary to invent him. The same is probably true of the Devil, since his existence helps to resolve an enduring and profound difficulty in Christian theology: the so-called ‘problem of evil’. If God is perfectly loving, why does He allow the innocent to suffer? If He has infinite power, why does He do nothing to prevent it? These questions are raised by any instance of underserved pain. Theologians distinguish between ‘natural evils’ – such as famine and disease – and man-made atrocities like the gulags and extermination camps of the twentieth century, but both lead to the same basic dilemma: why does a good and all powerful God allow such things to happen?

The problem of evil dissolves if all earthly events – including famines and atrocities – are attributed directly to the will of God. This position was adopted in some books of the Old Testament, which present an unflinching vision of Jehovah as the fount of both goodness and suffering. The message is unusually clear in the authorized translation of Isaiah 45:7: ‘I form the light and create darkness: I make peace and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.’ This position entailed a humble acceptance of divine sovereignty in all its aspects. Less palatably, it also implied that God was not unambiguously good. The construction of a perfectly benign (and perhaps more psychologically satisfying) vision of God required an alternative explanation for the obvious evils in the world – and the Devil emerged in this role. Indeed, some Old Testament scholars have argued that the idea of an entirely benevolent God encouraged the transformation of Satan from His servant into His evil opponent in the centuries before Christianity. This process was completed in the New Testament, in which a wholly loving God confronts a wholly malevolent Devil. On this interpretation, it appears that belief in the Devil arises from the assertion of God’s goodness.9

Viewed more narrowly, the Devil helped to resolve the apparent inconsistency between a perfectly loving and all powerful God and the presence of evil in the world. A good God would wish to prevent the innocent from suffering, and an omnipotent God could do so; yet human experience shows that this is not the case. One solution to this logical problem was to place an effective limit on God’s power by arguing that he acted within constraints imposed by the disobedience of his own creatures. Such disobedience could not be avoided without the abolition of free will, which a loving creator would not impose. The first rebellion against the deity was led by the angel Lucifer, who devoted himself to the corruption of humankind once he was cast down from Heaven. Through his intervention in the Garden of Eden, the first man and woman were deceived into betraying their maker, and this act brought sin and death into the world. A similar argument could explain specific instances of innocent suffering caused by famine and disease: as a powerful spirit in rebellion against God, Satan could be held responsible for such ‘natural evils’.10

The relationship between the Devil and God remained ambiguous, however. A tension existed between divine sovereignty and demonic agency: if the Devil was a free creature who disobeyed the Lord, did his freedom extend to complete autonomy? Such an assertion came close to acknowledging a spiritual power independent of God, and undermining His government. This problem arose whenever Christians emphasized divine authority, and came sharply into focus during the Protestant Reformation. For the German reformer Martin Luther, God was the ultimate cause of everything in the world, including events that appeared to be evil. The Devil, accordingly, always acted according to God’s will. Equally, John Calvin cited biblical precedents to affirm that the Lord supervised the Devil’s actions, as when ‘he turned Pharaoh over to Satan to be confirmed in the obstinacy of his breast’. By taking this view, Protestant theologians risked the suggestion that God desired evil. Luther avoided this conclusion by making some careful distinctions. First, he proposed that occurrences that seemed wicked to us were, in truth, part of God’s loving plan for the world. With our flawed minds and limited sense of perspective, we were incapable of seeing the goodness that underpinned all the creator’s works. Second, Luther distinguished between the will of God, which was always good, and the will of Satan, which was utterly malign. While the Devil took a cruel pleasure in what he did, God allowed him to act for reasons that were loving and just. Thus ‘God incites the Devil to evil, but he does not do evil himself’.11

In Protestant England these ideas were contained within the doctrine of ‘providence’. This was the belief that God’s hand guided every event towards His ultimate purpose. Providential thinking was applied to all manner of earthly affairs, and also reached into the world of spirits. ‘Devils do much mischief’, wrote the West Country minister Richard Bernard in 1627, ‘but even by these also doth God work His will, and these do nothing without the hand of His providence’. Francis Raworth observed in 1655 that ‘providence extends toward all rational and intellectual creatures, men and angels, good and bad’. Since God’s intentions were benign and just, even demons were unwilling agents of the higher good. Their acts were performed with malice, but the divine hand ensured that their outcome was benevolent. As Edward Leigh noted in 1646, ‘God well useth evil instruments besides and beyond their own intention’. In A Sermon of Gods Providence (1609), Arthur Dent adapted the words of St Paul to describe this strange marvel: ‘so mighty and wonderful is God, that he is able to make the light to shine out of darkness’. John Milton dramatized this idea in Paradise Lost, in which Satan was tormented by the knowledge that ‘all his malice served but to bring forth / Infinite goodness’.12

The doctrine of providence was illustrated in the more mundane context of an English murder case in 1603. Elizabeth Caldwell conspired with her lover and two accomplices to poison her husband with rats-bane; but their plot resulted in the accidental death of a serving girl instead. A contemporary account of the crime noted that Caldwell had been inspired by the Devil, but his aims were frustrated by the higher intentions of God. The failure of the plot proved to be the improbable route by which Caldwell discovered true religion, while her associates remained unrepentant slaves of the ‘ugly fiend’. In this way ‘the deceitful Devil, who hath sometimes permission from God to attempt the very righteous, was now an instrument to her sorrow, but her feeling faith the more increased’. Caldwell went on to exhort the crowd at her execution to resist demonic temptation, forswear adultery, and keep the Sabbath. Thus God used Satan as his tool, and the outcome of his actions was good rather than evil.13

The supreme power of God was further emphasized by the doctrine of predestination. Drawn from the works of St Paul and St Augustine, this concept was embraced by Martin Luther and the followers of the second-generation French reformer, John Calvin. In its Calvinist form, the doctrine asserted that God had chosen to save a portion of humankind – the ‘elect’ – from the beginning of time, and condemned the rest to damnation. This divine edict was immutable and could not be affected by the behaviour or ‘merit’ of individuals. In 1563 the idea was enshrined in the Thirty-Nine Articles which set out the official doctrine of the Church of England. According to the seventeenth article, ‘predestination to life is the everlasting purpose of God, whereby (before the foundations of the world were laid) he has constantly decreed by his counsel secret to us, to deliver from curse and damnation those whom he has chosen in Christ out of mankind, and to bring them by Christ to everlasting salvation’. While the correct interpretation of these words was the subject of scholarly debate, the most influential Protestant theologians of the Elizabethan period were firmly committed to the doctrine. William Perkins placed it at the heart of his sermons and catechisms in the 1590s, and the doctrine was publicized by other devotional writers such as George Gifford and Arthur Dent.14

By underlining the power of God, the doctrine of predestination appeared to diminish further the Devil’s role in human affairs. Not only did the Lord employ Satan as his instrument, but he retained control over the salvation and damnation of particular men and women. Although the ancient enemy wished to draw people into Hell for his own malicious pleasure, he had no final power over their fate. To human eyes, the decision of God to damn one person and save another might appear to be arbitrary and unjust, but – just like the existence of other apparent evils in the world – it reflected the deity’s eternal wisdom and ultimate purpose for humankind. The faithful were encouraged to submit themselves to the divine will, and examine their consciences for ‘signs’ that they were numbered among the elect.

Protestant theology, therefore, offered a radical solution to the problem of evil. As Jeffrey Burton Russell has observed, the leaders of the movement were ‘unflinchingly consistent in affirming the total omnipotence of God’, with the result that Satan was reduced to little more than ‘God’s tool, like a pruning hook or a hoe that he uses to cultivate his garden’. The implications of this theology were not fixed, however. While the doctrines of providence and predestination set absolute limits on Satan’s power, they proved to be extremely subtle (and supple) in their application. God’s providential wisdom could confound human expectations. The divine plan was ‘marvellous and unspeakable’, as Edward Cradocke pointed out in 1572. Indeed, the Lord’s methods could appear inscrutably harsh. As Arthur Dent explained in The Plain Mans Path-way to Heaven (1601), God did not spare his children from earthly afflictions; rather, he allowed them to suffer in ways that were ultimately beneficial, either in this world or the next. ‘He loveth them when he smiteth them. He favoureth them when He seemeth to be most against them . . . He presseth them that He may ease them. He maketh them cry, that afterward they may laugh.’ Thus God could employ Satan as an instrument to purify and chastise His people, both directly through temptation and indirectly by inspiring others to persecute the church. At the same time, the doctrine of predestination meant that He abandoned the unsaved to the Devil’s wrath. These possibilities meant that the doctrines of providence and predestination were compatible with diverse interpretations of Satan’s earthly power; and these interpretations reflected the world that reformed Christians perceived around them.15

In practice, many Protestant reformers came to emphasize the Devil’s might, and placed the struggle against him at the centre of religious life. In this respect, the teaching of John Calvin was entirely typical:

The fact that the Devil is everywhere called God’s adversary and ours also ought to fire us to an unceasing struggle against him. For if we have God’s glory at heart, as we should have, we ought with all our strength to contend against him who is trying to extinguish it. If we are minded to affirm Christ’s kingdom as we ought, we must wage irreconcilable war with him who is plotting its ruin. Again, if we care about our salvation at all, we ought to have neither peace nor truce with him who continually lays traps to destroy it.

Many English Protestants joined Calvin’s ‘irreconcilable war’ with Satan. This attitude was captured in the titles of numerous books devoted to the subject: particularly martial examples include John Downame’s The Christian Warfare, Wherein is First Generally Shewed the Malice, Power and Politike Stratagems of the Spirituall Ennemies of our Salvation, Satan and his Assistants the World and the Flesh (1604), Henry Hoddesdon’s An Armory against Satan (1616), William Gouge’s The Whole Armor of God: or A Christians Spiritual Furniture to Keepe him Safe from all the Assaults of Satan (1619), and the anonymous Seven Weapons to Conquer the Devill (1628). Thus the potential of Protestant doctrines to allay anxieties about the Devil was not realized. In fact, the Reformation had the opposite effect. To explain why this happened, it is necessary to reach beyond theology to the lived experience of English Protestants. Here the most important factors were religious conflict and the psychological demands of the reformed faith.16

SATAN AND CONFLICT

From the 1520s onwards, the successful establishment of Protestant churches in Germany and northern Europe destroyed the unity of medieval religion. Throughout the Middle Ages, the defenders of the western church had identified heresy as the work of Satan. This tradition continued in the early years of the Reformation, with the leaders of both religious factions condemning their opponents as the Devil’s agents; and this rhetoric intensified as confessional warfare engulfed the continent in the second half of the sixteenth century. For Martin Luther, Catholicism was explicitly ‘the Devil’s church’ and the pope was his earthly representative, or Antichrist, while the extremists within his own camp were ‘bewitched of the Devil’. In the same spirit, the Roman church and its political allies denounced the satanic origins of all branches of Protestantism. As a consequence, the profile of the ancient enemy increased considerably on both sides of the religious divide.17

Historians have speculated about the relationship between this heightened awareness of Satan and the persecution of witches in the early modern age. While the first prosecutions for witchcraft occurred in the late Middle Ages, and the first wave of persecution took place before the outbreak of religious conflict in the 1520s, the intensification of witch trials in the later sixteenth century coincided with the religious instability engendered by the Reformation. It was once argued that the confessional states that emerged in this period waged war against satanic witchcraft, and confirmed their authority in the process; but this view has not survived the discovery that the most intense persecutions were driven by local people acting independently of central governments. A more plausible explanation, advanced strongly by Brian Levack in the context of Scotland and England, is that some zealous Christians came to view witches as a kind of satanic fifth column within their communities. In those regions where witchcraft was perceived mainly as a religious crime, and where legal safeguards against torture were weak, the desire to create a God-fearing society could involve the elimination of witches. More generally, the widespread interest in the crime after 1560 contributed to the intense awareness among Catholics and Protestants of the Devil’s presence in the world.18

In England, the effects of religious division were complicated by the course of the national Reformation. The Protestant reforms introduced cautiously by Henry VIII, and more aggressively in the brief reign of his son Edward, were swept away by the Catholic Mary Tudor in the 1550s. Mary’s reign, which resulted in the execution of nearly three hundred Protestants and the exile of many others, caused later English reformers to identify their faith with persecution and conflict. Following the accession in 1558 of her Protestant half-sister Elizabeth, this perception was expressed most forcibly in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), the contents of which were summed up neatly by its popular title, the Book of Martyrs. As Foxe declared in the preface to the 1570 edition, the history of religion was the story of ‘what Christian blood hath been spilt, what persecutions raised, what tyranny exercised, what torments devised, what treachery used against the poor flock and church of Christ, in such sort as since Christ’s time greater hath not been seen’. This preoccupation with conflict was reinforced after 1588 by the war with Spain, which many Protestants perceived as a struggle against the Roman Antichrist. The view that religion was a kind of warfare was further encouraged by the hostility of many ordinary people to the perceived excesses of Protestant ministers and their supporters among the laity. The most zealous English Protestants, who were derided by their enemies as ‘puritans’ and known to one another as ‘godly’ Christians, sought to impose their own model of religious discipline on a largely unenthusiastic population. Their efforts divided many parishes between a minority of ‘godly professors’ and their more easy-going neighbours. This tendency pre-disposed the godly minority to perceive itself as an embattled vanguard of ‘true Christianity’. Thus by the late 1500s, many English Protestants believed that their religion was besieged by enemies at home and adversaries abroad. This perception, in turn, encouraged them to develop an intense awareness of the Devil’s power.19

Another factor that influenced Protestant perceptions of Satan was the incomplete nature of the Reformation itself. On her accession in 1558, Elizabeth sought to impose an inclusive religious settlement that could satisfy the wishes of her Protestant supporters without alienating the Catholic majority. Like her father, she also favoured the traditional model of church government by bishops, not least because their appointment by the crown tended to secure its authority. Consequently, the Elizabethan church retained much of the administrative structure of its Catholic predecessor, along with a liturgy and style of worship that was in some respects similar to Catholicism. The survival of these ‘popish trappings’ was resented by a sizeable portion of the Protestant community, which hoped that future concessions from the crown would complete the unfinished business of reform. Such people expressed their views in diverse ways: most accepted the rites of the English church but looked for their eventual amendment, while the more extreme pursued a policy of ‘nonconformity’, refusing to participate in the offensive rites prescribed in the Book of Common Prayer. More generally, all godly professors favoured a style of worship that focused on preaching instead of ritual. Support for this attitude was indicated in 1603 when the queen’s successor, James VI of Scotland, was presented with a thousand-name petition for reform of the church as he travelled south to claim the English throne. The new king considered these proposals at the Hampton Court Conference in 1604, but few significant concessions were made. Subsequently, the Elizabethan settlement remained in force until the 1640s, when it was violently overthrown by the godly supporters of parliament in the civil war.

This environment gave Protestants much opportunity to witness the crafty operations of the Devil, and to observe the extent of his kingdom on earth. While God’s hand ensured that his final defeat was inevitable, the many obstacles to the establishment of true religion – both in the hierarchy of the church and the hearts of ordinary people – suggested that Satan’s party would outnumber the godly for some time to come. By seeing the Devil’s influence primarily in the mind, Protestants could detect his stratagems in a host of earthly agents. More darkly, they could feel his presence in their own spirit and flesh, where he sought to undermine their faith and secure their damnation. In this role the Devil helped to explain – and sometimes to resolve – the doubts and trials that often accompanied the practice of godly religion itself.

THE DEVIL WITHIN AND WITHOUT

In his perceptive and subtle study of the Devil in the English Reformation, Nathan Johnstone relates the Protestant experience of Satan to the practical and pastoral concerns of those it affected. He notes that demonic temptation ‘provided a means of understanding very real experiences’. Above all, Satan’s wiles explained how apparently God-fearing people could be seduced by the false religion of Rome. As the ‘father of lies’, the Devil was a master of deception, and popery was his masterpiece. In the words of William Tyndale, the Roman church had ‘set up the ministers of Satan, disguised yet in names of and garments like unto the angels of light and ministers of righteousness’. As Johnstone points out, the success of this charade made English Protestants acutely aware of the spiritual blindness that afflicted fallen humankind, and Satan’s resourcefulness in exploiting it. This encouraged vigilance against demonic subversions of Christianity that could seduce honest believers if they were off their guard. It was only through careful attention to scripture, aided by sedulous pastors, that Christians could evade the Devil’s plausible deceits.20

Engagement with Satan also made sense of the spiritual difficulties that Protestants encountered. It helped to explain moments of spiritual failure, uncertainty or despair. Demonic temptation forced its victims to scrutinize their consciences and acknowledge their own sins. The Gloucestershire divine John Sprint offers a good illustration. In 1623 Sprint published a short pamphlet, The Christian Sword and Buckler, in the form of a letter to an unnamed friend. The text, which was reprinted ten times before 1650, suggested conventional responses to ‘the assaults of Satan’ on a sensitive conscience. These included the despairing thought that the reader was unworthy of salvation:

If he [the Devil] say your sins are many, and more than can be pardoned, tell him, where sin aboundeth, grace over-aboundeth. If he say you are the greatest sinner in the world, tell him it is true, but Christ came into the world to save sinners, whereof I am chief. If he allege the greatness of thy guilt, say, though my sins be as red as scarlet, yet he will make them as white as snow.

Here Sprint’s letter acknowledged a familiar source of anxiety among his godly audience: the fear that their sins excluded them from divine mercy. It was the Devil’s aim to cultivate this thought; and its remedy was God’s unmerited grace. The whole experience was intensely introspective: both the spiritual crisis and its resolution involved self-examination and the admission of sin.21

Such experiences undoubtedly help to explain the importance of Satan in the English Reformation. For Johnstone, the Protestant emphasis on a spiritual Devil entailed vigilance against falsehood and the kind of painful self-scrutiny described in Sprint’s letter. Above all, it compelled believers to confront their own fallen natures. Rather than crudely labeling their enemies as the Devil’s associates, or attributing their own ‘satanic’ thoughts and deeds to an external force for which they were not responsible, Protestants searched their own souls for Satan’s imprint. This interpretation may be unduly narrow, however. Satan had always served many purposes, and been understood with varying degrees of sophistication. The Protestant Devil was no exception: indeed, the idea of demonic temptation was an exceptionally flexible psychological resource. The potential of this resource was indicated elsewhere in Sprint’s text. Most crudely, the enemies of Protestant piety were placed in Satan’s camp: the Devil, Sprint observed, was ‘called the God of this world because he ruleth in the children of disobedience’, who showed their allegiance ‘by lying, swearing, and forswearing, deceiving, and oppressing, and such evil courses’. In eschewing the company of such people, the godly implicitly rejected Satan. More subtly, the experience of demonic temptation itself was a potential sign of grace. ‘Every temptation of a Christian’, Sprint noted, ‘is a ground of strong consolation’. This was because ‘warriors never besiege nor batter cities they have won, so Satan seeks not the souls he hath devoured’. This idea, which was a commonplace in devotional literature, could transform the anxieties of godly men and women into marks of election, and thereby confirm their separation from an unregenerate world.22

While the awareness of the Devil’s power could lead Protestants to rake their consciences for signs of sin, it could also provide an explanation for troubling thoughts and feelings. In this context it was possible to attribute ‘unnatural’ attitudes to Satan, and sometimes to deflect responsibility from the individual to an external power. The philosopher Charles Taylor has argued that a ‘porous’ conception of the self, in which the mind is open to supernatural agents beyond its control, was a defining quality of the pre-modern world. This outlook was accepted explicitly by Tudor and Stuart theologians, who held that Satan could implant thoughts directly into the human consciousness. Such demonic ‘injections’ could be identified and repudiated as the work of the ghostly enemy. Again, Sprint hints at this possibility in his description of religious anxiety. He notes that Satan ‘tells you that the word of God is false. This is the first lesson that the Devil teacheth’. Here he appears to identify moments of doubt as demonic intrusions to be renounced. More openly, the Oxford theologian Robert Bolton described how his friends found ‘great ease and comfort’ when they discovered that certain sinful thoughts they had experienced belonged to the Devil. Such attribution was possible when Protestants faced Satan as a tempter, and became grimly explicit in cases of demonic possession. The whole logic of possession – which Johnstone describes as an ‘extreme form’ of temptation – rested on the belief that the Devil was speaking through the afflicted individual, who was therefore not responsible for the words that he or she uttered.23

Thus the Protestant struggle with Satan created diverse possibilities for the individuals involved. His mastery of deceit meant that believers had to watch against seductive falsehoods and submit their consciences to scrupulous self-observation. At the same time, Satan’s hold over ‘worldlings’ set the godly apart from their more carefree neighbours; and the awareness of demonic temptation in itself was a hopeful sign of election. The Devil’s wiles could encourage soul searching and the admission of sin; they could also free people from responsibility for inappropriate thoughts and feelings. The autobiographies of godly men and women, which are considered in chapter three, suggest that all these possibilities were realized, and often in the same individuals. It was the very richness of the Devil as an intellectual resource that helped keep him at the heart of Protestant spirituality.

But engagement with Satan was not, of course, confined to the godly. While the reformed services of the church of England reflected a new attitude towards the ancient enemy, and ministers impressed his power as a spiritual tempter in sermons and printed texts, many older beliefs about the Devil survived long into the eighteenth century. The existence of this wider tradition further extended the role of the Devil in Tudor and Stuart life. It also created tensions and synergies within English culture that reflected the fate of the Reformation as a whole.