The threat of arrest hung over Cartwright for five months of 1590 before he was at last committed to the Fleet prison, probably in late October. On October 4 he had written to Lord Burghley in the hope that he might “relieve me against the troubles that are coming upon me: especially against her Majesty’s heavy displeasure” (p 452).2 In another letter he tells Burghley how anxious he was that the Queen should reject the slanderous reports she had received from his accusers and regard him as one of her loyal subjects. Even though his income as Master of Warwick Hospital was the chief means
1This is the final section of a paper delivered by the Editor at the 2011 Theological Conference. Last month’s article described some of Cartwright’s writing in defence of Protestant principles. On his return from the Continent to England he became Master of the Leicester Hospital, in Warwick.
2All references in brackets are to A F Scott Pearson, Thomas Cartwright and Elizabethan Puritanism 1535 to 1603, Cambridge, 1925.
of support for his wife and his five small children, he was willing to give up the position, he told Burghley, to please the Queen, who objected to him being Master.
Burghley clearly was not able to keep Cartwright out of prison but he did write to Archbishop Whitgift advising him not to take his place among the Ecclesiastical Commissioners examining Cartwright, in case he should seem to be taking revenge on an old opponent. Cartwright was falsely charged with having been re-ordained at Antwerp (the implication was that this was done according to a Presbyterian form). He was further charged with being instrumental in establishing a Presbyterian church among the English merchants in Antwerp and Middelburg, exercising ecclesiastical discipline without authority and using Presbyterian forms of worship. Other charges related to his ministry in Warwick: that he had preached without a licence; that he had criticised the Church, condemning bishops and the Book of Common Prayer; that he had not knelt at communion and had persuaded others to follow his example. The seven final charges related to his involvement in the Conference movement of the 1580s; in particular, he was accused of having written part or most of the Book of Discipline.
When brought before the Commissioners, Cartwright was expected to take the ex officio oath, by which the person being examined swore to answer truthfully all questions that might be put to him. His response was, as he told Burghley, “I esteemed it contrary both to the laws of God and of the land to require such an oath, especially of a minister” (p 317). In particular, he wanted to avoid incriminating any of his fellow Puritans. Yet he was willing to answer particular questions on oath, provided he had the opportunity to consider them beforehand. He was particularly anxious to clear himself from such accusations as being re-ordained, but that opportunity was denied him; and as a result of refusing to take the oath, he was sent back to the Fleet.
Bancroft tried to engage him in controversy over the existence of Presbyterian structures in early Christianity. Cartwright declined for the time being; clearly a sixteenth-century prison was not the best place for historical research – he would have needed to consult various books, for instance. Besides, his health was not good; he was suffering from gout and stone (in his kidney, possibly) and feeling the effects of increasing age (although he was only about 50, in his time that was considered relatively old). Yet, he told Bancroft, he had clearly shown in his published writings that, in Augustine’s time, there were elders who were not ministers. In a petition to the authorities, probably in 1591, the Puritan prisoners denied that they were schismatics or rebels; they expressed their belief that the Church of England was a true visible Church, but in need of further reformation; they believed, however, that it was unlaw-
ful to seek such reformation in any rebellious way; they declared that they met in Conferences because they thought it was lawful to do so – for the purposes of mutual edification, erecting a bulwark against Romanists and schismatics, and preparing a uniform programme of further reformation. They denied having exercised jurisdiction in these meetings – by appointing ministers, for example, or by the exercise of church discipline – and they pointed out that the Book of Common Prayer itself speaks of godly discipline.
As no progress was being made, because the Puritans were refusing to take the oath, the Commissioners decided to try to persuade Cartwright, as the most prominent Puritan, to submit to the oath. They were unsuccessful and handed him over to the Court of the Star Chamber, where he appeared in June 1591. There he denied some of the charges against him and emphasised that the Book of Discipline had never been put in operation; it merely stated what he and others wished to be put in practice. The subscribers to the Book of Discipline were declaring that they believed its contents to be agreeable to Scripture, to the judgement of learned divines past and present, and to the practice of many churches. And when they had undertaken to put portions of the Book of Discipline into practice, this was dependent on such a course of action having legal sanction.
Such treatment of the Puritans was bound to attract sympathy in Scotland and the General Assembly, meeting in March 1590, resolved “that the brethren recommend to God, in their public and private supplications, the afflicted brethren, in England, for the confession of the purity of the religion” (p 343). Elizabeth was irritated and, three months later, she protested to the Scottish King by letter. “There is risen,” she wrote, both in your realm and mine, a set of perilous consequence, such as would have no kings but a presbytery. . . . I pray you stop the mouths, or make shorter the tongues, of such ministers as dare presume to make prayer in the pulpit for the persecuted in England” (p 343). James replied to “his dearest sister and cousin”: having heard of the apprehension of Cartwright and others, he was “requesting you most earnestly that . . . it may please you to let them be relieved of their present strait” (pp 463-4).
Cartwright was being treated more harshly in prison than other ministers; their friends were permitted to visit them, but no one was allowed to visit Cartwright except his family and those who had necessary business to transact with him. Cartwright was reluctant to complain too much in case the bishops would restrict the other ministers’ visitors in the same way. After spending more than a year in prison, Cartwright and eight other ministers contacted Burghley in the hope that he would help secure their release. Burghley contacted the Attorney General, and there were further discussions which
included the Lord Chief Justice. Although it was becoming clear that no actual seditious conduct had been proved, the ministers were kept in prison.
However, their situation was attracting wider sympathy. Sir Francis Knollys, the treasurer of the royal household and a Puritan supporter, expressed to Burghley his amazement that the Puritans were thought to be as dangerous as Roman Catholics. Knollys was not asking for mercy for the ministers, but for justice; their alleged guilt had not been proven. It became clear that the best hope of release was for the ministers to look to Archbishop Whitgift. Cartwright was obviously reluctant to do so, in view of the previous controversy between them. He explained this to Burghley, while adding that he had already prepared a petition to Whitgift. Burghley advised Cartwright to send the petition and evidently persuaded Whitgift to receive it favourably; at least the Archbishop did not reject it outright when the ministers’ wives presented it to him.
It was probably the Attorney General who drew up a form of submission which the ministers were required to sign before they could be released. Among other demands, it required them to acknowledge the full ecclesiastical supremacy of the Queen, that it was seditious and unlawful for any body to attempt to alter existing church usages without the consent of her Majesty, that the existing church government was allowed by the Word of God, and that the Presbyterian system of government was both unlawful and dangerous.
The ministers refused to accept these demands, even at the cost of continued imprisonment. But some time around the second half of May 1592 all the ministers were released; it is likely that their increasing ill-health was a significant factor in the decision to set them free. The outlook for the Puritan movement did not look bright at this stage, particularly as the Queen had squashed every effort by MPs with Puritan sympathies to promote a bill for the further reform of the Church of England. No wonder William Fuller, a Puritan layman who had known the Queen when she was a girl, complained: “Your Majesty hath so insufficiently heard, believed and taken to heart what God hath commanded you, and so meekly and coldly obeyed . . . that but halfly by your Majesty has God been honoured, His Church reformed and established, His people taught and comforted”.3
Little is known about Cartwright during the three years following his release from the Fleet, except that he seems to have returned to Warwick and resumed his position in the Hospital. But in 1595 he left Warwick for Guernsey in the Channel Isles and spent six years there as chaplain at Castle Cornet. He would have found this a much more congenial situation, as presby-
teries existed in both Guernsey and Jersey and he was able to put into practice the principles to which he adhered and which had caused him so much suffering. This Presbyterian system was to continue until the Restoration of 1660. Cartwright helped to bring about, in 1596, a reconciliation between the Presbyteries of the two islands, after 13 years of disruption in their relations. In that year representatives, both ministers and elders, from both Presbyteries met as a Synod. Cartwright’s congregation consisted of the Governor, his family and others in the Castle, including the soldiers of the garrison, and it is said that Cartwright performed “some efficacious and gracious work” among the soldiers (p 386).
Cartwright returned to Warwick in 1601, but spent the following two years, until he died in 1603, as an invalid. “Yet”, we are told, “would he not intermit his labours, but continued preaching when many times he could scarce creep up into the pulpit” (p 387). Cartwright was nominated as one of the ministers who were to represent the Puritan side at the Hampton Court Conference but, before it met, he had gone where, in Samuel Rutherford’s words, “few kings and great folks come”. Bancroft described the Puritan representatives as “Cartwright’s scholars”, a remark which was presumably not intended as a compliment, but it does indicate Cartwright’s influence over the movement which was to become very much stronger in the new century.
On 25 December 1603 Cartwright preached his last sermon, on the verse, “Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it” (Ecc 12:7). Just two days later this worthy man’s spirit returned to God to receive his reward. He was 67. That morning he had spent two hours on his knees in prayer and he afterwards told his wife that “he found wonderful and unutterable joy and comfort, God giving him a glimpse of heaven before he came to it” (p 392). Samuel Clarke, an early biographer, notes that “he was frequent in prayer every day and, in his younger years, hath risen many times in the night to seek out private places to pray in. And as his labours were very great in the work of the ministry, so it pleased the Lord to make them very successful for the conversion and confirmation of many, and for terror and restraint unto others” (pp 395-6).
We may quote Cartwright’s definition of prayer in his A Treatise of Christian Religion, published after his death: “a calling upon God alone, in the name of Christ, by the titles wherewith (in the Scripture) He is set forth unto us, as well thereby to do service and homage unto the Lord, as to obtain all necessary graces”. He also speaks of prayer as a key to open “the store-houses of all God’s treasure and (as it were) the only hook whereby we reach all the blessings of God, which otherwise would be out of our reach” (p 403).
We may sum up in the words of Dr John R de Witt: “Doubtless the most
representative early Presbyterian Puritan was Thomas Cartwright, who . . . with a burning passion quite careless of the consequences asserted the sole lordship of Christ in His Church. Granting that the authority of Queen Elizabeth was ‘the greatest in the earth’, yet he affirmed that it was limited by the Word of God. . . . What Cartwright demands is not the dominance of the Church over the state, but the independence of the Church in its own realm and its divinely-given right to exercise the functions peculiar to it, particularly in the matter of discipline. . . .
“This very same ground was occupied by the Westminster Assembly. The Confession of Faith itself makes it sufficiently clear that the majority of the divines stood in the tradition of Cartwright and the sixteenth-century Presbyterian Puritans: ‘There is no other head of the Church, but the Lord Jesus Christ’. . . . The Assembly refused to accept any limitation upon what it conceived to be the right of the Church by divine institution. It was for the divines of Westminster, as for . . . Thomas Cartwright, a question of the kingly office of Jesus Christ, in which the civil magistrate had no right whatever to intrude.”4