Introduction
This article uses the Lord Leycester Hospital in Warwick as a case study to explore the complex relationship between the church and the military in early modern England. It considers the period between the foundation of the almshouse in the late sixteenth century and the death of its second master, Thomas Cartwright, in 1603. The ‘hospital’ or ‘almshouse’ (the terms were synonymous in the early modern period) was founded in 1571 by Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester (1532/3–88).Footnote 1 The earl obtained a royal licence for his almshouse and put through a private act of Parliament.Footnote 2 However, it was not until November 1585 that Leicester secured his charity’s financial endowments and legal rights when he incorporated the hospital’s master and almsmen, collectively known as brethren, as a body capable of holding lands and litigating as a corporation.Footnote 3 By a further deed in the same month, the earl made statutes for the hospital.Footnote 4 These documents set out how the Lord Leycester almshouse was to provide ‘sustenacion and relief’ to ‘poore needy and impotent people’ with preference awarded to wounded or maimed ex-soldiers, especially those from Gloucestershire and Warwickshire, as well as servants and tenants of the earl and his successors.Footnote 5
This article argues that the earl of Leicester conceived of his elite almshouse as a godly military project. The first section situates the earl’s decision to establish his almshouse in its broader cultural and political context. The new institution held a special symbolic significance for the Dudley family, but their ascendancy in the West Midlands did not come without its challenges. This section argues that the church-military relationship was central both to the hospital’s foundation and to the earl’s desires for memorialization. The second section argues that Leicester’s specific provisions for the governance of the almshouse reveals another aspect of his commitment to godly reformation, which is related to his decision to support Christian soldiers. The third section explores ideological controversies generated during the mastership of the prominent puritan theologian, Thomas Cartwright (1534/5–1603), in the 1580s and 1590s. It shows how the hospital’s puritan identity and its provision for military personnel became a point of controversy within the context of broader debates about the structure of the established Church of England. This article, then, places Leicester’s hospital, with its puritan agenda and military identity, at the centre of arguably the two biggest sources of tension within politics and society in Elizabethan England.
In Elizabethan England, the church and the military were not merely unstable categories but locations of controversy. Conceptions of the church were fiercely contested between the regime’s more cautious formulations – a position favoured by the queen during John Whitgift’s time as archbishop of Canterbury – and the more critical outlook of the puritan cause, pressing for further reform of the established Church of England, under which label we can place both Cartwright and Leicester.Footnote 6 In recent decades, historians have reinterpreted Leicester as the Elizabethan secular privy counsellor most sympathetic to, and supportive of, moderate puritanism; while Cartwright was widely regarded as the chief ideologue of the English presbyterian cause.Footnote 7 Although presbyterianism was ‘the most polemically developed and coherent form’ of puritanism within the Elizabethan Church of England, more recent scholarship has persuasively urged caution in labelling Cartwright as a seditious radical.Footnote 8 Indeed, Peter Lake has argued that the distinctions between ‘moderate’ and ‘radical’ puritans are often misleading.Footnote 9 In Cartwright’s case, such interpretation downplays the extent to which this sometime Cambridge professor maintained strong ties with the political establishment and campaigned for further reform within existing church structures, a position which helps to explain why key figures of the lay establishment, including the earls of Warwick, Leicester and Lord Burghley, were long-standing patrons of his activities.Footnote 10
Military engagement in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe was also dominated by religious beliefs. David Trim has suggested that these decades were distinctive because ‘religious beliefs were a primary cause of wars, and they could determine, too, how and where military operations were conducted and how soldiers behaved while on campaign’. Ideological clashes produced ‘bitter, long-lasting conflicts, internationalised civil wars and rebellions, and turned bi-partisan conflicts into multi-faceted coalition wars’.Footnote 11 In England, conflict with Catholic Spain and war in Ireland dominated the last twenty years of Elizabeth I’s reign, giving a sense of the exceptional level of military commitment in this period.Footnote 12 Simon Adams, the leading historian of the earl of Leicester, has argued that the English intervention Dudley led in the Netherlands against Spain was a ‘Puritan enterprise’, and Patrick Collinson labelled it a ‘crusade for the Gospel’.Footnote 13 Thus, for many sixteenth-century Englishmen, military service was interpreted as a Protestant religious obligation, though this was something the queen often resisted.Footnote 14
This article is also influenced by recent scholarship concerning the social impact of Tudor warfare. Steven Gunn has called for studies of warfare to imitate recent histories of the Reformation that have advanced comprehensive and subtle accounts of the relationship between religious change and English culture, politics and society. The study of military hospitals has an important part to play in meeting this ambition to increase the number of social histories of Tudor England that illuminate the ‘wider impact of war’.Footnote 15 In the early modern period, military service was often a non-permanent and non-professional employment, and the distinction between ‘civilian’ and ‘soldier’ could be murky.Footnote 16 Investigating institutions such as the Lord Leycester could offer a more nuanced picture of how the demands of war affected emerging social and political structures and practices of government at a local level in boroughs and parishes, as well as their role in national state formation processes. While this article looks at the Lord Leycester Hospital to demonstrate a blending of church and military affairs, it also suggests that this relationship, although intimate, was inherently precarious and contested. Elizabethans frequently disputed and questioned its specific embodiment, as seen by this institution’s chequered early history.
The Earl of Leicester and the West Midlands
This first section of this article explores how charitable foundations, and in particular the patronage of an institution with both a religious and military purpose, could be a significant reinforcement of noble honour and identity. As will be discussed, the Lord Leycester Hospital became a valuable asset from which the controversial Dudley family could draw particular strength. In the 1570s and 1580s, Leicester became increasingly involved in the administration of his estates, especially those in the West Midlands. This region held cultural and emotional significance for his family. The queen had granted Robert and his elder brother, Ambrose (c.1530–90), extensive lands and properties in the West Midlands and, by 1564, ennobled them as the earls of Leicester (1564) and Warwick (1561), respectively. As a result of these preferments, as Adams observes, the Dudleys became the ‘largest aristocratic interest in the region’. This represented a partial restoration of those estates that their father, John, the duke of Northumberland, had accumulated before he was convicted of treason under Mary I.Footnote 17 This context is important because when and how the Lord Leycester was founded was entwined with the broader politics of the Dudley ascendancy in the region, which bears particular relevance for the church-military relationship.
Recent work by Glyn Parry and Cathryn Enis has emphasized the aggressive nature of the Dudley agenda in the West Midlands, which was, in their words, ‘marked by conflict, discord, and dodgy dealings’.Footnote 18 They suggest that the territorial policy of the Dudley brothers must be viewed through the lens of their relationship with the Crown, in particular Elizabeth’s expectation that the brothers would inculcate Protestantism and monarchism into a region characterized by deep-seated religious divisions and a powerful resident Catholic gentry.Footnote 19 However, Dudley hegemony in the region was never absolute, and the project was intensely fragile, with alternative sources of patronage increasingly available from rival Protestant lords, especially Sir Christopher Hatton, who emerged as one of Elizabeth’s most important councillors in the 1570s.Footnote 20
Historians have shown Leicester’s role in the development of Kenilworth Castle and the elaborate receptions he held there for Elizabeth in the 1570s.Footnote 21 However, the Lord Leycester also played a significant role in how the earl ‘created a presence through architecture and material culture that relied heavily on the historical reputation’ of the Dudley earldoms.Footnote 22 The hospital represented a tangible and permanent merging of the family’s territorial, religious and military agendas, as well as making a case for Dudley legitimacy in the region. The bear and ragged staff was the historic emblem of the earldom of Warwick and connected Leicester to ancient nobility through the Beauchamps. Leicester was related to Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick (d. 1439), through his paternal grandmother.Footnote 23 Although it does not seem that Leicester placed any insignia on the almshouse’s original buildings, in the 1585 statutes, he provided his almsmen with identifiable liveries, ordering his almsmen to wear them when attending services at the parish church of St Mary’s in Warwick. Later, in April 1665, the master and brethren decided to introduce silver badges with the bear and ragged staff symbol on these garments. The original statutes did not refer to the wearing of any badges on the liveries.Footnote 24
It is hard to overstate the value that the Dudley earls placed on their Beauchamp connections. This distinguished ancestry provided the Dudleys with considerable political capital, justifying their claims to the Warwick earldom and former Beauchamp lands, in a context in which their elevation to the peerage was controversial as well as unusual. Not only was Leicester’s father, the duke of Northumberland, a convicted traitor, but it was rumoured that the earl of Leicester had murdered his first wife, Amy Robsart (d. 1560), whose death remains shrouded in mystery, to enable him to marry the queen.Footnote 25 At a more local level, appeal to the Beauchamp-Dudley link offered Warwickshire inhabitants a familiar sense of continuity, mitigating the impression that the Dudleys were sudden new arrivals; this was instrumental in a county where ‘the fifteenth-century wars and Guy of Warwick were still part of political discourse’.Footnote 26 The county town contained various commemorations to Richard Beauchamp, notably the eponymous chapel in the parish church of St Mary’s, reflecting how his family’s legacy was built into the material culture of medieval and early modern Warwick.Footnote 27 The earl of Leicester developed this cultural and material heritage by establishing his almshouse in Warwick. The Lord Leycester’s 1585 Deed of Incorporation directly evoked the Beauchamp legacy, recalling ‘the good and charytable deedes and workes of Richard Beawchampe late Earle of Warr[wick] and other our Anncestors beinge provided and intended for the relief of poore within the … towne’.Footnote 28
There was also strong familial and personal pressure on Leicester to present himself as a military leader. In early modern England, military honour was considered a qualifying condition of aristocratic status and manliness.Footnote 29 Such expectations were not merely symbolic. In 1585, when Leicester specified the military character of the almshouse, he may have been embarrassed by his own failure to live up to this aristocratic-martial ideal. The notorious Catholic libel, Leicester’s Commonwealth, published in 1584, is a printed source that is representative of some of the critiques of the earl’s ancestry, military prowess and religious faith in circulation in Elizabethan England. However, it is clear that the negative views expressed in this scurrilous tract about Leicester were not widely held; they were illustrative of a very particular factional view, with the tract becoming more influential after his death.Footnote 30 It was a particular mode of Catholic political analysis, arguing that Leicester was an evil puritan Machiavel who monopolized the state’s power, dominated the court and the council, and dictated ecclesiastical appointments. Nevertheless, although this satirical form of attack was not unique to Leicester, the libel underscores a wider cultural and political anxiety about the earl’s ability to mingle church and military policy for his own advantage.Footnote 31 Leicester’s Commonwealth publicly questioned Dudley ancestry, undermining the earl’s position among England’s historic nobility. The character of the moderate Catholic lawyer observes that Elizabeth, while elevating ‘so mean a peer as Robin’, had refused ‘noble knights and princes’, adding that Leicester is ‘noble only in two descents and both of them stained with the block’, a reference to the executions for treason of Leicester’s grandfather and father, Edmund and John Dudley.Footnote 32 The authors of Leicester’s Commonwealth also suggested that the earl did not possess the chivalric bravery and martial prowess to challenge his enemies ‘in the field as a knight should have done’. Instead, they claimed that Leicester chose to poison ‘valiant knights’ because ‘as he durst as soon have eaten his scabbard as draw his sword in public against them, he was enforced (as all wretched, ireful, and dastardly creatures are) to supplant them by fraud and by other men’s hands’.Footnote 33 Leicester’s Commonwealth, then, committed to the public sphere discussions about Dudley’s apparent villainy, dishonour and duplicity. It also sought to puncture the earl’s public image as an upstanding member of the Order of the Garter, the medieval order of chivalry to which he had been elected in 1559, which was a constant source of pride for Dudley in the many portraits of himself that he commissioned during his lifetime.Footnote 34
Both in 1571, the year of the hospital’s foundation, and in 1585, the year of the Deed of Incorporation and the statutes, Leicester would have felt it was appropriate to strengthen his public image as a ‘godly peer’.Footnote 35 In the early 1560s, there had been suspicions of Dudley’s Catholic links. For example, he was suspected of maintaining Catholic relationships by directing his sister, Lady Mary Sidney, to negotiate with the Spanish ambassador, Alvaro de la Quadra, bishop of Aquila, with the suggestion that the king of Spain give his public support to a marriage between Dudley and Queen Elizabeth. In return for the king’s support, Dudley and Elizabeth would reform English religion under his auspices and restore Catholicism. This episode has often been used by historians as evidence of Leicester’s opportunistic pursuit of marrying Elizabeth, and his willingness to embrace Catholicism in order to secure it. However, Adams is doubtful that Leicester was the driving force behind this initiative. He argues that it is more likely that this episode shares similarities with many others in Elizabeth’s reign, revealing more about the queen’s deliberate ambiguity regarding her marital plans for diplomatic ends, rather than it being convincing evidence that Leicester had Catholic ambitions.Footnote 36
On the eve of the Netherlands expedition of 1585, Leicester had few military accomplishments, and this lack of experience seems to be compounded when compared to that of his relatives. It was Leicester’s older brother, Ambrose, earl of Warwick, who had gained a reputation as an effective commander in the Le Havre expedition in 1562–3, where he received a nasty leg wound, a further testament to his honourable service.Footnote 37 Leicester had also – ‘“before his own eyes”’ – witnessed the death of his younger brother, Lord Henry, in the siege of St Quentin in northern France in September 1557.Footnote 38 In addition, Leicester’s father had received commendation for his military service in France under King Henry VIII.Footnote 39 The anti-Dudley poem ‘Epitaphium’, probably dating from the early Jacobean period, includes lines which suggest that Leicester’s attempts to self-fashion himself as a military figure were vain and unsuccessful: ‘Here lies the valiant soldier / that never drew his sword’.Footnote 40 In a similar vein, one of Leicester’s contemporaries, the historian and poet, John Clapham (1566–1619), who was one of Burghley’s clients, wrote in 1603 that the Netherlands campaign proved that ‘Leicester was no great soldier, his nature being more inclinable to ease and delights of the court than to service in the field.’Footnote 41 Although these final two examples date from after Leicester’s death, they capture a sense of the public suspicion that existed in Elizabethan political culture as to the earl’s vacuous military talents and the hollowness of his ‘rites of knighthood’.Footnote 42
Despite claims of his religious opportunism, the evidence – which includes his patronage of preachers, his selection of personal chaplains, his appointment of Oxbridge masters and correspondence with the puritan soldier, Thomas Wood – shows that Leicester’s commitment to moderate puritanism was consistent throughout his time in government. This context is important when analysing the godly values that underpinned the foundation of Leicester’s hospital.Footnote 43 The almshouse was founded at a time when it was important for Leicester to present himself both as a sincere Protestant and as a military leader. That Leicester decided in 1585 to be explicit about the function of his almshouse as an institution for the relief of ex-soldiers is striking. The mid-1580s was a time of profound ‘political crisis’ and, more generally, a social and cultural watershed in the political life of the English nation.Footnote 44 The death of the duke of Anjou and the assassination of the prince of Orange in 1584 were central to the sense of crisis that swept through Reformed Europe.Footnote 45 1584 also brought tremendous personal challenges for Leicester, in contrast to his political career which appears to have been at its climax: the death of his infant son, Robert Dudley, baron Denbigh, daunted his hopes of a legitimate heir.Footnote 46
Additionally, the specific provision of the Lord Leycester is interesting because there were few military almshouses in Tudor England; indeed, relief for veterans was sparse until the 1593 Act for the Relief of Disabled Servicemen, itself still rather limited. This act created a nationwide pension scheme for ex-servicemen administered on a county level by Justices of the Peace.Footnote 47 In a rare earlier attempt at veteran welfare, Mary Tudor had expressed a wish in her will for a London hospital for poor and old soldiers to be endowed with lands worth £266; however, this was not realized.Footnote 48 Geoffrey Hudson has argued that one reason why relief for disabled veterans remained modest in Elizabethan England was that many almshouse administrators were reluctant to admit them because of their connections to lawlessness and itinerancy. A great number of veterans in this period had been pressed vagrants or were convicted felons, which was antithetical to the designs of many founders, including Leicester, who wanted to relieve the honourable and respectable poor.Footnote 49 This point underscores historians’ recent emphasis on the soldier as a deeply contested and contradictory figure in early modern England.Footnote 50
The statutes were finalized on 26 November 1585, a week before Leicester left to take up his appointment as the leader of the expeditionary force to assist the United Provinces of the Netherlands in their revolt against Spain.Footnote 51 That Leicester’s self-fashioning as a military leader had reached new heights, and his encouragement and involvement in a militant Protestant foreign policy was contemporaneous with the composition of the almshouse’s ordinances is surely significant, and underlines the wider international religious context of the institution’s foundation.Footnote 52
Internal Governance of the Godly Almshouse
In drawing up his statutes for the internal governance of his almshouse, the earl of Leicester enunciated his commitment to martial honour and godly reformation. This section demonstrates how Leicester sought to pursue ‘godly reformation through the almshouse’, an ambition which was reinforced by his brother, the earl of Warwick, as shown by his separate deeds for the hospital.Footnote 53 That Leicester conceived of his almshouse as a godly community of Protestant believers is consistent with his combined political, military and religious vision in November 1585, and his milieu of international Calvinist solidarity. In choosing to provide charity to ex-soldiers, Leicester was not only responding to a pressing social need and to grave anxieties surrounding the figure of the disreputable veteran in Tudor England, but was also capitalizing on the Christian metaphor of the godly soldier. In this period, soldiers were often presented through Christian symbolism, yet at the same time were regularly considered to be in particular need of spiritual guidance.Footnote 54
Early modern almshouses were complex institutions since they existed at the intersection of secular and religious worlds.Footnote 55 The buildings that would later become Leicester’s almshouse had originally been built for the United Guilds of Warwick in the late fourteenth century; following the dissolutions of the guilds in the late 1540s, they were used by the town’s burgesses for their meetings. The United Guilds of Warwick represented an amalgamation of the Guild of St George the Martyr and the Holy Trinity, and the Guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The United Guilds, a fellowship of mainly local lay Christian men, embodied a spiritual locus for the community alongside the parish churches of St Mary and St Nicholas, and was bound up with the governance of late medieval Warwick. This point is significant since, even before Leicester publicized his intention to found an almshouse, its future premises were already at least two hundred years old and had complex religious associations.Footnote 56 Despite his different confessional opinions, this was a tradition that Leicester wanted to continue. When one of the Warwick burgesses showed Leicester the corporation’s buildings, the earl was said to have ‘liked [them] well’. Leicester’s architect communicated to the burgesses that his patron was charmed by the buildings, but that it was necessary to have the entire complex, including the chapel and garden, rather than just one part of the buildings, otherwise Dudley would establish his almshouse in his Kenilworth lordship.Footnote 57 Importantly, the buildings ‘alredy made woold save [Leicester] [500] m[ar]ks in his purse’, a considerable amount of money for a peer who often lacked much disposable income.Footnote 58 The existence of the chapel was clearly important and attractive to the earl in his designs for the almshouse and in choosing its location.
The Lord Leycester’s connection to older, pre-Reformation religious traditions is further exemplified by the fact that Dudley endowed the almshouse with lands that had formerly been owned by monasteries, including St Mary’s Abbey in Kenilworth and the Abbey of St Peter and St Paul in Shrewsbury.Footnote 59 In his Heroica Eulogia (1567), an illuminated manuscript produced for Dudley that aimed to prove that his patron had inherited the rights and properties given to previous earls of Leicester, William Bowyer addressed this complicated issue directly. Bowyer argued that Leicester’s right to these former monastic properties rested partly on moral grounds: the earl would rule the properties fairly, in contrast to ‘monkish avarice’. In this way, as Norman Jones observes, ‘[t]he Dudley family was cast in the role of rescuers from papal tyranny’.Footnote 60 Bowyer’s framing anticipates how Leicester might have later justified the existence of his Calvinist, military philanthropic institution that was partly endowed by a former local monastery. This was a complex situation that had particular relevance in Warwickshire given the county’s heterogeneous confessional makeup and strong Catholic presence. Angela Nicholls has suggested that almshouse founders often had to address ‘accepted network[s] of obligation to tenants, servants, neighbours’. In cases of former monastic assets, these obligations came with the land itself, and new owners were expected to maintain hospitality to the poor, an expectation which was not always fulfilled.Footnote 61
The Lord Leycester’s founding documents and statutes evidence how the earl conceived of his almshouse as a means to further his religious and military interests. For instance, Leicester used the term ‘[m]easondiew’ in the Deed of Incorporation.Footnote 62 ‘Maison Dieu’ was a medieval term for almshouses. Despite Leicester’s puritan sensibilities, he probably unthinkingly used this label because it was common currency at the time. The usage of the term in Elizabethan England represents a probably unconscious point of continuity with the charitable patterns of the Catholic past.Footnote 63 The deed also stipulated that Leicester’s institution would provide places for twelve almsmen. This number is itself a significant Christian symbol connected to ideas about perfect divine governance and associated with the number of Jesus’ apostles; it was frequently adopted by almshouse founders in this period. In a similar way to Leicester, Lord Burghley established a hospital in his ‘country’ of Stamford, Lincolnshire, for twelve poor men and a master in 1597.Footnote 64
It was not unusual to establish an almshouse in Elizabethan England; many individuals from across the Protestant spectrum did so. However, there are a number of features of the Lord Leycester statutes that highlight the godly directive that underpinned this foundation. From Ian Archer’s analysis of Thomas Cure’s 1584 ordinances for the College of the Poor at St Saviour’s, Southwark, it can be seen that Leicester’s puritan designs for his hospital have many similarities with Cure’s initiative. Perhaps not coincidentally, Cure was the queen’s saddler; he had benefitted from the patronage of Leicester, who, as Master of the Horse, probably had a close relationship with him. Archer writes that ‘Cure’s obsessive-compulsive ordinances are redolent of the godly control freak’s drive for moral discipline beyond the grave’.Footnote 65 However, ‘[o]bsessive compulsive regulation was, of course, no puritan monopoly’.Footnote 66 Many late medieval almshouses had expected inmates to live ascetic, disciplined and pious lives. Similarly, many features in Cure’s and Leicester’s ordinances were replicated in other provisions, though their rhetoric is often more muted.Footnote 67 The Lord Leycester’s thirty-four statutes were hardly religiously radical, but they do have a noticeable moderate puritan essence.
Leicester’s requirement that the master of the almshouse shall be an ‘ordinary preacher of God’s word’ is a particularly puritan feature of the hospital’s ordinances.Footnote 68 It was highly unusual for almshouses in this period to have their own preacher and chapel. This emphasis on the necessity for the master to be a preacher (rather than merely a priest) demonstrates Leicester’s commitment to puritan evangelizing, as well as distinguishing his charity as an elite institution.Footnote 69 Leicester’s almshouse opened its doors just seven years before the cornerstone was laid at ‘Leicester’s Church’ in the lordship of Denbigh, the core of the earl’s Welsh estates. Though never completed, Leicester embarked there on an ambitious architectural project to construct a large preaching centre. Had it come to fruition, it would have been the largest church built in England and Wales between the Reformation and the completion of the rebuilding of St Paul’s Cathedral in London in 1711. This underscores Leicester’s wider commitment to providing a puritan preaching ministry across his major estates.Footnote 70
Common to virtually all Elizabethan provisions, the almsmen at Leicester’s hospital were expected to lead religious and moral lives. Elite almshouses such as the Lord Leycester were meant to be model institutions, catering for the ‘deserving poor’ and epitomizing the highest levels of respectability.Footnote 71 At the sounding of a bell, every morning and evening the brethren and master were to say collective prayers in the chapel or common hall. The procedure for prayers must have been a lengthy one since the brethren said prayers from the Book of Common Prayer, as well as reciting the Thirty-Nine Articles and the Ten Commandments. The brethren were also ordered to attend the parish church of St Mary every Sunday. Leicester declared that his inmates would ‘upon their knees, with loud and audible voices, … altogether say [their prayers] in English’.Footnote 72 This emphasis on English (rather than Latin) was a common demand in ordinances, reflecting a desire to remove any hint of Catholicism from charitable practices.Footnote 73 A Protestant desire to break with the Catholic past is also apparent in the Lord Leycester’s Deed of Incorporation. Here the earl remarked that his hospital represented a contrast ‘from the errors and superstition of those former tymes’, which ‘are nowe abrogated and taken awaye’.Footnote 74
It is, however, striking that Leicester personally amended the statute on prayer, writing in his own hand: ‘This article for prayers to be referred to the master, to be such as he shall find most necessary and meet for private Prayer, within the House, being agreeable to the Book of Common Prayer, and according to the word of God’.Footnote 75 As one of the Lord Leycester’s earlier historians noted, ‘it is not difficult to see that [this ordinance] gives scope for the tastes and judgement of a Puritan such as Cartwright’.Footnote 76 Leicester’s personal amendment is unusual and provides the master with the religious freedom to lead prayers in a way that he finds most necessary so long as it is in the spirit of the Prayer Book, thereby protecting his almshouse from charges of sedition.
It is revealing that Leicester’s handbook of martial law, The Lawes and Ordinances, which was issued in 1586 for the queen’s soldiers in the Netherlands, contains many similarities with the almshouse’s statutes.Footnote 77 Both make it clear that Leicester viewed religious and martial discipline as symbiotic. The handbook’s second paragraph specifies ‘that martiall discipline aboue all things (proper to men of warre) is by us at this time most to be followed, aswell for the aduancement of Gods glorie, as honourablie to gouerne this Armie in good order’. The second ordinance Leicester issued in the Netherlands ordered soldiers not to blaspheme, and the third makes special mention of honouring God. Leicester’s handbook of martial law and his hospital ordinances also barred, insofar as was possible, women’s association with the soldiers. The military ordinances warned against ‘permitting … many vagrant idle women in an armie’, which resonated with the almshouse statutes, which stipulated that the almsmen could not take women as servants without the master’s permission.Footnote 78 The brethren were also prevented from marrying without the master’s consent and prohibited from entertaining women under the age of thirty unless they were family.Footnote 79 Though strict ordinances were normal in early modern almshouses, those of the Lord Leycester seem to have aspired to a godly, spiritually pure – almost monastic – lifestyle.Footnote 80
The statutes left by Ambrose Dudley, earl of Warwick, in May 1589 were more intensely and outwardly aligned to moderate puritanism than Leicester’s. In the absence of a legitimate son, Warwick was Leicester’s heir when he died in 1588 and assumed the patronage of the hospital for the short period until his own death in 1590. One explanation for the religious direction of the earl of Warwick’s statutes is that they were probably written in partnership with Cartwright. Due to some confusion about whether Leicester had completed the endowment of the hospital and secured its legal and financial rights before his death, Warwick made separate statutes for the almshouse and endowed it with additional land. Warwick’s forty-three statutes go into greater depth about the behaviour expected of the almsmen. This included separate orders on avoiding adultery, blasphemy, heresy and idleness, all puritan bugbears that had been dealt with collectively in fewer statutes by Leicester. The extension of the statutes under separate items may underscore a desire on the part of Warwick and Cartwright to reaffirm the moral expectations of the brethren’s behaviour. Similarly, in the statute concerning prayer, Warwick sought to spell out more clearly than his brother the form they could take, writing that ‘[n]everthelesse our will is not that the master … shall bee soe straightly tyed to [the Prayer Book] forme of prayers but that the same may bee allowed as they shall thinke most necessary’.Footnote 81 Warwick’s 1589 statutes, therefore, while clearly not subversive, did not express the same necessity to (at least ostensibly) commit to the Prayer Book as a benchmark, which is communicated in Leicester’s supplementary note; Ambrose’s statutes therefore subtly provided additional freedoms to the master-preacher and demonstrate a heightening of the puritan message.
In addition, Warwick nominated the presidents of Magdalen and University colleges in Oxford as the visitors to the hospital, which represented a change from the bishop, dean and archdeacon of Worcester selected by Leicester. Warwick’s nomination of the Oxford masters seems to have reflected a desire to withdraw the hospital directly from episcopal visitation.Footnote 82 It is also suggestive that University College’s master in 1589 was Anthony Gate, a puritan layman who had been appointed to the post by Leicester in 1584.Footnote 83 However, Warwick’s modifications to Leicester’s statutes do not represent an overturning of his brother’s godly mission, but rather an amplified articulation of it, in the context of a puritan agenda which had developed greatly between 1585 and 1589. Warwick’s statutes lend support to Enis and Parry’s reinterpretation of Ambrose as a major military, political and religious figure in his own right, who in the historiography has mostly been overshadowed by Leicester.Footnote 84
Cartwright and Sutcliffe: The Lord Leycester as a Space of Ideological Controversy
This final section examines how the relationship between the church and the military developed at the Lord Leycester under the direction of the well-known puritan theologian Thomas Cartwright. It demonstrates how the affairs of the hospital and Cartwright’s oversight of it became entangled with the broader ideological debates between conformists and presbyterians regarding church government in the 1590s. Cartwright was the second master of the Lord Leycester and served intermittently between 1585 and his death in 1603. He succeeded the first incumbent, the Oxford graduate, Ralph Griffin (d. 1593), who had previously been the master of the grammar school in the corporation’s buildings. Cartwright returned from exile in the Netherlands, where he may have been one of Leicester’s chaplains, to become head of the almshouse.Footnote 85
Two attractive features of the mastership were its practical jurisdictional exemption from the Warwick town and parochial authorities, and the generous material and financial endowment.Footnote 86 The position seems to have allowed Cartwright to avoid ecclesiastical supervision more easily than other Elizabethan preachers and clergymen. Cartwright’s ability to preach despite being unlicensed, and to hold puritan meetings in Warwick and the surrounding area without major problems until 1590 was largely due to the strength of the Dudley patronage.Footnote 87 Secondly, Cartwright’s £100 annuity meant that he was well remunerated. Although Cartwright would later complain that the mastership had effectively bankrupted him, his objectively high salary and comfortable living attracted much controversy and jealously. These are crucial points to bear in mind when considering the tensions that existed between Cartwright and his conformist opponents.Footnote 88
By 1590, Cartwright’s mastership and his ministry in Warwick had begun to attract national interest. In October of that year, Cartwright was brought before the Court of High Commission, the realm’s highest ecclesiastical court, as part of the queen’s judicial crackdown on presbyterianism. Cartwright was examined before the commission, facing thirty-one articles that detailed his activities in the Netherlands, including rumours of his presbyterian ordination and his suspected complicity in writing the seditious Martin Marprelate tracts. These tracts were the pseudonymous libels printed and disseminated in the autumn and winter of 1588 to 1589, which were controversial with the authorities more because of their mocking tone, than for their presbyterian intellectualism.Footnote 89 Other charges suggested that Cartwright subscribed to the puritan Book of Discipline rather than the Prayer Book, and described his involvement in organizing secret presbyterian religious meetings. A considerable number of the commission’s charges related to Cartwright’s activities in Warwick, which were later polemicized by conformist opponents, especially Matthew Sutcliffe, the prolific writer who served as dean of Exeter from 1589 until his death in 1629.Footnote 90 This partly explains why Cartwright’s residence in Warwick was intermittent. The investigation into his religious affairs meant that Cartwright was imprisoned in the Fleet in London from his arrest in October 1590 until his release in May 1592.Footnote 91 Cartwright’s mastership was again interrupted between 1595 and 1601, when he lived in the Channel Islands, having been appointed to the chaplaincy of Castle Cornet, Guernsey. During this period, his efforts were aimed at reconciling the Presbyterian communities in Guernsey and Jersey to one another.Footnote 92
Due to Cartwright’s dual role as master of a military almshouse and as one of the leading ideologues of the puritan movement, the detailed examination of his Warwick affairs generated considerable integrated discussion on the subjects of puritanism and the military, two subjects high on the agenda of late-Elizabethan political culture. Cartwright’s position represented the controversies inherent in the presbyterian wing of the church, especially the question of whether the godly were acceptable overseers of charitable institutions. At the same time, the situation of the almsmen encapsulated the intense local and national debates of the 1590s on how the state should provide assistance to ex-soldiers, an anxiety that was prominent in the parliaments of this decade.Footnote 93 In this sense, the Lord Leycester almost became a rhetorical figure in itself, and the almshouse was more than the sum of its parts, as writers drew on its existence to comment on the leading ideological controversies of the day. Both the conformist allies of the queen and Archbishop Whitgift, and those like Cartwright who favoured further reformation, regularly invoked martial imagery in their debates within the Church of England. For example, in 1597, Matthew Sutcliffe suggested that while ‘divers valiant men [were fighting] on the Seas, and at Cadix in her Majesties service’, Cartwright’s friend, Job Throckmorton, was idly writing ‘rayling and lewd prafaces in corners’.Footnote 94 This passage contrasted the honour of the soldiers serving the Crown with the idleness of controversialists like Cartwright and Throckmorton, arguing that presbyterianism was inherently subversive.
Sutcliffe also claimed that Cartwright’s involvement with the almshouse was entirely self-serving. Cartwright apparently did not care for the poor soldier almsmen as Leicester had desired; instead, he used the mastership for his own ends. Sutcliffe wrote: ‘you take it in euill part, that I should cal the Hospital … your Hospitall; and yet is the speach common … not is it any aduantage to your cause, whether it be called my Lord of Leycesters Hospital, or your hospital’.Footnote 95 Sutcliffe went on to argue that if the master had his ‘foolish course, many learned men would not have bene so wel mainteined, as the poore of your Hospital’.Footnote 96 Sutcliffe juxtaposed Cartwright’s apparent luxurious residence in prison with the deserving needs of ex-servicemen, stating: ‘[s]o soft was his lying, so trim was his lodging … so diligent was his wife to rake in rewards; that many braue men of good desert, that serue in her maiestie in her warres would bee content … to exchange the commodity of their places with him’.Footnote 97 Written only a few years after the 1593 Act for the Relief of Servicemen, this critique pointedly compared the estimable service of the queen’s soldiers with fraudulent presbyterian ideology, embodied in the figure of Cartwright, who ironically had been put in charge of a military almshouse and was complaining about his imprisonment.Footnote 98
Sutcliffe sought to illuminate apparent inconsistencies inherent in presbyterianism by attacking Cartwright’s employment at a hospital, which seemed to give him civil and ecclesiastical responsibilities. Sutcliffe sneered at his foe that he ‘deale[s] in the gouernment of his hospitall, and other ciuill causes of his owne; albeit hee take himself to be a minister of the worde; then either hee doeth against his owne rule, or els hath no reason to exclude ministers from dealing in ciuill causes’.Footnote 99 He was here shining a light on the Calvinist presbyterian two-kingdoms perspective, which saw the church and state as distinct but coordinate jurisdictions, where ecclesiastical and civil offices were meant to be kept separate. Sutcliffe was thus using Cartwright’s Warwick career to make a hard-hitting ideological point about the hypocrisies of Cartwright’s position as master with his presbyterian beliefs about the separation of offices. The two-kingdoms perspective was a nuanced position that left areas of ambiguity that were exploited by conformist opponents such as Sutcliffe.Footnote 100
Of course, Sutcliffe was not an ignorant contributor to this debate, and his career further demonstrates the blending of church and military concerns. Sutcliffe was an accomplished martial jurist who had deep knowledge of military affairs. He accompanied Leicester to the Low Countries as adjutant-general (c.1587–8) and later joined the 1599 expedition of his patron, the earl of Essex, to Ireland as Judge Marshal. These legal roles gave Sutcliffe primary responsibility for overseeing military discipline, both in the camps and further afield.Footnote 101 Also while serving as dean of Exeter, Sutcliffe wrote his fifth publication, The Practise, Proceedings, & Lawes of Armes (1593).Footnote 102 This highly influential text was written for Essex, who wanted to update Leicester’s Netherlands ordinances to improve martial discipline and inspire military victories. Sutcliffe’s military expertise and legal training gave his criticisms of Cartwright’s mastership greater potency and added weight, not only to his defence of the queen’s conformist policy, but also to his arguments about the dangers the presbyterian ideology posed to the security of the realm.Footnote 103 Later, during James’s reign, Sutcliffe’s writings would earn him a reputation as a virulent anti-Catholic polemist, something that he had in common with Cartwright. As the spearhead behind the short-lived theological Chelsea College, founded in 1610, Sutcliffe would also discover the administrative and financial challenges of running a small academic institution.Footnote 104
Nevertheless, the ideological utility of the coupling of church and military was not monopolized by conformists in these debates. The godly were enthusiastic supporters of military chaplaincy, powerfully demonstrated by the strong complement of puritan ministers that joined Leicester’s Netherlands expedition.Footnote 105 Cartwright too frequently incorporated the metaphor of the godly soldier in his defences of presbyterianism. For example, in his reply to Whitgift in 1573, twelve years before he became master, he used the generally accepted view that military personnel required religious instruction to support his argument for the separation between ‘worldly affayres’ and ‘ecclesiasticall offices’.Footnote 106 Cartwright cited the Council of Chalcedon (451), writing that ‘it [was] decreed that none of the cleargy should either goe to warfare as souldyers or captaynes or should receiue any secular honours’ and should instead concentrate on pastoral duties because clerics should not hold civil office.Footnote 107 Furthermore, in a letter of May 1590, Cartwright wrote to his influential friend, Sir John Puckering. Attempting to avoid imprisonment, he implicitly invoked the almshouse brethren, claiming that if he were imprisoned, the ‘poor Church of Warwick’ would be bereft of proper spiritual guidance.Footnote 108 Similarly, when Cartwright was jailed, he wrote to Lord Burghley in November 1590, saying that without him, ‘the poor people of [W]arwick [are] utterlie destitute of anie tolerable ministerie, to the great grief of manie good men, and triumphe of papist’.Footnote 109 In both examples, we can detect the rhetorical power inherent in the notion of wayward soldiers without theological guidance, rather than this being merely a practical consideration. These examples also point to the potent and diverse interest that early modern English clergy had in discussing military matters beyond theological justification, indicating that the church-military coupling was a rich cultural relationship and not a niche intersection.
These controversies reinforce the argument that while the church-military connection was considered a valuable political and ideological point of appeal for various writers within the Church of England, it was contested. Rather than being centred around poor relief and philanthropy, this article has explored how one elite institution was so much more. The Lord Leycester illuminates the complex and interwoven relationship between the church and the military, both at a local level and in terms of their broader regional, national and ideological ramifications, encapsulated by the clashes between Cartwright and Sutcliffe. We have also seen how political elites responded to veterans, not just for practical reasons, but also for serious theological and symbolic considerations. This article has argued that Leicester, in establishing his hospital in Warwick, was partly responding to the powerful political climate of religious warfare fought by Protestant England in the late sixteenth century, a struggle in which he was actively involved. Historians have primarily studied the earl of Leicester through his activities at court and in the Netherlands, as well as his artistic and parliamentary patronage, with fewer contributions from social and cultural historians.Footnote 110 However, an exploration of Leicester’s charitable activities – a topic that still requires further research – adds to the complexity that has characterized recent assessments of his character. It is clear that the earl’s relationship with the church and the military requires much more differentiated judgements, going beyond William Camden’s portrayal of Leicester as the queen’s favourite who was seeking to rob and undermine the church, or his well-established military failures in the Netherlands.Footnote 111 The tangled dynamic between the church and the military played a leading and active role in Leicester’s thinking and policy interests throughout his lifetime. It was physically cemented for posterity in the form of a military hospital with its attendant master-preacher, an institution through which his memory lives on to this day.
Open access
