The Blank Line

by John Whitgift, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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The Lord Treasurer's letter came on the second of July, at seven in the morning, with the river already beginning to smell. My servant Dunstan Wood laid it beside the bread and stood back, as he does when he knows the seal. I finished the bread first.

It was a long letter for Burghley, who writes short when he is sure and long when he wishes to be seen to be sure. He was sorry to trouble me so often. He was more troubled himself. He was daily charged by councillors and public persons with neglecting his duty in not staying my proceedings, so vehement and so general, against ministers and preachers. And then, a page further down, he came to it. He had, by chance, come to the sight of an instrument of twenty-four articles, Apud Lamhith, May 1584, to be executed ex officio mero, and he found them so curiously penned, so full of branches and circumstances, that he thought the inquisitors of Spain used not so many questions to comprehend and to trap their preys.

By chance. My Lord Burghley comes to the sight of nothing by chance. Somebody had carried him a copy, and I could name four men in Northamptonshire who might have done it, and two in Kent.

He closed, after the usual furniture about peace and concord, with a sentence he had plainly written first and built the letter round: this kind of proceeding is too much savouring of the Romish inquisition, and is rather a device to seek for offenders than to reform any. And underneath, because he cannot help himself, a tag, half of it in Latin: though omnia licent, yet omnia non expediunt.

I laid the letter face down on the table. I did not answer it then. A reply written in the heat of being called an inquisitor reads like an inquisitor's reply. A reply written on the third day reads like an archbishop's.

"The parson of Ickham is below, your Grace," said Wood. "He came up yesterday and lay at the Swan in Southwark. He has been at the gate since six."

"Has he eaten?"

"He would not take anything from the kitchen."

"Then give him small beer, and do not ask him whether he will take it. Put it in his hand."

---

Nicholas Fagge had been suspended in February, with eight others of my own diocese, for refusing the second of the three Articles. He would acknowledge the Queen's supremacy; he said so loudly and often. He would allow the Articles of Religion to be agreeable to the word of God, and had a good deal to say about how much more agreeable they would be if Geneva had drafted them. But he would not set his hand to the statement that the Book of Common Prayer contains in it nothing contrary to the word of God. The cross in baptism stuck in him. So did the ring in marriage, the surplice, and the churching of women, but the cross most of all, and he had written me eleven pages about it in a hand that grew smaller as the argument grew larger.

I had read all eleven. The Lord Treasurer would not have believed that, and the parson of Ickham would not have believed it either.

They brought him to the long room off the guard chamber, where the light comes off the river. He had ridden fifty-odd miles from Canterbury on a hired horse and the dust was still in the creases of his gown. He was a big man, younger than I had expected from the letter: thirty-four, perhaps, with the red hands of someone who digs his own glebe. He held the beer as though it might be a test.

"Sit, Master Fagge."

He sat. The paper of the twenty-four articles lay at my left hand, the same instrument Burghley had come to the sight of by chance. I had laid it there that morning. I turned it over now so that the blank side was up, and I saw him watch me do it.

"You know what that is," I said.

"Every minister in Kent knows what that is, my Lord."

"Then you know I have not put it to you. I have not put it to any man of my own diocese. I am not going to put it to you this morning."

He set the beer down on the floor beside his chair. "Then why am I sent for?"

"You are not sent for. You wrote to me. Eleven pages. A man who writes eleven pages to his archbishop wishes to be answered, and I prefer to answer a man to his face rather than by a letter he may read aloud in an alehouse in Wingham."

His colour went up. It had been read aloud, then, or something like it. I had supposed so.

---

I will set down the argument briefly, because it was not the argument that mattered, though he thought it was.

He said that the sign of the cross was a human invention, added to a sacrament that Christ had instituted without it; that what is added to God's ordinance by man is will-worship; that the papists had made the cross an idol, and a church newly come out of Egypt should not carry Egypt's furniture with her.

I said that the Book does not make the cross a part of the sacrament. The child is baptised with water in the name of the Trinity, and is fully baptised before ever the minister's thumb comes near his forehead. The cross comes after, and the Book says what it is for: in token that hereafter he shall not be ashamed to confess the faith of Christ crucified. A token. Not a sacrament, not a merit, not a charm. A thing indifferent, which the Church, having authority in things indifferent, has ordered to be done decently in one way rather than every parson's way.

He said that if it was indifferent, then the Church could as well leave it out.

I said that it could. It had not. And there the matter rested, for a thing indifferent which authority has ordered is no longer indifferent to the man under authority. It is indifferent in itself. It is not indifferent in him.

"That is the whole of it, Master Fagge. You are not asked to say the cross is commanded by Scripture. You are not asked to say it is good. You are asked to say that the Book contains nothing contrary to the word of God. Not that every leaf of it is gold. Only that there is no poison in it."

"There is a crucifix in it, my Lord, if a man looks."

"There is a thumb and a forehead in it. If you see a crucifix there, you brought it with you."

He did not laugh. I had not expected him to. Cartwright never laughed either, in the old days at Trinity, when I was Master and he was the Lady Margaret's professor, lecturing against bishops from the chair I had held before him. Men of that temper believe that wit is a kind of evasion. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is only the shortest road between two points.

---

At about ten Wood came in with a message from the Court, which was nothing, and went out again, which was the purpose of his coming. Fagge looked at the river. A horse-ferry was crossing to Westminster with a cart on it and two men holding a bay's head against the chop.

"I have a son," he said, still looking at the water.

I waited.

"He was born in February, the week I was suspended. My neighbour at Littlebourne baptised him, because I could not. I asked him to leave out the cross. He said he would not break the order for me, nor for any man, and he asked me to stand at the font as father. I would not. I stood in the porch."

"And the child was crossed."

"The child was crossed. My wife held him. I stood in the porch and heard it done."

He turned back from the window and looked at me, and I understood that this, not the eleven pages, was what he had ridden fifty miles to say. He had stood outside his own church while his son was signed with the thing he called an idol, and he had come to Lambeth to make the man responsible look at him.

So I looked at him. I owe that much to any man.

"Master Fagge. Your wife is with child again."

He started. "How does your Grace know that?"

"I did not know it. You told me now. A man does not stand in a church porch in February and ride to Lambeth in July over one child. He rides because there is another coming and he cannot stand in the porch a second time."

He said nothing. His hands were open on his knees, the red knuckles.

"When?"

"Candlemas. Or a little before."

---

Here is what I could have done, and what Burghley supposes I do.

I could have turned the paper over and put the twenty-four questions to him one after another on his oath. Whether he had used the cross. Whether he had worn the surplice. Whether he had used the Book entire, or left out parts of it, and which parts. Whether he had attended any conventicle, private exercise or prophesying, and with whom. He would have answered truly, because he is that kind of man, and by noon I should have had enough to deprive him outright and to proceed against three of his friends. That is what the articles are for. The Lord Treasurer is right about that. He is wrong in supposing that what an instrument is for is the same as what it must be used for.

A church that cannot enforce its own discipline is not a church. It is a conversation. But a church that enforces its discipline on every occasion it is entitled to is a machine for making martyrs, and martyrs are the one thing the Presbyterian party cannot manufacture for itself. They need us to make them. I do not intend to oblige them.

What the Settlement required of that morning was not Nicholas Fagge's conscience. I have no use for his conscience; it is his, and God's. What the Settlement required was his hand on a page, under three sentences, so that the parish of Ickham should have its parson again and the parson should be inside the structure and not outside it in a porch, being admired by Wingham for his sufferings.

I took the subscription book from the shelf behind me. It is a plain book, calf, the size of a Bible for a reading desk. The Kentish names run down the left of each leaf in their own hands, under the three Articles copied fair at the head. Most are written firmly. Some are written very small. One man, at Elham, had signed and then drawn a line under his own name, as if to keep it from escaping. I opened it at the leaf where Ickham ought to be. There was the line, with the parish written in the clerk's hand in the margin, and nothing on it.

"I will tell you what is open to you," I said. "Not what I would like, which is that you should sign as it stands, but what is open."

He did not answer, which I took for leave.

"There are men in the Council who think I have been too sharp. You know who they are. You have very likely written to one of them." He did not deny it. "To accommodate them, and for no reason of doctrine, I have allowed some ministers to subscribe with an explanation. A man may set down beneath his name what he understands himself to have subscribed. If you sign that the Book contains nothing contrary to the word of God, and write under it that you understand the cross to be no part of the sacrament, but a ceremony only, retained by authority, and not of necessity, I will receive it. It is nothing more than what I have just told you the Book itself says. You will be writing my own sentence under your name. I shall not mind."

"And then I make the cross on the next child."

"Then you make the cross on the next child, and it is your own thumb, and you know what you mean by it, and you have told your Archbishop in writing what you mean by it. Or you do not sign, and after Candlemas the parson of Littlebourne makes it for you while you stand in the porch, and you know what he means by it, which is that you were not there."

That was the hardest thing I said that day. I watched it go in.

"The child will be crossed, Master Fagge. That is settled. It was settled in 1559 by Parliament and the Queen. It is not in your power or mine to unsettle it. What is in your power is only whether you are inside the church when it is done, or outside."

---

He asked for pen and ink. I gave him mine. He drew the book towards him and dipped and held the pen above the line, and the ink gathered at the nib, and he held it there until it fell, a single drop, on the margin beside Ickham. He looked at the blot. Then he laid the pen down across the sand-box, very carefully, so as not to mark the page further, and pushed the book back towards me.

"I cannot, my Lord. Not today."

"No," I said. "Not today."

Burghley would say I had wasted a morning. Some of my own officers would say I had shown weakness: a man who refuses under the Archbishop's own eye should go out of the room deprived, so that the next man knows. I have considered both opinions, and I hold neither of them. A man who cannot sign today and is deprived today is finished; he goes to the Low Countries or to a lecturer's stipend paid by some godly knight, and preaches against bishops for thirty years. A man who cannot sign today and is given until Candlemas has half a year with his wife's belly growing and the sight of a porch before him. I did not make the porch. I only declined to take it away.

"Your sequestration stands," I said. "The fruits of the living will be paid to the man who serves the cure, as before. I shall write to my commissary at Canterbury that you are not to be deprived before the feast of the Purification. Not for refusing the second article, nor for anything that has passed between us here. You will not be examined on the twenty-four articles by any officer of mine before that day. That I give you, Master Fagge, not as a concession to your conscience, which needs none from me, but because I would rather have a parson in Ickham than a martyr in Wingham. You may tell Wingham I said so."

He stood. He was taller than me by a head. He picked up the beer from the floor, looked at it, and drank it off at a draught, which I think surprised him as much as it did me.

"Will your Grace write to the Lord Treasurer of this?"

"I shall write to the Lord Treasurer of a great many things. I doubt you will be among them."

He bowed — properly, to the Archbishop, not to the man, which I noted and did not resent — and Wood took him down.

---

I went to the window. After a little while he came out under the gatehouse and stood a moment in the road with his hat in his hand, as if he had forgotten which way Kent lay. Then he went down to the horse-ferry, where the hired horse was being held for him by a boy, and he paid the boy something, and led the horse onto the boards. The ferryman pushed off. The tide was making, and the boat went upstream sideways for a time before it found its line.

I sat down again and turned Burghley's letter face up.

Too much savouring of the Romish inquisition. I would answer it on the third day, as I had promised myself. I would tell him that the articles were drawn as all such interrogatories are drawn, in every court that examines on oath, and that his own Court of Wards uses the like and is not ashamed of them. I would tell him that an instrument that is never used is not a threat, and an instrument that is always used is not a discipline, and that the art of government lies between, where he has always lived and supposes I do not. I would not tell him about Ickham. He would take it as proof that he had been right, and he had not been right. He had been right about the resistance. He had never been right about the alternative.

The subscription book was still open at the Kentish leaf. The ink blot had dried beside the margin, a small black seed with a tail where it had run. I took the pen out of the sand-box, dipped it, and wrote beside the blot in the margin, 2 Jul. 1584. Coram me. Usque ad fest. Purif. Before me, until Candlemas.

Then I wiped the pen, closed the book on the empty line, and set the twenty-four articles under the inkstand, where they could be seen.

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THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem tertium decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (20 October 2026), ā Iōanne Whitgiftō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

John Whitgift, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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