Wide As the Waters by Benson Bobrick

Author:Benson Bobrick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2001-04-09T04:00:00+00:00

Another important source for the Catholic scholars was the diglot or bilingual Latin-English edition of the New Testament that Miles Coverdale had prepared in 1538 in response to Cranmer’s advice to the clergy to “confer the Latin and English together” in their own study of the text.

By 1582, when the Rheims New Testament was published, twelve years had passed since the Vatican had pronounced Elizabeth excommunicate and deposed, and in England, Scotland, and Ireland Jesuit agents sought to foment sedition and rebellion against her. The government as well as the queen herself were felt to be at risk, and this general peril had a moderating effect on even the most radical Puritans, who understood that the fortunes of their cause were more dependent on her survival than on the triumph of their sectarian demands. “From every side,” it is said, “the feeling was borne in upon the nation at large” that England was nearing the hour of her destiny; and this united her people and made Protestants and patriots one.

Then in 1584, William the Silent, who had organized Dutch resistance to the Spanish in the Netherlands, was assassinated. In the following year Elizabeth dispatched a small force under the Earl of Leicester to aid the Dutch, and two years later, a devastating raid by Sir Francis Drake on Spanish shipping and stores at Cádiz and Lisbon “singed the king of Spain’s beard.” Meanwhile, copies of letters reputedly written by Mary Stuart approving the assassination of Elizabeth had fallen into the government’s hands. Under the Act for the Preservation of the Queen’s Safety, Mary was tried by an English court, condemned, and executed in 1587 in the great hall at Fotheringhay Castle, near Peterborough, at the age of forty-four. On the night before her execution, she swore a last solemn oath of innocence on a copy of the Rheims New Testament. The Protestant Earl of Kent, who was present, unkindly upbraided her for it, saying she had sworn “a valueless oath on a false book”; but she replied with quiet strength, “Does your lordship think that my oath would be any better if I swore on a translation in which I do not believe?”

The Spanish Armada was launched against England the following July, but gales worked havoc on the Spanish galleons, which were driven into the North Sea. Superior English seamanship did the rest. In the face of the invasion, most Catholics in England in the end remained loyal to their queen. Many, indeed, had willingly enrolled in the defense force she hastily assembled, and some heard and cheered the stirring speech she gave to the troops drawn up at Tilbury to resist the expected assault. “I have but the body of a weak and feeble woman but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and a king of England, too, and think foul scorn that any Prince in Europe should dare to invade the borders of my realm.” It was afterward reported (by one of Walsingham’s agents) that

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