The Anti-democratic Paradigm (1570s–1590s)

Abstract Chapter 1 analyses the first important moment at which the issue of anti-democracy rose to prominence: the 1570s–1590s. It all blew up around the contentious question of the organization of the Church, and the role of ministers and their election in it. Holders of the status quo—including intellectual bigwigs such as John Whitgift and Richard Bancroft—strenuously opposed Presbyterianism. They denounced Presbyterian exponents like Thomas Cartwright for promoting ‘popularity’, which here meant the search for direct democracy and its practices (‘popular government’). The kernel of this diatribe, and of subsequent ones, mirrored the Admonition Controversy’s debates on Church government in post-Reformation England. More specifically, Church establishment representatives such as Richard Cosin, Thomas Cooper, and Matthew Sutcliffe identified Presbyterian principles and practices with those set up in democratic Athens, Anabaptist Germany, and Calvinist Geneva. Besides singling out the Presbyterians as subversive fanatics who made cunning use of religion to rally the most ignorant portions of the population behind their democratic agenda, the fierce ecclesiastical disputes between people like Whitgift and Cartwright and their followers not only revealed the pivotal place of questions concerning democratic government, popular power, and people’s obedience at this time. They also set the tone for a great of deal of subsequent anti-democratic polemics that were to shape the history of the Jacobean and Caroline reigns. Finally, Chapter 1 argues that anti-Presbyterianism did not run counter to what Patrick Collinson has called ‘republicanism applied to the Church’. Instead, it pointed to something much more sinister and treacherous than republicanism: this was the menace of plebeian democracy.