The Caroline Church heroic: the reconstruction of epic religion in three seventeenth-century communities.

In his biography of Nicholas Ferpar, A.L. Maycock speaks volumes in describing the Ferrat family's transition in 1625 as a movement from one venture (the Virginia Company) to another, the "great adventure" of Little Gidding.(1) In this one phrase Maycock comprehends the view of its founders that no less than the Virginia Company's epic plantation of true religion among the Indians, the community at Little Gidding ranks as a heroic enterprise, the discursive preoccupation of which proves to be the very nature of Christian heroism itself. Even if readers of the Ferrat papers do not know how highly Nicholas Ferrat prized the Acts and Monuments, it is impossible for them to miss the Foxeian narratives of "heroic suffering" so pervasive in the "story books" left as folio records of the dialogues performed by the so-called Little Academy.(2) Staged for a select audience in the 1630s, these Ferrar-Collett symposia concern themselves chiefly with the wonderful accounts of that heroic virtue, mortification, and faith manifested by exemplary Christians from the beginnings of the church right up to the seventeenth century.(3)

But in the Gidding story books Christian heroism is as complex as it is pervasive. For one thing, the Little Academy interlocutors are convinced that most of their contemporaries have no appreciation for the true heroism of the church, "hissing out as Folly & Fables all those Heroical Actions & Events of former Times, wch exceed that measure of goodnes, wch wee haue stinted out our selues by" (Blackstone, 191). For another, the story books mediate competing notions of Christian heroism and criticize even those heroic ideals dear to the interlocutors themselves - not least the epic odyssey of the Virginia Company.

Whatever their scathing criticisms of a Stuart culture in love with the wrong (romantic) traditions of heroism, the Little Gidding story books epitomize the labored and multifaceted Caroline search for the elusive marks of the genuine church heroic. One problem in this wide-ranging search is that between 1625 and 1640 there are so many strong contenders - old and new, courtly and anti-courtly, Laudian and Foxeian - fracturing the Elizabethan and Jacobean consensus that Protestant heroism demands opposition to the papal Antichrist. This consensus has, of course, already been unsettled by Jacobean pacifism and James's opposition to the Virginia Company late in his reign. But it is under Charles I that the loss of a consensus on Protestant heroism is deeply felt and that strenuous, elaborate efforts are made to reassemble a synthetic archetype for this heroism. Moreover, far from negating ecclesiastical heroism, the competition over and dispersion of its constituents contribute to the apologetic formation of a skeptical and fallible heroism, with an earnest but mistakeridden endeavor after true religion becoming the diacritical honor of the Church of England. From the crisis over the Palatinate to the Order of the Garter to the Laudian beautification of the church, from Virginia to Little Gidding to Great Tew, from Agamemnon to Scylla and Charybdis to the Ovidian translation of epic combat into metamorphoses - the Caroline church is distinguished by its transmission, transformation, and analysis of interconnected but also hostile versions of religious heroism. The mediation between these heroisms results in an impressive courtly synthesis but also disenchanted bathos; in opulence but also austerity; in skepticism about the possibility of heroism but also skepticism as the very essence of heroism; and in renunciation of the world but also renewed justifications of violent intervention in the world.

For King Charles the heroism of the English church was a principal concern. Much more than his father, indeed in part because of his father, Charles came to power under the shadow of Elizabeth, who was hailed by such Stuart critics as Thomas Scot as more masculine in her military aggression against the Antichrist than James with his irenic accommodation of Catholic Europe. In 1624-25, after the return of Prince Charles and the Duke of Buckingham from Spain upon the collapse of the "match," Scot and others found reason enough to hope for the revival of the spirit of Drake as a remedy for "this Dull or Effeminate Age."(4) As Mervyn James summarizes it, this anticipated return to the militant Protestantism of an Elizabeth or a Sidney would need to unleash a several-pronged attack: "a European Protestant league, a larger investment of resources in the war with Spain, wider military commitments abroad, westward oceanic expansion, and an extended naval assault on the Spanish empire."(5) According to John Reynolds - whose works zealously support the causes of the Elector Frederick and his wife Elizabeth, of New World colonization, and of the national honor to be derived from immediate and full-scale warfare against Spain - a heavenly congregation of monarchs from Henry VIII to Queen Anne would together indict James for seducing England away from religious warfare into the decadence of an impious peace, made palatable for the idle by the pastimes of "Stage-playes, Maskes, Reuels & Carowsing."(6) But not Charles whose mettle, according to one Spaniard in a Thomas Scot work, "is of another temper, and not so flexible as some take it."(7)

Just so, in the early years of his reign Charles's war with Spain and Buckingham's naval operations on behalf of the rebel Huguenots led to the report in foreign lands "that the days of Queen Elizabeth are revived."(8) At the start, as R. Malcolm Smuts puts it, Charles enlisted the Elizabethan cult of heroic monarchy, its capacity for ushering in a second golden age or the New Jerusalem, and its climactic role in the Foxeian "eschatological struggle between the forces of Christ and Antichrist."(9) Thereafter the king was deeply shaken by his England's shameful failure to revive the Protestant valor of his brother Henry, in whose honor a masque had celebrated the restoration of the "Fallen House of Chivalry" at a time when King James had reneged on heroic "austerity, military preparedness, and Protestant alliances."(10) Smuts has argued that the failure to secure a place "at the head of an international coalition" for the defense of Protestantism embarrassed Charles into "a decisive break with the religious and patriotic traditions that had grown up around Elizabeth."(11) A break was made, true, but it was not a decisive one: as Kevin Sharpe has shown, Charles continued to consider war a vital option, to blame parliament for the failures of the religious warfare of the late 1620s, and to express the shame that he felt in their wake. "This loss of honour," Sharpe concludes, "was to have an enduring influence on Charles, and on his attitude to monarchy and to government."(12) Still very much under this influence in the 1630s, Charles devoted himself to a brave new ideal of religious heroism set forth in a ceremonial synthesis of power, virtue, and style.

The masques of the 1630s testify to Charles's deep commitment to an impressive church heroic, but also to his partial deflection of Protestant heroism away from the military cults of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Henry in two related directions. At the level of court ideology, the Carlo-Marian emanations of virtue, love, and piety are celebrated for revitalizing English morality and spirituality at large. Such a reformative influence, commonly hailed as "heroic," manifests itself in such exclusive circles as the newly spiritualized Order of the Garter, but it is also aimed at British subjects wherever they worship, at home or abroad. At a more material level, the Laudian restitution of the resources, ceremonies, and fabric of the church is linked by apologists and critics alike to the high cultural style of ancient epic so that the Caroline church heroic is as much a matter of beauty as it is of virtue. Into this composite heroism court poets and apologists inject transmuted forms of godly militarism, from the knightly and romantic to the nautical and colonial. The problem with the court's synthesis is that its elements are just as likely to conflict as they are to converge, and at any rate each element is vulnerable to criticism.

In Davenant and Jones's Britannia Triumphans (1638), there is a prominent convergence between images of the king's "heroic virtue" and signs of the church's restored magnificence. The very first scene centers on the repaired and newly classical St. Paul's, "the symbol . . . of High Church Laudian reform."(13) Modeled on the temple of Antoninus and Faustina, its portico was held largely responsible for restoring St. Paul's to its proper status as the "principall ornament" of the English church.(14) However, in Stuart debates over the beautification of the church, while such a pagan genealogy and the epic analogues of English temples may be taken for granted, their spiritual benefits are not. Lancelot Andrewes argues that Christians have always borrowed architecture and prayers from the pagans who borrowed them from the Jews, that this is a perfectly acceptable practice and easily distinguishable from papist excesses and superstitions, and that the lineage of church ceremony will incite Christians to worship their true God more carefully and orderly than the heathens did their false deities.(15) At the same time, Peter Heylyn traces the practice of setting aside sacred places - but also most sacred areas within those places - to classical culture, finding prime examples in the Aeneid and declaring that "there's no question to be made but many Temples of the Gentiles were, without any alteration of the Fabrick, converted into Christian Churches."(16)

Whereas Heylyn and John Cosin approve these grand resources for "replenishing" the church with "ornaments, utensills, and beautie" in "this last declyning age," the so-called "puritans" whom they accuse of debasing the style of the church - and with it all uniformity, decency, and spirituality - argue against such conversions. In 1628, Peter Smart complains that Cosin would offer his flock the rites of Cybele or Bacchus, and transplant them into the high ritual "which the poet describeth in the 4th of his Aeneidos."(17) The stances of other participants in the debate over the beautification of the church are sometimes hard to pin down. For instance, John Williams's love of rails does not prevent him from criticizing the paganism of Caroline altar policy.(18) Indeed, in the final chapter of The Holy Table, he concludes his attack on altars by deriving the church use of diptyches for the commemoration of noteworthy Christians from the Iliad.(19) Thus, for good or ill, Caroline efforts to dignify and decorate the church are measured according to epic proportions.

In Britannia Triumphans, then, the prominence of St. Paul's defines the church heroic in terms of the material enrichment, ceremonial elevation, and ancient catholicity of worship. This vein of ecclesiastical heroism amounts to a rearguard defense against papist attacks by shoring up the beauty of the church from neglect and decay. As part of the synthesis between the physical reconstitution of the church and the heroic virtue of the king, the Banqueting House, as the political equivalent of St. Paul's, is mentioned at the outset of the masque, which (the reader is told) took place in a "new temporary room of timber" in order to prevent damage to Rubens's recently imported ceiling and "other enrichments" in Whitehall. The ceiling, moreover, features the apotheosis of Religion among the other royal virtues named "heroic" in this and other Caroline masques.(20)

In court entertainments, Graham Parry has noted, "Charles is generally presented as the embodiment of Heroic Virtue" - a virtue combining contemplative depth and spiritual purity together with a military activism in potentia.(21) In Britannia Triumphans, the figure of Action, whose motto is medio tutissima ("safest in the middle"), is advanced in congruence with a church balanced between the potential for military Protestantism and the domestic rebuilding of the temple. What this balancing act means is that Charles's synthetic ideal of heroic religion attempts to subsume its more controversial elements in a larger, inestimable mythology. Nonetheless, the controversial element in Davenant's masque - the promotion of Britain's naval strength - is notorious for its estimable cost, not just because of the naval failures of the early reign but also because of the tax on which that strength is now said to rely.(22) For this reason, it is noteworthy that Action quashes Imposture's critical skepticism, the "pleasant new philosophy" with a complex status in the masque. At once the voice of reason and a cover for fraud, skepticism is rendered all the more problematic regarding courtly notions of religious heroism when Imposture teams up with Merlin in the burlesque of another potentially deceptive tradition of heroism with ironic roots in the court itself, the romance. As we will see, the philosophy of Sextus Empiricus proves integral to revisionary apologies for Caroline religious heroism, most notably in a text published the very year of Britannia Triumphans, Chillingworth's Religion of Protestants. Thus skepticism is not simply some alien and caustic enemy of the court and its magnificent church; its presence also hints at troublesome weaknesses in the English church itself and even at its untold strengths. In Britannia Triumphans, then, when Britanocles, the embodiment of royal "wisdom, valour, and piety," gives way to Bellerophon or "Heroic Virtue," the latter is associated with the reclamation of both reason and chivalry from their debasement in the Socinian and magical impieties into which the king's church, so critics argue, has a tendency to slide.

If the refined heroics of the court must be carefully separated from certain problematic forms of heroism to which the king and his church apologists nonetheless have debts, Action is compelled by Imposture further to differentiate himself from the puritan's impoverished doctrine and discipline. Thus, Action associates his virtue at once with human responsibility and with the beautification of the church, opposing puritans who evacuate human agency in attributing even sin to God and who vilify ceremony.(23) All in all, the court's religious heroism is said to combine the best of all other heroisms, from chivalry (including valor and love) to virtuous rationality, from wisdom and piety to a St. Paul's evocative of ceremony and ornament in the grand style, and from naval prowess in the vein of Elizabeth to the aura of Henrietta whose beauty, we are told, might serve as the inspiration for epic poets such as Homer. "In this isle," Bellerophon concludes, the heroes "old with modern virtues reconcile" in a catholicity of honorable traditions congruent with Laud's own commitment to the catholicity of the English church.(24)

The Caroline synthesis of traditions in reconstituting the church heroic is featured in other masques as well. In The Temple of Love, the Greek epic tradition, chaste love, and the conversion of Indians into "all soul within" are part and parcel of the king's depiction as "the last and living hero."(25) Similar is Tempe Restored, in which the king is featured as that heroic virtue combining "religion, justice, and all the other virtues joined together," with the masque bringing together allegories from Homer - souls reclaimed from the wiles of Circe - and from the colonial enterprise of saving the impious Indians who appear in Circe's train. There is a contemporary logic to this conflation: authors such as Hugo Grotius envision the Indians and ancient Greeks in the same category of a paganism possessed with some basic religious values but in dire need of an enterprising Christianity. According to Thomas Morton, the Indians are offshoots from the demise and dispersion of the Trojans, at one time out there on those same seas over which Odysseus ranged and so not unreasonably imagined as encountering Circe.(26) As with naval prowess, the epic enterprise of saving the heathens is a controversial vestige of the past - one thought by some to have been tragically jettisoned by the Stuarts when James disenfranchised the Virginia Company and Charles failed to revive its mission. The consequence of this betrayal was, it was complained, that the colonies were now fully given over to Spanish imperialism or to separatist errors. As usual, Charles made matters only worse, in the eyes of his critics, by his failed attempts to restore a colonial policy to the activism of his church, with Laud overseeing the (short-lived) committee responsible for ensuring conformity to the Church of England wherever British peoples worshiped.(27)

Not surprisingly, then, Tempe Restored is on safer ground when it focuses on the splendor of classical architecture and the contests of mythology, with Heroic Virtue joining Divine Beauty in the subjection of Circe. In contrast to the court whose virtue and reason never seem imperiled by Circe, the Indians are said to be "naturally bestial" whether or not they have help from the sorceress. Indeed the problem of their conversion is simplified when they are sent packing so that the masque can tout its "richly adorned" spectacles illustrative of "the magnificence of the court of England." Heroism is internalized and therefore removed from any colonial context: "Heroic Virtue is that king / Of beauty that attracts the mind, / And men should most implore."(28) As in Britannia Triumphans, however, the court obliquely faces up to the potential corruptions of its more visible forms of religious heroism, with the most ornamental scene taking place in Circe's palace while Circe's passion is reclassified as an adiaphoron, the value of which depends on its use. Richness can manifest either heroic virtue or the evacuation of rational spirituality, as Circe represents the potentially restorative or corrosive legacy of paganism in the Caroline elevation of ceremonial beauty and passion.

So too in Coelum Britannicum, magnificence figures centrally in the court's vision of heroic virtue. The reformation of heroism is at odds with poverty, the virtues of which are lazy, dull, and cheap: "but we advance / Such virtues only as admit excess, / Brave bounteous acts, regal magnificence, / All-seeing prudence, magnanimity, / That knows no bound, and that heroic virtue / For which antiquity hath left no name, / But patterns only, such as Hercules, / Achilles, Theseus."(29) Approximating the ecclesiological position that God deserves in our worship services the best and most that we can give, the idea of a plentiful and restorative heroic virtue suits the basic premise of the masque that Caroline England has inherited and must enrich a culture in ruins. Thus, a cautious "prudence" seems something of a misfit in the paean. But riches, we learn, are just as dangerous as poverty is undesirable: more often than not, the love of riches has induced the desecration of temples, vicious bloodshed, and misguided colonialism. If this be so, the enrichment of the temple is in direct opposition to an interest in New England, which is disparaged in Carew's masque as a land to which some English Argo should transport the scum, humors, diseases, and vices rejected in the court-influenced reformation of Britain. But this divide between heroic goals is problematic for the court precisely because Charles putatively oversees the conformation of worship wherever there are English subjects. The immediate context of the masque drives home its colonial dilemma: three days after its performance the Privy Council discussed New England's descent into separatist chaos.(30)

Whether or not domestic magnificence and a colonial mission can be reconciled - and writers such as Purchas argue that they can be - the court's heroic virtue is more securely triumphant in the mythology that unites conjugal love with wisdom and industry. But in Carew's masque the diachronic dimension of the synthesis whereby modern heroes recreate the ancients in the same fashion that Laud would resituate the English church in a catholic tradition remains in question. In the interest of reconciliation, Momus points out that some of the old constellations are worthy of retention, not least the dragon commemorating the legend of "a divine Saint George for this nation." He comments further on the admirable recent habit of memorializing, in "embellished" form, the military heroism of the past. Whatever his penchant for criticism, Momus introduces the Order of the Garter as the most impressive Caroline synthesis of heroic traditions, uniting old and new but also Elizabethan - with its military, chivalric, and apocalyptic tendencies - and Caroline.

As Kevin Sharpe explains, Charles sought to endow the Order of the Garter with a religious significance at once deeply spiritual and grandly ceremonial. "In his letter to his son, at the prince's inauguration into the order," Sharpe notes,

Charles referred to the "emulation of chivalry" and the "glory of heroic actions" which the knights swore to uphold. Rubens's picture, however, is also an apocalyptic drama: the slaying of the dragon of evil and the triumph of innocence. Charles changed the Garter badge to enhance the religious imagery by adding "a huge aureola of silver rays copied from the French order of the holy spirit" to the holy cross of St George . . . As Peter Heylyn, the chaplain of the order, wrote in his history of St George, the badge symbolized "how bravely he repelled the Devil, how constantly he persevered in the profession of his faith."(31)

At the end of Carew's masque - which, like the Garter festival, is "a spectacular liturgy of state"(32) - the putative origin and sacred center of the Order are depicted in "afar off . . . prospect" of Windsor Castle, flanked by Religion, Truth, and Wisdom (on one hand) and Concord, Government, and Reputation on the other.(33) Like St. Paul's Cathedral in the later masque, the Castle epitomizes the Caroline synthesis of religious heroisms. Even the Armada is included, suitably transformed into ornamentation in "the particular Christmas hangings of the guard chamber of this court, wherein the naval victory of eighty-eight is to the eternal glory of this nation exactly delineated."(34) nce again militarism and beautification converge, with the court's sponsorship of ecclesiastical reformation aimed as much at the body and ceremony of the church as it is at the refinement of its spirit.

As John Kerrigan puts it, chivalry "satisfied a deep ceremoniousness in [Charles's] nature," and so it is not surprising that before the masque is complete, the "martial dance" of the past resurfaces in all its colorful ornament ("their antique helms curiously wrought") and chivalric virtue. Such scenes, moreover, are said for centuries to have served to "adorn and beautify the eighth room of our celestial mansion, commonly called the Star Chamber, with the military adventures, stratagems, achievements, feats and defeats, performed in our own person" (Orgel-Strong, 574). Yet the conclusion to this memorial undercuts the synthesis, "whilst yet our standard was erected, and we a combatant in the amorous warfare." Elizabethan religious warfare is metamorphosed into an eroticized amours, even though the masque stages continuity between "ancient worthies of these famous isles" and those modern heroes whom they foreshadow. Whatever Charles's love of George or the ongoing possibility of an English war in the 1630s, the military element fits uneasily in the context of virtually two decades of English abdication from any leadership in the Thirty Years War, the latest (if protracted and highly convoluted) installment in the Foxeian apocalypse pitting Protestants against the Antichrist.(35)

As late as 1640 in the performance of Salmacida Spolia, masque-makers feature the Caroline reformation of "Doctrine and Discipline" in their celebration of royal heroism. But in this masque the road to honor is singularly difficult, with the king reduced to a stoical patience and heaven itself overcast. Heroism in short resides not in some impressive synthesis of virtuous purity, knightly power, and material enrichment but in the strife of mortals slouching toward blessedness. This lapsed, skeptical notion of religious heroism is more than just some proleptic form of melancholy on the eve of the Civil War. Rather, in the age of Charles I religious heroism is represented not just in the form of the court's ideal synthesis but, more skeptically, in terms of the church's struggles with the fracturing of a consensus sometimes perceived as papist, sometimes as Elizabethan. In other words, the heightened Caroline pursuit of the constituents of true religious heroism may be unsettled by the multitude of attractive competitors, but Christian heroism itself is also redefined in the period so that its diacritical marks are fallibility, criticism, and revision.

Mervyn James has argued that the Elizabethans and especially Sidney accomplished a "synthesis of honour, humanism and religion," whose legacy in the Caroline period was fractured between the court, which promulgated a version of that synthesis, and its critics, whose allegiance to a Foxeian vision of history was posed in opposition to those Laudians who had little patience for Foxe.(36) From the beginning, it should be noted, the Foxe legacy itself was hardly univocal, as it supported the national church and even bishops on the one hand and stood critical of the persecutions sponsored by the state and its prelates on the other. But the rifts in the Foxeian heroic were not deeply felt until the reign of Charles, not least because this heroic stood in such prominent opposition to the principles of the Laudian church. In the 1630s, Prynne was all the more irksome to Laud in claiming both sides of the Foxe legacy, supporting the monarch against an evil clergy and continuing a long line of heroic patience in the face of persecution. Critics indebted to Foxe also took aim at the assumption that the newly celebrated prelacy would be responsible for elevating the church to epic status; whereas Francis Markham could underscore the grand style of the Caroline temple by insisting on the "first Ranke in Honour" of its bishops, Lord Brooke subverted such a claim by enlisting his own aristocratic heritage against the modest origins and upstart mobility of prelates such as Laud.(37)

In turn, Laud's own preference for one facet of the Caroline synthesis - the ceremonial beauty and decency of worship - over the others also demonstrates how fractured or multiple the church heroic had become. In a letter to William Kingsley, the Archdeacon of Canterbury, he illustrates just how contentious the various constituents of the court's heroism might prove. Dated 29 April 1636, the letter instructs the Archdeacon to hire a painter for the purposes of removing from a church monument "all that concerns the Fleet in '88, because that belongs to a foreign nation."(38) In his other letters, Laud vacillates between encouraging the deposed Queen of Bohemia and expressing his opposition to any English involvement in wars that would work at cross purposes with his pursuit of the "honour of the Church" in terms of its beauty, catholicity, ritual, and wealth. Little interested in international Protestant coalitions, Laud shows an equally slight commitment to the business of regulating religion in the colonies: as early as 1626, he records a meeting with a Dutchman whose proposal to free the West Indies from the Spaniard involves religion "in a great measure."(39) But Laud is unconvinced that the man, John Overtrout, has a viable plan. In the notebooks kept by John Finet between 1628 and 1641, the master of ceremonies is compelled to divide his attention between the rituals of the court and the intricate diplomacy with European powers. But for Laud the latter concern, with its potential for warfare, is best avoided as a "laberinth" - no matter that Charles's sister and her children are the Protestants captured within. Laud is not interested in the court's synthetic (and costly) myths; for him the "labour" of churchmanship should be centered on "an orderly settlement of the external worship of God," or the protective "hedge" of the church as he calls it elsewhere. With Humphrey Sydenham, Laud believes that ecclesiastical authority has awakened under Charles, since "canons, constitutions, decrees which were formerly without soul or motion . . . have recover'd a new life and vegetation" and "Ceremonies . . . have gotten their former lustre and state again."(40)

Between 1625 and 1640, then, no one facet of religious heroism is a matter of widespread consensus, and none exists without its damaging or limiting components. Take Heylyn's History of that most famous Saynt and Souldier of Christ Iesus St. George of Cappadocia (1st edition, 1630; expanded in 1633). As Roy Strong has argued, Van Dyck's figure of Charles as a knight on horseback - in which the King is wearing his golden Garter chain - combines the images of emperor, warrior, lover, and saint into a "single monarchical symbol."(41) It helps in this synthesis that court mythologists imagined ancient Romans and Britains as culturally intermingling. The image functions, Strong adds, as the same kind of concordia discors of the king that one finds in the masques: in Charles's new emphasis on the religious and liturgical aspects of the Garter ceremony, the church heroic is defined as Ecclesia Triumphans, with "triumphant" meant in the double sense of "in processional" as well as "beyond reproach, victorious."(42)

Given the embarrassing events of the late 1620s, however, the battles of George are often represented in the Caroline period as a storied tradition or a future projection. In the Rubens painting of Charles as Saint George rescuing a lady from the dragon (1629), the battle is finished, the dragon is dead, and the devotees bow down in admiration of the victory. In Van Dyck's depiction of the king with Henrietta Maria, Charles, "clasping the laurels, is seen in the role he so often assumed in the masques, that of the heroic lover" while his queen is represented as the peace with which such power must be wed.(43) Another problem with George's place in the Caroline synthesis is that by the accession of Charles, the consensus about the enemy - the papal Antichrist - is breaking down. Whatever the early Stuarts' competing views of the medieval English church and whatever James's own accommodation of Catholic Europe, Jacobeans manage to agree on the basic tenets of Foxeian history. But increasingly in the 1620s and 1630s, writers suspend judgment regarding the identity of the Beast while others, especially the Laudians, go so far as to decide against the candidacy of the Pope and therefore to repudiate the legacy of Foxe.(44) Among those relieving the Pope of his duties as Antichrist is the historian of the Garter, Peter Heylyn, who is perfectly willing to deny the apocalyptic dragon but eager to emphasize the "institutional succession" of the Garter together with the "positive religious value of [its] rites and ceremonies."(45)

But in Heylyn's defense of that "most excellent and heroicke institution" of the Garter, even George himself is scarcely beyond reproach. Calvin, among others, has denied his existence altogether. More intricately, some critics have challenged the historicity of the stories so that Heylyn is compelled to be critical of the sources through which he must recover George. All the same, Heylyn insists on the uses of heroic fictions: in the Iliad, Aeneid, and Arthurian romances, poets embellish so that readers "might more constantly bee prompted to Heroicke undertakings."(46) He repeats this point later, when George inspires Christians to emulation in much the same fashion that Homer's Achilles inspired Alexander. George has been identified, however, with a cruel and heretical bishop so that Heylyn must purge his saint of "unwarrantable" elements. Without George the New Jerusalem is "poorer" but a persecutory Arrian hardly enriches it. In reducing the story to its basic elements - the knight's family, their move to Palestine, his service at court, his "heroicke" defense of Christianity in a time of great persecution - Heylyn strives to establish a consensus in all churches over time about the saintliness of George. George, he protests, has been commemorated in all four ecclesiastical ways, in martyrologies, liturgies, relics, and temples. But even with Christian of Denmark and Gustavus Adolphus in the Order for 1632, Heylyn undermines any consensus over whether the heathen enemy of George is papal, imperial, or Turkish. Perhaps this is fitting, given the convoluted politics of the Thirty Years War. Even on the domestic front, however, a consensus over religious heroism seems impossible when in 1636, the Foxeian Henry Burton can appropriate the church heroic from the Laudians in arguing that those godly saints with "a greater and more extraordinary measure of Christian zeale and courage for Christ" will always be persecuted by the merely ceremonial and largely papist prelates, and that such Christians of "heroick grace" - ironically like George - will find themselves condemned as dangerous heretics.(47)

For a number of reasons, then, Caroline ideology complicates heroic religion insofar as a brilliant and powerful synthesis of ideals encounters equally compelling critiques of and deep-seated fractures in that synthesis. Graham Parry has remarked of the differences between Jacobean and Caroline court cultures that the former iconography was more static, the latter more dynamic, and that Charles tended "to project himself in roles, either directly - as upon the Whitehall stage in masques where he appeared variously as British Emperor, Heroic Virtue, or a heroic lover - or indirectly, by having artists (especially Van Dyck) depict him in dramatic circumstances, as St. George or as a triumphant Emperor."(48) That is, Charles's heroism was set forth contextually, in situ. In liturgical contexts the Caroline church heroic could approach a triumphant stasis but overall it was emphatically militant, always in the process of being made, lost, and remade.

Between 1625 and 1640, this heroic process is widely acknowledged to be perilous and fallible as well as mediatory and reformative. Among those epic images to which Richard Montagu, William Laud, and other embattled apologists return, the English church is often imagined as a ship sailing in the treacherous waters between Scylla and Charybdis, assaulted contradictorily as truth struggles to navigate between extremes. With Hercules the writers claim to be facing the unpleasant task of cleaning up the stables. Montagu in particular thinks of himself as a beleaguered epic hero, alone "in the gapp" between puritan and papist. Comparing himself to those "old heroes" of the church, he often cites the words of Agamemnon from Book One of the Iliad, according to which God and a good cause are said to justify the hero in the face of wretched betrayal and wild insubordination.(49)

On one occasion Montagu hails Bishop Richard Neile as the English church's Achilles. But Chillingworth, we will see, attributes the Greek hero's delusionary infallibility to apologists for popery. Indeed the heroism of the Church of England is often characterized in this period by its fallible execution of a nonetheless sufficiently secure authority in assessing matters of faith and worship. Differing in their degrees of confidence about church authority, English apologists variously modulate the element of skepticism in such a militant heroism. On the question of the perseverance of the saints, for example, there is among Stuart divines a wide and nuanced range of opinions on whether it is fail-safe or not.(50) Whatever the impressive mythologies of the court, then, other Caroline communities devoted to rethinking the church heroic must reckon not just with the bathetic failures of Stuart heroism but with heroism as failure in the processes of reformation. Even the stalwart Montagu draws his other "favorite tag" (as Trevor-Roper calls it) from Ovid's transformation of epic heroism into a series of metamorphoses.(51) And this, of course, is the very epic translated by the man (George Sandys) whose new world adventures and eventual habitation with Lord Falkland connect those two communities producing the most complex and searching meditations on the Caroline church heroic, Little Gidding and Great Tew.

In his Acts and Monuments, John Foxe divides the martyrdom of Dr. Robert Ferrar, Bishop of St. David's, into two phases. In the first and longer part, Ferrar is depicted in King Edward's time as the victim of politically motivated slander - which includes allegations that the Bishop has usurped the King's authority, fostered superstition against the King's injunctions, and proved himself a covetous, negligent, and popish prelate. Then, with the ascension of Queen Mary, Ferrar is burned for refusing to advocate the Mass and transubstantiation and to renounce justification by faith alone; for supporting clerical marriage; and for resisting papal authority.

In their story books, it is obvious that the participants in the so-called "Little Academy" are deeply influenced by Foxe; like Foxe, they celebrate "memorable example[s] of constancy" in the name of the faith and in opposition to the world, and they read ecclesiastical history for signs of providence and for moral instruction. Replacing military heroism with "heroic suffering," Foxe bequeaths to Nicholas Ferrar and his family the simple idea that ecclesiastical histories make us "better in our livings," "better prepared unto like conflicts," and secure in the knowledge of "what true christian fortitude is, and what the right way to conquer; which standeth not in the power of man, but in the hope of the resurrection to come, and is now, I trust, at hand."(52) The legacy of Foxe is integral, then, to the heroic mortification so zealously acclaimed by the interlocutors at Little Gidding.

But as the case of Bishop Ferrar suggests, the legacy of Foxe is not altogether simple for the inhabitants of Little Gidding. For one thing, Foxe supports both establishmentarians and nonconformists in the English church - and Little Gidding is at once conformable and irreducible to the Caroline church. For another, the tale of Bishop Ferrar anticipates the martyrdom by slander of the Little Gidding community, caricatured by some of their more biased contemporaries as papists and separatists alike.(53) Even among the more careful and sympathetic spectators, Little Gidding provokes considerable bemusement on the part of English Christians, from the King and Queen (who until the 1640s send messengers) to those many visitors - some official, others informal - who struggle to read the composite iconography and practices of the community against the backdrop of the Stuart religious landscape.(54) The story books confirm what this interpretive quandary can only suggest, namely, that heroism at Little Gidding involves the adventure of reinventing the Church of England, and that this adventure is characterized not by some confident and impressive synthesis of ideals but by trial and error in the enrichment of worship and the reformation of spirituality.

In the story books at Little Gidding, then, Christian heroism is only in part straightforward, a matter of saintly patience and mortified opposition to the world. But it is also elusive because there are competing notions of Christian heroism and each - including romance, colonization, and crusade but also patience and contemptus mundi - is subjected to criticism. As it is explored in the Gidding dialogues, heroism is offered as an epitome of what the Church of England ought to be or has failed to be - witness the collapse of the Virginia Company - and as a synopsis of what the Church is: a critical and fallible negotiation between rival notions of the church and, as such, equivocal and mediating. As the interlocutors trade stories, religious heroism is not just undercut by a disenchantment over its fraudulent forms; it is also reconstituted in terms of the fallen world's inevitable recourse to incessant critique and makeshift constructions.

In their staged dialogues, the interlocutors concern themselves with correcting "misapprehension[s]" that inhibit the pursuit and perfection of virtue and devotion.(55) In contrast to the world's "opinions and practizes," they long to approximate the saints and their own allegorical titles in Christian knowledge, faith, and action. Keenly alert to their own shortcomings, and with an emphasis on the heroic execution of virtue and piety, the speakers tell noteworthy and illustrative stories from ancient to modern times. Thus the Chief relates the wild ambition of that "brave King and Captaine Pirrhus" who too long defers a life of "Wisedome, Temperance, Patience, Meekenes, Humility"; Patient offers in contrast the "incomparable" justice of Trajan, whose immediate attention to the complaint of a widow is divinely rewarded with a great military victory. Some stories involve lapses from virtue: for example, as an emblem of the loss of charity to anger and revenge, the exceptional piety of a priest from Antioch is undermined by his envy for a protege. Just as often in the stories, modern heroes endure the tumult of post-Reformation Christendom, as King Henry IV of France teaches a would-be assassin the difference between a church that harms the innocent and a church that forgives the guilty, while Katherine of Aragon suffers nobly in the rift between the pope and the king, her husband.(56)

For the most part the applications are kept simple: enmity is bad, charity good, and Christian bliss is at odds with the world's false goods. But problems small and large arise along the way. In the case of Henry IV, for example, it is pointed out that mercy is inferior to the "conjunction of two so different vertues," a compound of mercy and justice. Then there is the question of warfare and military heroism: at Little Gidding, romance in particular is condemned for its unholy marriage between Christianity and violence, but the interlocutors also credit the idea that a king's charity now ensures his military victories later.

Throughout the story books, this problem of whether Christians can justify violence is linked to the larger question of just how Christian heroism pertains to, or exists in, the political and even the natural world. As A.N. Williams remarks of one dialogue, the interlocutors are "curiously ambiguous" in assessing the benefits of springtime, with its restoration of the world's "bravery." In celebrating the Easter of 1631-32, the participants offer at once "a Counterpoyze to the common Jollity of that season" and an appreciation for the (limited) extent to which the green world approximates "those farre more rich though lesse evident beauties" of heaven.(57) Similarly on Christmas of 1631, "the dayly recompting[s] of some good Histories" are "delightfull and vertuous exercises," more ascetic than the average English holiday yet not without their pleasures (Sharland, 19-20). At Little Gidding, then, the question of heroism centers on the problem of deciding just what can and should be accomplished in this world - on the battlefield, in the colonial search for a new Eden or New Jerusalem, in political and judicial actions, and in the perfectibility of virtue among the saints. It might even be said that heroism at Gidding comprises the laborious condition of striving to answer in life as in discourse this very question.

Not surprisingly, the writers' most extended, troublesome, and searching meditations on heroism involve questions as to whether utopias exist in this world, whether the miracles and wonders of saints' lives are either true or useful, and if retirement from the world and its offices is desirable or even possible. Each of these questions impinges on Little Gidding itself - on its involvement in colonialism, on its asceticism, and on its views of a Europe torn by over fifteen years of putatively religious warfare.

Many of these questions infiltrate what appears to be a straightforward (if long) celebration of Charles V's retirement from empire and the world. An important iconic figure for Elizabeth I and Charles I, "this heroycall Emperour" is given his own day-long dialogue at Little Gidding. On the day in 1631 set aside for the story of Charles's retirement, the narrator (the Chief or Mary Collett) lays a trap for her audience. Charles V, she begins, ranks among the happiest of men because he combined noble blood, empire, and great actions with "the right Composure of an Inward Disposition to inioy them" (Williams, 33). From his royal visage and equestrian skills to the excellence of his extended family, Charles V is a perfect example, she concludes, of how external happiness complements internal virtues as the very essence of the "Heroical Prince."

But then the Chief springs the trap: describing her discourse as a journey over seas, into creeks and channels in search of a haven, she undermines her own assertion that Charles V represents a perfect composite of internal and external blessings and, with it, her claim that such a composite defines happiness after all. Simply put, Charles becomes the true Christian hero when he renounces the world and all its politics and pomp, for only then does he acknowledge that "There's no happines at all in this World" (Williams, 51). Even prior to his retirement, the Chief suggests, Charles himself has doubts about his place in the world, since in his "continual Exercize of Heroical Industry in most Noble & weighty Affaires," the emperor understands the political value of triumphant pomp and lavish pleasures but he himself has little desire for these things (Williams, 35). Yet Charles himself is fallible: for instance, his illegitimate children make him "a greater Example by his fall then perhaps he would have been by his Integritie" (Williams, 56). This last statement is significant not just because it concurs with the point made so often in the dialogues - that stories about perfectly saintly virtue are less helpful than stories of the moderately virtuous and humanly struggling wayfarer - but also because it broaches what proves to be an ongoing meditation on fallenness as a condition for religious heroism, with epic spirituality following the loss of - and preceding the retention of - a pastoral Eden.

As he is presented in the story books, Charles is most heroic in distress - witness "this Heroical Prince's Demeanour in the Infortunacy at Algeers" (Williams, 38) - and in revision. When the Emperor lapses in choosing policy over honesty, God refines him through punishment, a crucial point in the auditors' understanding of "Heroical Vertues" (Williams, 41). So too the Chief's strategy is to initiate the uprooting from the auditors' minds and hearts of those "long rooted & fortified" misconceptions about happiness.(58) More than anything else, then, Charles represents "the Reformation of corrupted manners" and his renunciation is the culmination of a heroic life defined in terms of continual sanctification.

If Charles V comes at long last to renounce "the imaginarie idol of Humane Felicitie" (Williams, 67), it is strangely the case that he continues to strive for "the revnitement of diuided opinions in the Church of Christ." Pursuing the unity of true religion in this world, his imperial life involves him in diplomacy, warfare, and colonization, all at cross purposes with retirement. And the relevance to Little Gidding of this facet of Charles's heroism unsettles the dialogue even more. After all, Nicholas Ferrar has opted for semi-retirement over the offers of a diplomatic position in a time of religious warfare; and despite his ongoing advisory role in colonial matters for Charles I, he and his brother John have been humiliated and penalized under James for their leadership in the colonization of Virginia. Embracing an intensely spiritual and richly liturgical form of godly living - one that is said to refine and elevate the spirituality of the parish radiating out from a domestic retreat - the interlocutors nonetheless admire the providence of God as it operates through Charles across the world and in pursuit of Eden. Given this quandary over the value of whether Christian heroism thrives in or against the grain of the world, the dialogue revisits the ruins of the Virginia Company in what serves as a painful opportunity to rethink the very essence and scope of Christian valor.

For John and Nicholas Ferrar in the early 1620s, the Virginia Company kept alive the Elizabethan heroic tradition of their father, along with Hawkins, Drake, and the other seamen who checkmated Spain by exporting Protestantism to the heathens of America. In addition, the Company offered a new means of enriching and revitalizing English Protestantism at home. As Samuel Purchas maintained in his extended defense of English rights to colonize Virginia, the enterprise resembled Solomon's journey "to fetch Ophir Materialls for the Temples structure, and to edifie Christs Church, with more full and evident knowledge of Gods Workes in the World, both of Creation and Providence."(59) As heir to his "Heroicke Brother" Henry, Prince Charles was hailed as the leader who, according to Purchas, might replenish the ecclesiology and spirituality of the mother church while spreading true religion to America.

In epic terms, the Virginia enterprise was also construed as a cataclysmic movement of the European church westward. For some, this translatio entailed a progression toward spiritual and ecclesiastical perfection in the New Jerusalem: consolidated by Spenser, the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century analogies between the English church regaining paradise with the grace of God and Aeneas's journey to Roma Aeterna were commonplace expansions of the medieval allegorization of the epic hero as "a Christian Everyman."(60) For others, America represented a nodal point in the ongoing struggles of the church militant. It should be remembered that Nicholas Ferrar fought to have Herbert's poetry published with the infamous two lines of the "Church Militant" intact: "Religion stands on tip-toe in our land, / Readie to passe to the American strand." In this poem, interpreted early on "as a 'heroic poem . . . which is partly historical, & partly prophetical,'" Herbert describes the progress of the church, together with the arts and power, in cyclical terms, with each cycle having its high points and low.(61)

But in Herbert's poem each low point is more degraded than the previous ones - a pattern crucial to the revision of colonial heroism at Little Gidding. Whatever their initial beliefs about the colonial mission of the Virginia Company, the Ferrars came away from the massacres, diseases, famines, and politics of the enterprise with a more melancholy, critical, and disenchanted sense of epic religion.(62) In Herbert's model of the translation of the church, heroism does not entail full restitution or perfection in a new Eden. Instead, the church's militancy always consists of metamorphosis, conflict, and decay as history spirals downwards toward the coming of Christ. In a similar vein, it is not surprising that George Sandys conceived of his translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses as an apt product of his travels to and troubles in Virginia. With Christian warfare taking place in a declining world, the painful irony of Herbert's poem may be summarized in the words of Raymond Anselment: "Time . . . is the enemy of perfection, and any attempts to repair its ravages are doomed."(63) In this vein, heroism comes closest to the melancholy found in Chapman's Odyssey, as Colin Burrow describes it: Chapman's emphasis there is on "the painful and inescapable self-absorption of exile," on how "the whole lie of the world is against the success of virtue," and on "how grim it is to be good."(64) The best the church can hope for is temporary respite, brief periods of vitality, and above all the benefits of painful scourgings and expiations in what A.B. Chambers calls "that longer and harder westward path."(65) But its battle against decay is endless and, until Christ returns, futile.

As is often the case in the dialogue on Charles V, the disenchantment over colonization checkmates an initial bout of optimism. Thus, following her source, the Chief at first declares that God saved "the full discouerie & subjection of the New-found world" for Charles V, who "was appointed to conioyne them not only by an intercourse of Ciuil Commerce, but by the farre more perfect Bond of Christian Religion, so he was to cleare those scruples, which had or might on either part disquiet" (Williams, 70). The so-called "scruples" pertain especially to the boastful and papist Spaniards who deify their own "imaginarie All-sufficiencie," an idolatry which would appear to necessitate Protestant intervention in the Christianization of the New World. But suddenly Charles assumes an extraordinary colonial position. His Solomonic renunciation of the world disabuses the Indians of the idea that he is a god; they learn from him that all human beings are sinfully mortal, that the world is nothing, and that only God is sufficient in grace, wisdom, and power. In other words, Charles's retirement forms the basis of the heathens' admiration of him, and this the basis of their disillusionment about the idol of human sufficiency constructed by colonial Spaniards.

But the most ironic disillusionment produced by the great adventure of colonization belongs to the English and especially to the Ferrars who have learned that there is no Eden or perfect happiness in this world, and that any such fancy must be uprooted:

The remembrance of Eden, wherein our First Parents were sett, being propagated not only by sacred Historie, but by continued Tradition hath in all Ages brought forth a strong & rauishing conceit; That there was yet remaining in the world a place of Perfect Happines. Which because it appeared euidently false by the discouerie of that Portion, which wee inhabite, The Mainteners of this Fancie haue aiwaies cunningly described it to ly hid in farre remoued Coasts & accessible only to the Possessours thereof. You shall not find any of the wise Naturalists, that haue recorded to Posteritie their knowledge of the seuerall parts & conditions of this world, but haue withall expressed the common report & beleif (wherein you shall easily perceiue their own credence implied) of certain people liuing aiwaies in an vninterrupted Course of Felicitie, & vnder the influence of a benigne Heauen, which some of them haue pointed out to be vnder the Poles, other farre in the West in certaine Ilands of the Atlantique Sea, on which they haue imposed the Names of Happy & Fortunate. (Williams, 70-71)

The heroism of Charles V does not consist of his pursuing this edenic pipe dream, but rather in his exposing its sham through his renunciation of the vanity of the world. Having surveyed the world with the help of his ministers in search of Eden, Charles returns not with "a greene oliue branch of Comfort & hope," but with "the Confutation of all those idle dreames, Assuring by the Experiment of Ten Thousand Eie Wittnesses, That those Fortunate Ilands, which haue been so long boasted of by Antiquitie are but a few petty barren rocks yeelding a scanty maintenance to their short-liued inhabitants" (71).

In this disenchanted vein of argument, then, the Elizabethan church heroic and its Jacobean descendants are deluded at best, greedy propagandists at worst; at best the New World offered them colorful trinkets, at worst Circean seduction behind the gloss of "Cunning deuised Fables." But far from dismantling the church heroic altogether, the Gidding dialogue poses the romanticized ideal of the American mission against a lapsed form of heroism of which trouble, deception, and fallibility are the diacritical marks. This non-edenic heroism amounts to an ongoing Odyssean battle against enchantment and degeneration without hope for peace or perfection in this world's "furious Gulf euer combated with Stormes & Tempestes." Whatever its pacific appearance, Little Gidding is established in the dialogue as a microcosm of the world at large, "a vale of miserie & our whole liues a Continual exercise of Afflictions & Anguish" (Williams, 71). Or as it is put more positively in the dialogue, life in this religious household consists of "a continual Exercize of Heroical Industry in most Noble & weighty Affaires" (35).

This is not to say that the utopian impulse is completely eradicated from the dialogues at Little Gidding. Like those Laudians who posit especially holy spaces in an admittedly fallible church, the interlocutors follow the historian Speed in celebrating the Isle of Man as a remarkably pious and just place which is, all the same, imperfect. The Manx have minimized lawsuits and crime, and they worship "with more sinceritie, then in most places, though not wth that perfection, wch it ought. But men are frail. & They are to be deemed not only good but the best, who doe least amisse" (Blackstone, 119). In this cautious paean on Man, we have the upshot of heroism at Little Gidding, as time and again the narrators mediate between models of perfection and the ongoing spiritual struggles of the fallen world.

The Gidding mediation between perfect and lapsed forms of heroism is readily seen in the narrators' caution regarding the transmission of saints' lives. For the most part, their shorter dialogues center on the most "admirable passages that stand recorded in the ecclesiastical histories," that is, on examples of invincible piety and virtue (Sharland, 192). Some of the most "admirable" stories have two clearly distinct sections insofar as they feature the conversion of some egregiously vicious sinner into an amazingly virtuous saint. But it is this very division into deeply fallible and superhumanly perfect halves that incites the interlocutors to reconsider the value and believability of such stories of "Admirablenes," with the Chief usefully separating the account "of sinners Conversion wrought by meanes of Saints" from the narrative "of saints perfection encreased by meanes of sinners" (Sharland, 202). Both halves relate the workings of the Holy Spirit, not least in the unpremeditated eloquence of the saints; and in the case of stories about prostitutes converted to honesty and godliness, the auditors insist on hearing both halves. Thus the interlocutors are unwilling to jettison the value of extraordinary virtue, with Foxeian heroes such as Bishop Ferrar himself serving as reminders to an impoverished and decadent age of just how powerful Christian heroism can be. Although providence is consistent unto itself in ancient and modern times, God uses "strangenes" to provoke us out of the ordinary bondage of everyday life. It is wrong to expect extraordinary heroes from God, but it is equally wrong to rule them out. But while the Guardian chastises modern readers for discrediting heroic stories taken from antiquity, the narrators at Little Gidding concede their uncertainty about "the Authoritie" of such histories, even those with obvious moral value.

On several occasions, the interlocutors bring home to Little Gidding the suspension of heroism between perfection and lapse. The Affectionate reminds the others that they must be "better off" than ordinary Christians (Sharland, 243), but on St. Luke's Day, 1632, the dialogue begins with a lament for their failure to execute their pious resolutions. As a physician, Luke represents the community's hope in "a lifting up, a rising againe, and a rising together" (Sharland, 156) so that the Gidding church heroic is driven by a social as well as an individual combat with lapse. Each individual is exhorted to live up to his or her allegorical name, but it is together that they must battle human fallibility when the "beautie, the noveltie, and the honour of excellent things" give way to labor. When godly living "comes to the maine battail," then a congregational version of the Homeric shame culture must motivate the Christian warriors in their thirty-years war with "the paines, the patience, the difficulties, the hazards, that like so many dreadfull files of pikes and shott stand in guard of vertue, and deny the prize of worthy Actions except they be forced by Combate and Conquest" (Sharland, 157-58). With "Industrie, Humilitie, and Wisedome" and with their "shoulders to the wheel," the heroism of everyday Christians "to gett out of the slough wherein [they] are fallen" (159) offers a more brazen, yet all the more valuable, enrichment in the face of material impoverishment, activism's dishonor, and Eden's loss.

Despite their deflation of the colonial enterprise, however, the interlocutors aren't fully committed to retirement as an alternative ascetic heroism, even though it too has its share of "excellent things." After all, it is still important that Charles V is responsible for converting the heathen, if only through the example of his renunciation of power and the world. The emperor's renunciation itself is fitful and vulnerable to critique. Some have objected that Charles renounced the world only when he grew too old, tired, and melancholy. Moreover, as he is portrayed in the source material, it is difficult for him to leave behind his "vndefatigable course of serious Imployments for the Common good of Christendome" for "quiet, Rest & Peace" (Williams, 81). In fact, what is striking about the Chief's account of the emperor's journey to his private retreat is how often that journey gets interrupted by continual and heroic exercise for the sake of religion in the world. When, in striking a truce with France, Charles is detained from sailing to his private house in Spain, the Chief applauds the delay: "Hee shall better please & serue god, that condescends to serue & please his Neighbour in things, that truly edifie, then he, that in an intire retirement, liues to himself alone, though his Life be altogether in & vnto God" (Williams, 88). Such a middle ground is perfectly suitable for Little Gidding, which was by the early 1630s established as a private retreat with active and reformative involvement in the parish. For Charles, then, "the best preparation to heaven is to leaue peace behind him," and the guarantee of a future European peace is scarcely aided by his renunciation of the world. In this cause, he pauses yet again to educate his descendants and so becomes a model for all parents who seek to do the same. Once again, he is in harmony with the reformative activities of Little Gidding when Charles "makes the Catechizing of his Grandchild . . . the Epilogue of all his Heroical Actions" (Williams, 103). But the Chief is unsure, if it comes to a choice, which "was more Admirable, To relinquish these things as inferiour to his own high sett Aime, or to reassume them againe as necessarie for the furtherance of others." Perhaps, she suggests, the readiness is all, for "Hee, that abandons Earthly Imployments for God is alwaies ready on Mans vrgent Necessitie to take them vp againe" (Williams, 88-89).

For the Gidding community, Charles's asceticism thus has a complex relationship to heroism: on the one hand, it entails a release from his heroic struggle against worldly desires, but on the other it intensifies the temptations of "Comfort & pleasures," the ongoing conquest of which qualifies the emperor as "a Mighty Champion" (130-31). The last section of the dialogue - in which it is debated whether the Submisse should become a gentle servant in a noble household - summarizes the community's complex relationship to the world at large. When it is argued that her service in such a position would be both arrogant and humiliating, the Resolved complains that "The Contradiction of your discourses . . . intangle[s] my thoughts, as in a Laberinth; & though, meethinkes, now & then I see light, yet it proues but like those foolish fires, that lead wandering passengers into further errours" (Williams, 141). The Guardian responds that they have been struggling with "seeming Contradiction" all along, especially in "that great Maze" which led to "Charles his true want of Happines in the appearent possession of it" (148). Ambushed by "Errour & Daunger," heroic exercise at Little Gidding proves to be discursive as well as practical. Given the material pitfalls, complex lineage, and ethical mazes of the various heroisms, from Foxeian martyrdom and international warfare to new world colonization and Laudian beautification, the interlocutors acknowledge that skeptical questioning is as integral to the strength of the church as catechistical answers. For the Ferrars, then, religious heroism is labyrinthine because its interrogative forms coexist with the family's otherwise clear and fervent commitments to certain honorable enterprises in the Church of England: the restoration of the church's catholicity; the decent beautification of liturgical worship in the context of the interior trials of mortification and sanctification; the care of sick bodies and of impoverished souls in the parish; and the conversion of the heathen in Virginia as part of the apocalyptic combat against the Antichrist.

In other dialogues, the interlocutors convey a similar combination of conviction and doubt regarding the violence undertaken on behalf of the faith, from the zealous acts of iconoclasm that Nicholas Ferrar himself approved to the spectacle of endless bloodshed in Germany.(66) More often than not, the interlocutors elevate the patient suffering and heavenly orientation of the Christian saint over any fraudulent marriage between violence and spirituality. In stories regarding both sides, Catholic and Protestant, popes as well as princes, the narrators praise renunciation "of this worlds wretchedness," since "whateuer els may be disputable, yet this is plaine and certaine" (Sharland, 68-69). Nonetheless, mortification eludes the saint for a number of reasons. For one thing, heaven's "Inevidency . . . breeds a doubt in most Mens minds of the certainty" of happiness in the life to come (Sharland, 173). For another, the widely shared belief "that this world is a vale of misery, and that there is no true and solid Comfort to bee found, whilst wee are here on earth," is modified by a critical exception: "but in the faithfull service of God" (70).

Does this service include bloodshed? Violence, we are told, has wrongly found its way into representations of Christian heroism, as the Guardian points out: "and now I see the reason why not onely Virgill and Homere, but Ariosto and Spencer and all other bookes of Chevalry, bring in their fayned worthies so defective in Patience. Mans witt, can well enough, I perceive, fitt all other weapons of Christian Religion to serve the worlds turnes, even against religion; but onely Patience thats too weighty to bee put on a Counterfeit" (119). Having extended this repudiation of romantic violence, the Chief is eager to destroy these popular books in a "Bone-fire" (119). Ironically, like Nicholas's declaration that he would dismantle any room in which the Mass has been held, the iconoclasm directed against the romantic celebration of Christian warfare is itself not without an element of godly violence.

Such a bonfire, we know from biographical records, was built near the end of Nicholas's life with the special purpose of burning, among other secular writings, romances and heroic poetry.(67) In the story books, the Chief is urged to elaborate on the evils of romantic fictions, especially since some members of the family have loved such books "from their Cradle almost" and, more generally, the chivalric "match betweene Christianity and revenge" has so extensively infected Europe in "these last and perilous times of ours" (119). In attacking "the lying Patternes of Orlando and Rogero" in contradistinction to such early Christians as the patient Christopher, the Chief maintains that modern "Champions in the Fayth are produced compleat in all manner of Vertues, Patience excepted," and that no such hero can ever teach "Temperance, Justice, Charity, or any other Vertue" (120-21). Also, in modern times, the deformity of such heroism is hidden by the grand style - the pomp, flourish, and glitter - of its romantic accouterments. As with the papist mass, so too with devilish romance: at Little Gidding, the presence of such false religious heroism is enough "to cause the burning of the House, or the unnaturall Death of the heire" (121).

But it is unclear exactly what is meant by "these last and perilous times." As critics of Stuart court culture, which as we have seen cultivates romantic images of the church heroic, the Little Gidding interlocutors might be focusing their attacks on the synthetic "heroic virtue" integral to the mythology of the Caroline monarchy. But the Ferrars themselves have encouraged a violence against the American Indians motivated explicitly by the appeal to holy and honorable revenge. Does the Chief mean the international quagmire entrenched on the Continent since 1618? Or is the phrase "these . . . times" broad enough to take in the Elizabethan ancestry of Stuart colonists and militant Protestants? And given its own fitful relationship to Laudian beautification, how might the community summarize or stabilize the uses of iconoclasm?

In the Gidding dialogue on the winding sheet, the problem of religious violence is carefully studied through accounts of German history, a legacy that is bound to come round to the European warfare of the 1620s and 1630s. The dialogue focuses on those rulers possessing a keen awareness of their mortality, especially Frederick III and his son Maximilian I. But far from reducing them to quietism, the dialogue clarifies that their constant attention to death strengthens these fearless men in their active lives. Purged of their vices, they are all the more eager to act in the name of God, "Neuer at Rest, but when they are in Labor, not truly quiet, but when they are strongly exercized in weldoing" (Blackstone, 127). Some of their labors are more easily reconciled to Christian charity than others. In troubled Germany, for example, peacekeeping is as difficult a task as warfaring, since a peacekeeper like Frederick must "put the strength of his hand to the Rudder, as well as the Forecast of his head els he could neuer haue steered right in such an ouergrown Tempest as then raged vpon ye whole face of ye Earth almost" (Blackstone, 127).

But of course aggressive peacekeeping (Frederick) or charity (Ferdinand) - in short, "Christian Affabilitie" - is easier to legitimize than Christian warfare, the justice of which is reasonably clear only if the enemy is not Christian. For instance, Frederick III must confront the usurpation of his lesser imperial principalities by the King of Hungary and Bohemia and by his brother and cousin. Having started to fight, the emperor realizes that too much Christian blood will be shed and so decides instead to join forces with the King of Hungary against their common enemy, the Turks. The lesson of this change in strategies is simple: God rewards those rulers who leave all to providence, forget petty revenge, and concentrate on the welfare of Christendom. Frederick's visit to an ambitious and covetous Pope is somewhat more subtle with regard to the relative value of peace and war, as he wins the Pontiff over with his mild disposition but keeps an army behind him all the same. In a similar vein, the story of Rudolph's foundation of the Habsburg empire serves as a summary of how Christians should eliminate most of their conflicts in order to focus on one. As the Repeater puts it, ideally a Christian would live in peace: "But since few aime & scarce any there be yt attaine this hight, it is necessarie yt there should be Patterns of that Lower degree of vertue, wch the world is capable & willing to imitate" (Blackstone, 144). Although they show ample admiration for marvelously patient saints and martyrs, the Gidding narrators read the persistence of Christian warfare as a sign of the fallible and exploratory nature of the church heroic.

War in general continues to occupy their attention as other stories are told "appliable to all manner of Contention as well as that, wch is in warre" (Blackstone, 148). But the shadow of the Thirty Years War itself looms when we hear of "that strange Act & Resolution from Iohn Frederick of Saxonie, one of the last, & vndoubtedly one of the Noblest and greatest, yt euer came from him" (149). The story goes that this John Frederick, a deposed elector, was Luther's greatest protector (after God); aptly, he serves to illustrate Luther's belief that princes rely on reformed doctrine more than reformers rely on princes - and he does so in battle by relying on God and faith as "a stronger sheild than power." In the end he retires to his remaining estate and refuses the military help of a powerful Marquis; in his wake he leaves no clear lesson about the justice of religious warfare, if little of the complexity of the most recent war over deposition, empire, and religion. There is no mention by the Gidding narrator of John George, or the current Elector of Saxony's suspension between Protestantism and nationalism, and none of the war's byzantine negotiations crossing religious boundaries while still maintaining, with the emergence of Sweden, a religious dimension. There is one mention of the arrogance opening "one of the cheif sluces, through wch the bloud of so many Emperors hath of late drayned," the point of which is that mortals should always remember death and their God (150). But the hint of modern relevance makes Christian warfare only more difficult to evaluate than the safely remote crusades of the distant medieval past.

Eventually in "The Winding Sheet," the interlocutors speak directly to the dilemma of deciding between heroic renunciation and epic warfare. When the pompous ease and murderous treachery of the Pope is condemned in contrast with Frederick III's penchant for "warres and Journeys, and Treaties of weighty and difficult businesses," the Apprentice spots a problem: "Why this Passage very strangely setts of ye vertue, yt is in peaceablenes for the prolongation of Life. when wee see yt this great Follower of Peace for going but once aside out of the way had been well nigh supprized by death for his Labor. I will not say, Error. For I know not whether any peace ought to be preferred before this kind of warre" (Blackstone, 156). It simplifies the case that papal decadence is so unattractive even if the value of Christian warfare is hard to measure. On request and with a glance at the blood shed in Virginia, the Apprentice goes so far as to explicate with great caution the conditions for a holy war: "This sacred warre, yt setts vp the crosse, not for a standard to order ye March by, but for the maine end of all the designes & actions of the whole attempt, wch intends not the enlargement of Territories & Honors but ye propagation of Religion. Not the spoil of the conquered but their enrichment, enfranchizing them vnto true Libertie by reducing them to the subiection of the right Faith & putting them in possession of Heavenly Treasures in exchange of a little worldly pelf, wch it may be they come by this meanes to be depriued of" (157). Unlike the courtly synthesis of St. George and Laudian enrichment, this paradoxical heroism admits the brutal cost of an exchange whereby the heathens' material and physical loss is supposed to translate into their spiritual treasure.

The Repeater also praises those wars undertaken for the sake of "Pietie & Charitie, Gods Honor & Mankinds common Good" (Blackstone, 157). But actual wars fall short of their putative ideals, "the successe prouing alwaies wth exception almost cleane contrarie" (157). It is added that some authorities take this critique further in charging the Crusades with "the ruine of our Church as well in Temporal as in Spiritual regards" (158); among these critics, Etienne Pasquier is noted for his conviction that saintly virtue will convert an infidel whereas war cannot. For this reason, Saint Lewis was successful in his mission until he embarked on two military "voyages" which proved ruinous for all his "pure Deuotion" (161). But more often than not, the circumstances of crusading and the motives of crusaders are complicated in "The Winding Sheet," as Lewis the Young's crusade is presented in the context of papal politics, a controversial divorce, and the grievous memory of a horrible war at home. Once again the Apprentice is careful about motive: "yt it was not pure Deuotion, no innocent but expiatorie Religion, yt induced Lewis the yong to this Attempt" (164). Such shameful wars recreate the fall of man all over again, substituting "Bitter & deadly fruit . . . for such a plant of Paradise as Deuotion is" (165). And these mortal combats remind the narrator of God's incomprehensibility, for instance, when the relatively "innocent & pius" Conrad nonetheless encounters "many hazards, miserie, & dangers" in crusade (166).

In "The Winding Sheet," then, the repudiation of a marriage between militarism and Christianity is compelling and leads to the rejection of romance in the name of mortification, charity, and peace. But the interlocutors also confess their lifelong fascination with romance and cannot altogether jettison holy warfare. Instead they often prefer to characterize religious heroism not as a clean divorce from the vicissitudes of life on earth, but as a laborious, vulnerable struggle in the fallen world over the terms and costs of an exchange between violence and spirituality - a struggle parallel to the hardships of reinventing a church that must navigate between rival soteriologies and disciplines. In turn, the attractions of quietism require modification; thus the "conceald Life" should be carried out "not in sluggish Idlenes but in happy quiet" and "Imployment" (Blackstone, 171). Meanwhile, in contrast to "the world now adaies," the interlocutors express nostalgia for those "Elder and better times" when godly warriors such as the Maccabees were divinely guided in conquering the impious tyrants of the world (177). The Learner takes this support for holy war quite far; at the outset of battle, a litany confessing one's weakness and reliance on God "is vndoubtedly a certaine way to obtaining of the victorie" (178).

Toward the end of "The Winding Sheet," the counterexamples to invincible Christian warfare are specifically English, including the losses sustained in the Norman Conquest. And they are contemporary, for it is Buckingham's disastrous expedition to Re that causes the community its greatest alarm: "The Inforcement of this Example were most necessarie perhaps for the present Age, on wch the Inheritance of this debauched Humor of our Ancestors is euidently fallen, & like a snow-ball much increased perhaps in ye descent. Whereof that prodigious Ballad made vpon the Expedition to the Isle of Ree" (183). In addition to their searching analysis of church heroism, the interlocutors at Little Gidding expose the Caroline synthetic mythology to ridicule by pointing to its popular reception as the kind of mock-romance permitted only in the antimasques of the 1630s. When the Apprentice curtails the discussion by remarking that their own weakness prevents them from doing the subject justice, we are left to decide whether they support the pursuit of the Elizabethan church heroic against the idle, decadent hedonism of the Stuart court, or whether the failures of the Stuart regime are taken for synecdoches of an English church heroic that, including the community at Little Gidding and its parish, is defined by the fallible and ceaseless labors of godly living after Eden. If the latter view prevails, it is the vulgar ballad itself, and not the expedition to Re, that works against the heroism of the English church. Thus the Repeater offers a prayer in support of those English soldiers who must work to "vnderstand & amend this dangerous Enormitie." Dismissing the ballad as a sign of "Common Impietie," the family devotes another prayer in honor of "our Deare Soueraigne, who hath so embellished his Crown wth Deuotion" (Blackstone, 184). Whatever their criticism of the Stuart court, the modern aristocracy, and contemporary English manners, there is a deep-seated sympathy expressed by the family at Little Gidding for the Caroline efforts to re-create religious heroism so that its wars will be just, its ceremonies rich, and its failures useful in "euery adventure" (187) of the church.

At Little Gidding, however, useful failure is most important of all. As with Spenser's rewriting of Virgil so that grace and not human sufficiency enables the hero to triumph, the Little Academy habitually remembers the reality of its "own Frailtie" as well as "others Peeuishnes" (Blackstone, 144-45). Accordingly, in establishing their community, the family carefully chooses "pious Resolution" over ascetic vows for, as they know well, resolve admits ongoing and earnest reformation, entrenched as it is in the trials of error and revision.(68) Charged with indeterminacy by papists and with irresolution by puritans, the Caroline church also requires apologists who can calculate the benefits and minimize the liabilities of its lapsing heroism, the value of which is raised in Chillingworth's Religion of Protestants.

As the dialogues of the Little Academy unfold, we are therefore confronted with competing notions of religious heroism from colonization to renunciation, along with disenchanted critiques of these notions and the possibility that revision is fundamental to a Christian heroism always conditioned by misapprehension and fallibility. Central to the writers' enterprise is a criticism both of "the debauched Vsages of our present Euill Age" and of the "Frayltie & Feares & other misapprehensions" of the Gidding community itself, with its aim at "renewing . . . those holy practizes, wch better times & men gaue Example of" (Blackstone, 102, 107). On the one hand, then, the dialogues offer careful and extended meditations on how the women at Gidding should exempt themselves "from all worldly Complements & Ceremonies" such as one finds at "a solemne Mask" (133). But this estrangement from the conventions of court culture leads, as Maycock suggests, to the struggles of self-definition in a vacuum where, as one interlocutor puts it, there is "A Dearth of Patterns in an exuberance of Rules."(69) Affectionate insists that it is their godly duty to establish a precedent for the future but knows that such leadership has considerable "hazard at first" and that, in short, the invention of Little Gidding is the most heroic enterprise that the family will ever undertake (Williams, 172).

The skeptical edge of heroism at Little Gidding can be glimpsed in Nicholas Ferrar's translation of Juan de Valdes's Hundred and Ten Considerations, in which true Christianity is always characterized by difficulties at once internal and external. According to Valdes, "for a man to bee sollicited to doubt, is a signe of Christian profiting."(70) It is the man filled with the Holy Spirit whose internal life is riddled with "much contrast, and much contradiction," as such a man experiences more deeply the struggle to mortify the flesh, and more violently the unlikelihood of grace. Time and again, Valdes asserts that "the impious cannot believe . . . the superstitious believe with ease; and . . . the pious believe with difficulty."(71) Superstition means that the believer readily accepts human fictions mixed in with spiritual truths, while the true Christian is aggressively critical of such mixtures in himself and in others.

Indeed the external difficulties of Christian life involve the ongoing search for so-called "countersigns," that is, for the badges worn by other Christians piously engaged in critical combat with the world, the flesh, and the devil. Charity, Valdes insists, "is the proper counter-signe of Christian Piety"; another "great countersigne for a man to bee assured of his piety, and of his predestination," is godliness in the face of death.(72) As part of the maturation of belief, doubt itself is "a certain countersigne of [a Christian's] profiting in Christian faith."(73) The strenuous efforts made by George Herbert, as an orthodox Protestant reader, to sort out Valdes's own extremes - be they antinomian or papist - remind us that the literary efforts of Little Gidding are as much an epitome of the ecclesiastical labors of the Caroline church as they are a repudiation of Stuart policies and practices.(74) The work of William Chillingworth testifies to the same conclusion, namely that the Little Gidding community emblematizes the struggles of the Caroline religious imagination as it seeks the place and identity of its church in the course of ecclesiastical history.

For English church apologists in the 1630s, one of the most influential treatments of a spiritual warfare distinguished by its search for the tessera, watchword, or countersign of true Christians among hypocrites and pretenders was Acontius's Stratagemata Satanae.(75) In Chillingworth's Religion of Protestants (written 1635-37; first published 1638), Acontius is enlisted in defense of the English church against those papists who assail its novelty and uncertainty. According to Chillingworth, the English church is heroic precisely in refusing fraudulent claims of infallibility and in crediting skeptical criticism and earnest endeavor as integral to the Christian odyssey.

Chillingworth confronts the Roman Catholic charge against the Church of England that it is stuck in an epistemological quandary, relying on the Bible for its prime authority but with no clear and stable authority for legitimizing interpretations or even the canon of the Bible. The English church is charged, moreover, that in its irresolution and uncertainty, '"Protestantisme waxeth weary of it self,'" with its moderates '"at this time more unresolved where to fasten, then at the infancy of their Church.'"(76) Having converted to and from Catholicism and remaining unevenly committed to the Thirty-nine Articles, Chillingworth himself is subject to be caricatured as an unstable skeptic; as his friend John Earle paints the picture, "Each Religion scares [the skeptic] from its contrary: none persuades him to itself . . . He finds reason in all opinions, truth in none: indeed the least reason perplexes him, and the best will not satisfy."(77) Such instability is natural, critics charge, because Protestant churches such as the Church of England have had to invent themselves ex nihilo; this explains, they conclude, why there is a "new face" of late on the Caroline church, a romish make-over in the beautification of worship and in the mitigation of rigid Calvinism.

The essence of Chillingworth's defense of the English church is that he transforms skeptical instability into godly heroism. So it is that he tends to compare his Catholic opponents to Achilles, a name suggestive of their delusions of infallibility. By contrast, the heroism of the Church of England is odyssean, a perilous journey of which careful navigation, habitual error, and disenchanted revision are integral parts. Not only does Chillingworth situate the Roman church at the very epistemological impasse with which the papists charge the English church, but he also conceives of God as a merciful, reasonable being, one that credits the earnest, if mistaken, pursuit of truth. God measures the heart's sincerity, not the mind's infallibility, and does not expect an absolute certainty to which the human condition gives no access. Affording us all the saving certainty we need in the Scriptures and a confluence of helpmates in tradition, the church, and reason, God watches over us to see if we persist in the "constant and impartiall search of truth."(78) In short, God demands "his servants true endeavours to know his will and doe it, without full and exact performance" (8).

Chillingworth's favorite metaphors for the Christian's critical, earnest, and imperfect search for truth involve travel: for instance, a servant sent to Paris or Jerusalem is required to use "utmost diligence" but is not punished for honest mistakes (96-97). In making his major point-that Protestants have in Scripture a sufficiently clear and relatively "safe" way to salvation-Chillingworth points out that "A Traveller is not alwaies certain of his way, but often mistaken: and does it therefore follow that hee can haue no assurance that Charing crosse is his right way from the Temple to White-Hall? The ground of your errour here, is your not distinguishing, between Actuall certainty and Absolute infallibility" (140). So too when a wise man is led by a star or a pilot by a card and compass: such travellers are "led sufficiently, but not irresistibly" (146).

When the papists accuse the Protestants of leading good Christians into profane heresies, Chillingworth retorts that the Church of England, like prudent Odysseus, navigates between the Scylla of foolish worship and the Charybdis of atheism (167-68). The apologist agrees that "the golden mean, the narrow way is hard to be found, and hard to be kept" (168). "Hard, but not impossible," and safer as well, with a God who saves us from our errors and credits earnest intention over lapsing success. Anyone hoping to prevent all error in the church militant "must be ameer stranger in the world" (217); indeed the papists "think simple errour a more capitall crime, then sins committed against knowledge and conscience" (214). Thus, Chillingworth converts the strategies of critical skepticism and the errors of fallen humanity into the epic stature of the English church, bound to make it home after its adventures between extremes, against enchantment and monstrosity, and despite error and delay.

In elevating "the narrow way of sincere and universall obedience, grounded upon a true and lively faith" (218), Chillingworth recasts individual heroism in a reduced form: "it cannot but redound much to the honour of the truth maintain'd by me, which by so weak a Champion can overcome such an Achilles for error even in his strongest holds" (411). For Chillingworth, even the intentions behind Luther's solitary stand against romish corruption must be weighed cautiously: "If he did so in the cause of God, it was heroically done of him" (291). As Robert R. Orr has shown, individual conscience is of primary value to Chillingworth, for "[i]n the Christian warfare, every man ought to strive to be foremost" (291). But Chillingworth opposes any deification of the individual hero as a misunderstanding of the church heroic. It is therefore important for him that many people followed readily in Luther's footsteps, and that as "a man of a vehement Spirit" Luther himself tended at times to "over doe it" (381): "In the mean time, I hope all reasonable and equitable judges will esteeme it not unpardonable in the great and Heroicall spirit of Luther, if being opposed, and perpetually baited with a world of Furies, hee were transported sometimes, and made somewhat furious" (312). Heroic faith is never a perfect thing, subject as it is to "augmentation and diminution" (326); human endeavor is integral to the church heroic, but individual or even ecclesiastical perfection is not its corollary. As Laud puts the case in his account of the conference with Fisher, "reformation, especially in cases of religion, is so difficult a work, and subject to so many pretensions that it is almost impossible but the reformers should step too far, or fall too short, in some smaller things or other."(79) Reissued in 1639 under his own name, Laud's work responds to the charges also confronted by Chillingworth in maintaining that the Church of England is at once safely redemptive and continually fallible.

As at Little Gidding, the lapsed but sufficient heroism of the Caroline church in The Religion of Protestants is defined in terms of the fertile practice of equivocation. According to Heather A.R. Asals, sacred equivocation entails the recognition that religious predication must incorporate two things in one word or vessel.(80) For Herbert, Ferrar, and other seventeenth-century theologians who come to prefer it over analogy, such equivocation is ontologically committed to real presence yet ever attentive to the fallenness of the predicator. As Asals puts it, "To suggest that man misreads the real is to suggest the imperfection of his hermeneutic capacities. But it is not to suggest that the Real is not present. To dramatize man as misreader is to dramatize irony, paradox, and tension as the nature of the Eucharist and the materials of language in 'the Church."'(81) As Asals suggests, quoting Rosemund Tuve, the equivocal via media of the Caroline church is mappable along thresholds - between heaven and earth, skepticism and dogmatism, reformed spirituality and sacred ceremony, the possible and impossible - with its liturgical practices occupying "'that gap between what truth is, and how man perceives it.'"(82) What is lacking from the courtly synthesis of heroic religion, then, is any sense of the skeptical, strenuous, and fallible practices of holy mediation.

Like other apologists for English Protestantism, Chillingworth is motivated to distinguish the equivocal odyssey of his church from the also odyssean shifts and dodges of the Jesuits, especially as the Greek hero appears in Ovid; charged with wiliness, the Jesuit's "answer would be much like that which Ulysses makes in the Metamorphoses for his running way from his friend Nestor, that is, none at all" (410). But if the papist entrapment of Christians for the sake of religious imperialism is pernicious, then Chillingworth posits another, more tolerant approach to the heroic unification of the faithful. In reminding Christians of "that liberty which Christ and his Apostles left them," he purveys for "Truth a most Heroicall service" in urging an attention to those countersigns that might reassemble Christendom (197). With "Charity and mutuall toleration" for errors made by sincere pilgrims, controversy can be productive and salvific, not disruptive and condemnatory.

Chillingworth's appeal to Ovid, his residence at Great Tew, and his extended quotation from a book entitled Europae Speculum. Or, a View or Survey of the State of Religion in the Westerne Parts of the World nevertheless all serve as reminders of his manifold associations with the Sandys family whose deep involvement in the dismantled Virginia Company unsettles the spiritual and intellectual odyssey recommended in The Religion of Protestants. In the 1630s, after all, Nicholas Ferrar and George Sandys are still involved in the making of colonial policy, the delusions of which are underscored by the simultaneous rise of, on the one hand, the official desire to control the religious practices of New England, and on the other, the nonconformity of those practices.(83) Like Ulysses in the Inferno, who tirelessly urges his men westward through the Pillars of Hercules and eventually to their demise, the heroic spirit of the Stuart church is hard to keep at home, at court, or in spirit. With Virginia and the Elizabethan colonial legacy still looming, the odyssean legacy of the Caroline church is transmitted as much through Dante as through Homer, and even more through Sandys's beloved Metamorphoses in which the Trojan war figures in the cosmic history of ceaseless transformation. It is a version of this metamorphic history on which Nicholas Ferrar insists when he overcomes those censors of Herbert's poetry who hope the poet to be no prophet.

If Caroline communities such as the court, Little Gidding, and Great Tew strove to reassemble or to redefine the church heroic, these efforts were in part responses to the obvious failures of the Caroline church in military Protestantism. Charles never succeeded in restoring his sister's family to the Palatinate and he failed to oversee a colonial rebuff to Spanish imperialism; his efforts on behalf of the Huguenots reaped only ignominy and, unlike Gustavus Adolphus, he led no troops into battle against the Habsburg dynasts. Writers from William Alexander and Richard Eburne to Thomas Morton continued to promote the colonial enterprise as the chief means "to procure glorie vnto God, honour to [Charles], and benefit to the World."(84) And they repeated the commonplace belief that "doubtlesse towards the end of the world, the true Religion shall be in America."(85) In the last years of James's reign, however, even the still hopeful Richard Eburne remarked that "We must not greatly maruell if our so long continued rest and peace from warres and war-like imployments, our vnspeakable idleness and dissolute life, haue so corrupted and in manner effeminated our people generally and for the most part, that they cannot endure the hearing, much lesse the doing of any laborious attempts, of any thing that shall be troublous or any whit dangerous vnto them."(86)

In 1629 there was an audience for the reissue of Edwin Sandys's View or Survey of the State of Religion in the Westerne Parts of the World, in which he lamented the passing of heroic religion and its corollary, the disunity of Christendom:

It remaines that Princes take the matter in hand, and constrein the Pope and others to yield to some such accord. Indeed this were an only right way to effect it. For reason is a good Oratour, when it hath force to back it. But where are these Princes. They dreame of an old world, and of the heroicall times, who imagine that Princes will break their sleeps for such purposes. If there were at this day a DAVID in Spain, a IOSIAS in France, an EZECHIAS in Italy, a CONSTANTINE in Germany; the matter were ended in very short time.(87)

In A Collection of Emblemes (1635), George Wither also emphasizes the marriage between power and virtue in those "Heroicke-spirits" striving to produce "Great workes."(88) In more witty fashion, burlesques of the Order of the Garter such as the "Order of the Fancy" and the "Order of the Bugle" mock an unheroic age - an age with no additional materials for a Hakluyt or a Foxe to celebrate.(89) Far from skepticism and failure, the "Epick Poeme" is often conceived as the remedy to ignorance and impasse; in defining his friend's life as such a poem, Lord Falkland writes of Henry Morison that he led "us on, to what we did not knowe: / And, being what wee were not, made us see / What we should offer at; and sweat to bee."(90) Although "offer" and "sweat" suggest that the reader is credited for strenuous if failed endeavors, such an understanding of epic grandeur entails that the irresolution of English religion requires some heroic model but is none itself.

In his survey of contemporary religious practices, Edwin Sandys is not alone in his dismay over the decay of Christian heroism. Prior to his adventures in Virginia, Edwin's brother, George, offers his own traveler's survey of decay in the Holy Land and surrounding areas, long ago "the seats of most glorious and triumphant Empires; the Theaters of Valour and heroicall actions," but now "the most deplored spectacles of extreme miserie."(91) As a chief officer and, after the massacre, a revenging soldier in Virginia, George is directly involved in the aspirations and frustrations of religion's transplantation by the English themselves. In other contexts, he is committed to bolstering Protestant heroism under the threat of its demise. For instance, in a poem honoring the deposed Queen of Bohemia, he contrasts her fervent English supporters with the lotos eaters who forget their epic purpose, while his translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses is dedicated to those readers clothed "with all Heroick Vertues."(92) If the frontispiece of this dedication resembles the set for one of Charles's masques, the dedication to Charles remembers the failures of the Virginia Company and the decay of heroism in Stuart England itself, when "we had hoped," he tells the king, "ere many yeares had turned about, to haue presented you with a rich and wel peopled kingdome."(93) His Ovid, however, is all the American fruit he has to offer, "bred in the New-World, of the rudenesse whereof it cannot but participate; especially hauing Warres and Tumults to bring it to light in stead of the Muses.(94)

In close proximity, then, Sandys positions the optimism of courtly synthesis - with Charles and Henrietta representing the pantheon of heroic virtues - together with the history of heroism's decline, "tracing the almost worne-out steps of Antiquitie." But his master trope of metamorphosis stakes out a middle ground between optimism and pessimism, as the heroic is always defined by cycles of transformation so that decline leads to rise, westward movement back to east. Not surprisingly, Sandys appeals to ancient and modern experience alike in glossing heroic virtue or ornament. Epic odysseys are therefore comparable to modern voyages and Ovid's description of the palace of the sun, modeled on Homer's account of Achilles's shield, "is imitated by the moderne in their Screenes and Arasses."(95) This cyclical view of history is the upshot of Hakewill's magisterial response to theories of decay - that decay together with reconstitution can be found in all ages.(96) Similar is the Caroline church: from Laud's conference with Fisher to the emblems of Wither, it is recalled, with Augustine, that the church militant is often likened to the moon, changeable, migratory, sometimes obscure, its light derivative yet sometimes splendidly full.(97)

But this notion of a metamorphic church raises as many questions as it answers. Are failure and decay integral to religious heroism in this world, in line with Sandys's gloss on Iliad 14 that "no humane felicity is either perfect or permanent" while the afflicted "wander through the aboades of burdned Earth, despis'd by men and Gods"?(98) Even Herbert's "Church Militant" associates westward movement with a downward spiral, and Donne's "Good Friday" poem comes to allegorize his westward movement in terms of patient obedience to God's whip.(99) If, as Kenneth Murdock has it, "Life was for the Puritan an epic - an epic of ordinary men, who sought by fulfilling their part of a contract with God to achieve some assurance that God had chosen to save them" - what role might ordinary individuals or communities play in shaping or directing the church's mutations?(100) Might kings and ministers effectively reconstitute the body of the church, and disseminate its spirit? In epic terms, George Sandys affirms that they can when he praises Laud, "Who through such Rockes and Gulphes, on either side, / So steadily the Sacred Vessel guide: / Repairs her bruised keile, Close up her Rente; / New rigg and decke, wth her old Ornamente."(101) Might rulers and people alike contribute to the rebuilding of Solomon's temple or to the regaining of Eden? Or might the English people, their communities, and leaders be endlessly metamorphosed between the extremes of hope and despair, their church ever caught between the millstones of rival doctrines and disciplines?

It is just such a ceaselessly transformative epic that we find in a puritan diarist like Richard Norwood, in the Chillingworth skeptic, and in the puritan-papist Ferrars.(102) In his study of Herbert, Joseph Summers writes that "[t]o simplify the religion of Nicholas Ferrar or most other seventeenth-century religionists is to falsify; to understand, one must see individual religious experience within the light of the various movements of the time."(103) Between its longing for order and its alertness to lapses and possibilities, the Caroline church remains committed to or nostalgic for those powerful heroic forms and legacies of which it is deeply, even heroically, suspicious. Caroline epic religion is at once simple and complex, synthetic and fractured, opulent and austere, hopeful and disenchanted, naive and skeptical, narrowly Protestant and broadly catholic. With the Civil War, Nigel Smith argues, there persists a broad range of political and religious uses of the epic tradition but the main direction of heroic appropriation is inward, "to refer to inward states of human constitution and consciousness."(104) By contrast, in the heyday of the Caroline church, it is widely believed that religious heroism has been lost, but no one maintains that it has been simplified.

UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA, CHAPEL HILL

1 Maycock, 1980, 107-22. Cf. Charles, 1-18, especially 10, on the "great spiritual venture" of Little Gidding.

2 Knott, chap. 2. Biographical sources tell us that Nicholas Ferrar "took great delight" in Foxe's book "& the Story of Bp: Ferrar he had perfect, as for his names sake"; see Blackstone, 10; and Mayor.

3 The Gidding interest in historical narratives is well documented in the biographical materials; for instance, at meals the family read aloud "some Chronicles of Nations, Journeys by land, Sea Voyages, & the like," with their most instructive points carefully noted in a book and repeated later (Blackstone, 46-48). Their special interest in "Christian heroism" has been noticed by Tudor-Craig, 174-87. See also Van de Weyer, 1989, 27-28.

4 Drake, title page.

5 James, 1-92; the quotation is on 72. Cf. Adamson.

6 Vox Coeli, in Scot, separately paginated, 36.

7 Scot, The Second Part of Vox Populi, separately paginated, 26.

8 Thus a Tuscan ambassador, quoted by Smuts, 37.

9 Smuts, 21.

10 Ibid., 29. Smuts adds, "There are no Jacobean parallels to the Fairie Queen, the Book of Martyrs . . ." (28).

11 Ibid., 11.

12 Sharpe, 45.

13 Orgel and Strong, 668.

14 St Paul's, 17; for the classical model, see Parry, 261.

15 Andrewes, 365-92. The authorship has been questioned.

16 Heylyn, 1637, 2:80.

17 Quoted in Ornsby, 166-67.

18 On Williams and the altar policy, see Sharpe, 337-38; and Davies, chap. 6.

19 J. Williams, 233.

20 On the ceiling, see Palme; Gordon, 24-50; and Strong, 1981.

21 Parry, 184.

22 For a recent consideration of ship money, see Sharpe, 545-98; for the masque and ship money, see Strong, 1981, 7.

23 Orgel and Strong, 663.

24 Ibid, 666.

25 Ibid., 600-01; cf. Parry, 196: "the Queen was fabled to be of Indian origin."

26 Grotius, bk. 4, [section] 3 (the book is interested in the conversion of East Indians in particular); Morton, 20-22.

27 For Charles, Laud, and the "church abroad," see Trevor-Roper; the "brief effort" to control the colonies is discussed on 258-61.

28 Orgel and Strong, 482.

29 Orgel and Strong, 576.

30 See Dunlap, 280.

31 Sharpe, 219; Sharpe takes the point about the aureola from Thomas, 197. Cf. Strong, 1972, 59-63.

32 Sharpe, 222.

33 Cf. Strong, 1972, for Charles's "removal of the festival [of the Garter] to Windsor Castle away from London" (59).

34 Orgel and Strong, 574.

35 Kerrigan, 335; the author notes the relative dearth of studies of the Caroline fascination with romance and mock-romance.

36 James, 73-74.

37 For Markham and Lord Brooke, see James; for the legacy of Foxe, see Knott; and Lamont.

38 Laud, 6:460; the phrase "honour of the Church" can be found in 7:351.

39 Laud, 3:184-85.

40 For Laud on the "laberinth," see Laud, 7:367; for the "hedge" along with the labors of reforming the church, see Laud, 2:xii-xvi. For Finer, see Loomie, especially 15-19. For Sydenham, see Fincham, 91.

41 Strong, 1972, 41.

42 Ibid., 88. On triumphs and processionals, see Palme, 122.

43 Strong, 1972, 73.

44 For the collapse of consensus on the Antichrist, see Milton, 187-200; and Hill.

45 Milton, 204.

46 Heylyn, 58.

47 Burton, 30.

48 Parry, 267.

49 Ornsby, 28, 84, 97.

50 For the range of opinions on predestination, see White.

51 Trevor-Roper, 74, mentions Montagu's favorite quotation.

52 For "heroic suffering," see Knott, chap. 2. The quotation from Foxe is taken from Actes and Monuments, 1:xxvi.

53 According to Barnabas Oley, Nicholas Ferrar once remarked "that to fry on a faggot was not more martyrdom than continual obloquy. He was torn asunder as with mad horses or crushed betwixt the upper and under millstone of contrary reports; that he was a Papist and that he was a Puritan" (quoted by Maycock, 308; cf. Mayor, 72). Cf. Clarke, 135, on the Little Gidding attempt to avoid polarities and to achieve "a third position independent of them both."

54 For a revision of the Little Gidding relationship with Charles, see Robert Van der Weyer, 1986, 152-72. Thomas Fuller mentions the "causeless cavil" over Little Gidding (see Mayor, 75-76). Edward Lenton's letter describing his visit to Little Gidding and the transformation of that letter into the satirical Arminian Nunnery can be studied in Mayor. For the dinner party at which slander by one party is corrected by another who points out that the people at Gidding are "Orthodox, Regular, Puritan Protestants," see Blackstone, 74.

55 Quotations from the story books are taken from Blackstone; Sharland; and Williams. Each volume provides information about the Little Academy and its manuscripts, design, participants, and meeting dates.

56 For the critique of "opinions," see Sharland, 1-2; for "Pirrhus," see Sharland, 4-6; for Trajan, Sharland, 6-10; for the priest of Antioch, Sharland, 23-28; for King Henry, Sharland, 33; for Katherine, Sharland, 36-37.

57 See Williams, 14.

58 Ibid., 56; Williams points out the Baconian facet of this passage.

59 Purchas, 1:20. See also Sanford; and Wright.

60 See Watkins.

61 See Hovey, 71-84. For the reading of the poem as an epic, see Anselment.

62 The vicissitudes of Ferrar's years in the Virginia Company are fully documented in volumes 3 and 4 of Kingsbury.

63 Anselment, 313.

64 Burrow, 226-32.

65 Chambers, 31-53; see 52.

66 For Nicholas's iconoclasm, see Blackstone, 75.

67 On the bonfire, which took place on 28 November, 1637, see Blackstone, 63.

68 On the difference between resolves and vows, see Barbour, 341-66.

69 Williams, 172. For the struggle at Little Gidding and in the Caroline church with the lack of an "adequate tradition of spiritual teaching," see Maycock, 7.

70 Ferrar, 278.

71 Valdes, 271.

72 Ibid., 49, 110.

73 Ibid., 279.

74 For Herbert on Valdes, see Hutchinson, 304-20.

75 See Weber, 264.

76 Chillingworth, preface, [paragraph] 20. Unless otherwise noted, future references to this text are made parenthetically.

77 Earle, 76. Cf. Aubrey's view that Chillingworth "much delighted in Sextus Empeiricus" and loved disputation (Lawson-Dick, 64).

78 Chillingworth, 8. On Chillingworth's philosophy of religion, see Orr.

79 Laud, 2:173. In a sermon preached on 20 May 1632, John Cosin elaborates on the recurrence of the journey motif in religious discourse. See Cosin, 1:119-21.

80 See Asals. Cf. Stewart, 3-26; devotion at Little Gidding and in Herbert's poetry is irreducible to "doctrinal statements, expressing instead equivocal impulses, evasions, and doubts" (21).

81 Asals, 6.

82 Ibid., 6.

83 For Sandys and the New World, see Davis, 1955. For Dante's Ulysses in New World discovery literature, see Sanford, 38.

84 Alexander; Eburne; and Morton. The quotation is taken from Alexander, A3v.

85 The quotation is from Eburne, 7; the commonplace status of the idea is discussed in Anselment, 302; and its contemporary uses in Levang, 265-68.

86 Quoted from Richard Eburne in Wright, 142.

87 Sandys, 205.

88 Wither, 30; for the marriage between power and wisdom, Mars and Pallas, see 80, 103, 137, 163, and 238. Cf. Quarles's appeal to "heroick fire", 1 (text paginated separately); see also 18, 23, and 37. Freeman studies the tradition of heroic emblems, and argues that Quarles's emblems "are, in fact, much more deeply concerned with action" in representing "the individual experience of the human soul in its search for sanctity" (121, 119).

89 For the Order of the Bugle, see Kerrigan. For the Order of the Fancy, see Raylor.

90 Quoted in Weber, 283.

91 Quoted in Davis, 1955, 46.

92 For the lotos eaters and the Queen of Bohemia, see Davis, 1948-49, 107. The quotation from Sandys's Ovid is from the 1632 Oxford edition, which adds commentary to the folio edition of 1626.

93 G. Sandys, 1632, dedication to the King.

94 Ibid.

95 For analogies, see Sandys's Ovid, 65, 253, and 454. Sandys's glosses are filled with commentary on "heroic" virtue (for example, 187-90, 197, 329, 420, 426, 447, 475, and 478). In a poem on Sandys, Lucius Cary compares Sandys favorably to Homer, Odysseus, and Grotius, seeing Sandys as at once epic poet, adventurer, and missionary. See G. Sandys, 1872, 414.

96 For Hakewill's argument, see Harris.

97 For the church militant in lunar terms, see Laud, 2:226 (with reference to Augustine's epistle cxix, cap. 6); and Wither, 111.

98 G. Sandys, 1632, 261.

99 Chambers.

100 Murdock, 61.

101 See Davis, 1943, 221.

102 See Norwood.

103 Summers, 50.

104 Smith, 203 and chap. 7.

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