Richard Haydocke's Inventions and Jacobean Religious Neutrality Victor Lenthe

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Richard Haydocke’s Inventions and Jacobean Religious Neutrality

by Victor Lenthe

This article examines documents surrounding King James’s 1605 interrogation of Richard Haydocke, a Puritan famous for giving sermons in his sleep. I show that the king wanted to hold Haydocke responsible for statements that were subversive but also rumored to be divinely inspired, and that he therefore developed an intriguing ratio-nale for considering revealed knowledge as a human invention. My findings contribute to scholarship on Stuart political thought by documenting an instance in which James commits himself to a constructivist conception of culture unusual for a divine right theorist. By documenting an early modern attempt to theorize the regulation of reli-giously motivated political speech, they also contribute to a history of concerns asso-ciated today with debates about the limits both of secularism and of postsecularism.

RICHARD Haydocke’s short- lived fame as a sleep preacher had the south of England riled up in spring 1605. Crowds came to his bedside, eager to hear a country physician prove the self- evidence of Protestant chauvinism by denouncing Roman Catholics in sermons he delivered while asleep. Nor was it just any version of Prot-estant chauvinism. Audience members must have felt a frisson in hear-ing Haydocke criticize the 1604 canons, which had sidelined the Puri-tan faction within the Church of England. Haydocke’s performances led people to believe that God was speaking through him about such politicized issues as the tolerations granted to Catholics and the sway Puritans ought to hold in the national church.1 Mindful of the risks asso-

1 No transcripts of Haydocke’s sermons survive, but Edmund Howe’s near- contemporary account describes a widespread belief that he spoke “by inspiration” when he “enuayed against the Pope, against the Crosse in baptisme, and against the last Canons of the Church of England” (Howe [building on John Stow’s 1580 volume], The Annales or Generall Chronicle of England, augmented ed. [London, 1615], 864). Further on in this article, I use contemporary sources to reconstruct more details of these events.

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ciated with political dissent, King James investigated the situation per-sonally. The spectacle ultimately did not survive royal scrutiny. Under pressure Haydocke signed a confession stating that he was a fraud. Alexander Marr and Carole Levin have connected the Haydocke af-fair—as this strange episode was subsequently labeled—to early mod-ern conceptions of wonder, revealed knowledge, and altered states of consciousness.2 By examining documents produced in the context of the royal investigation, this article shows that the events also prodded King James to reconsider the relationship between politics and revelation in ways that have wide- ranging implications for understanding his work as a political theorist.

One factor that surely heightened James’s interest in the Haydocke affair is that it presented a limit case for the body of political theory he had begun articulating in such books as The Trew Law of Free Mon-archies (1598) and Basilicon Doron (1599). As a divine right theorist, James believed his political legitimacy was ordained by God.3 Yet as the Haydocke affair forced him to recognize, such theological legitima-tion becomes less plausible if any country physician can promulgate a competing set of revelations in his sleep. As I show, James responded to this challenge by construing Haydocke’s revelations as acts of poiesis—a term I invoke in the sense developed by Victoria Kahn to capture an early modern idea encompassing both the literary creativity conveyed by the word poem and, more broadly, any process of cultural making by which humans shape their world.4 James’s response to Haydocke reflects comparable slippage between literary and political notions of what Haydocke was doing. Even as the king’s goal was to hold Hay-

2 Marr, “Richard Haydocke’s Oneirologia: A Manuscript Treatise on Sleep and Dreams, Including the ‘Arguments’ of King James I,” Erudition and the Republic of Letters 2 (2017): 113–81; and Levin, Dreaming the English Renaissance: Politics and Desire in Court and Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 11–19. Subsequent citations of Marr, often per-taining to the contemporary documents his article transcribes, will be given parentheti-cally (abbreviated as RHO).

3  Even the most otherwise divergent interpretations of James’s political theory agree it appealed to divine right. See Johann Sommerville, “James I and the Divine Right of Kings: English Politics and Continental Theory,” in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. Linda Levy Peck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 55–70; and Glenn Burgess, “The Divine Right of Kings Reconsidered,” English Historical Review 107 (1992): 837–61.

4 Kahn describes poiesis as the human capacity “to make at least part of the world we live in” and links it to “a secular notion of human agency . . . [and early modernity’s] new preoccupation with the ways art and fiction reoccupy the terrain of religion” (The Future of Illusion: Political Theology and Early Modern Texts [Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014], 22 and 3).

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docke responsible for political action and speech, his argument hinged on a notion of invention reflecting an idiosyncratic adaptation of Re-naissance theories of poetics and rhetoric. As I will show, James’s dis-tinctive understanding of poetic invention offered him a rationale for holding Haydocke responsible, while bracketing difficult questions about his revelations’ authenticity.

My analysis speaks to two bodies of scholarship. First, it offers an unusual perspective on the history of Stuart political thought. Scholars debate whether the divine right theories espoused by James brought revelation into politics or kept it out. The argument that they brought revelation in is intuitive enough, given that divine right by definition invokes a divinity.5 By contrast, scholars including Johann Sommerville and Alan Orr credit James with carving out a realm for purely secular politics, because (among other reasons) a king who derived his legiti-macy directly from God no longer needed to depend on churches for legitimation.6 As I will show, James’s response to Haydocke implies a different type of religious neutrality. By describing revelations as poetic inventions, it situates them within culture and thus limits their capacity for political legitimation to the cultural context that produced them.

My account also speaks more generally to scholarship recovering his-torical perspectives on the relationship between politics and revelation. Much of this work is invested in the concept of political theology, and I will discuss the Haydocke affair’s relationship to that question below.7 Tied to political theology or not, historical perspectives on politics and religion appear newly important in light of the postsecular recognition that many people’s political commitments today remain conditioned by experiences of revelation incomprehensible to the general public, thus rendering familiar liberal- secular models of religious neutrality increas-

5 J. W. Allen, English Political Thought, 1603–1644 (1938; repr., London: Archon Books, 1967), 97–101; Conrad Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War, The Ford Lectures Deliv-ered in the University of Oxford, 1987–1988 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 65–68; and Burgess, “Divine Right Reconsidered,” 839 and 861.

6 Sommerville, “James I and Divine Right,” 58–59. Sommerville reaches similar conclu-sions by different means in his Politics and Ideology in England, 1603–1640 (Harlow: Long-man, 1986), 9–56. Orr, though disagreeing with Sommerville on other points, finds further evidence that James mistrusted any influence that the “realm of the supernatural” might exert on politics. See his “‘God’s hangman’: James VI, the Divine Right of Kings, and the Devil,” Reformation and Renaissance Review 18 (2016): 147.

7 Besides Kahn’s Future of Illusion, see Julia Reinhard Lupton, Citizen Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005); and Ethan Gua-gliardo, “The Poet, the Skeptic, His Witches, and Their Queen: Political Theology and Poetic Charms in Sidney’s Defence,” English Literary History 81 (2014): 733–56.

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ingly insufficient.8 Early modern Europe provides a rich archive for historical and comparative perspectives on these problems and some-times suggests solutions to them. For example, Kahn, upon whose ter-minology this article draws, advocates a position she finds in Spinoza when she contends that treating both politics and revelation as forms of poiesis, or human making, can contain the role of religion in public life without unfairly excluding believers.9 James’s response to Haydocke proposes a similar rationale for containing religion’s influence on pub-lic life, but James also diverges from Kahn on two points. The first is that his rationale hinges on the word invention. As I will show, his flexible understanding of that word was distinctive even when compared to other Renaissance thinkers. Allowing for the possibility that Haydocke had in some combination made, found, and translated his revelations, the term invention was uniquely effective at bracketing politically diffi-cult questions about authenticity. There is also a second point of differ-ence. In James’s mouth the poiesis argument—intended as it was to stifle Puritan dissent—highlights the fact that constructivist cultural theory comes in a variety of political affiliations, thus challenging its propo-nents to specify precisely which aspects of it to pursue.

The rest of the article is in five parts. The first reconstructs how Hay-docke put revealed knowledge to political ends. The second analyzes James’s response, showing that it implied a nuanced argument about why revelations should be considered human inventions. Part three re-covers James’s distinctive understanding of invention. Part four situ-ates these ideas within his larger body of political thought. A conclu-sion, finally, assesses what the Haydocke affair teaches us, both about the scope of James’s political theory and about the varieties of religious neutrality available in early modern England.

HAYDOCKE’S C HALLENGE

Section one demonstrates that Haydocke put revealed knowledge to political ends in ways that challenged James’s theoretical conception

8 In political theory, the postsecular turn is exemplified by Jürgen Habermas’s post- 2000 work. See especially Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere,” European Journal of Philosophy 14 (2006): 1–25; and “Notes on a Post- Secular Society,” New Perspectives Quar-terly 25 (2008): 17–25.

9 Kahn, “Political Theology and Liberal Culture: Strauss, Schmitt, Spinoza, and Arendt,” in Political Theology and Early Modernity, ed. Graham Hammill and Julia Reinhard Lupton (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 23–47.

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of his royal legitimacy. The events themselves are worth rehearsing in more detail than I was able to provide above.10 Haydocke first gained local notoriety at Oxford. A recent graduate of the university, he was splitting his time between his nascent medical practice in Salisbury and his alma mater, New College, where he also maintained lodgings. The eloquent sermons he gave in his sleep were especially notable because he had a reputation for being a bad speaker while awake. He probably had a stutter, and a contemporary letter describes him as “but a dull fellow, and known to be no great scholar” during his waking hours.11 His chamber fellow seems to have discovered his talent for somnilo-quy, and soon throngs of people began gathering. It was a spectacle. According to contemporary accounts, “[A]ll the fellows and schollars of the Colleage come . . . to hear him preach in his slepe.”12 Haydocke after-wards, “hauinge bene lyke a dead speakynge man, in a great but cold sweat aftere 2 or 3 veamente groanes he wakethe, without knowledge of any thinge that hathe passed” and “knows nothing what he sayd, but woundreth to se[e] so many about him.”13 One eyewitness account uses words such as “strange” and “admireable” and emphasizes that Hay-docke was on some occasions surrounded not only by a fascinated audi-ence but also by “fyve or syxe” scribes taking down his words.14 Attest-ing further to the spectacular nature of the events, the king and Privy Council heard about it and cared enough to send Thomas Sackville, first Earl of Dorset, to investigate in person. This official scrutiny came to a head in April 1605.

The king and Privy Council took the investigation seriously. They brought Haydocke to the capital, confined him somewhere near the court, and stayed up at night to listen to him sleep preach. James was convinced Haydocke was a fraud. Sometime around the 28th of April, under considerable pressure, Haydocke signed a confession stating

10 Except where otherwise noted, I follow Marr on the facts of Haydocke’s sleep preaching and interrogation (cf. RHO 121–32). Compatible accounts (sometimes less com-prehensive or older) include L. G. Wickham Legg, “On a Picture Commemorative of the Gunpowder Plot, Recently Discovered at New College, Oxford,” Archaeologia 84 (1934): 32–35; Ralph B. Weller, “Some Aspects of the Life of Richard Haydocke, Physician, En-graver, Painter and Translator (1569– ?1642),” Hatcher Review 2 (1985): 456–77; and Levin, Dreaming the Renaissance, 11–19.

11 Edmund Lassells to Gilbert Taylor, seventh Earl of Shrewsbury, 11 April 1605, from Greenwich (transcribed in RHO 180).

12 Lassells to Taylor (RHO 180–81).13 W. S. to Unnamed Recipient, 4 March [1605] (transcribed in RHO 180); Lassells to

Taylor (RHO 181).14 W. S. to Unnamed Recipient (RHO 180).

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that he had initially started reciting sermons at night to cure himself of a speech impediment and that simple vanity led him to persist in the habit after it started attracting crowds.15 James pardoned him on the condition that he confess publicly and desist from any further sleep preaching. In order to please the king, and perhaps to rehabilitate his reputation, Haydocke also wrote a manuscript treatise entitled “Onei-rologia: or A breife discourse of the nature of Dreames.” In it he elabo-rates on his confession by affirming that rational discourse in sleep is always impossible. Appended to “Oneirologia” are also the arguments by which the king had attempted to persuade Haydocke that he was engaged in a fraud that would no longer fool anyone. (Given the pres-sures on Haydocke, it is impossible to know precisely of what these ar-guments actually convinced him—that he was engaged in a fraud, that it was time to confess to a fraud he knew he was committing, or that it would be prudent to confess to a fraud he did not believe he was com-mitting. Yet James’s arguments, as I will discuss, contended both that Haydocke was a fraud and that he had been found out.) The beautiful manuscript in which Haydocke presented his treatise to the king sug-gests he may have hoped eventually to publish it. For reasons unclear, he never did. The presentation copy of the manuscript survives in the Folger Shakespeare Library, however, and a good transcription has re-cently been published.16

The significance of the events and documents pertaining to Hay-docke’s sleep sermons extends in directions beyond those pursued by the scholars I have already discussed—scholars who primarily limit their focus to Haydocke.17 In contrast, my purpose is to examine James’s response, which theorizes revelation as poiesis in ways that partially re-direct the king’s previously published theories of divine right. James’s ideas are recorded directly in “Oneirologia,” but they are also implicit throughout everything Haydocke wrote after being interrogated, inso-far as he was writing for the express purpose of pleasing his king and thus had to reflect monarchical ideas (ideas familiar to him as a result of his extensive interrogation). As I will ultimately show, Haydocke posed

15 National Archives of the UK, State Papers 13/14, no. 80, fols. 153–54, State Papers Online. For ease of reference, subsequent citations refer to the published transcription of Haydocke’s confession in Legg, “On a Picture Commemorative of the Gunpowder Plot,” 37–39. They will appear parenthetically, with the title abbreviated as C.

16 Folger Shakespeare Library, MS J.a.1. On the document’s textual history, see RHO 125–51. For ease of reference, all subsequent citations of “Oneirologia” will refer to Marr’s published transcription (RHO 152–78).

17 Cf. RHO 125–51; and Levin, Dreaming the Renaissance, 11–19.

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a problem for James not so much because of his religiopolitical dissent but rather because the sleep- preaching act inadvertently challenged the monopoly on revealed knowledge underpinning any persuasive appeal to divine right. First, however, I need to establish that Haydocke was perceived as putting revealed knowledge in service of political posi-tions that ran counter to royal policy.

Although Haydocke, in his confession, strenuously denied that he had ever claimed to channel divine revelation, multiple sources suggest that contemporaries perceived him to be doing just that.18 The earliest printed account of the affair is Edmund Howe’s 1615 continuation of Stow’s Annales, which recounts how “the people greatly supposed, and many verily beleeued [Haydocke’s] nocturnall preaching was either by inspiration or by vision.”19 Arthur Wilson, relating the episode slightly later, similarly describes Haydocke “Preaching (as he pretended) by Revelation” and suggests this was a major reason for the king’s con-cern.20 These printed accounts are credible not only for being nearly contemporary with the events (when Howe was writing in 1615, Hay-docke was still alive) but also for their consistency with surviving eye-witness accounts. King James, for one, signaled that he was concerned about exactly such a public perception of divine inspiration when he boasted in a 1605 letter to Robert Cecil, first Earl of Salisbury, of having “closed [Haydocke’s] prophetical mouth” and went on to liken him to the “strangely possessed maid” Anne Gunter, whose encounters with supernatural forces James had also exposed as fraudulent.21

More sympathetic sources, too, repeatedly express a level of wonder about the sleep preacher consistent with this sense of inspiration and prophecy. Edmund Lassells, probably repeating court gossip, writes that the sleeping Haydocke speaks the biblical languages, Hebrew and Greek, even though the waking Haydocke does not and that, upon awaking, Haydocke “knows nothing what he sayd.”22 An eyewitness account by one W. S. reflects a similar sense of wonder, suggesting that

18 See RHO 156. Haydocke’s denial is easily explained as an attempt to mitigate his culpability.

19 Howe, Annales, 864. Marr asserts that the first printed account of the affair was Richard Baker’s 1643 Chronicle, but Howe may in fact be the source for Baker’s similar account (cf. RHO 116n10).

20 Wilson, The History of Great Britain (London, 1653), 111.21 James VI and I to Robert Cecil, 7 October 1605, from Royston, in Letters of James VI

and I, ed. G. P. V. Akrigg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 266. On public perception of similarities between Haydocke and Gunter, see Levin, Dreaming the Renais-sance, 13–16.

22 Lassells to Taylor (RHO 180–81).

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“the strangeness of it all . . . taketh away all shewe of collusion”—in other words that it is too strange to be fake. Although W. S. stops short of any explicit reference to divine inspiration, his description implies the possibility: the entire event is “strange” and “admireable, & that is all we cane saye of it.”23 Describing Haydocke performing feats be-yond his intrinsic capacity, Lassells and W. S. both signal a perception of him as a passive vessel for his sermons, whose content may be in-spired by a supernatural agency—consistent with the public perception of prophecy James boasted of having shut down as well as with Howe’s account of a general perception of “inspiration and vision.”

Contemporary and near- contemporary sources thus agree that much of Haydocke’s audience believed God was speaking through him. They are equally clear that the political order was one of the things at stake in these putative revelations. The Venetian ambassador Nicolo Molin wrote to his superiors that Haydocke’s words had been “suggested to him by the Puritans.”24 In keeping with this assessment, Howe de-scribes Haydocke as “enuay[ing] . . . against the last Cannons of the Church of England.”25 The canons in question had been instituted in September 1604, in the wake of the Hampton Court Conference, and were widely seen as sidelining the Puritan faction within the Church of England’s government by requiring all ministers to affirm the Book of Common Prayer and the Thirty- Nine Articles (to which some Puritans objected).26 These Puritan sympathies made Haydocke eminently po-litical, especially when Puritanism is understood in the sense deriving from Patrick Collinson and referring to English people who were in one way or another too Protestant to fit easily into the national church that exerted great influence on public life.27 Scholars have highlighted the

23 W. S. to Unnamed Recipient (RHO 179–80).24 Molin to the Doge and Senate of Venice, 18 May 1605, in Calendar of State Papers and

Manuscripts, Relating to English Affairs, Existing in the Archives and Collection of Venice and in Other Libraries in Northern Italy, vol. 10, 1603–1607, ed. Rawdon Brown (London: Long-man Green, 1900), 240–41.

25 Howe, Annales, 864.26 Patrick Collinson, Richard Bancroft and Elizabethan Anti- Puritanism (Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press, 2013), 213–17. On Puritans’ reasons for objecting to the Thirty- Nine Articles and the Book of Common Prayer in the context of an earlier but comparable controversy, see Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 71–87.

27 Collinson, “A Comment: Concerning the Name Puritan,” Journal of Ecclesiastical His-tory 31 (1980): 483–88. Other statements developing this understanding of Puritanism as a relational and not an absolute concept include Lake, Anglicans and Puritans, 7; and Lori- Anne Ferrell, Government by Polemic: James I, the King’s Preachers, and the Rhetorics of Con-formity, 1603–1625 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). See also, of course, the

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politicization of Puritan dissent in various ways, with Nicholas Tyacke in fact pointing to Puritanism as evidence that political opposition was a conceptual possibility in early seventeenth- century England.28 Even Haydocke’s strenuous denial—that “I never had any sinister plott pur-pose or drift to ye disturbance of ye peaceable estate of ye Church or common weale”—indicates that the stability of the political order was one of the things at stake in the Privy Council’s investigation (C 38).

A report by two government agents gives a more specific account of Haydocke’s politics. A long preamble suggests mostly that the au-thors are sympathetic to Haydocke, praising his sermon for being “very formal,” “full of learned discourses,” “fit,” “very well appropriated to the matter,” and orthodox in “the applications of the doctrine.” Then comes a more politically salient observation:In the end he made a Prosopopeia to the King’s Majesty, wherein he did repre-sent the machinations of Satan by the papists of this Kingdom to overthrow reli-gion and erect up again idolatry and popery, with an exhortation to his Majesty to beware of such men and take order with them.29As an eyewitness account, this broadly substantiates Howe’s and Molin’s assessments of Haydocke as aligned with virulent anti- popery and Puritanism. In urging the king to “take order with” people seeking “to erect up again idolatry and popery,” Haydocke was probably re-ferring to functionaries such as the new archbishop, Richard Bancroft, a leading anti- Puritan and one of the architects of the recent church canons. Many Puritans (and some Catholics) perceived those anti- Puritans to be pursuing a course of reconciliation with the Church of Rome, and the 1604 canons represented their victory over Puritans.30 In this sense, Haydocke was critiquing a powerful political establishment and defending his newly marginalized friends. At the same time, asso-ciating “papists” with “the machinations of Satan” and exhorting the

point of origin for much of this scholarship: Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London: Methuen, 1967).

28 Tyacke, “Puritan Politicians and James VI and I, 1587–1604,” in Politics, Religion and Popularity: Essays in Honour of Conrad Russell, ed. Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust, and Peter Lake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 21–44.

29 John Gordon and Thomas Hyde to William Cecil, 13 April 1605, from Sarum (tran-scribed in Legg, “On a Picture Commemorative of the Gunpowder Plot,” 34).

30 On perceptions that the Church of England’s establishment was reconciling with the Roman Catholic Church, see Peter Lake, “Business as usual? The Immediate Reception of Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 52 (2001): 457–62 and 482. On the Puritan faction’s defeat in the Hampton Court Conference, see Alan Cromartie, “King James and the Hampton Court Conference,” in James VI and I: Ideas, Authority, and Govern-ment, ed. Ralph Houlbrooke (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 61–80.

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king to “take order with” a vaguely defined “them” also implies incite-ment of violence and persecution against Roman Catholics. To under-stand the significance of James’s attempt to contain Haydocke’s political reach, it is useful to keep in mind this two- pronged aspect of Haydocke’s politics. Combining criticism of the establishment with hostility toward what was arguably England’s most vulnerable minority, his revelations were politically threatening in more than one way.

Traces of Haydocke’s tone reflected in the agents’ letter also politi-cize his sermons considerably. This claim may sound surprising. Marr interprets the letter as “stress[ing] . . . the preacher’s evident faithful-ness to his monarch,” and indeed, the agents’ description of his formal manner, learnedness, and faithfulness to the “sentences of the poets and of the fathers” seems to contradict the “enuay[ing]” Howe attributes to him (RHO 122). Such descriptions may, however, simply reflect the agents’ desire to predispose the king in Haydocke’s favor. Their names were John Gordon and Thomas Hyde, and Gordon’s commitment to the “‘international Calvinist,’ anti- Catholic sentiment” also pervading Haydocke’s sermons offers one plausible explanation for this bias.31 The letter’s pro- Haydocke bias is in any case apparent in the authors’ suggestion that Haydocke deserves a good preaching position and in how much they strain to intensify nearly every indicator of Haydocke’s respectability with the adverb very—according to Gordon and Hyde, Haydocke is “very formal,” “very full of learned discourses,” “very well appropriated,” “very apt,” etc. Moreover, all of these indicators of re-spectability are completely subjective. Has there ever been a sermon whose references to scripture could not, by a sufficiently sympathetic listener, be described as apt or learned? By contrast, the agents’ descrip-tion of Haydocke’s virulent antipopery—likening Catholicism and its perceived sympathizers to Satanic machinations—paraphrases senti-ments too specific to fudge, even if the authors attempted to bury them beneath testaments to learnedness and civility. Howe may therefore be the more trustworthy source in characterizing Haydocke’s tone as in-vective.

The letter’s reference to a “Prosopopeia to the King’s Majesty” also helps pinpoint Haydocke’s politics. It implies—quite possibly against the authors’ intentions—a high level of ideological charge in Hay-docke’s sermons. The ordinary meaning of prosopopoeia as speaking in the character of an absent person is almost certainly not what Gordon and Hyde meant. If it were, the preposition to would hardly make

31 Ferrell, Government by Polemic, 43.

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sense, and any impersonation of the king would likely have caused a bigger stir and more scrutiny. Based on phrasing and context, the agents almost certainly meant that Haydocke was addressing the king as though he were present. This is more correctly called apostrophe, but it is closely related to prosopopoeia. As a recent rhetoric manual had done its part to conflate the two figures under the shared description of “feigning the presence or the discourse” of absent people, Gordon and Hyde were in good company when they stretched the word’s mean-ing in this way.32 Although possibly less subversive than feigning the king’s voice, this detail, too, politicizes Haydocke’s sermons. The public performance of an apostrophic “exhortation” to His Majesty was politi-cally bold, even if it was (as the letter suggested) urging him to follow his supposed self- interest. It begins to appear even bolder when one remembers that the real audience for this counsel was not the absent king but rather the listeners at Haydocke’s bedside. Such moments in which the rhetoric of royal counsel migrates to public venues are one aspect of András Kiséry’s account of how politics, in the modern sense of the word, became possible in seventeenth- century England. The fact that Haydocke’s politics consisted partly in religious fear- mongering may also bear out Kiséry’s hesitancy to be overly optimistic about these emerging political possibilities, but the perception that Haydocke was channeling divine inspiration must in any case have amplified the po-litical force of this rhetoric of counsel.33

Haydocke also presented a different kind of threat, however. He threatened the divine right theories by which James justified his rule, because (whether or not Haydocke himself went there) subjects with direct access to revealed knowledge have the resources to debate whom God has placed on their throne. One way of understanding Haydocke’s challenge is through the lens of political theology, a phrase that in mod-ern theoretical scholarship refers both to the theological legitimation of a political order and to the more ambiguous relationship between poli-tics and theology in modern societies, where revealed knowledge often retains an undeniable hold on public life, even as religious diversity

32 John Hoskins, Directions for Speech and Style (1590), quoted in Kasey Evans, “Proso-popoeia and Maternity in Edmund Spenser and Thomas Lodge,” English Literary History 85 (2018): 397, my emphasis. As Evans notes, modern theorists tend to discuss prosopo-poeia’s feigning of discourse—speaking in the character of another person—as comple-mentary but ultimately distinct from apostrophe’s feigning of a presence capable of hear-ing that speech (393–99).

33 Kiséry, Hamlet’s Moment: Drama and Political Knowledge in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 157–61 and 15–17.

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has rendered overtly theocratic government implausible. Particularly the second component of that definition has made the term useful for theorists attempting to reconceptualize ideas such as citizenship and sovereignty for a contemporary political moment increasingly recog-nized as postsecular.34 The Haydocke affair, however, placed James un-comfortably between those two conceptions of political theology. The divine right theory expounded in Trew Law, for example, can be con-sidered political theology in the first sense, claiming theological legiti-mation for a regime. Yet Haydocke, even without consciously denying Stuart legitimacy, forced his king to confront the ambiguities and short- circuits that theological legitimation will have in any modern society, where people usually cannot agree on what God has commanded, but where a widespread belief that one deity or another is commanding something can be difficult to extricate from politics. One reason James’s argument about the Haydocke affair is so compelling is that it responds to the political insufficiency of a theological legitimation in which it nonetheless remains invested.

JAMES’S RESPONSE

The fact that the king gave Haydocke a series of explanations in lieu of any real punishment suggests that the affair posed a greater threat to his political theory than to his political power. This second section re-constructs James’s assessment of the above events from the documents Haydocke wrote to appease him. It shows that the king was eager to at-tribute agency to Haydocke and to hold him responsible as the author of his revelations and not as their passive vessel. The sense conveyed by Haydocke’s confession that his sleep preaching was an innocent, almost comical fraud should not distract from the scope of James’s argument. As far as anyone knew throughout April, Haydocke’s revelations were real. James’s response is therefore best construed as a rationale for cur-tailing the political reach of the authentic revelations people believed Haydocke to be channeling. As I will discuss, its argument hinged on the literary ingenuity Haydocke showed in crafting beautiful speeches and thus evokes Kahn’s notion of poiesis, with its focus on the intersec-tion between literary and political making.

James’s thesis was that Haydocke was more than a passive vessel for

34 For a survey of the impulses behind much of this work, see Graham Hammill and Julia Reinhard Lupton, introduction to Political Theology and Early Modernity, ed. Hammill and Lupton (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 1–20.

88 Richard Haydocke and Religious Neutrality

divine revelation, that in his sermons he was either doing or making something, and that he was therefore responsible for their content as an author and not merely as a messenger from a false god. This notion per-vades both documents Haydocke wrote to appease a king with whose ideas he was by now intimately familiar. The confession states that he started speaking at night “for a bettering of my invention & speech” and that it was “from the beginning a voluntary thing done with knowledg vpon a discovery in my self of a greater abilitie & freedom of memory invention & speech” (C 38). “Oneirologia”’s preface similarly explains that “I had perfect knowledge of what I spake[,] that it was voluntary and wakeinge, vppon some præmeditation,” and that the original pur-pose of the exercise was “the bettering of my naturall defects of vtte-rance and inuention” (RHO 155). The wording emphasizes that Hay-docke was anything but a passive vessel. Phrases such as “voluntary,” “ability,” “freedom,” “with knowledge,” and “invention” all indicate agency and suggest that Haydocke was doing or making something. “Invention”—which Haydocke invoked repeatedly—also had a more specific meaning. For Renaissance teachers and theorists of rhetoric, the much- emphasized academic subject concerned with speaking per-suasively and well, invention was the technical term for the first canon or step in the process of composing a speech—“[t]he findyng out of apte matter,” in the words of one contemporary manual.35 As Roland Greene has noted, the meaning of invention was undergoing a shift in 1605, and I will return to this question, which has implications for James’s argument.36 For now I just note that when Haydocke confessed, under James’s strong influence, to having invented his sermons, he rep-resented himself as an author practicing an art that was taught in school and that was therefore considered a skill one could learn. All of this im-plies his agency.

Whereas James’s thesis can be gauged by what he pressured Hay-docke to confess, the nuances of his reasoning are another matter. Con-veniently, Haydocke appended to “Oneirologia” a list of James’s ar-guments. Although Haydocke apparently reconstructed them from memory, it is safe to assume a high level of accuracy. Under the circum-stances, it would have been both dangerous and counterproductive for

35 Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (London, 1553), 3v.36 Greene, Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes (Chicago,

IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013); see also Rayna Kalas, “Invention,” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th ed., ed. Roland Greene et al. (Princeton, NJ: Prince-ton University Press, 2012), 724–25.

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Haydocke to put words in his king’s mouth. Divided into four categories (philosophical, medicinal, theological, and civil), James’s arguments signal that he was thinking through Haydocke’s political agency from a number of different angles. Of these, only his theological argument remains fixated on the revelations’ authenticity. It states that “Oracles ceased at Christs comeinge” and concludes that, therefore, “these can bee noe reuelations” (RHO 177). Although evoking esoteric teachings about the cessation of pagan oracles, the phrasing seems intended pri-marily to recall the common Protestant doctrine that God’s revelations are accessible only through scripture.37 Yet even more intriguing is that James chooses not to press the point. He had good reason not to. Such arguments about authenticity were evidently insufficient. The crowds gathering to see Haydocke no doubt knew one version or another of the “Oracles have ceased” doctrine,38 but they still thought the sleep preacher was divinely inspired. This forced James to pursue arguments rooted in secular notions of politics and culture.

The “Ciuile” portion of James’s argument brackets all questions about authenticity, arguing explicitly to contain the political reach of true and false revelations alike. He acknowledges that only “a Tyrant . . . could animaduert and punnish vnthought words” but nonetheless insists that he must hold Haydocke responsible even “[i]f this should bee true in you.” He reasons as follows:such a grounde beeinge graunted and confirmed by your example, what dan-gerous sequelles might follow thereon in other ill disposed instruments of ye Deuill, whoe might dissemble and counterfeit the like abilitye, and soe publish what hæresies in religion, and Machiauillian plotts in ye Common- wealth they pleased? And without controwlement. (RHO 177–78)

Part of the argument is pragmatic: even if Haydocke’s revealed knowl-edge were authentic, treating him as God’s mouthpiece would provide a dangerous precedent, shielding also people who counterfeit revela-tions. Yet beneath this pragmatism also lies a prescriptive argument about how politics should work. When James says he wants “controwle-

37 On the variety of teachings on the cessation of the pagan oracles circulating in early modern Europe, see Anthony Ossa- Richardson, The Devil’s Tabernacle: The Pagan Oracles in Early Modern Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 13–45. Although James’s phrasing is curious, a comparison between Haydocke’s sermons and pagan oracles seems not to be part of his purpose. Haydocke had little apparent connection to paganism, and the sentence goes on to discuss the cessation of miracles after the time of the apostles, which emphasizes a division between biblical and postbiblical times rather than between Christian and pagan revelations.

38 See ibid., 14–15.

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ment,” he surely means his ability to punish plotters, dissemblers, and counterfeiters. But the word also had another meaning in 1605, refer-ring to the process of controlling or investigating the veracity of a claim through reasoned debate. In this sense, controllable also meant debat-able.39 James’s fear of uncontrollable plots thus also signals fear of po-litical movements that preempt reasoned inquiry or debate. Certainly, James was not defending the right of ordinary people to control politi-cal arguments, but he himself, as king, wanted to investigate and debate an idea’s merits without being stymied by the circular logic of dissi-dents restating subjective experiences of revelation ad infinitum.

The “Philosophicall” portion of James’s argument then proceeds to justify this necessary presumption of human authorship on epistemo-logical grounds. Its rationale again applies to authentic and dissembled revelations alike. Essentially the king contended that Haydocke’s in-spired speech was too aesthetically pleasing to be produced entirely without human agency, but his reasoning is worth quoting at length:The eare is delighted with harmony: but of all other figures none is more de-lectable than ye “similiter cadens,” and Agnomination, most frequent with you, wherein you seeme to twinge euery word by ye eare, to see whether there bee any life in it or noe: Nowe except you heard this your selfe, you could not soe-much and so often affect the same. Therefore you must needs heare your selfe, and soe consequently wake, & haue knowledge of yt you speake: and ye rather, beecause you doe this sometimes in Latine, and sometimes in English, which argueth Election. (RHO 176)

Put simply, Haydocke’s sermons are too literary to be “vnthought.” The pleasing rhetorical figures and apparent awareness of his audience—speaking in Latin while in Oxford, but in English while in the coun-try—indicate his agency, inventiveness, and choice, at least in the com-munication of his prophecies. Likewise in “twinge[ing] euery word by ye eare,” Haydocke was doing something. The same qualities that make a speech attractive to the human ear, in other words, and thus politi-cally effective, are for James proof of human agency. The argument does not fully exclude the possibility of actual revelation, but it stresses that human judgment and ingenuity play a role anytime an apparent revela-tion is thrust into the public sphere by being communicated to others. It justified holding Haydocke responsible as an agent by redirecting focus away from a revelation’s authenticity and toward its cultural legibility.

This focus on Haydocke’s eloquence offers further indication (along

39 Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “controlment, n.,” def.

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with the recurrent theme of invention) that the king was conceptualizing the events through the lens of early modern rhetorical theory. Thomas Wilson’s The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), for example, discusses one of the rhetorical figures James finds Haydocke using in its chapter on elo-cution: similiter cadens means something along the lines of what one would today call parallelism.40 Eyewitness accounts collectively make repeated reference to all five canons of rhetoric—the technical terms for the steps in the process of composing a speech, comprising inven-tion, arrangement (also known as disposition), memorizing the speech, elocution, and delivery.41 Yet the rubric of elocution—concerned with ornamenting speeches with pleasing figures and pithy phrases—was particularly useful in establishing Haydocke’s agency. Wilson defines it as “chusing” apt words and sentences.42 Much in the same vein, James’s goal was to establish Haydocke’s “Election” in speaking in terms that would be both comprehensible and pleasing to his audience. Such em-phasis on the human agency inherent in elocution can be found in many Renaissance rhetoric manuals, with one earlier but influential theorist suggesting it was the part of rhetoric most “proper to man.”43 More re-cently, the Church Reformer and education theorist Philip Melanchthon had applied this notion to sacred rhetoric, such as sermons. Decipher-ing “the meaning of the words in which the divine mysteries have been hidden,” Melanchthon wrote, requires knowledge of elocution, because “[n]o one can judge linguistic matters correctly unless he has mastered the correct method of speaking. For what is easier than to be deceived by a particular word or figure?”44 Even with divinely inspired speakers, that is, Renaissance rhetorical theory took the apt words and pleasing figures of elocution to reflect a distinctly human skill.

Although derived from a secular and originally pagan tradition of

40 Wilson, Arte of Rhetorique, 108r. On agnomination, see John Florio, A Worlde of Wordes (London, 1598), 44.

41 For invention, see W. S.’s letter (RHO 180); and Haydocke’s confession (C 38). For dis-position, see W. S.’s letter (RHO 180). Elocution is invoked obliquely by James’s, and also by Gordon and Hyde’s, extensive discussions of Haydocke’s figures (RHO 176; Legg, “On a Picture Commemorative of the Gunpowder Plot,” 33–34). Haydocke’s confession says he used his sermons to work on his memory (C 38). I have been unable to find a source using the word delivery, but Lassells uses the synonym “utterance” (Edmund Lassells to Gilbert Taylor, seventh Earl of Shrewsbury, at Court, 29 April 1605, quoted in RHO 125).

42 Wilson, Arte of Rhetorique, 85v.43 George of Trebizond, “Five Books on Rhetoric,” quoted in Renaissance Debates on

Rhetoric, ed. and trans. Wayne Rebhorn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 28.44 Melanchthon, “The Praise of Eloquence,” in Rebhorn, ed., Renaissance Debates on

Rhetoric, 109.

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rhetorical thought, James’s emphasis on the human agency inherent in elocution did not contradict the religious beliefs of his society. As noted above, the king separated his philosophical and civil arguments from his theological ones, but it is worth highlighting that even his most secular arguments were compatible with sincere, Calvinist religiosity. Partly this has to do with the doctrine of accommodation, which still informs many traditions of Christianity and Judaism today. At its core, this doctrine holds that undiluted divine revelations exceed human comprehension, and that God’s word therefore may—and also must—be adapted before being applied to the world. As Stephen Benin high-lights, many different versions of this belief circulated in Reformation Europe. Yet even the most disparate versions of it raised questions about rhetoric and the language arts. John Calvin’s version—somewhat para-doxically—insisted that Moses “did not present his own fabrication” and that God was ultimately “the Author of it,” but also that Moses “adapt[ed] his discourse to common usage.” John Colet was less defen-sive of divine authorship when he simply likened Moses to a “popu-lar poet” who “invent[ed] some figure” to communicate the closest humanly comprehensible approximation of what God had revealed to him.45 Notwithstanding the differences between Calvin and Colet, both versions of the doctrine concern literary ideas such as authorship and poetic figures. Even more to the point, both allow human agency a role in the communication even of genuinely revealed knowledge. This widespread Calvinist belief thus offered a theological justification for James’s intuition—articulated above in the jargon of rhetorical theory—that society is ultimately made by people and that religious convictions do not release them from their responsibility for what they make.

MAK ING AND F INDING

Even in building on a venerable tradition of rhetorical theory, James also contributed something new. While established theories already at-tributed agency to Haydocke for how he phrased his ideas, the wide- spread belief that God was speaking through him made it expedient for the king also to offer an account of where he got his material. In the rhetorical tradition this is called invention, and I have already indicated that the word recurs throughout Haydocke’s confession. By identify-

45 Benin, The Footprints of God: Divine Accommodation in Jewish and Christian Thought (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), 188, 191, and 192.

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ing James’s treatment of divinely inspired invention as his contribu-tion to early modern rhetorical theory, this third section tracks partly on Debora Shuger’s argument that interest in sacred rhetoric drove Renais-sance rhetoricians’ most important innovations on their classical mod-els.46 Yet two factors distinguish my story from Shuger’s. First, James saw Haydocke’s sacred rhetoric as an adversary, and second, his way of calling its religiosity an “invention” was anchored in contemporary theories of poetics that tended to be secular in their orientation.

In 1605, invention could mean a greater variety of things than it could have meant a century either before or after. In theories of rhetoric and poetics, especially, two nearly opposite meanings of the word existed side by side. An older sense—reflecting the word’s etymological link to the Latin invenire—still denoted finding material in textual authori-ties such as the church fathers or Homer and composing a text faith-ful to their precedent. By contrast, an emerging modern meaning more familiar today began to denote an original creation independent of pre-cisely such traditions. Thus, even as Philip Sidney strove to write origi-nal poetry “lifted vp with the vigor of his owne inuention,” religious controversialists would use the same term in admonishing perceived heretics to be more inventive, but meant by this more faithful to patris-tic texts.47 Greene, who has traced this evolution in detail, describes the early modern understanding of invention as a “semantic palimp-sest, in which new meanings replace but never entirely overwrite older ones.”48 James himself was an acute observer of the word’s shifting meaning, as evidenced by two books of poetry he wrote as a young king of Scotland in the 1580s and 1590s, one of which also contained the first theory of poetics for the Scottish language.49 Scholars of James’s writ-ings have studied the political implications of the young king’s literary efforts from a variety of perspectives but never in relation to their rich understanding of poetic invention.50 Although James does not figure in

46 Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Prince-ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 7.

47 Sidney, The Defence of Poesie (London, 1595), C1v; and Greene, Five Words, 27–28.48 Greene, Five Words, 8.49 James Craigie, introduction to The Poems of James VI of Scotland, ed. Craigie, 2 vols.

(Edinburgh: Blackwood & Sons, 1955), 1:xi– lxx and 1:xxix.50 Scholars connecting James’s early, specifically Scottish literary writings to overtly

political concerns include Jane Rickard, Authorship and Authority in the Writings of James VI and I (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 33–68; Astrid Stilma, “The Battle of Lepanto: The Introduction of James VI of Scotland to the Dutch,” in Houlbrook, ed., James VI and I: Ideas, Authority, and Government, 9–23; and Sandra J. Bell, “Kingcraft and Poetry: James VI’s Cultural Policy,” in Reading Monarch’s Writing: The Poetry of Henry VIII, Mary

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Greene’s history of this concept, he offers one of the most nuanced early modern discussions of it. This is relevant to the Haydocke affair be-cause it clarifies what James meant when he accused the sleep preacher of inventing his revealed knowledge.

From one perspective, James’s poetic theory unapologetically ad-vances an understanding of invention in its emerging modern sense—human making freed from the constraints of tradition. His “Schort Trea-tise, Conteining Some Revlis and cautelis to be obseruit and eschewit in Scottis Poesie” cautions poets to be original in their inventions:descryue not the morning, and rysing of the Sunne, in the Preface of zour [i.e., your] verse: for thir thingis are sa oft and dyuerslie writtin vpon be [i.e., by] Poëtis already, that gif ze do the lyke, it will appeare, ze bot imitate, and that it cummis not of zour awin Inuention, quhilk is ane of the cheif properteis of ane Poete.51The passage invokes a decisively modern notion of invention, free from textual authority—something that has not been “written upon by poets already.” The following chapter elaborates that “sen Inuention, is ane of the cheif vertewis in a Poete, it is best that ze inuent zour awin subiect, zour self, and not to compose of sene subiectis” (P 1:79). At the center of this notion of invention is the phrase “zour self” (the Scots zour means your), emphasizing that you yourself must invent your subject, without reference to models.

From one perspective, then, James’s understanding is eminently com-patible with the emerging notion of invention as original, new making. Applied to the Haydocke affair, this would imply that the sleep preacher had faked his revelations. Yet James’s thinking is actually more compli-cated. As Allan F. Westcott noted long ago, James’s “indebtedness to [George] Gascoigne’s excellent Notes of Instruction (1575) is obvious on every page” of the “Revlis and Cautelis.”52 In one way, since that text serves as Greene’s lead illustration of the newly available understand-ing of invention as making anew, James’s indebtedness to it again re-inforces his affiliation with that school of thought.53 Yet in another way,

Stuart, Elizabeth I, and James VI/I, ed. Peter C. Herman (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medi-eval and Renaissance Studies, 2002), 155–77.

51 Craigie, ed., Poems of James VI, 1:78, emphasis original. All subsequent citations of James’s Essayes will be from this edition and will be noted parenthetically by volume and page number, with the book’s title abbreviated P.

52 Westcott, preface to New Poems by James I of England from a Hitherto Unpublished Manuscript (Add: 24195) in the British Museum, ed. Westcott (New York: Columbia Univer-sity Press, 1911), vii– xci and xlvi– xlvii.

53 Greene, Five Words, 31–32.

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the very act of intellectual borrowing also contradicts the originality James claimed to promote. Westcott may be uncharitable in likening him to a “border reiver,” but even James Craigie’s defense of the king rests in large part on the permissibility of borrowing commonplace material.54 The resemblance between James and Gascoigne in any case extends to the passage on invention. Both authors cite the ridiculous-ness of hackneyed praise for a woman’s beauty as the prime example of why poets should make their inventions original.55

The irony of plagiarizing an exhortation to invent something new was not lost on James. Throughout his Essayes, he embraces the seman-tic slippage between the notions of finding and making respectively contained in the word invention, deftly turning what might be con-strued as a fault into one of the most interesting concepts in his poet-ics. In a moment of dry humor, “Revlis and Cautelis” cautions against “translating any thing out of vther language, quhilk doing, ze not only essay not zour awin ingyne of Inuentioun, bot be the same meanes ze are bound, as to a staik, to follow that buikis phrasis, quhilk ze translat” (P 1:79). Although compatible on the surface with the creative notion of invention outlined above, this denigration of mere translators for being bound to their source texts “as to a stake” signals a moment of ironic self- distancing. Whether or not James thought of Gascoigne’s tract as a poetic invention or his own as a mere translation, the most prominent item in his Essayes is a Scots rendition of a long narrative poem origi-nally called L’Uranie, by the French Huguenot Guillaume de Salluste, titularly known as Du Bartas. James’s “Vranie” was most definitely a translation of a poetic invention and thus a test case for his notion that a poet should invent in the sense of make something new, make up, fic-tionalize, fabricate, and everything else suggested by the word today.

In his preface to “The Vranie,” James both confesses and justifies its lack of invention. He dwells considerably on how he found, rather than made, his material: “Hauing oft reuolued, and red ouer . . . the booke and Poems of the deuine and Illuster Poëte, Saluste du Bartas,” begins his account of the composition process (P 1:16). The material, in other words, is invented in the sense of having been found in an authorized source. Although the preface initially represents this unoriginality as a flaw, caused by a lamentable situation in which “nature hathe refused

54 Westcott, preface to New Poems by James I, xlvi; and Craigie, introduction to Poems of James VI, xxvii– xl.

55 Cf. Gascoigne, “Certayne Notes of Instruction concerning the making of verse or ryme in English,” in The Posies of George Gascoigne, Esquire (London, 1575), T2r– U2v.

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me the like lofty and quick ingyne” she granted to Du Bartas, James ultimately hits on a more complex evaluation. He thinks better of his theoretical tract’s command to make anew, admitting that his transla-tion does many things “whilkis ar forbidden in my owne treatise of the Art of Poesie in the hinder end of this booke” (P 1:16–17). The reference signals that the “Revlis and Cautelis” does not encompass the full ex-tent of James’s thinking on any of the topics it discusses, including espe-cially invention.

The preface’s most notable departure from the “Revlis and Cautelis” is its justification of mere translation as a legitimate type of invention. James reasons as follows:First, because that translations are limitat, and restraind in some things, more then free inuentions are, Therefore reasoun would, that it had more libertie in others. Secoundlie, because I made noght my treatise of that intention, that eyther I, or any others behoued astricktly to follow it: but that onely it should shew the perfection of Poësie, wherevnto fewe or none can attaine. Thirdlye, because, that . . . I auow it [i.e., “The Vranie”] not for a iust translation. (P 1:17)

The passage proposes a notion of invention embracing all of the mul-tiple meanings available in early modern culture. It makes three argu-ments. The most pragmatic one (the second) leaves the ideal of “free invention” intact while also suggesting that no poetic theorist could reasonably expect people to adhere to it consistently in practice; the intention was never “astricktly to follow it.” James’s two other argu-ments (the first and third in his list) qualify the idea of invention itself. James reasons that since “The Vranie” is not a “iust translation,” it will be more than just—in the sense of merely—a translation. Infidelities caused by the different meters required by Scots and French blur the distinction between invention as finding and invention as making that the “Revlis and Cautelis” had insisted on. Such inventive infidelities are caused by the absence of “free invention,” which (counterintuitively) permits taking “libertie[s]” that would not otherwise be allowed. James mentions the faux pas of “Rhyming in tearmes,” but the most obvious of these liberties is the decision to turn away from free invention and toward mere translation in a volume whose theoretical apparatus con-demns exactly that. Finding liberty in the lack of free invention, James’s thinking appears paradoxical. Phrased differently, it may reflect com-mon sense: the less free one is, the more liberties one will be forced to take. Intuitive or not, however, it results in the following idea when applied to the matter at hand: the mere finding of translation is also making.

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James’s understanding of invention was distinctive even when com-pared to other Renaissance thinkers. His particular way of embracing the double understanding of invention as both making and finding actu-ally makes it a triple understanding. Articulated in a playful preface to a Scottish version of a French poem, James’s twin notions of making and finding crystallize in relationship to a third term— translation. Here I both follow and depart from an article that may offer the most sug-gestive short interpretation of James’s literary career. Building on the translation theorist André Lefèvre, Derrick McClure has contended that works such as “The Vranie” should be considered not as transla-tions but as “transcreations,” insofar as appropriating Du Bartas (for example) to a new cultural context with new reference points made his poetry mean something new.56 McClure’s argument has many mer-its, rightly highlighting James’s paradoxical reliance on translation to counter the sense of belatedness and cultural dependency shared by many Scottish writers at the time. Yet transcreation does not fully cap-ture the complex understanding of poetic invention underlying James’s literary efforts. My discussion above suggests that James’s pursuit of poetic ingenuity—including through translation—stood in tension with his inverse recognition that such ingenuity is completely unattain-able. This adds a wrinkle to McClure’s notion of transcreation. Much as every finding was for James also a making, the reverse seems to hold as well in his way of thinking about poetics.

By relating invention to translation, James also happens to invoke a term pervading modern debates about the relationship between religion and politics. In his postsecular phase, Jürgen Habermas began back-tracking from his earlier, secularist insistence that politics be conducted in religiously neutral language. He began arguing that the dual ideals of religious neutrality and societal inclusiveness will be best served if non- believers remain “agnostic” about the ontological truth claims of political arguments grounded in revealed knowledge and focus in-stead on “translating” those arguments’ revealed premises into “lan-guage that is equally accessible to all.”57 Habermas’s notion of transla-tion has a few different facets, but his emphasis on making religiously motivated political commitments legible to a general public would en-compass both Haydocke’s efforts to put his supposed revelations into language his audience could understand and his audience’s— including

56 McClure, “Translation and Transcreation in the Castalian Period,” Studies in Scottish Literature 26 (1991): 185–98.

57 Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere,” 16 and 12.

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the king’s and Privy Council’s—willingness to meet him halfway, for example by engaging in good faith with political arguments resting on translations of revealed knowledge they did not share. That second as-pect of Habermas’s “institutional translation proviso” has proven con-troversial because it places a significant burden on nonbelievers, essen-tially requiring them not just to share in the translation process but also to tolerate arguments they may rightly suspect of being thinly veiled commands from someone else’s god. Kahn therefore has good reason to suggest that Renaissance notions of poiesis offer a useful alternative way of conceptualizing political revelations. When the revelation being translated is treated as a cultural construct analogous to a poem it can be discussed without dominating the discussion.58 Yet the sticking point is whether believers will be willing to see their experiences of revela-tion in analogy to a poem and whether asking them to do so might not contradict the standard of general accessibility many liberals cherish. Rocco Rubini’s critique of Kahn suggests that her approach preempts any “middle ground” with people whose worldviews are defined by the premise that their revelations’ validity is transcendent.59

My purpose here is not to arbitrate these modern theoretical debates but rather to recover an additional Renaissance perspective on what it means to call a revelation an act of poiesis. To a certain extent, the merits of Habermas’s, Kahn’s, and Rubini’s respective positions depend on how they conceptualize poetics and translation. As historical perspectives highlight, these terms are flexible. For James, both hinge on a peculiar notion of invention that allowed him to insist that something was made up without ever implying it was false. Even in allowing that Haydocke was translating genuine revelations from his God, an understanding of finding and translating as also making something new placed the re-sult in the realm of poiesis and thus allowed its human conduits to be held responsible as authors. In reaching for a technical term from poetic manuals to make this point, James recalls Michael Witmore’s study of early moderns’ attempts to grapple with the recognition that victims of demonic possession may, even inadvertently, be imitating stories they had heard somewhere. The discovery that mimesis can take on a life of its own, writes Witmore, was “every bit as much a contribution to the

58 See Kahn, Future of Illusion, 7 and 186n17.59 Rubini, review of Kahn, Future of Illusion, Modern Philology 113 (2015): E53. At least

where early modern England is concerned, Rubini may underestimate the middle ground offered by such factors as the ones discussed above.

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early modern theory of poetics as, say, Sidney’s Apology for Poetry.”60 The Haydocke affair shares many features with Witmore’s archive. Like the allegedly demon- possessed Will Summers, for example, Haydocke was described alternately as an ingenious fabricator and as a faithful medium for inspiration. Molin’s belief (quoted above) that Haydocke perpetrated a great fraud at the behest of a shadowy group of Puritans imputes a mix of agency and passivity to him. James’s account of his sermons as inventions, in the layered sense of the word I have been re-covering, conveys a similarly subtle notion of human agency.

The single word invention thus contributed to a theoretical argument that would have been impossible to express as efficiently either a century before or after. Invention as finding entails an emphatic recognition that any poiesis is culturally situated and thus dovetails with the modern rec-ognition that aspects of one’s culturally conditioned experiences—here religious heritage, but potentially also other factors— affect the argu-ments one can either make or find plausible. At the same time, however, invention as making entails the converse recognition that cultural con-straints (iambic pentameter or Calvinism, for example) do not negate people’s poetic agency in shaping their world, even if they may chan-nel it. In some ways, James even suggested, constraints may augment agency. To use his phrase, being bound to the stake of a specific cultural tradition inevitably spurs free invention, because efforts to imitate au-thorities from different cultures—whether Du Bartas or a sacred text—will never be “just translations,” both in the sense that they will never be adequate reproductions and in the sense that they therefore will never be merely reproductions. The argument maximizes personal responsi-bility by construing public legibility as evidence of human agency and thus makes any politically significant utterance “controwl[able]” in the multiple senses of the word outlined above. James’s word choice also has a different type of importance: the semantic palimpsest constituting the word invention in 1605 gave both Haydocke and the king plausible deniability. Since the word neglected to specify truth or falsehood, it al-lowed both believers and skeptics to save face. This was the notion of poiesis James ascribed to Haydocke when he forced him to confess to invention.

60 Witmore, Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 205.

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POIESIS AND DIVINE R IGHT

All this was a surprising argument for James to make. The notion that revelations were acts of human invention and thus poiesis would seem to infringe on his own monarchical divine right, thus denying him the transcendent legitimation he claimed in much of his published politi-cal theory. Indeed, at other points in his career, James distinguished rigorously between revelation and poiesis. His Daemonology (1597) had condemned witches simply as tools of the devil and thus rejected any notion that they shaped their supernatural experiences, while in 1622 he sought to curtail dissenting preachers’ free invention by limiting them to the “Common- place[s]” found in the Thirty- Nine Articles and other already vetted documents.61 With Haydocke, by contrast, James spent considerable time emphasizing the agency the sleep preacher exercised in shaping his revelations, because it justified holding him responsible as an author. It may be tempting to interpret this disjunction cynically, as a ruler’s desire to have it both ways, but that would not do justice to the nuanced argument this article has found in the king’s response to Haydocke, which offers a workable (if perhaps not fully logical) settle-ment of a question that continues to occupy theorists today. Moreover, as this fourth section shows, an incipient recognition of cultural poiesis is already visible in parts of James’s previously published statements of political theory, thus suggesting that his investment in the argument ex-tended beyond shutting down one pesky sleep preacher. What follows may seem like an overly charitable interpretation of a thinker who re-mains a highly authoritarian divine right theorist, but my belief is that his theory of culture is worth appreciating on its own terms.

A note on historiography may be in order. Historians of Stuart politi-cal thought agree that the practical considerations of ruling two coun-tries often shaped James’s theoretical arguments, but there are differ-ent versions of this methodological premise. The version informing this article holds that James’s ideas sometimes indeed emerge most clearly from the interplay between his texts and their various contexts, but also

61 James VI and I, “Directions for Preachers (1622),” in The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon, ed. Peter McCullough, Hugh Adlington, and Emma Rhatigan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 558. For an illuminating discussion of the context to which the 1622 directions responded, including their relationship to Puritanism and virulent antipopery, see Joseph Marshall, “Reading and Misreading King James, 1622–42: Re-sponses to the Letter and Directions Touching Preaching and Preachers,” in Royal Subjects: Essays on the Writings of James VI and I, ed. Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2002), 476–511. On Daemonology, see Guagliardo, “Poetic Charms,” 739–42.

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that they nonetheless add up to a body of political theory with enor-mous scope and a reasonably high level of ideological consistency. One example of this approach is an article by Rei Kanemura showing that James initially embraced divine right theory because it helped shore up his claim to the English throne, even while also showing that the king’s followers applied this theoretical framework sincerely and consistently in ways that extended beyond monarchical self- interest and ultimately redirected the course of British politics and political thought in ways they did not expect.62 Even while the Haydocke affair did not lead to the fundamental paradigm shift Kanemura finds in the English succes-sion controversies, it nonetheless offers an important point of context for understanding James’s thought, because it forced him to clarify one of the central concepts of the divine right theory he espoused—political revelation. It did so, moreover, a mere six months before the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot spurred a number of better- known statements on that topic. My premise that James’s thought added up to something reasonably coherent need not entail perfect logical consistency. If any-thing, his theory of the relationship between revelation and politics is more compelling for the way its internal tensions and haphazard solu-tions signal how difficult this topic will be for any religiously diverse society.

Take Trew Law. Even as it legitimates James’s rule by reference to divine revelation, its understanding of this concept is more complex than is often recognized. I will highlight the book’s appeal to revela-tion upfront to avoid overstating what I nonetheless believe to be a sub-stantial commitment to poiesis. “Kings,” writes James, “are called Gods by the propheticall King Dauid, because they sit vpon God his Throne in the earth.”63 Yet what in many ways begins as a straightforward ar-

62 Kanemura, “Kingship by Descent or Kingship by Election? The Contested Title of James VI and I,” Journal of British Studies 52 (2013): 323–35. See also, more generally, the disagreement between revisionists such as Jenny Wormald, who argues that James all but abandoned his Scottish political theory upon his accession to the English throne, and post- revisionists such as Peter Lake, who contends that James consistently espoused a theory of politics that can be broadly but accurately described as divine right absolutism. Kanemura’s position generally resembles Lake’s, but her version of the approach also em-phasizes how the internal tensions of sincerely held and consistently applied theories can produce unexpected political consequences as historical context changes. See Wormald, “James VI and I, Basilikon Doron, and The Trew Law of Free Monarchies: The Scottish Con-text and the English Translation,” in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. Linda Levy Peck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 36–54; and Lake, “The King, (The Queen), and the Jesuit: James Stuart’s True Law of Free Monarchies in Context/s,” Trans-actions of the RHS 14 (2004): 257–60.

63 James VI and I, Political Writings, ed. Johann Sommerville, Cambridge Texts in the

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gument from divine right also avows such biblical revelations as King David’s to contain aspects of human making comparable to what James imputed to Haydocke.

Witness the ambiguity in Trew Law’s subsequent claim that kings “giue their Oath, first to maintaine the Religion presently professed within their countrie, according to their lawes, whereby it is established, and to punish all those that should presse to alter, or disturbe the pro-fession thereof” (PW 64–65). In one way, the statement advocates some-thing close to theocracy, instrumentalizing royal power to promote the religion for whose sake the polity—on this argument—exists. Yet the wording leaves in doubt whether religion is truly prior to the polity. Even the single phrase, “presently professed within their countrie,” sig-nals remarkable ambivalence about the source of a revelation, which Trew Law thus construes not as a universal or transcendent source of legitimation but as something that must itself be legitimated by the religious customs and practices of a particular time and place. More-over, insofar as the religious underpinnings of the polity are themselves “established” by the polity, “according to [a king’s] laws,” revelations will be as much dependent on politics as the other way around. My in-terpretation here departs slightly from Sommerville, who influentially argues that Stuart political theory prioritizes politics over revelation, using revealed knowledge as a mere supplementary illustration for principles it also derives independently from natural law.64 That argu-ment is compatible with mine, but equally at issue in Trew Law’s empha-sis on the religion presently professed in a country is a theory of culture subsuming both politics and revelation.

Trew Law also prefigures James’s reasoning in the Haydocke affair by critiquing religious dissidents in terms that bracket the truth or false-hood of their revealed knowledge. In condemning “seditious preachers . . . stir[ring] vp rebellion vnder cloake of religion,” for example, James specifically avoids commenting on whether their religion is based on true or false readings of the Bible. The preachers, he writes, may be “of whatsoeuer religion” (PW 71). The principled indifference implied by the word whatsoever evokes James’s response to the Haydocke af-fair, where the word invention similarly bracketed all questions about a revelation’s truth value. The problem, for James, is simply that revealed

History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 64–65. All subsequent citations of Basilicon Doron and Trew Law are to this edition and will be given parenthetically, with the title abbreviated PW.

64 Sommerville, Politics and Ideology, 9–56.

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knowledge of any kind might become a cloak—as he phrases it—for politics. The sartorial metaphor signals the dangers of obscuring politics beneath revealed knowledge, of using revelation as an article of cloth-ing to shield an otherwise indefensible political cause from exposure to the elements or to public ridicule. Much like the notion that religion is located in the culture of a particular time and place, James’s particular version of anticlericalism suggests a notion of revealed knowledge that is at most mutually constitutive with politics. God may indeed have placed James on his throne, as Trew Law proclaims throughout. Yet that revealed knowledge must itself be legitimated by the laws and collec-tive human agency of the polity. It must not shroud them like a cloak.

James’s account of the biblical origins of kingship similarly avoids justifying the political order by reference to transcendent revelations and instead proposes a complex interrelationship between popular will, royal power, and divine command. To an extent, the biblical ac-count in 1 Samuel 8 already envisioned a complex relationship between these terms. God grants the Israelite people a king because they beg him for it, persisting in their demand even after the prophet Samuel has explained to them the drawbacks of living under kingly rule—a king will make your sons his soldiers and servants, he will make your daugh-ters apothecaries and cooks, and he will take the best of your crops. Yet James’s rendition of this story goes to great lengths to highlight the people’s agency, to dwell on the consideration they were granted, and to emphasize the consequent legitimacy of their consent. He empha-sizes that Samuel “forewarn[ed] them, what some kings will doe vnto them, that they may not thereafter in their grudging and murmuring say . . . We would neuer haue had a king of God . . . [if] hee had let vs know how wee would haue beene vsed by him.” Fully informed of the downsides of living under kingly rule, in other words, the people chose kingship of their own volition. In James’s telling, divine right is thus produced not solely by revelations imposed on a passive people but also by the people’s agency and “willing consent” in entering into a “contract,” anchored though that contract may also be in revealed knowledge (PW 68–69). To be sure, Trew Law also at times legitimates kingship by appealing to revelations that are “dited by Gods spirit” and that therefore seem, at least on the face of it, to transcend culture (PW 66). Yet at other times James suggests that whatever God’s spirit imparts is not given readymade to passive recipients. In his telling, people are partial authors even of authentic revelations.

For James, divine right is thus both found and made. It is found both

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in a direct communication from God and in the cultural heritage by which it reached seventeenth- century England. Yet in James’s rendition it was also made by the Israelite people, whom he conceives as agents petitioning God to give them a king. He also conceives the English people who inherited aspects of Israelite culture as agents. Following his preface to his translation of Du Bartas, divine inspiration is remade each time it is applied to a new cultural context. According to such rea-soning, God’s word is made continuously by the collective agency of a religious culture “presently profess[ing]” a religion that the king prom-ises to maintain and that in turn maintains his rule. James would ex-pand on these ideas in the Haydocke affair, pinpointing specific fea-tures of rhetoric and poetics proving that human agency shapes divine commands each time they gain political relevance by being communi-cated to others. But already in Trew Law—divine right manifesto though it may be—he signals an incipient recognition that revealed knowledge is as much made by society as the other way around.

Entailed in the constructivist notion of revelation emerging between Trew Law and the Haydocke affair is a religiously neutral approach to politics and culture. Notwithstanding the king’s appeals to divine right and frequent manifest persecution of religious minorities, aspects of his thought were religiously neutral in a narrower sense. By sidestepping difficult discussions about the legitimacy or illegitimacy of revelations and instead locating them within culture, his poetic conception of re-vealed knowledge allowed, at least in theory, for the possibility of ex-tending equal recognition to different religions. James’s commitment to that theoretical premise would be tested only a few months later, in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot. In that context—again for the purposes of determining responsibility—James found himself arguing that his sub-jects exercised a considerable degree of agency in applying their reli-gious convictions and experiences to political life. As he would argue in his post-Plot speech to Parliament, while it may have been the Plot-ters’ “blind superstition of their errors in Religion that led them to this desperate device; yet doth it not follow, That all professing that Romish religion were guilty of the same.”65 While the king’s overt contention that the Plotters’ religion was in error appears to depart from his more agnostic assessment of Haydocke, his simultaneous insistence that most Catholics were innocent resembles the documents this article has ana-

65 James VI and I of Scotland and England, His Maiesties Speach in This last Session of Parliament (London, 1605), C2r.

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lyzed, because it implies that the Plotters exercised personal agency and ingenuity in applying their revealed knowledge to the political sphere. The problem was their Plotting, not their Catholicism. Scholars debate how meaningful or sincere such protestations of religious neutrality were, with Michael Questier suggesting they merely cloaked religious persecution and Sommerville contending that they were genuine pre-cursors to modern notions of religious neutrality.66 The ambiguities in the judgment James passed on Haydocke a mere six months earlier sug-gest one explanation for these conflicting interpretations: James himself felt conflicted about the supernatural. Yet whatever his feelings, by the time of the Haydocke affair he had developed a rationale for concep-tualizing politics independently of the revealed knowledge that some-times motivates political action.

C ONCLUSION

This article has attributed to King James a culture- oriented, construc-tivist theory of revelation that allows, at least notionally, for a reli-giously neutral political sphere. In offering a historical perspective on concerns that theorists continue to debate today, it should also qualify the term religious neutrality and assess the historically specific version of it emerging from the Haydocke affair. In at least one obvious way, James falls far short of anything that could plausibly pass as religious neu-trality today. My charitable redescription of his efforts to “hold people responsible” is not intended to obscure his objective of stifling dissent from the 1604 Church Canons. In this way, the Haydocke affair shows that notions of poiesis can be put to ends other than the liberal ones Kahn hoped to promote in developing the term for contemporary de-bates about the postsecular public sphere. Yet in other ways, James’s argument is not entirely incompatible with modern, liberal notions of culture and politics. For one, it is worth noting parenthetically that Haydocke’s incitement to violence against Catholics would earn him scrutiny also from a modern, liberal state. Yet even insofar as James was simply acting on anti- Puritan animus, his emphasis on personal respon-

66 Questier, “Loyalty, Religion and State Power in Early Modern England: English Ro-manism and the Jacobean Oath of Allegiance,” Historical Journal 40 (1997): 311–29; Som-merville, “Papalist Political Thought and the Controversy over the Jacobean Oath of Allegiance,” in Catholics and the “Protestant Nation”: Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England, ed. Ethan Shagan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 162–84.

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sibility reflects a premise that people are at least partial authors of the cultural reality they inhabit, that they are capable of changing it, that they are thus not at the mercy of preexisting religious traditions, and that they therefore bear some responsibility for their political choices even when those choices are motivated by revealed knowledge. It is possible to sympathize with such ideas, and a distinctly early modern conception of poetic invention made them more persuasive by bracket-ing unproductive debates about the authenticity of other people’s reli-gious experiences.

Even if they did not pervade every aspect of his political theory, James’s impulses in the Haydocke affair offer a new perspective on him as a thinker. Other scholars examining different archives have found other types of religious neutrality in Stuart political thought. James’s insistence that Haydocke’s revelations were poetic inventions is com-patible with, but cannot be reduced to, the religious neutrality asso-ciated with emerging theories of the secular state—the kind Sommer-ville finds in James’s response to the Gunpowder Plot, for example, with its dem