The “Devotion & Morality” section of Volume 1 of the Pepys Ballads Collection is devoted to religious themes: “Scripture-Storys, Examples of Virtue & Vice, Death-Bed-Repentances etc., Godly Lessons General, Raillery against the Pope & Popery, etc.” The section contains 25 ballads, and the subtitles accurately describe the contents and even the sequence of ballads in the section. The section begins with four tales from the Old Testament and ends with two polemics against the Pope. The Devotion & Morality ballads of Volume 1 were published between 1607 and 1630, with the majority dated by STC circa 1620 – 1625. Weinstein writes that “STC allocates dates for all Pepys ballad entries” (lv), and explains that when there is “no date printed on the ballad itself . . . a definite date is provided by STC from contextual information” (lv). To the extent that we may rely on STC’s accuracy, then, the Devotion & Morality ballads—those that Pepys explicitly associated with religion—were published during the reign of James I and Charles I, a period during which differences over religious doctrine escalated from the polemical discourse of pamphlets and treatises to the realities of civil war. The Devotion & Morality ballads consist primarily of moralistic tales from which the heated political and religious debates of the period are conspicuously absent. The notable exceptions are the “popery” ballads, “A Scourge for the Pope” and “A New-Yeeres-Gifte for the Pope.” Pepys begins Devotion & Morality with the most ancient of tales, the Old Testament scripture stories, and ends with the ballads most overtly engaged in the contemporary events of the early seventeenth century, the popery ballads. Perhaps we can understand that that which comes last in this case is “latest” or “newest,” and thus use these popery ballads as an entry point into the section, a key to the tenor of religious thought and discourse of the period.

Both “A Scourge for the Pope” and “A New-Yeeres-Gifte for the Pope” were published in 1624, and Rollins speculates that both ballads appear “perhaps after May 6, 1624, when James I issues his last proclamation against Jesuits and seminary priests” (Garland 170). The proclamation to which Rollins refers is likely based on a petition from the House of Lords, dated April 10, 1624, in which Parliament petitions James I:

to the Intent the Jesuits and Priests now in the Realm may not pretend to be surprized, that a speedy and certain Day may be prefixed, by Your Majesty's Proclamation, before which Day they shall depart out of this Realm, and all other Your Highness's Dominions; and neither they nor any other to return, or come hither again, upon Peril of the severest Penalties of the Laws now in Force against them; and that all Your Majesty's Subjects may thereby also be admonished, not to receive, entertain, comfort, or conceal any of them, upon the Penalties and Forfeitures which by the Laws may be imposed on them.

“A Scourge for the Pope” is the first known composition of Martin Parker, and it clearly celebrates the banishment of the Jesuits proclaimed in 1624: “Where are the Jesuites, / That late were so arrogant, / . . . They are best be packing, / Their power is slacking” (17 – 26). Although not a refrain, each stanza ends with a reference to Romish evil, the hated Pope to whom the Jesuits must now flee. Parker’s heated rhetoric describes the removal of the Jesuits not as a conclusive victory, but rather as an event in the ongoing battle with Rome, a struggle that requires that one “Give no permission / To Romes superstition, / Upon no condition, / of promise or hope” (142 – 5). The deliverance of “famous Brittany” from “Popish Actions” may be but temporary, however, and in his final stanza Parker calls upon his audience to offer supplications to God that James and Prince Charles (“our second hope”) might have “the strength to subdue, / Antichrist and his crue” (158 – 9). Beneath the celebratory rhetoric, the reader senses the fear of backsliding, of a return to Roman Catholicism.

“A New-yeeres-gift for the Pope,” the final ballad in Pepys’s Devotion & Morality section, describes the “difference twixt Papist and Protestant” by comparing the material trappings of Romish liturgy—“Bells, Beads and Crosses” and other “Popes Trinkets”—to the sacred basis of Protestant faith, Scripture. Although Protestantism eschews icons and images of saints, blind Justice remains a popular secular Reformation icon. The ballad proposes that Justice weigh the Bible in one of her scales against a “Cartload of Trinkets” placed in the other scale by the Pope. “Yet all is in vaine, they cannot, they cannot,” the refrain tells us, and it is unnecessary in the ballad to state explicitly what it is that “they cannot”: that the material vanity of popish trinkets can never outweigh the sacred Word.

Anthony Milton describes the period in which these ballads were published, the time of the early Stuart church, as a “shifting mass of doctrines and attitudes” (26), a period of complexity and dynamism far removed from the simple oppositional image of Roundhead versus Cavalier that survives from the civil war. “Avant-garde conformists, Calvinist conformists, moderate and radical puritans alike were developing and modifying their ideas over this period, moving closer or further from the establishment as events dictated, or as new fears arose” (Milton 26). In this complex religious environment, “divines warily studied the limits of acceptable behaviour and thought” ( Milton 27). In such a time of doctrinal tensions, anti-popery was seen as a vocation that might “unite puritans and bishops, enabling them to put the presbyterian upheavals behind them, [to] stimulate an awareness of a common identity which conformists and precisians shared” (Milton 31). Milton writes that “[o]ne of the most public manifestations of anti-popery was the publication of anti-papal controversial literature” (37). In Parker’s “A Scourge for the Pope,” one senses an almost-repressed fear that the Jesuits might in fact not decisively leave England, that the Pope himself remains an ineluctably powerful vortex of evil, a threat to future kings and their people. “Violent attacks on popery [such as Parker’s ballad], and the systematic production of anti-papal polemic, were . . . seen as important because of their direct effect in preventing what was believed to be the constant threat of conversion to Rome” (Milton 38).

Why, then, do we not find more anti-papal ballads in the first volume of the Pepys collection and elsewhere? Watt describes sixteenth century anti-Catholic ballads, including “a series of mock epistles to and from the pope, set to the latest tune, ‘Row well ye Mariners’. . . . But despite their clever use of biblical allegory or satire, these politicized ballads did not survive to be sung by a seventeenth-century public. Only three anti-Catholic ballads surviving in the broadside form were written in the early seventeenth century” (88 – 9), including the two discussed in this essay. The types of anti-papal literature that Milton describes include: “books of remembrance” such as George Carleton’s A Thankfull Remembrance of God’s Mercy (37); catechisms that “included sections advising the reader on what to say when confronted by Romanist arguments” (38); and scholarly works of “anti-papal controversial divinity” (38). The discourse of anti-popery was present and visible not in ballads, but in books, catechisms, treatises, works written by and for the educated, by the divines. Such works “were the most distinctive feature of English Protestant theology and occupied the energies of all the principal members of the Jacobean episcopate” ( Milton 31). Watt writes that “[b]y the 1620s, anti-popery was no longer simply a patriotic emotion directed against an external enemy, but a focus for discontent with foreign policies of the English monarch, and with the ‘Armenian’ innovations of the English church” (90). The ballad writers and sellers may, with rare exceptions, have been simply intimidated by the prospect of engaging in this perilous conversation, one that had become the province of sovereigns, bishops, and theologians. A more nuanced view might suggest that the troubled religious discourse of the early Stuart church—one that centered on the relationship between sovereign, state, and the churches of England and Rome—is present on or below the surface of the tales in all of the Volume 1 “Devotion and Morality” ballads, from the stories of Jonas, Samson, and Susanna, to the doomsday Prophesies of such speakers as Calebbe Shillocke and the Bell-man, to the omnipresent warnings to take heed and do good.

~ Gerald Egan

Works Cited

British History Online. House of Lords Journal Volume 3: 10 April 1624. Journal of the House of Lords: volume 3, (1802). <http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.asp ?compid=30395 &strquery= Proclamation Jesuits> 1624, 2003

Milton, Anthony. Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600 - 1640. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.

Rollins, Hyder E. A Pepysian Garland: Black-Letter Broadside Ballads of the Years 1595 - 1639. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1971.

Watt, Tessa. Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550 - 1640 . Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.

Weinstein, Helen. Catalogue of the Pepys Library at Magdalene College Cambridge, II. Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1994.