‘To thrust such Monsters upon the English’: The Grallae Controversy in the 1640s
Contrary to any chivalric theory of martial honour, there can be ‘glory’ in stabbing one’s enemy in the back if there exists a ‘just cause of concealment’. So claimed the Grallae, an anonymous tract published in Franeker in 1646. This text was an attack on the ‘Stilt-walker’ Willem Apollonius, a key preacher of the Further Reformation in the United Provinces and ally of the Scottish Presbyterians who attended the Westminster Assembly. Both of these hard-core Protestant groups felt that the Anglo-Dutch Reformations had either not gone far enough or had taken a wrong turn. They were united by an ‘ecclesiology’ – or system of church government – that sought to limit the magistrate’s role in religious affairs, while permitting the clergy greater involvement in politics. This was a controversial theory to propound in the 1640s, because it departed from the orthodox ‘magisterial Reformation’ envisioned by John Calvin and appeared to stray towards a more Catholic blend of the civil and spiritual spheres. Against what it perceived as these crypto-‘papists’, the Grallae sought to defend the civil magistrate’s divine prerogative. Claudius Salmasius and Petrus Lansbergius, two lay opponents who had witnessed Apollonius’s reforms reduce the magistrates in his territory to ‘base slavery in Church government’, were almost certainly responsible for producing this text. The ensuing ‘Grallae Controversy’ had important ramifications for Anglo-Scoto-Dutch ecclesiological debates in the 1640s, showcasing how lay humanists struggled to underwrite the spiritual authority of civil rulers. It exemplifies some of the key tensions that would need to be worked out across the course of the ‘long Reformation’, fuelled by divergences in opinion among Christians as to the structure of the true Church and calibration of the church-state balance.
Apollonius rose to prominence as a Further Reformer in Zeeland in the early-1640s. Through the Westminster Assembly context, he forged an important relationship with Robert Baillie, the Presbyterian pamphleteering strategist. The Assembly was convened against the backdrop of the English Civil War to try and achieve ‘neerer agreement’ between the Anglo-Scottish Churches. Baillie recognised this as a ‘golden’ opportunity to impose Presbyterianism on England, following the famous Solemn League and Covenant signed in 1643 between the two nations. The Presbyterians’ proposed model for church government centred around a rejection of episcopacy, a rigid church ‘discipline’ – or system for enforcing public morals – and administration of spiritual affairs by councils of local elders. Baillie was in the market to reinforce these arguments, and Apollonius was commissioned to produce various apologetics defending the Covenant as a universal ecclesiology. This resulted in some important works being transmitted in English to the Assembly, including Apollonius’s Remonstrance... Concerning the Welfare of the Church of England (1643) and Consideration of Certaine Controversies at this Time Agitated in the Kingdome of England (1645).
John Rogers Herbert, Assertion of Liberty of Consience by the Independents of the Westminster Assembly of Divines, (1847).
Apollonius developed three central propositions in these tracts: that all earthly churches comprised one ‘universall externall Church’; that religious ‘Independency’ needed to be extinguished; and that the universal visible Church was to be governed according to a rigid, top-down Presbyterian discipline. Separatists who removed themselves into ‘private Congregations’ threatened the integrity of this ‘one... organicall body’. Salvation through ‘Particular’ conventicles which met outside the established Church was impossible, because Christ had procured the covenant of grace for the ‘universall’ Church alone. Conveniently for Baillie’s purposes, Apollonius then used key scriptural proof-texts to argue that under divine law, this universal Church was to be governed by councils of Presbyterian ‘Elders’, leaving no role for civil magistrates in guiding men to salvation.
Through his dominance of the Walcheren Classis, Apollonius imposed his ecclesiology throughout the Zeeland region. He subsumed a number of separatist churches – including two foreign English Churches – into the Classis, often without obtaining the approval of the governing States General. This was justified because, as Apollonius had outlined in his De Jus Majestatis Circa Sacra (1642), the Church had a separate, higher telos than that of civil magistracy. In any purportedly ‘spiritual’ concern, it was the word of the Classis, not the States, that bound Christian subjects.
Apollonius’s domestic policies and his meddling overseas proved deeply controversial. Resentment towards the ‘Walachrian papist’ had grown in Zeeland, while anti-Presbyterians in the Assembly dismissed Apollonius’s ecclesiology as inapplicable to England. The great jurist John Selden, for instance, asserted that implementing Apollonius’s theory would mean trampling over the rights of magistrates enshrined by England’s ‘ancient [common] law’. It was at this point that Salmasius and Lansbergius were commissioned by unidentified individuals in England and the United Provinces to produce the Grallae. Salmasius – the famous arch-humanist at Leiden University – recorded in 1645 that he had ‘on the same terms’ received requests from Anglo-Dutch backers to write a treatise concerning the rights of magistrates in spiritual affairs. He appears to have collaborated with Lansbergius, a Middelburg physician whose family were long-standing enemies of the Further Reformers. Lansbergius’s role was apparently to supply Salmasius with details concerning Apollonius’s Middelburg reforms, in order to connect the local Zeeland story to a broader intellectual framework.
Claudius Salmasius Print by Jonas Suijderhoef c. 1685
Lansbergius began the Grallae with an exposé of Apollonius’s ‘tyrannical’ reign in Middelburg. He deemed Apollonius responsible for ‘weakning’ Middelburg’s foundations as a civil polity, and decried his attempt to ‘interpose himselfe’ in England’s religious ‘troubles’ by taking ‘charge of comforting the Church there by Letters’. Salmasius picked up this line of argument, alleging that Apollonius had ‘thrust... Monsters upon the English’ in his writings to the Assembly. The Grallae’s main-text then systematically attacked Apollonius’s ecclesiological claims, with Salmasius seeking to expose Apollonius’s concept of the ‘universal visible Church’ as a fallacy. Apollonius had drawn a clever, but utterly casuistic distinction between the ‘externall union’ which is formed between worshippers congregated in the visible Church, and the ‘mysticall… internall union’ with Christ which exists independently of any earthly congregation. For Salmasius these two unities may differ as much as a ‘Swines-stigh doth from a pure Flocke of Sheep’. Any attempt to collapse the two in order to sanctify the ‘whole furniture of the outward Ministery’ was corrupt. There was no similitude between the worldly Church and the true Church in the life to come. This therefore rendered the question of how the worldly Church should be governed adiaphora, or a ‘thing indifferent’ to be determined by civil princes at their pleasure.
Unlike his universalist adversary, and owing perhaps to his philological background, Salmasius’s impulse was always to relativise according to the circumstances that had generated particular Reformed Churches. For instance, while Apollonius rejected the decrees of the Synod of Dordt – the assembly convened in 1618-19 to try and settle the debate over ‘Arminianism’ within the Dutch Church – as ‘humane’ and having been ‘extorted from Ministers against their wills’, for Salmasius they constituted a binding statement of Dutch Reformed doctrine. Complex historico-legal processes had generated fragile Reformed settlements, which ought to be conserved rather than dismembered in the name of Further Reformation.
The most repugnant feature, however, of Apollonius’s ecclesiology to magisterial Reformers was his attempt to subordinate civil rulers to the clergy. This was ultimately the ‘just cause’ vindicating Salmasius and Lansbergius’s anonymous attack. By producing what to many looked like a radical Catholic theory of clerical power, Apollonius the ‘Pope-Ape’ had turned the magistrates into the mercenary arm of his universal Church. Salmasius then embarked on a lengthy historico-philological analysis to demonstrate that, ever since the time of the Sanhedrin and Constantine – utilised here as key early Church precedents – civil authorities had exercised ultimate control in spiritual affairs. The upending of this hierarchy in Zeeland demanded that the States reassert control over Apollonius’s Classis, and prevent the spread of his dangerous ideas throughout Christendom.
In service of this objective, the Grallae was translated into English and published in London in 1647. Selden praised this ‘ingenious’ work in his De Synedriis (1650-55), expressing delight at seeing ‘Erastian’ pamphlets – or texts which followed Thomas Erastus in rejecting the Presbyterians’ scriptural claims – appear in the vernacular. The Scottish theologian George Gillespie, meanwhile, wrote that the secularist ecclesiology ‘lurk[ing] in the hearts of many Atheists’ had now been unleashed by this ‘fierce, furious Erastiane’. Sketched here in broad-brush strokes, the Grallen-strijd had far-reaching implications for ecclesiological debates in the late-1640s. It offers a case-study of how lay humanists sought to expose the ‘Stilts’ belying divine law ecclesiologies, and represents an important episode in mid-seventeenth-century Anglo-Dutch religious history.
Callum Shaw has recently completed the MSt in Intellectual History at Keble College, Oxford. His research interests centred around early modern religious and political thought, in particular the French humanist Claudius Salmasius and the Anglo-Dutch dimension to the Westminster Assembly debates.
