Andrew Hadfield, Lying in Early Modern English Culture: From the Oath of Supremacy to the Oath of Allegiance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)
Thomas More alone in his cell in the Tower of London offers a fitting image for Andrew Hadfield’s meticulous new book, Lying in Early Modern English Culture. Of course, More was hardly alone, at least not all of the time. He wrote and received letters, even as guests, wanted or otherwise, arrived to converse with him, to interrogate him. This too is a fitting image for Hadfield’s book which, as he notes early on, concerns a period before the invention of the chimney flue, in which only the rich had separate rooms and the rest spent their lives surrounded by others, one and all huddled around the warmth of the stove. We all have our secrets – thoughts and opinions we’d rather keep to ourselves, wayward emotions and pressing desires too embarrassing or compromising to reveal. What option is there for us but to conceal them? In a society in which people ‘lived most of their lives with others’, Hadfield writes, we should expect to find ‘a more robust toleration for falsehood in everyday life’ (15). Like the stones of the Tower of London, we use our lies, deceits, and deflections to place a wall between ourselves and the world even as that world presses in on us, its intrusive demands compelling us to feint first this way, then that.
Hadfield organizes his book around two great demands and the various feints they inspired – the Oath of Supremacy (1535) and the Oath of Allegiance (1606). Refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy, refusing to recognize the English king as sovereign of the English Church, More finds himself imprisoned in the Tower, reflecting on the nature of truth and lies, oaths and perjury. Context matters, Hadfield contends, and this is the final reason why More, confined within his cell, is such a fitting image for this book. The walls of the cell demarcate a space, its occupation a time, and its inhabitant, his visitors, and the outside forces that conspired to bring them together a set of circumstances that lend More’s mortal dilemma its specificity. More’s reflections on this dilemma – is it ever justified to forsake a lawfully taken oath and, if not, is it ever justifiable to lie to avoid breaking a lawfully taken oath? – take their real meaning and bearing from their circumstances.
But what were these circumstances?
More finds himself in a state of moral perplexity – normally harmonious rules for ethical conduct (‘Never break an oath!’ and ‘Never lie!’) seem to conflict. Isolated from others, in a country which has severed its relation to the Catholic Church, he is left to his own devices to sort the muddle out. ‘More’s need to rely on his own conscience’, Hadfield explains, ‘is undoubtedly a sign of the changes taking place in conceptions of an individual’s rights, duties, and relationship to institutions’. More finds himself cast back upon his own thoughts and judgments ‘and he constantly warns his readers how fundamental and how dangerous this change will be’. Framing all of this is the Reformation and its transformation of an ‘understanding of conscience as objective in nature, subject to the dictates of the Church, to subjective, as individuals had to rely on their own understanding of how to behave morally’ (48). Quite simply the Oath of Supremacy, with its requirement to renounce verbally the Catholic Church, promoted an environment in which faithful Catholics might choose to dissimulate or lie about their beliefs, rather than give up them or admit to them and face execution. From this perspective, the Oath of Allegiance constitutes a response to its predecessor’s duplicitous consequences, an effort to sort out the crypto-Catholics in the fold. Hadfield sets as his goal to map the various ‘modes’ of lying that developed in this place, at this time, given these religious and institutional pressures.
In his 2012 book, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone – Especially Ourselves, Dan Ariely, the Duke economist, argues that lying has never been so easy as it is today, nor have people ever lied so much as we do now. Putting aside for the moment the vexed problem that there has rarely been a period in history in which people did not bemoan the previously unsurpassed mendacity of their contemporaries, Ariely rests his case on the proliferation of intermediaries between speaker and audience as the cause of our rampant dishonesty. It is easier to lie when barriers exist between you and the person with whom you communicate, whether they be chat rooms, texts, tweets, email, or Facebook posts. Distance, real or metaphorical, lessens the perceived dangers, costs, and moral culpability of our lies. There is probably something to this. After all, these technologies simply imitate the condition of possibility that makes all deception possible. There is always a distance, real or metaphorical, between speaker and audience, if only because there is always the possibility of distance between what we assert and what we believe to be true. A lie, runs a popular, if not universally agreed upon definition, is a false statement made with the intention to deceive. The technological barriers between speaker and audience that Ariely highlights are barriers inherent to the very nature of human communication. This is not a profound insight, but it does suggest that we ought to think of lying as a communications technology, a tool that has its uses and the uses to which it can be put will differ with the circumstances. A hammer is a hammer, even when I use it as a paper weight.
When Hadfield turns from his discussion of the Oath of Supremacy and Oath of Allegiance, to his various case studies concerning the different ‘modes of lying’ during the second half of the sixteenth century, he is, for all intents and purposes, examining how people put the tool of lying to work in different situations (32-33). In ‘The Religious Culture of Lying,’ for example, Hadfield places the Reformation polemics between More and Tyndale, which so often turned on the question of lying, against the backdrop of the binding power of oaths made to man and God. While Tyndale more often than not condemned lies as universally sinful, he would also argue that lies are acceptable ‘in extreme circumstances’. This was a popular form of English Renaissance backpedaling, hardly limited to Tyndale – agree with Augustine that every lie is sin, while carving out exceptions whenever such absolute prohibitions become impractical. As Hadfield notes, Tyndale’s position is ‘easy enough to understand,’ but problematic. While Tyndale affirms that ordinary language establishes ‘a contract between the godly individual and the deity,’ he simultaneously renders ambiguous the individual’s ‘relationship with authorities that are accepted as legitimate’ (117). In works like William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat and Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender, Hadfield nimbly demonstrates how various writers and thinkers, caught between competing and opposed institutional and religious demands, exploited this lacuna in Tyndale’s thought, ruminating on both the prevalence of lies and on their potential social utility.
In a subsequent chapter, Hadfield turns to the age-old association of rhetoric with deceit. Englishmen learned the art of rhetoric from Quintillian, who could not entirely defend the art against Socrates’ famous charge that it does little more than teach men how to deceive, making falsehood look like truth. As Hadfield shows, this concern would lead Erasmus to declaim against a culture of lies that he thinks has corrupted the Church, leaving it open to Luther’s devastating critiques. We must adhere to the truth, Erasmus argues, and attempt to distinguish truth from falsehood. Perhaps we must, but it isn’t easy and, as Hadfield’s analysis progresses, black and white distinctions shade into various sorts of gray, leaving everything uncertain. Montaigne, like Erasmus, will recite at length the social and spiritual devastation that lies leave in their wake, and yet his essays leave the reader wondering if in the infinite complexity of the real world, truth and lies can be easily identified.
And so it goes, from rhetorical manuals to handbooks of courtesy, the court, and the world of politics, and from there to the reliability of witnesses and the alleged truth of scientific and religious testimony. In nearly all aspects of sixteenth-century English life, Hadfield diagnoses a generalized anxiety concerning truth and deception. Books of courtly conduct, such as Giovanni Della Casa’s Galateo: A Treatise of Manners and Behaviours, translated into English in 1576, depicts an aristocratic culture steeped in ritualized forms of etiquette and false pleasantries that effectively transform the court into ‘a place where lies are not merely encouraged but are enshrined in the very practice that make [it] the centre of our political and cultural life’(213). Worse, as Hadfield notes, the domestication and normalization of a culture of dishonesty cannot be contained and what happens in the court comes to undermine all our social interactions, even our relations to religious institutions and to God (211). As Hadfield develops his analysis from case study to case study, it becomes clear that his opening discussion of the Oaths of Supremacy and Allegiance are more like beacons alerting us to the existence of a multitude of barely concealed shoals of mendacity and deception. This is nowhere clearer than in his closing analysis of Othello which depicts all manner of lies, and how lies beget more lies, so much so that even the liar begins to find it impossible to tell truth from fiction, even in their own speech.
All of this, I think, brings us back to More, confined behind the stone walls of his cell. From without, we never see More, only the walls that conceal him. The situation of the historian is little different. We never see More himself, only his writings and the writing of others about him. Hadfield’s deep dives into his case studies may or may not wear on the reader’s patience, but a truly valuable insight drives this impressive book and it is an insight I wish he had returned to at the end. Strategies of concealment, deflection, and dishonesty may well have characterized much of sixteenth-century social interaction, but it also characterizes the writings that survive from the time – letters, treatises, polemics. The problem isn’t just that they lied to each other, it’s that they may well be lying to us. ‘My contention in this book,’ Hadfield explains, ‘is that we need to question the ways in which certain historical events are known to us through documents full of lies’ (4). Hence Hadfield’s decision to eschew a grand history of lying, a history of mentalities, in favor of focused case studies that attempt to uncover how people used this tool in specific circumstances that, in turn, yielded specific writings that themselves are tools designed to sway public or royal opinion. ‘A false document,’ Hadfield observes, ‘sets in train a series of problems that cannot be solved by an appeal to the inherently fictional nature of narrative, disabling the historian’s belief that an authentic archival source always takes evidential preference’ (5). Rather, if we want to understand the past, we must make the effort to recover the problems and projects that motivated past writers to deploy different modes and styles of lying. As he argues at length, for example, the fall of Anne Boleyn begins to look quite different when we approach the surviving evidence as evidence that people crafted to tell a particular kind of story, and not necessarily a story about what really happened. This is difficult work and Hadfield accomplishes it admirably in case after case, and as there is no shortage of cases, there will be no shortage of work. I would, however, have appreciated some guidelines.
Dallas G. Denery II
Bowdoin College
48.2.8
Comments
It delves into the complexities of truth, deception, and moral dilemmas faced by individuals during this period, using various case studies and examples to illustrate the pervasive influence of lying in different aspects of English life. Hadfield's approach to uncovering the motivations behind historical writings and the use of lying as a tool for shaping public opinion provides valuable insights into the challenges of interpreting historical documents. His meticulous analysis sheds light on the nuanced relationship between truth and deception in the context of specific historical circumstances, offering a thought-provoking perspective on the complexities of human communication and ethical conduct.
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