William Cecil Nicholas Bacon & the Secret Michael Wood Press

[A Phoenix]

Sir William Cecil, Sir Nicholas Bacon, and the Secret Clandestine Michael Wood Press

In late 1552 the first wife of Nicholas Bacon, Jane (nee Ferneley), suddenly died leaving him with their six surviving children all under the age of twelve, with the youngest son Edward only three years old. They were all in need of a mother and by February 1553 Nicholas had married Anne, daughter Anthony Cooke whose sister Mildred Cooke in similar circumstances a decade earlier had married William Cecil in December 1545. He must have known Anne for years and have been only all too familiar with her formidable character and celebrated intellect, the kind of qualities which made her a good choice as both wife and mother. 

She also came with important family and political alliances with connections to the very highest levels in society. Her father Anthony Cooke had been tutor to Edward VI whom she had assisted as governess in the royal household. Her brother-in-law Cecil was in the service of the Protector Somerset and afterwards made a privy councillor and secretary of state.

Her other sister Elizabeth Cooke would marry the diplomat and translator Sir Thomas Hoby of Bisham Abbey, a manor house long held in the possession of royalty, King Edward II and Henry VIII, who granted it to Anne of Cleves, where Princess then Queen Elizabeth was a regular visitor, whose colourful cast of occupants, including the Earl of Warwick ‘the Kingmaker’ and various Earls of Salisbury, Bacon made good use of in his Shakespeare history plays: Edward III, Richard II, I Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, Henry V, I Henry VI, 2 Henry VI, 3 Henry VI and Richard III.

Then afterwards Lady Elizabeth married John, Lord Russell, son and heir to the earldom of Bedford and in the fullness of time Katherine Cooke, the Elizabethan diplomat and ambassador, Sir Henry Killigrew.

Nor would Nicholas have to wait long before he fully appreciated the wisdom of his decision. Within months of their marriage Anne proved invaluable in securing the safety of senior members of the Cooke-Bacon family in the dangerous life and death high drama of Tudor succession politics.   

 

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[A Phoenix]

Sir William Cecil, Sir Nicholas Bacon, and the Secret Clandestine Michael Wood Press

The death of Edward VI on 6 July 1553 placed Nicholas Bacon and his brother-in-law William Cecil in a very precarious position both religiously and politically. Their close association with the Protestant Reformation and with many of those prominent in its cause, including their father-in-law Anthony Cooke, gave them good reason to fear the prospect of a staunch Roman Catholic monarch.

As principal secretary to the powerful John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland (father of the Elizabethan favourite Robert Dudley, afterward Earl of Leicester) Cecil was pressurised into signing his name as a witness to the instrument which altered the succession in favour of the ill-fated Lady Jane Grey.  

In fear of the potential consequences, including imminent incarceration and death, he entrusted to Bacon a letter headed ‘Requests to my wife, 13 June 1553’ endorsed ‘My letter to my wife by Mr. Attorney of the Court of the Wards’, in which he dramatically explained his situation.1 With the crisis of succession turning in favour of Mary Cecil feared she might condemn him as a traitor. 

1. Conyers Read, Mr. Secretary Cecil and Queen Elizabeth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955), pp. 96, 477n43. 

 

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[A Phoenix]

Sir William Cecil, Sir Nicholas Bacon, and the Secret Clandestine Michael Wood Press

With the crisis of succession turning in favour of Mary Cecil feared she might condemn him as a traitor. Princess Mary had fled to East Anglia to muster support among the Catholic nobility and raise a large army.

On 14 July Northumberland headed for Cambridge to confront and capture Mary meanwhile Cecil and other members of the council proclaimed the Catholic Tudor as queen. The council members despatched Cecil to make peace with Mary with whom he caught up with at Ipswich.

His brother-in-law and his wife were at Redgrave and after the arrival of Mary at Kenninghall Nicholas and Anne paid her a visit professing their support. Anne had already been in Mary’s service and set about preparing the peace for her brother-in-law Cecil. When Cecil finally met up with Mary, he was relieved to find his sister-in-law Anne in attendance on the queen, who welcomed him and declared him an honest man.

Despite her strong Protestant convictions which she presumably concealed to outwardly conform to the new regime Anne continued to serve Mary as a Gentlewoman of the Queen’s Privy Chamber,1 and doubtless passed whatever information she could to her beloved father Anthony Cooke, husband Nicholas Bacon, and her brother-in-law William Cecil, throughout the course of the Marian reign.

1. Robert Tittler, Nicholas Bacon: The Making of a Tudor Statesman (London: Jonathan Cape, 1976), pp. 53-54. For a more recent detailed account see Deborah Spring, Lady Anne Bacon A Woman of learning at the Tudor Court (Hertfordshire Publications an imprint of University of Hertfordshire Press, 2024), pp. 53-62.

 

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[A Phoenix]

Sir William Cecil, Sir Nicholas Bacon, and the Secret Clandestine Michael Wood Press

Under the new regime both Nicholas Bacon and William Cecil remained in England with the only restriction placed upon Bacon by the queen’s advisers, writes Sidney Lee ‘was a prohibition against his leaving England; it was feared that he might enter into dangerous relations with protestant exiles.’1 A point more expansively articulated by his other early biographer John Lord Campbell ‘Notwithstanding the seeing warmth of the Roman Catholic zeal he now displayed, Queen Mary had some suspicions of his sincerity, and forbade him to go beyond the sea, because “he had a great wit of action,” and she was afraid he might enter into plots that were formed against her amongst the Protestants of Germany.’2 Under Mary, Bacon retained his post at the Court of Wards and continued to serve as Treasurer of Gray’s Inn.

Similarly, Cecil no longer a secretary of state, also appeared to remain on good terms with the new regime. He was required to immediately surrender his Chancellorship of the Order of the Garter and was not appointed to any government office. He did however formally receive a general pardon in October 1553 even though Mary and some of her Privy Councillors held him in some suspicion and intermittingly Cecil spent time at court. He too, for outward appearances, also conformed to the Catholic faith and attended Mass and even had a priest serve his household as chaplain.3

1. Sidney Lee, Sir Nicholas Bacon (1509-79), Dictionary of National Biography. 

2. John Lord Campbell, Lives Of The Lord Chancellors And Keepers Of The Great Seal Of England From The Earliest Times Till The Reign Of King George IV Fourth Edition (London: John Murray, 1856), II, p. 216. 

3. Martin A. S. Hume, The Great Lord Burghley A Study In Elizabethan Statecraft (London: James Nisbet & Co, Limited, 1898), pp. 50-52; Conyers Read, Mr. Secretary Cecil and Queen Elizabeth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955), pp. 102-4; Alan Gordon Smith, William Cecil The Power Behind Elizabeth (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. Ltd., 1934), pp. 33-35; David Loades, The Cecils Privilege and Power Behind the Throne (Surrey: The National Archives, 2009), pp. 47-49.

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[A Phoenix]

Sir William Cecil, Sir Nicholas Bacon, and the Secret Clandestine Michael Wood Press

For four hundred years his large number of biographers have presented Cecil has spending the majority of the reign as a private citizen attending to his estates and other personal interests. His biographer Alan Gordon Smith in a chapter entitled the ‘Hidden Years’, covering the Marian reign, states ‘So the next five years passed in masterly self-effacement. While many of his friends suffered persecution or voluntary exile, William Cecil was content to wait and watch, busying himself prudently with his estates.’1

So too Nicholas Bacon, states his only full-length biographer Professor Tittler ‘During the remainder of her reign Bacon avoided as far as he could any further involvement in partisan politics. He conformed outwardly to the Marian reaction, and went about his affairs in a businesslike and unobtrusive manner…Thus at least for Bacon, the years of Mary’s reign meant a period of marking time.’2

Yet things were not as they seemed and Mary and some of her Privy Councillors were right to be suspicious of Bacon and Cecil and for that matter other members of the closely-knit clan of the Cooke-Bacon-Cecils who were all Protestant down to their bootlaces and were not just content to just sit and wait it out.

1. Alan Gordon Smith, William Cecil The Power Behind Elizabeth (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. Ltd., 1934), p. 35. 

2. Robert Tittler, Nicholas Bacon: The Making of a Tudor Statesman (London: Jonathan Cape, 1976), p. 54 and Robert Tittler, Nicholas Bacon (1510-1579), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004-26).

 

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[A Phoenix]

Sir William Cecil, Sir Nicholas Bacon, and the Secret Clandestine Michael Wood Press

The two brothers-in-law Cecil and Bacon may well have kept their heads down and outwardly conformed to the new regime but unbeknown to their biographers, from the very beginning of the Marian reign, the intertwined Cooke-Bacon-Cecil family were secretly conspiring at home and abroad to undermine it.

Within a few weeks of the accession of Mary Tudor the Cooke-Bacon-Cecils were involved in the planning, organising and setting up of a clandestine printing press producing a series of radical Protestant pamphlets hostile to the new Catholic regime.

From approximately October 1553 to May 1554 there appeared eleven pamphlets all printed from the same press ostensibly printed at ‘Roane’ (Rouen) in the name of ‘Michael Wood’, some of which appeared with title pages which simply read just ‘from Roane’ with a date, but lacking the name of a printer, with another two of the tracts lacking the name of a printer or place of publication.

For well into the twentieth century bibliographers and scholars were puzzled about the mysterious identity of ‘Michael Wood’, until Leslie Fairfield, on the basis of typographical and other evidence established it was a pseudonym for the Elizabethan printer John Day.

His findings were published in The Library (1972), under the title ‘The Mysterious Press of ‘Michael Wood’ (1553-1554)’,1 and fully confirmed by the modern day authority Elizabeth Evenden in her article titled ‘The Michael Wood Mystery: William Cecil and the Lincolnshire Printing of John Day’, published in The Sixteenth Century Journal in 2004.2

1.  Leslie P. Fairfield, ‘The Mysterious Press of ‘Michael Wood’ (1553-1554)’, The Library, 5th series, 27 (1972), pp. 220-32. 

2. Elizabeth Evendon, ‘The Michael Wood Mystery: William Cecil and the Lincolnshire Printing of John Day’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 35 (2004), pp. 383-394. 

 

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[A Phoenix]

Sir William Cecil, Sir Nicholas Bacon, and the Secret Clandestine Michael Wood Press

The works printed by John Day, under the pseudonym of Michael Wood, and those linked to him are as follows:

Anon., An Admonishion to the bishoppes of Winchester, London, and others (Roane, by 
            Michael Wood, I October 1553). STC 11593
Anon., Whether Christian faith maye be kepte secret in the heart (Roane, no printer, 3 
            October 1553). STC 4468
Stephen Gardiner, De vera Obediencia (Roane…by Michael Wood), 26 October 1553).
             STC 11586
Stephen Gardiner, De vera Obediencia (Roane…by Michael Wood, 26 October 1553). 
             STC 11585
Stephen Gardiner, The Communication betwene my Lord Chauncelor and iudge 
              Hales (no place, printer, or date). STC 11583
Anon., An Excellent and a right learned meditacion (Roane…by Michael wodde, 3 
              January 1554). STC 1293
Anon., A letter sent from a banished minister of Iesus Christ (Roane…by Michael 
            wodde, 4 January 1554). STC 10016
Anon., A Dialogue or Familiar talke between two Neighbours (Roane...by Michael 
            Wodde. 20 February 1554). STC 10383
Anon., A Soveraigne Cordial for a Christian Conscience (Roane, no printer, 11 May
            1554). STC 5157
Jane Dudley, An epistle of the Ladye Jane (no place, no printer, 1554) STC 7279.
Anon., The Champion of the Church (Roane: Michael Wood, 3 January 1554), now 
            lost. Not in STC. 1

1. Leslie P. Fairfield, ‘The Mysterious Press of ‘Michael Wood’ (1553-1554)’, The Library, 5th series, 27 (1972), pp. 220-21 and Elizabeth Evendon, ‘The Michael Wood Mystery: William Cecil and the Lincolnshire Printing of John Day’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 35 (2004), pp. 384-85.

 

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The title page of An Epistle Of The Ladye Jane (1554) published by the clandestine press of John Day directed by the Cecil-Bacon-Cooke family

 

 

[A Phoenix]

Sir William Cecil, Sir Nicholas Bacon, and the Secret Clandestine Michael Wood Press

Seven of the eleven pamphlets were printed anonymously and on the face of it their authorship is unknown. Six of them Admonition, Whether Christian Faith maybe kept secret, A Sovereign Cordial, the Meditation, Dialogue or Familiar talk, and the editing and translation of De vera Obedientia have been variously ascribed by different authors to Bale,1 and The Champion of the Church writes Elizabeth Evenden is ‘possibly John Bale’.2

On the other hand Fairfield puts forward several pieces of evidence indicating Bishop John Hooper authored Whether Christian faith may be kept secret in the heart and A Sovereign Cordial for a Christian Conscience.3

For the English translation of the two editions of Gardiner’s De vera Obediencia first published in 1535 Bale provided a new preface and a conclusion. Its publication was designed to embarrass Mary’s new Lord Chancellor by dragging up his anti-papist tract written in defence of Henry VIII’s dispute with Rome. The two editions bear the date 26 October 1553 but it seems likely the second and improved edition was printed a few weeks later.4

The Communication between my Lord Chancellor and Judge Hales reports a conversation between Bishop Gardiner, Lord Chancellor and Sir James Hales Justice of the Common Pleas and the authorship of An Epistle of the Lady Jane, which includes a letter to her sister Catherine the night before her execution, provides an account of her last words on the scaffold.5

A Letter sent from a banished minister of Jesus Christ, as its title indicates, was most probably written by some unknown author who was then overseas and its authorship remains unknown.6

The religious controversialist John Bale whom Nicholas Bacon had known since his Cambridge days was during the period these publications were being secretly printed, in England as well as in Ireland, during the summer of 1553.

He had written, edited and translated the lion’s share of these clandestine publications and either directly or through a series of intermediaries must have been sending them to Day possibly via Bacon or Cecil.  

1. T.W. Davies, ‘A Bibliography Of John Bale’, Oxford Bibliographical Society Proceedings & Papers, V (1936-1939), pp. 225, 276-78. 

2. Elizabeth Evendon, ‘The Michael Wood Mystery: William Cecil and Lincolnshire Printing of John Day’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 35 (2004), p. 385. 

3. In his article Leslie P. Fairfield, ‘The Mysterious Press of ‘Michael Wood’ (1553-1554)’, The Library, 5th series, 27 (1972), pp. 220-32, he discusses the authorship of all the ‘Michael Wood’ works.

4. Leslie P. Fairfield, ‘The Mysterious Press of ‘Michael Wood’ (1553-1554)’, The Library, 5th series, 27 (1972), pp. 229-30 & Jesse W. Harris, John Bale A Study In The Minor Literature Of The Reformation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,1940), pp. 50-51. 

5. Leslie P. Fairfield, ‘The Mysterious Press of ‘Michael Wood’ (1553-1554)’, The Library, 5th series, 27 (1972), pp. 225-26. 

6. Ibid., p. 225

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[A Phoenix]

Sir William Cecil, Sir Nicholas Bacon, and the Secret Clandestine Michael Wood Press

The extensive typographical evidence showing John Day and ‘Michael Wood’ were  one and the same is supported by another piece of evidence found in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (otherwise known as the Book of Martyrs).

In the first edition of Acts and Monuments Foxe links John Day’s printing of Gardiner’s De vera Obediencia with Stamford in Lincolnshire:

And as I haue spoken of other countries [i.e. counties], so also co[m]ming to Stamfort, I might haue iust occasion somewhat to saye of W. Cooke, who not only susteined trouble, but was also committed to vile pryson, for that he suffered this oure printer to print ye boke of Wint. De vera obed.1
 

This important passage only appears in the first edition of the Book of Martyrs printed by John Day in 1563, and mention of W. Cooke is omitted from all subsequent editions.

The entire section confirms Evenden ‘in which this passage appears was dropped from subsequent editions because of the information it provided about radical Protestants whose activities Foxe was increasingly concerned to conceal.’2

In 2004 Evenden finally established Day’s secret clandestine printing press was located at Barholm five miles northeast of Stamford in Lincolnshire on land owned by Cecil.3 

1. John Foxe, Acts and Monuments (London: printed John Day, 1563), p. 1681 col. b. This passage is cited by C. L. Oastler in John Day the Elizabethan Printer (Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1975), p. 11, who curiously makes no attempt to identify ‘W. Cooke’, merely passing it over in silence. 
 

2. Elizabeth Evendon, ‘The Michael Wood Mystery: William Cecil and the Lincolnshire Printing of John Day’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 35 (2004), p. 386. 
 

3. Ibid., pp. 386-88. See also Elizabeth Evenden, Patents, Pictures and Patronage John Day and the Tudor Trade (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 229-37; Elizabeth Evenden and Thomas S. Freeman, Religion And The Book In Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 67 and John N. King, ‘John Day: master printer of the English Reformation’, in The Beginnings Of English Protestantism, eds., Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie (Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 180-208, at pp. 198-99.

 

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[A Phoenix]

Sir William Cecil, Sir Nicholas Bacon, and the Secret Clandestine Michael Wood Press

The ‘W. Cooke’ named by Foxe in Acts and Monuments was William Cooke, son of Anthony Cooke, younger brother of Mildred Cooke Cecil and Anne Cooke Bacon, and the brother-in-law of their respective husbands William Cecil and Nicholas Bacon.1

It appears William Cooke’s involvement in the publication of De vera Odediencia was suspected by the authorities, and he was arrested and imprisoned. No record of the date of his arrest and imprisonment survives. All that is otherwise known of William Cooke around this time is he entered Gray’s Inn in 1554,2 under the care and supervision of his brother-in-law and then Treasurer of Gray’s Inn, Nicholas Bacon.

Through the patronage of William Cecil, his brother Richard Cooke was returned for Stamford in the parliament of 1553 and William Cooke sat for the Cecil controlled borough in 1559. He of course was obviously following instructions and acting as an intermediary on behalf of the more senior figures in his family, namely, his father Anthony Cooke and brothers-in-law William Cecil and Nicholas Bacon, in a family enterprise which if discovered by the authorities may well have cost them their lives.

1. Neither Fairfield nor Evenden make it known to their readers that William Cooke was the brother of Anne Cooke Bacon and brother-in-law of Nicholas Bacon. In fact, the name Bacon is not mentioned once in either of their articles and both fail to appreciate or acknowledge that John Day’s secret clandestine printing press was a joint enterprise organised and directed by the Cooke-Bacon-Cecils. 

2. Marjorie K. McIntosh, ‘Sir Anthony Cooke: Tudor Humanist, Educator, And Religious Reformer’, Proceedings Of The American Philosophical Society, 119 (1975), p. 239n.34.

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[A Phoenix]

Sir William Cecil, Sir Nicholas Bacon, and the Secret Clandestine Michael Wood Press

Early in the Marian reign their father-in-law Anthony Cooke and Sir John Cheke both found themselves prisoners in the Tower in July 1533 for complicity in the Lady Jane Grey affair but unlike Cheke’s brother-in-law Cecil (from his first marriage to Cheke’s sister), Cooke had not signed the Letters Patent for the Limitation of the Crown and the two of them were soon released.

After spending around nine months in England during the time the ‘Michael Wood’ pamphlets were being printed by Day in Lincolnshire for political and religious reasons Cooke spent the rest of the Marian reign in self-imposed exile.

 

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[A Phoenix]

Sir William Cecil, Sir Nicholas Bacon, and the Secret Clandestine Michael Wood Press

 

Following a trip to Italy Cooke & Cheke arrived in Strasbourg in April 1554 one of the leading centres in the neighbouring cities and towns in modern day Germany and Switzerland that formed a network of reformist religious and intellectual groups, which included printers and publishers, and an intelligence network and distribution system, providing courier routes for books, letters and money back and forth to England and elsewhere around the continent.

During his whole time in exile Cooke secretly kept in regular touch with sons-in-law Bacon and Cecil, who despite their public conformity to the Catholic regime were from the outset involved in the radical Protestant underground movement in England, operations mirrored by Cooke and other leading reformers abroad. 

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[A Phoenix]

Sir William Cecil, Sir Nicholas Bacon, and the Secret Clandestine Michael Wood Press

With financial and other support from Cecil & Bacon, he quickly became the leading figure in directing the underground activities of the English exiles and the production of polemical Protestant tracts printed on the continent and smuggled through the ports into England.

In The Marian Exiles Garret observes ‘Mystery has always surrounded the group of important English gentry and clergy who gathered in Strasbourg’, among them Sir John Cheke and Sir Anthony Cooke: ‘the suspicion that the colony served as a centre for political propaganda; that it was in constant touch with London on the one hand, with Paris and Rouen on the other, is strongly confirmed by the undercurrent of wariness in dealing with English refugees that pervades the protocols.’1 She had little doubt that Cooke’s house ‘was the headquarters of intrigue from which emanated many of the mischievous pamphlets of Ponet and Becon, which by way of Emden, were carried into England.’2

It was, she continues, Cecil who was originally responsible for the Protestant Exodus of 1554 and Cecil and Bacon conspired with Sir Anthony Cooke and other Protestant exiles to establish ‘a shadow government abroad’. Some of whom, including Francis Russell, second Earl of Bedford constituted the ‘secret cabinet’ in the first year of the Elizabethan reign, responsible for the change in religion from Catholic to Protestant,3 which changed the future direction of England and afterwards, much of the future direction of Europe.

1. Christina Hallowell Garrett, The Marian Exiles A Study in the Origins of Elizabethan Puritanism (Cambridge University Press, 1938), p. 27. 

2. Ibid., p. 28. 

3. Ibid., pp. 15-16, 125-26. Cf. Marjorie K. McIntosh, ‘Sir Anthony Cooke: Tudor Humanist, Educator, And Religious Reformer’ Proceedings Of The American Philosophical Society, 119 (1975), pp. 242-45 and Robert Tittler, Nicholas Bacon The Making of a Tudor Statesman (Ohio University Press, 1976), p. 54.

 

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