Anonymity's Subject: James I and the Debate over the Oath of Allegiance

IN THE AFTERMATH of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot in England, the Jacobean parliament passed into law a controversial oath of allegiance that required English Catholic recusants to swear their loyalty to James and to deny the pope's power to depose monarchs. ¹ Not surprisingly, the law met immediately with detractors. Among the most vocal were Cardinal Robert Bellarmine and Pope Paul V, both of whom sent letters condemning the oath into England shortly after the law was passed. Most monarchs would have assigned the task of responding to these letters to a trusted theologian. King James, however, indulged his personal interest in theological debate by responding to the criticism himself. ² In February, 1607/8, he published anonymously Triplici Nodo, Triplex Cuneus: or, An Apologie for the Oath of Allegiance, a quarto treatise of 112 pages that accused his detractors of having misunderstood the narrow civil purpose of the oath. On the one hand, the anonymous Apologie leaned on the king's authority; it sported his coat of arms, and it clearly advocated his position that the oath asked only for civil obedience and was not intended as a tool for persecution. One could argue that the publication was indeed the king's in its privileges, point of view, and spirit, even if he had not claimed authorship of it. On the other hand, the anonymous publication introduced its author not as a sovereign king but as a supportive and concerned subject, one who referred to the king frequently using deferential third-person phrases and titles. The authorial voice in the treatise was clearly not the king's. Whether readers found James's authorship transparent or well concealed, his anonymity proved short-lived. In a 1609 revision of the Apologie, James claimed both editions and took pains to defend his earlier anonymity, which had, much to his dismay, provided his opponents with an easy target as the conflict over the oath escalated.

The first and second editions of the Apologie offer a unique picture of royal authorship and royal anonymity in the early seventeenth century, but they also demonstrate more generally the complexity of anonymity's functions within early print culture. Neither the printing press nor the rise of the professional author had succeeded in making anonymity obsolete. ³ In Jacobean England, anonymity remained a common condition and an accepted (or tolerated) frame for many books and manuscripts. James almost certainly counted on his anonymity seeming unremarkable in the larger contexts of the oath controversy and his own publication history. He had published anonymously before, very transparently in Basilikon Doron (1599) and somewhat less so in a True Lawe of Free Monarchies (1598) and A Counter-Blaste to Tobacco (1604). As many authors and book producers did, James turned to anonymity for its functional flexibility and its interpretive potential. He hoped to find within it an advantage and authorial breadth that a king's name could not garner. Anonymity was not so much a mask that James sought to hide behind as it was a convention that asked readers to look at the 1607/8 Apologie in a particular way, to see the text as part of a theological conversation in which the author's logic would be as persuasive as his social standing. Anonymity's flexibility, however, proved difficult to manipulate, especially for a king. The challenges that James faced as an anonymous author who wanted to control the reception of his work give the modern scholar a particularly clear view of the dynamic and fluid relationship between authorial identity and anonymity in the period. As it turns out, the king had a great deal to lose when he chose to hide his identity. The relationship between anonymity and identity, as James learned, involved a competition to control the meaning of authorship in which the author had only limited power.

However common the choice to publish...