The law that can be named is not the true law
On secret societies, civil wars, Palestine Action, and the word of God
Last weekend, the British government proscribed a protest group called Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act, which means that they are now, legally speaking, terrorists. It’s against the law to be a member of Palestine Action, or to raise funds for Palestine Action, or to hold a meeting at which any members of Palestine Action will speak. But because British antiterror legislation is, as historians will one day put it, interesting, there are a few other provisions. It’s also illegal to express any kind of support for Palestine Action. It’s illegal to express an ‘opinion or belief’ that might cause other people to support Palestine Action. It’s illegal to wear or display a garment or item that might lead someone else to think you’re a member or supporter of Palestine Action, even if you aren’t. The relevant laws are freely available to read online. I have some questions.
Since they’re a terrorist group, it would obviously be completely illegal to say something like ‘I support Palestine Action,’ which is why I would never say anything of the sort. You can think whatever you want inside your own head, but if anyone ever asks what you think of Palestine Action, the only legal answer is that you’re against them. But other statements are hazier. It’s completely fine to criticise terrorism laws and enforcement in general: for instance, if you wanted to say ‘It’s funny how the police in this country seem to be totally powerless when it comes to actual crime, to the extent that you can show them exactly where your stolen phone’s been taken and they’ll do absolutely nothing to retrieve it, but as soon as someone puts up some terfy stickers, or writes some immoderate WhatsApp messages about their kids’ school, or breaks any of the other laws against saying the wrong kind of thing, suddenly there’s thirty bobbies and a TSG van on their doorstep,’ that would be legally protected speech. But what if someone said something like ‘Palestine Action aren’t actually in any meaningful sense a terrorist group and the proscription should be lifted’? Disagreeing with a specific proscription is tricky. It’s not the same as saying ‘I support Palestine Action;’ in fact, it would be possible to say it without having any positive feelings about Palestine Action whatsoever. Maybe you oppose everything about them, maybe you think they’re a bunch of loony lefties and antisemites and criminals to boot, but you don’t think it’s accurate to describe them as terrorists. At the same time, though, you’re still supporting them. You are on their side against their opponents, and so that statement is plausibly illegal, which is why I only brought it up as an example and definitely didn’t actually say it.
In other words, while it’s completely legal to argue that stuff like murder or littering should be decriminalised, in this case the law creates a kind of forbidden zone around itself. This law must not just be obeyed: it must also be unquestioned. And depending on how you structure your arguments, the number of things that can’t be said is potentially limitless. What if someone said this? ‘Palestine Action was proscribed after two members broke into RAF Brize Norton and sprayed red paint on two RAF planes, in protest against the British military’s role in what they regard as an ongoing genocide in Gaza. There have been legal precedents here: for instance, in 1999, three activists broke into a naval base in Scotland and damaged a maintenance barge for nuclear-armed submarines. They were charged with trespass and malicious mischief, not terrorism. The court ruled that any use of nuclear weapons would be illegal under international law, and the activists walked free. The same year two women painted the words ‘DEATH MACHINE’ on the HMS Vengeance; they were charged with criminal damage, not terrorism, and also found not guilty. In 2003, five activists protesting against the Iraq War broke into RAF Fairford and attacked planes and support vehicles. They were charged with criminal damage, not terrorism. Of the five, two were ultimately acquitted, two walked free with a conditional discharge, and one was given a £250 fine. Their defence team included an up-and-coming barrister named Keir Starmer.’
Everything in this purely illustrative passage is completely true, but it’s also exactly the kind of completely true information that might lead someone to believe that Palestine Action are part of a longstanding protest tradition, one that’s become an accepted part of this country’s political fabric, and not what they actually are, which is a terrorist group. As such, it could be illegal to say anything even vaguely resembling the passage above. Is the fact that Prime Minister Keir Starmer once defended the Fairford Five classified information? Of course not. But you can, potentially, go to jail for saying it. Precedent has shown that you can also be charged for saying the wrong thing when it’s part of an artistic performance—that is, if you’re a musician in character, or an annoyingly ironic essayist. The maximum sentence is fourteen years in jail. This is why, again, I would never actually make the statement above, and only include it as an example of the kind of thing our government has wisely chosen to make it illegal for people to say.
What makes things even more difficult is that Palestine Action does not exist. Unlike other terrorist groups—like, say, ISIS—they dissolved as soon as the proscription took effect. Nobody will ever be prosecuted for being a member of Palestine Action, because Palestine Action has no members. No one will get in trouble for funnelling money to Palestine Action, because there is nothing to receive it. But you will still be arrested if you go out in public and say ‘I support Palestine Action,’ even though those words don’t actually refer to anything at all. This is just a succession of meaningless sounds that summons policemen to take you away.
Antiterror law is weird. It always seems to encode some hard little paradox at its core. Some monstrosity that’s been secretly latent in the whole structure of legality, or a remnant from a much older stratum, a wilder, more mystical, less rational way of doing things. British antiterror law is bizarre, but despite their stronger attachment to the vague idea of free speech the Americans aren’t really much better. US intelligence agencies are allowed to operate under classified interpretations of legislation like the PATRIOT Act. There is the publicly available law, which contains provisions like ‘Section 1956(b) of title 18, United States Code, is amended—(1) by redesignating paragraphs (1) and (2) as subparagraphs (A) and (B), respectively, and moving the margins 2 ems to the right.’ This has its public meaning, which has to do with pedantically editing existing law. But it also has a secret, esoteric meaning known only to initiates, which could be based on numerology or deconstruction or the government equivalent of fan theory. That meaning could be anything at all. The margins they want to indent might be you. You will probably never know. Meanwhile, other laws are themselves secret. Every year, Congress passes an Intelligence Authorisation Act, a National Defence Authorisation Act, and a Department of Defence Appropriations Act; most of the content of these bills is public, some is not. Every year, a secret addendum to each of those acts is passed into law. These addenda have the same legal force as the laws that govern gambling or corn subsides. You are not allowed to know what they say.
You might think having secret laws is somehow wrong. You might think the existence of a law you can’t know about, or freely discuss, or which manages to criminalise a nebulous and possibly infinite cluster of actions, is a betrayal of the principle of law in general. Unfortunately, that’s not really true.
There is a tradition of public, open, legible legal codes. The Stele of Hammurabi is a block of basalt, seven and a half feet tall, inscribed with two hundred and eighty-two dictates. We don’t know exactly where in Babylon it stood, because hundreds of years later the Elamites came pouring over the hills to sack the city and carry off its laws to their own capital at Susa. But you have to assume that the stele was somewhere public, where anyone could go and confirm the official minimum wage for a field worker (according to §257, it’s eight gur of corn per year), or how much a vet can charge for successfully operating on an ox (one sixth of a shekel, per §224), or what to do if a female tavern-keeper charges too much for beer (§108 says drown her in the river). In Athens, Draco and Solon inscribed their laws on the axones and kurbeis, which historians are pretty certain were either the same thing or two different things, and which consisted of rotating three- or maybe four-sided pillars or possibly beams, but which were definitely made of wood, or maybe bronze. These axones and/or kurbeis have also never been unearthed, so we don’t know exactly what was in those laws. According to Plutarch, Draco imposed the death penalty on basically everyone. ‘Even men convicted of idleness were executed, and those who stole pot-herbs or fruits suffered just like murderers.’ The Athenian state spent a while violently exterminating its citizens for picking apples or bumping into people by accident, until the city was on the point of civil war, and Solon was appointed to draw up a slightly cuddlier constitution. Demades said that Draco’s laws were written not in ink, but blood, but the important thing is that they were still written: if you wanted to know why all your neighbours were being executed, you could go to the Agora and see the words ‘NO BLINKING—ON PAIN OF DEATH’ written on the axones. Meanwhile the Twelve Tables, the first written Roman law, were posted on bronze plaques in the Forum. The actual tables were destroyed when the Gauls sacked Rome in 387 BC, but later laws were also carved into bronze and publicly posted. Long into the imperial era, the white marble walls of the Temple of Jupiter would have been crowded with hundreds of laws and regulations, all jostling like festival flyers.
But while this is a legal tradition, it’s not our legal tradition. The only people who still really uphold the idea of public law are Wahhabi Muslims and ultra-orthodox Jews. Uniquely, the ancient Hebrews proclaimed that their written law wasn’t just a codification of existing custom or the decree of secular power, but had been directly given by God himself. In Exodus 21 and 22, the primordial power that created the entire Universe pauses to issue what is essentially the standard package of Bronze Age Near Eastern law from the stormclouds above Sinai. ‘If anyone digs a pit and an ox or a donkey falls into it, the one who opened the pit must pay the owner for the loss and take the dead animal in exchange.’ That sort of thing. At the time, this must have seemed like a great idea: if the law is a divine commandment, then it’s protected from the caprices of history. You don’t need stelae or axones; the inscription-place is everywhere. ‘These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.’ A truly public, universal, incontestable law. Freedom from arbitrary tyranny, freedom from social unrest. It worked: like most Jews, I can drone that entire passage, in Hebrew, by heart. If anything, it worked too well.
Since the majority of Jews are no longer highland pastoralists, the content of the law has been pretty comprehensively updated. The most recent codification of Jewish law is the sixteenth-century Shulchan Arush, which is maybe the most impressively pedantic document ever written. The Torah gives a list of animals that can and can’t be eaten; the Shulchan Arush is more detailed. A cow might be kosher, but ‘the structure of the gallbladder involves two layers of fat. The upper layer is prohibited, and the fat and tubes attached to it are prohibited.’ What hasn’t changed is the aura of holiness that still hovers over this arbitrary material. This is how the law, which was once intended to regulate everyday life and keep it humming along without too much interpersonal violence, has ended up devouring everyday life altogether. It is no longer in service of anything else; instead of a social compact, it becomes an obsessional neurosis. Have you ever listened to ultra-Orthodox Jews talk? These people only have two topics of conversation: family gossip and halacha. Everyone is expected to know and follow the whole of the law; all their intellectual energies are consumed in observing every subclause of this byzantine system of regulations. This is why they have such terrible taste in furniture, why they dance to that weird Casio-synthesiser Haredi-trance, and why their politics are always genuinely insane. As soon as we escape the shtetl of frummery Jews can do extraordinary things, but as long as the black hat is on our heads we have no real interests, passions, or personality, except the law.
This is not our situation in the secular world. Unlike the Haredis, you do not know the whole of the law. You do not mumble it to yourself every night. There are no big public stelae that record exactly what you’re not allowed to do, and what will happen to you if you do it anyway. Actually, there are some, but they’re all partial and fragmentary. They say things like ‘NO PARKING 9 AM TO 9 PM, £300 FINE.’ Unlike the Twelve Tables, they do not also promise to punish ‘whoever enchants by singing an evil incantation,’ or regulate behaviour at a funeral. Most of the rest of the law is publicly available, but some of it is in baffling jargon, and there’s far too much of it for any ordinary individual to comprehend. Understanding the law is left to a specialised caste of lawyers. The rest of us have to go around with a vague second-hand understanding that things like burglary and nonconsensual surgery are probably illegal, and then sometimes discover to our surprise that you can go to prison for fourteen years for wearing a tshirt with the name of a group that doesn’t even exist.
The idea that ordinary people should be able to know what the law says is, historically speaking, a rarity. Where public law does exist, it’s usually as the residue of class struggle. Those brass plaques in the Roman Forum only went up after protracted civil unrest. According to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the plebeians complained that all the laws were ‘kept in sacred books’ and ‘the patricians alone were acquainted with these.’ Patrician magistrates would try cases according a standard that the plebeians were forbidden from ever understanding. But since the plebeians did all the work, they could threaten a mass emigration from the city unless public laws were instituted. The magistrates tried to prevent themselves from being ‘compelled to conduct the government in accordance with laws,’ but Dionysius writes that the political struggle kept producing terrible omens. Rome could deal with the usual bad signs—lightning, earthquakes, plus ‘spectres flitting through the air and voices that disturbed men’s minds’—but when it started to rain small chunks of what looked like human flesh, the ruling class were sufficiently spooked to allow the law to be published. Aristotle describes a similar period of civil conflict before the Constitution of Solon. We know less about class struggle in early Mesopotamia, but all those boastful royal preambles at the top of the stelae—‘To eliminate cries for justice, to eradicate enmity and armed violence, I, Lipit-Ishtar, pious shepherd of the city of Nippur, established justice in the lands of Sumer and Akkad’—might not be as boastful as they seem. Not the words of an all-powerful king imposing his decree, but one forced to give up his unlimited power, and post the laws where anyone can read them. The revolution in ancient Judea, the one that confiscated the law from kings and priests and gave it directly to God, must have been immense.
But the default form of law is still the secret law. For most of human history, people have been governed by laws they’ve not been allowed to actually know. This is what Kafka—who was, of course, the last person to really truly get it—intuited in The Trial. You know the gist of the story, even if you’ve never read it: one day poor Josef K is arrested for a crime, but no one will tell him what he’s supposed to have done; he learns that in this court, beyond the ordinary magistrates, there are tier after tier of more and more powerful officials that could save him if they wanted, but it’s unheard of for anyone to ever be acquitted, and the more he insists on his innocence the more his judges decide he must be guilty; finally he’s taken to a quarry outside the city and killed. Boring pop-critics like to make fatuous interpretations of the novel. Really it’s about guilt, it’s about alienation, it’s existential; the secret is that Josef K is on trial for the crime of being born. This is bullshit. The Trial is not an existential text. It’s an ethnographically complete account of the Poro Society of West Africa.
Fine: not the Poro in particular, but of the hundreds of secret societies that have existed on every continent, since (according to Brian Hayden) at least the Upper Palaeolithic. In places without fully developed states, the power to make and enforce laws often ends up in the hands of these secret societies. The societies give their initiates supernatural powers: they can call on ancestor spirits to cure illnesses, control the weather, bring victory in battle and success in hunting, make crops grow, and—according to them—generally improve everyone’s wellbeing. Sometimes the spirits appear in spectacular public masked dances: most of the masks in various anthropological museums actually belong to secret societies.
The Northwest Coast has the Hamatsa and Melanesia has the Suque, but thanks to ethnographers like Kenneth Little and George Harley, the best-attested secret societies have been in West Africa. These include the Yassi, the Kofung, the Njayei, the Ekpo, the Isong, and the Njawhaw, but the Poro is by far the largest and the most powerful. More importantly, it cuts across clan, kinship, and political boundaries. If you’re a member of the Poro, your rank and status will still be recognised in a distant village, even if they speak a completely different language. In effect, this makes the Poro a kind of superstate. Poro law supersedes the dictates of secular chiefs; before the colonial period, it allowed thousands of small, scattered agricultural settlements to exist under a basically uniform system of law and government. During the colonial era, the Poro was one of the main centres of resistance to British rule. Even today, the modern states of Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone sometimes struggle to assert their own public legal authority against the Poro. This is not because rule by Poro is nice. Like most secret societies, it’s nightmarishly exploitative and antidemocratic.
All adult men are expected to be members of Poro (women have their own secret society, the Sande), along with any other societies they wanted to join, but ordinary initiates have no power and are told almost nothing about the society’s esoteric knowledge. Poro has ninety-nine degrees, and to work your way up, you have to pay. When a boy was initiated in the late colonial era, his father had to pay in cloth, brass, and chickens to the senior members, often going into debt in the process. Higher levels required payments in rice, palm oil, rum, and cash. To get beyond the first few levels you had to be extremely rich, but the higher you go the more you receive from the lower levels, so those with wealth could recoup their investments fairly quickly. The real function of the Poro was to redistribute all surpluses towards a small elite. This did still come with a cost: Harley writes that to reach the very highest level, a man would have to sacrifice and eat his own son. (To be fair, this bit isn’t in The Trial; it’s in The Judgement, another of Kafka’s stories.) The Poro have had a very relaxed attitude to killing. Through the colonial era, anyone who laughed at their dances and ceremonies would be killed and eaten. Anyone who saw ritual masks being made, or otherwise discovered that the ancestor spirits were really just people in disguise, would be killed and eaten. Anyone who publicly doubted the Poro’s supernatural power—and there were always some—would be executed on the spot. Most people learned to keep their mouths shut and stay away from Poro lodges, but the Poro had other laws that were, like its mystical knowledge, known only by the higher echelons of the secret society. Sometimes you could be executed for a crime you didn’t even know you’d committed, breaking a law you could never be told.
Maybe Kafka’s background is significant here: from a Jewish perspective, all secular law is basically indistinguishable from the Poro. His nightmare ended up coming very close to the ideal form of the law, but it’s not quite there. How secret is this law, really, if all these officials and initiates are allowed to know it? In Kafka, the higher judges that know everything might be very far away, but they still exist. The absolute most basic law would be a totally pure prohibition: one in which the content of the law is forbidden to everyone. There is something you’re not allowed to do, but you’re not allowed to know what it is, and the authority that enforces the law is not allowed to know it either.
Such a law has, in fact, existed: in England, during the sixteenth century. Exactly one person has ever been charged under it: the Elizabethan nobleman Henry Poyntz, Third Earl of Craven.
Craven was a notorious libertine, a favourite and possible lover of Elizabeth I, and (allegedly) an atheist. One of his risky inventions was a sport he called ‘heretickall Bear-bayting,’ in which he would keep two pet religious dissenters, with totally opposite views on the nature of God and man, and after dinner allow them to scream obscenities at each other for the entertainment of his guests. After a few rounds everyone would vote on the winner, and the loser would be turned over to the ecclesiastical authorities. But after repeatedly pitting recusants against nonconformists, he decided he wanted something with teeth. And after scouring the countryside for deranged cults, he managed to acquire two much more dangerous pets.
The first was John Folcroft, a wandering preacher and Spiritual Libertine. The Spiritual Libertines, also known as the Brethren of the Free Spirit, were an antinomian cult that had spread in Europe since the thirteenth century. The Spiritual Libertines were pantheists: they believed that God pervades the entire universe, and every ordinary thing that exists is just a manifestation or mode of appearance of God. They also believed that the individual human soul is self-identical with the universal consciousness of God, and that Christ was not unique, but simply the first person to realise this. (He wasn’t; the doctrine of the Free Spirit was first expressed by Yajnavalkya in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, some time in the seventh century BC. Exactly how this extremely Dharmic idea started cropping up in Europe is a mystery for another time.) The reason the Spiritual Libertines had been suppressed with such incredible bloodshed, though, was their third doctrine: because the individual soul is the same as God, once someone becomes aware that they are God it’s impossible for them to sin, and everything they do is justified. The spiritually enlightened man can have whatever he wants. So roving bands of heretics would descend on small settlements, killing at will, stealing the farmers’ stores and fucking their wives, and leave singing hymns about how everything in the world is the body of God, and all of it is good.
The second of Craven’s acquisitions was a reformed theologian called Laurentius Clung, widely acknowledged as the single most unpleasant person of his age. Clung, who I might have mentioned before, was a renegade Calvinist who broke with his mentor after landing on the doctrine that none would be saved, and God had predestined not just most but absolutely all of his creations for the fires of Hell. His reasoning was airtight: it’s impossible for something good to love something less good than itself, because that would mean affirming an imperfection, therefore God does not love us, and he only created us in the first place as a punishment for being inferior to him. Clung thought that the only redeemable part of any person was their hatred for whatever lay beneath them, which is why he’d made it his personal mission to see as much of the world as possible, and hate it all. The many obscene screeds published during his lifetime include Against the foul, abominable lies of shit-dwelling Melanchthon and his fleas-in-their-arses followers, along with Against the filthy practices of the cobbler Gerrit Lapper, who is abominably stunted, and powerfully ugly, with one blackened tooth in his head, and is a cuckold whose wife exposes her diseased flaps for a medium-sized pork pie, and who lives in the red-painted house in the village of Overlangbroek near Utrecht, and a heavy tome titled Against nostrils. (‘Allowing sinners to breathe quietly, rather than through the ragged hole of the mouth, which furnishes the hypocrite with an egress for falsehoods and an ingress for cocks, they allow such creatures to pretend to a dignity they do not possess.’) For simply expressing these personal beliefs he was exiled from the Netherlands; after a brief but tumultuous stay in France he ended up seeking refuge in England.
Clung’s impressions of the English were mixed. At first, he approved of their habit of complaining constantly about the weather. ‘When the sun comes out they bemoan the heat of its rays, when it withdraws they bemoan the clouds, when water nourishes the earth they bemoan its damp: these people understand well that all of this world has been made to increase their suffering.’ He was outraged, though, when he discovered that the English didn’t accept that their punishment was just, and kept holding out hope for something called ‘nice weather.’ Similarly he approved of the local cuisine until discovering that it was not taken as a form of penance, and the English actually enjoyed it.
Now Craven had his combatants, the universal lover and the universal hater, but the heretical bear-baiting did not go according to plan. Both heretics were given apartments at Coldwheat Hall, the Poyntz family estate near Bradford, and Folcroft’s stay there was mostly peaceful. Craven supplied him with all the food and beer he wanted, and the enormously fat preacher contented himself with lazily molesting the servants. However, the needle-thin Clung caused more serious problems. As soon as he arrived at Coldwheat Hall, he took offence at Craven’s Chinese porcelain, acquired at enormous expense, which depicted a pagoda by a peaceful riverside with geese—‘heathen, barbarous images, the bloodied temples and charnel-houses of Moloch’—and smashed it all. The sheep on Craven’s estate were of an inferior breed, and therefore righteously poisoned. Clung also insisted on being allowed to preach to the local folk, ideally at the parish church of St Peter in Bradford. When he was told that under the constitution of the Church of England nobody could preach anywhere in the country without a licence and a bishop’s approval, he flew into a rage.
A few days later that rage was published as a pamphlet, in English, titled Against the faint, mooncalfish, effeminate settlement, that lyeth halting between Baal and God, in this realme of Englande. He starts by praising Elizabeth I for persecuting the ‘babylonish swyne, sweltering at the dunghylle of heathenrie, euen the Papistick recusantes.’ He also praises her for persecuting the puritans and nonconformists, ‘proud synners, whose heades are exalted lyke the Cedars of Libanus, whom the Lorde shall hewe downe; and I verely truste that Her Maiestie is His moste puissant instrument in heweing them downe.’ But then he calls down several pages of obscene curses on her for failing to properly persecute the most dangerous, most devious, and filthiest false sect in the country, ‘the font of piss whereat all Englishmen drawe their drinke,’ the Church of England. Finally, he signs the pamphlet with his name, Laurentius Clung, and his address, Coldwheat Hall.
With that one pamphlet, Clung destroyed his host. The Earl of Craven’s enemies—in particular, William Cecil—turned on him at once: he was immediately turfed out of court and stripped of his positions, grants, and monopolies; next they started plotting to have him executed. This would be more difficult, since Craven really hadn’t known anything about the pamphlet before publication, and there was no law that imposed the death penalty for simply sheltering a nonconformist. But they had a secret weapon. The Church of England had inherited reams of canon law, but lightly garbled: a lot of stuff had to be taken out, on saints and relics and the role of the Pope, but some material was also put back in; long-repealed fragments from the supposedly purer and more primitive apostolic church. One of those fragments was an anathema against the Isotimians, a forgotten fifth-century sect. Their heresy was once considered so dangerous that not just anyone who preached it, but anyone who had even heard it had to be put to death. The law did its job: a thousand years later, no one had any idea who the Isotimians were or what they had believed. But between them, John Folcroft and Laurentius Clung represented the furthest possible extent of heresy; surely one of their doctrines would have to be it.
Henry Poyntz, Earl of Craven was tried at the Consistory Court at York Minister. Most of the trial ran in the ordinary way: he admitted to sheltering the heretics and listening to them speak, in full knowledge of their views, although he kept insisting that he’d never actually agreed with them and remained a faithful Anglican and subject of the Queen. Finally, Laurentius Clung was produced as a witness. (Folcroft had escaped into the moors; his body was eventually found halfway up a fairly small hill.) This is where the problems began. To convict Craven, the court had to confirm that Clung’s beliefs really were the same as the heresy of the Isotimians. But they couldn’t question Clung about those beliefs, because if it turned out that they were the heresy of the Isotimians, then absolutely everyone in the courtroom—which included Edwin Sandys, Archbishop of York, his Chancellor Thomas Starsmeare, Matthew Hutton, Dean of York, the Archdeacons of Nottingham and Richmond, and Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon and President of the Council of the North—would also have to be executed.
The task of interrogating Clung went to Thomas Starsmeare, the plodding Chancellor. He had achieved his position by being a perfectly acceptable bureaucrat, passionless enough to weather his way through the religious tumult of the Tudor age, swinging to any wind, grovelling to any superior, and remaining a generally forgettable slab of meat throughout. Now, this deeply unimaginative man was forced to develop new methods for learning the unlearnable. His first approach was admirably direct:
CHANCELLOR: Art thou of the Isotimianes?
CLUNG: I know not.
CHANCELLOR: Yet persisteth there not in thy doctrine, and in thy heresies, the secte of the Isotimianes?
CLUNG: I haue hearde no such name. I cleaue onlie to the doctrine of God, as reuealed by Scripture and right reason.
CHANCELLOR: Is it by the rule of right reason and holie Scripture, or by the subtiltie of thine owne conceit, that thou art brought to this abhominable confusion, this foule and execrable impietie, which the Isotimianes haue broached?
CLUNG: I knowe not any Isotimianes, therefore I knowe not.
CHANCELLOR: Thou art of the Isotimianes. Auow it.
CLUNG: Sir, I wyll not.
His second approach was more devious. Maybe he couldn’t learn what Clung actually believed, but surely it would be fine to find out what parts of the orthodox position Clung disputed. This way, he could at least get a vague sense of the extent of his heresy. So he instructed Clung to only answer with ‘aye’ or ‘nay,’ and tried out the catechism on him. It didn’t go according to plan. Clung believed in the Holy Trinity and the holy Church; he believed that the Son was of one substance with the Father but had two natures, human and divine; he shruggingly acknowledged Elizabeth as Supreme Governor of the English Church and the real but immaterial presence of Christ in the Eucharist. But finally:
CHANCELLOR: Doest thou beleeue in the communion of sainctes, the forgiuenesse of synnes, the resurrection of the bodye, and the lyfe euerlastynge?
CLUNG: Naye.
CHANCELLOR: By God his holy name, man, why? Why embracest thou all other partes of the Christian fayth saue this?
CLUNG: [After a significant pause] Naye.
In desperation, the Chancellor asked Clung to explain his doctrine outright, but as soon as Clung started speaking the Chancellor stuck his fingers in his ears and started loudly and solemnly chanting ‘La, la, la.’ He told the Archbishop that Clung’s doctrine had been spoken in the Consistory Court, but no one had heard it, and therefore his job was done. The Archbishop disagreed. Finally the Chancellor landed on the same idea the Archbishop had landed on before him, which was to get someone else to do it. So he summoned a horse-thief called Will Marshman, who had already been condemned to death for his crimes, and put him in a cell with Clung to hear his doctrine. Later, Marshman could tell the Chancellor whether his heresy was so bad that someone should be put to death simply for listening to it. But when the Chancellor returned Marshman was in floods of tears, blubbering that he would be going to Hell, that there was no forgiveness, and the Dutch gentleman had proved it all with logic. This explanation had far too much actual content for safety, so the Chancellor fled with his fingers in his ears. But he had another idea. Marshman was told to explain what he’d heard to another, slightly stupider criminal, less capable of understanding abstract concepts, who told it to another, and another, until it finally reached the last messenger, a woman convicted of drowning her newborn son, who was called Margaret but couldn’t be relied on to consistently remember her own name. Margaret told the Chancellor that according to Clung, ‘God is sore vexed with the worlde for her synnes.’
In the end, the Earl of Craven solved everyone’s problems by dying of apoplexy. Laurentius Clung languished in prison for another year while the Crown tried to work out what to do with him. Finally, he became one of the first people in English history sentenced to transportation, and was shipped to the ill-fated Roanoke Colony in Virginia. Since then, no one else has been tried under the perfect prohibition unknown to everyone. But it’s still there, waiting, the final and impossible form of the law, to seep up into the statute books again.
By the way, I really did try, but there are significant gaps in the record; it turns out that a parish church burned down in the late eighteenth century with generations of rolls inside, which is why I couldn’t find any conclusive evidence that Chancellor Thomas Starsmeare is a direct ancestor of the current Prime Minister. But you know, don’t you? Sometimes you just know.