The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon (Oxford Handbooks) [1 ed.] 9780199237531, 0199237530

Citation preview

t h e ox f o r d h a n d b o o k o f

the early modern sermon

This page intentionally left blank

the oxford handbook of

THE EARLY MODERN SERMON Edited by

PETER McCULLOUGH HUGH ADLINGTON and EMMA RHATIGAN

1

3

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Oxford University Press  The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn ISBN ––––          

Contents List of Figures Notes on Contributors Preface

viii x xiv

PA RT I C OM POSI T ION, DE L I V E RY, R ECE P T ION 1. Ars Prædicandi: Theories and Practice

3

Greg Kneidel

2. The Preacher’s Bibles

21

Lori Anne Ferrell

3. The Preacher and Patristics

34

Katrin Ettenhuber

4. Preachers and Medieval and Renaissance Commentary

54

Carl Trueman

5. The Preacher and Profane Learning

72

Noam Reisner

6. Preaching Venues: Architecture and Auditories

87

Emma Rhatigan

7. Sermons in Performance

120

Kate Armstrong

8. Preaching in the Parishes

137

Ian Green

9. Women and Sermons

155

Jeanne Shami

10. Sermon Reception John Craig

178

vi

contents

11. Sermons into Print

198

James Rigney

12. Preaching and Context: John Donne’s Sermon at the Funerals of Sir William Cokayne

213

Peter McCullough

PA RT I I SE R MONS I N SC OT L A N D, I R E L A N D, A N D WA L E S 13. Preaching the Scottish Reformation, 1560–1707

271

Crawford Gribben

14. Preaching the Reformation in Early Modern Ireland

287

Raymond Gillespie

15. The Sermon in Early Modern Wales: Context and Content

303

Stephen K. Roberts

PA RT I I I E NGL ISH SE R MONS , 1500 –1660 16. From Tudor Humanism to Reformation Preaching

329

Lucy Wooding

17. Official Tudor Homilies

348

Ashley Null

18. Preaching the Elizabethan Settlement

366

Arnold Hunt

19. Veiled Speech: Preaching, Politics and Scriptural Typology

387

Kevin Killeen

20. Preaching and Parliament, 1640–1659 Tom Webster

404

contents

vii

PA RT I V E NGL ISH SE R MONS , 1660 –172 0 21. Restoration, Religion, and Law: Assize Sermons, 1660–1685

423

Hugh Adlington

22. Preaching at the Court of Charles II: Court Sermons and the Restoration Chapel Royal

442

Matt Jenkinson

23. Sermons in Print, 1660–1700

460

Rosemary Dixon

24. The Sermon Culture of the Glorious Revolution: Williamite Preaching and Jacobite Anti-Preaching, 1685–1702

480

Tony Claydon

25. The Political Sermon in an Age of Party Strife, 1700–1720: Contributions to the Conflict

495

Pasi Ihalainen

PA RT V A PPE N DI X E S I. Preachers on Preaching II. Preaching Observed III. Preaching Regulated

517 536 546

Select Bibliography Index

571 581

List of Figures

1.

Diagram for sermon ‘explication’ from John Wilkins, Ecclesiastes (1646)

14

2.

Diagram for sermon ‘confirmation’ from John Wilkins, Ecclesiastes (1646)

15

3.

Diagram for sermon ‘application’ from John Wilkins, Ecclesiastes (1646)

16

4.

Engraved frontispiece of the Great Bible (1539)

25

5.

All Saints, North Cerney, Gloucestershire (squint and pulpit)

88

6.

All Saints, North Cerney, Gloucestershire (interior)

89

7.

St Saviour, Foremark, Derbyshire (chancel screen, box pews, and ‘triple-decker’ pulpit)

91

8.

St Peter, Bishop’s Waltham, Hampshire (pulpit)

93

9.

All Saints, Pavement, York (pulpit)

94

10.

St Mary, Pilton, Devon (pulpit hourglass)

95

11.

St Peter, Croft-on-Tees, N. Yorkshire (Milbanke family pew)

96

12.

Magdalen College, Oxford, Chapel (Humphrey monument)

97

13.

St Martin Ludgate, City of London (interior)

100

14.

Jordan’s Meeting House, Buckinghamshire (interior)

101

15.

St Alphege, Greenwich (interior)

103

16.

Charterhouse Chapel, London (Sutton tomb, detail)

113

17.

Charterhouse Chapel, London (Sutton tomb, detail)

114

18.

St Ninian, Ninekirks, Westmorland (interior)

164

19.

Hugh Latimer preaching at Whitehall

166

20.

Monument to Sir William Cokayne, St Paul’s Cathedral

215

21.

A sermon at Paul’s Cross, by John Gipkyn

221

22.

Choir of St Paul’s Cathedral (interior)

228

23.

St Michael, Llanfihangel Din Silwy, Anglesey (pulpit)

304

24.

Welsh ‘cwydd’ (metrical sermon)

307

25.

Tryssor i’r Cymru (title page)

320

26.

St George, Dittisham, Devon (pulpit)

331

27.

A bishop preaching

334

list of figures

ix

28.

Frontispiece of John Tillotson’s Works

465

29.

Frontispiece of Edward Leigh’s Systeme or Body of Divinity

467

30.

Frontispiece of Lancelot Andrewes’s The Morall Law Expounded

468

Permissions: English Heritage (nos 5–6, 8–18); The Bodleian Library, Oxford (nos 1–3, 20, 22); Special Collections, University of Birmingham (nos 19, 26–30); Cardiff Council Library Service (nos 24–5); The Huntington Library (no. 4); Bridgeman Art, for the Society of Antiquaries (no. 21); Madeleine Gray (no. 23); Peter McCullough (no. 7).

Notes on Contributors

Hugh Adlington is Lecturer in English at the University of Birmingham. Co-founder (with Mary Morrissey) of the Sermons Research Network, he has published widely on early modern literature and religion; he is editing a volume in The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne; and is author of the forthcoming John Donne’s Books: Reading, Writing, and the Uses of Knowledge. Kate Armstrong is an independent scholar. She is author of ‘“Error Vanquished by Delivery”: Elite Sermon Performance in Jacobean England’ (unpublished Oxford D. Phil., 2007). Tony Claydon is Professor of Early Modern History at Bangor University, Wales. He is author of Europe and the Making of England, 1660–1760 (Cambridge, 2007); William III and the Godly Revolution (Cambridge, 1996); and co-editor, with Ian McBride, of Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland, 1650–1850 (Cambridge, 1998). John Craig is Professor of Early Modern English History at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. He is author of Reformation, Politics and Polemics, The Growth of Protestantism in East Anglian Market Towns, 1500–1610 (Aldershot, 2001), co-editor, with Patrick Collinson, of The Reformation in English Towns, 1500–1640 (Basingstoke, 1998) and edited, with Patrick Collinson and Brett Usher, Conferences and Combination Lectures in the Elizabethan Church: Dedham and Bury St Edmunds, 1582–1590 (Woodbridge, 2003) for the Church of England Record Society. Rosemary Dixon is AHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow for ‘Dissenting Academy Libraries and their Readers, 1720–1860’, a research project based at the Dr Williams’s Centre for Dissenting Studies, Queen Mary, University of London. She has published articles on John Tillotson and sermons in print in The Library (2007) and Religion in the Age of Enlightenment (2010), and is currently working on a book about the use of printed sermons in the long eighteenth century. Katrin Ettenhuber is Fellow in English at Pembroke College, Cambridge. She co-edited, with Sylvia Adamson and Gavin Alexander, Renaissance Figures of Speech (Cambridge, 2007), and is author of Donne’s Augustine: Renaissance Cultures of Interpretation (Oxford, 2011). Lori Anne Ferrell is Professor of Early Modern Literature and History at Claremont Graduate University. She is author of Government by Polemic: James I and the King’s

notes on contributors

xi

Preachers (Stanford, 1997) and, most recently, The Bible and the People (New Haven, 2009).With Peter McCullough, she is co-editor of The English Sermon Revised (Manchester, 2000) and is editing a volume in The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne. Raymond Gillespie is Professor of History at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He has published widely on early modern Ireland and religion, including Devoted People: Belief and Religion in Early Modern Ireland (Manchester, 1997), and Thomas Howell and his Friends: Serving Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, 1570–1700 (Dublin, 1997). Ian Green is Honorary Professorial Research Fellow (History) at the University of Edinburgh. His many works include Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2000), and The Christian’s ABC: Catechisms and Catechizing in England c.1530–1740 (Oxford, 1996). Crawford Gribben is Long Room Hub Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Print Culture, School of English, Trinity College, Dublin. He is the author of The Puritan Millennium: Literature and Theology, 1550–1682 (Dublin, 2000), God’s Irishmen: Theological Debates in Cromwellian Ireland (New York, 2007), Writing the Rapture: Prophecy Fiction in Evangelical America (Oxford, 2009), and Evangelical Millennialismin the Trans-Atlantic World, 1500–2000 (Basingstoke, 2010). Arnold Hunt is Curator of Manuscripts at the British Library and author of The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and their Audiences, 1590–1640 (Cambridge, 2010). Pasi Ihalainen is Professor of General History at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. He has published many comparative studies of British and European political thought and religion, including Protestant Nations Redefined: Changing Perceptions of National Identity in the Rhetoric of the English, Dutch and Swedish Public Churches, 1685–1772 (Leiden, 2005) and Agents of the People: Democracy and Popular Sovereignty in British and Swedish Parliamentary and Public Debates, 1734– 1800 (Leiden, 2010). Matt Jenkinson read for his D.Phil. at Merton College, Oxford. He is the author of Culture and Politics at the Court of Charles II, 1660–85 (Woodbridge, 2010) and a number of articles on Restoration literature and history. Kevin Killeen is a Lecturer in English Renaissance Literature at the University of York. He is the author of Biblical Scholarship, Science and Politics in Early Modern England: Thomas Browne and the Thorny Place of Knowledge (Aldershot, 2008) and the co-editor, with Peter Forshaw, of Biblical Exegesis and the Emergence of Science in the Early Modern Era (Basingstoke, 2007). Greg Kneidel is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. He is author of Rethinking the Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Literature (Basingstoke, 2008), and is working on a book on John Donne and the law.

xii

notes on contributors

Peter Mccullough is Sohmer-Hall Fellow and Tutor in Renaissance English Literature at Lincoln College, Oxford, and is Lay Canon (History) of St Paul’s Cathedral. He is author of Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching (Cambridge, 1998), co-editor with Lori Anne Ferrell of The English Sermon Revised (Manchester, 2000), editor of Lancelot Andrewes: Selected Sermons and Lectures (Oxford, 2005), and General Editor of The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne. Ashley Null is Adjunct Lecturer in Anglican Church History, Faculty of Theology, Humboldt University of Berlin and Visiting Fellow of the Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge University. He is the author of Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine of Repentance: Renewing the Power to Love (Oxford, 2000) and editor of Cranmer’s Great Commonplaces (Oxford, forthcoming). Noam Reisner is Lecturer in the Department of English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University, specializing in the interdisciplinary study of early modern English literature, classics, and theology. He is the author of Milton and the Ineffable (Oxford, 2009), and has published on the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes. Emma Rhatigan is Lecturer in Early Modern English Literature at the University of Sheffield. She is author of several important articles on early modern preaching and drama, and of a forthcoming study of Donne and preaching at Lincoln’s Inn. She is also editor of a volume in The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne. James Rigney is Dean of Christ Church Cathedral, Newcastle, New South Wales; he was previously Chaplain, Fellow, and Director of Studies in Theology at Magdalene College, Cambridge. He was a contributor to The English Sermon Revised (Manchester, 2000) and has published on seventeenth-century pamphleteering and on the editing of Shakespeare. Stephen K. Roberts is Section Editor (1640–60) of The History of Parliament. He is author of Recovery and Restoration in an English County: Devon Local Administration 1649–1670 (Exeter, 1985), and is working on a book on the revolutionary regime in Wales during the Interregnum. Jeanne Shami is Professor of English at the University of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. She is author of John Donne’s 1622 Gunpowder Plot Sermon: A Parallel-Text Edition (Pittsburgh, 1996), John Donne and Conformity in Crisis in the Late Jacobean Pulpit (Cambridge, 2003), editor of Renaissance Tropologies: The Cultural Imagination of Early Modern England (Pittsburgh, 2008), and General Editor of The Oxford Handbook of John Donne (Oxford, 2011). Carl Trueman is Vice President for Academic Affairs at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He is a student of seventeenth-century reformed orthodoxy, and his publications include Luther’s Legacy: Salvation and English Reformers, 1525–1556 (Oxford, 1994) and John Owen: Reformed Catholic, Renaissance Man (Farnham, 2007).

notes on contributors

xiii

Tom Webster is Lecturer in History at the University of Edinburgh. He is author of Godly Clergy in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2003), editor of the Diary of Samuel Rogers (Woodbridge, 2004), co-editor, with Francis J. Bremer, of Puritans and Puritanism in England and America (Santa Barbara, 2006), and is completing work on the relationship between diabolic possession and divine union. Lucy Wooding is Senior Lecturer in History at King’s College London. She is the author of Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England (Oxford, 2000) and Henry VIII (London, 2009).

Preface

Scholarly interest in early modern sermons has flourished in recent years, driven by recognition of the crucial importance of preaching to religious, cultural, and political life in post-Reformation Britain. Since the 1990s, the landscape of sermon studies has been transformed by an increasing number of seminal monographs, scholarly essays, and editions. However, no comprehensive survey of these significant developments has yet been undertaken. Mid-twentieth-century general accounts of early modern preaching focused largely on the formal literary accomplishments of major authors such as John Donne, Lancelot Andrewes, and Jeremy Taylor, with less consideration given to the content and context of their sermon prose. This volume considers the sermon as ‘literary art inextricably engaged in the public sphere’ (Ferrell and McCullough 2000: 2), and seeks to reflect the rich diversity of recent literary and historical studies. Emergent areas of interest represented here include research on sermons in performance, pulpit censorship, preaching and ecclesiology, women and sermons, the social, economic, and literary history of sermons in manuscript and print, non-elite preaching, and sermons preached in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. Generous use of illustrations we hope will encourage critical thinking about early modern sermons not just as texts, but also as vividly performative acts that involve auditory as well as preacher, and as crucial influences on ecclesiastical architecture. The volume also responds to the recently recognized need to extend thinking about the ‘early modern’ across the watershed of the Civil Wars and Interregnum, on both sides of which sermons and preaching remained a potent instrument of religious politics and a literary form of central importance to British culture. We hope that the volume will serve as a research tool—for experts in the field and for students new to it—that provides both a comprehensive guide to the key rhetorical, ecclesiological, and historical precepts essential to study of early modern sermons, and a wideranging essay collection illustrating the principal trends in recent research. The organization of the volume reflects the logic of its aims and rationale in five main sections: ‘Composition, Delivery, Reception’, ‘Sermons in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales’, two diachronic sections on English sermons (‘1500–1660’, ‘1660–1720’), and finally a series of documentary appendices, a select bibliography, and an index. Part I comprises articles ordered according to theme. Although designed to be approachable as surveys, they are all fresh, and in many cases entirely unprecedented pieces of original scholarship. Chapters in this part are for the most part synchronic assessments of late-medieval to early eighteenth-century trends. They map essential areas of the critical terrain, including: competing traditions of preaching theory and practice inherited from the later Middle Ages and adapted under pressures of the Reformation and later social and

preface

xv

religious change; the bibles and principal exegetical and illustrative sources (classical, patristic, and contemporary) used by early modern preachers; the performance and reception of sermons in their many varied original settings; the ‘afterlife’ of sermons in both manuscript and print; and, finally, an extended case study that illustrates the application of such textual and contextual methodologies to a single sermon by John Donne. Part II presents together for the first time original articles on the vibrant and unique conditions and achievements of preaching in the ‘archipelagic’ principality and kingdoms of Wales, Ireland, and Scotland respectively. Parts III and IV offer case studies of crucial aspects and moments in English pulpit history before and after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. In recognition of the limitations of regnal or other forms of periodization, editors and contributors are at pains to stress the continuities, as well as the distinctions, between preaching styles and content at both ends of the volume’s chronological spectrum. Discussion of sixteenth-century pulpit oratory, therefore, reaches back to pre-Reformation preaching theories and practices. Similarly, consideration of the pivotal role of preaching at moments of political change is not confined to the Civil Wars and Interregnum, but also focuses on the political and constitutional upheavals of 1688, and debates over ‘high’ and ‘low’ views of the Church of England under Queen Anne. The volume concludes with three appendixes of primary sources to aid understanding of the theories, reception, and regulation of preaching. The third of these (‘Preaching Regulated’) assembles in one place for the first time all the official acts and proclamations that governed preaching in England, Scotland, and Ireland from the Reformation to the late seventeenth century. The editors have endeavoured to cross reference as generously as possible between all chapters, illustrations, and appendices. In our judgement, a comprehensive bibliography that simply merged the lists of works cited at the end of each chapter would have been unwieldy, not least given the number of early modern sermon titles that are so unhelpfully similar (‘A Sermon’, etc.). Instead, we provide a ‘Select Bibliography’ that attempts to capture those works (mainly modern) that we deem most important to the field. For more detailed bibliography, readers should use the lists of works cited at the end of each chapter, and the index. These lists are organized in ways that best reflect the type and combination of sources used in each chapter. The detailed index should enable readers to find not only persons, places, and events, but also discussions of important thematic topics where they appear across the full range of the period-specific chapters. Even with a large collection like this one, dreams of comprehensiveness lead to some rude awakenings. It is a consolation, though, that the few gaps—most particularly the lack of literary or theological (versus political or bibliographical) discussion of mid-seventeenth-century nonconformist sermons, and of those by great Restoration divines such as South and Anderson—simply represent an area of opportunity yet to be taken up by scholars. It was a great sadness to the editors that ill health prevented Dr William Wizeman SJ from contributing an essay on Roman Catholic preaching in the reign of Mary Tudor; we warmly commend his 2006 monograph, along with seminal work by Eamon Duffy (2006, 2009) as worthy substitutes.

xvi

preface

As ever, editorial debts are too great and too many to number with any accuracy. We must, however, first thank our contributors for their professionalism and patience. Similarly, we must record our gratitude for the commissioning enthusiasm of Andrew McNeillie (then of OUP), and his successor, Jacqueline Baker. Several repositories and institutions have been invaluable in our attempt to restore a visual dimension to our subject, and we are thankful for assistance and permissions to reproduce illustrations from English Heritage, the Bodleian Library, The Huntington Library, Cardiff City Library, The Society of Antiquaries, and Special Collections, University of Birmingham. The costs associated with illustrations were generously funded by a grant from the Zilkha Trust, Lincoln College, Oxford. Peter McCullough, Lincoln College, Oxford Hugh Adlington, University of Birmingham Emma Rhatigan, University of Sheffield Note: In all quotations of early modern texts, whether print or manuscript, original spelling has been retained, though i/j, u/v, and long ‘s’ have been modernized and conventional contractions silently expanded. In a work such as this, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is crucial for authors, editors, and readers alike; all citations of it were checked against the ODNB Online, at the time of writing. For all bibliographical entries, place of publication is London unless otherwise cited. Two seminal studies of early modern preaching appeared too late to be used in this volume: Katrin Ettenhuber’s study of John Donne and Augustine (see Notes on Contributors), and Mary Morrissey’s Politics and the Paul’s Cross Sermons (Oxford, 2011).

pa rt i

COM POSITION, DE L I V ERY, R ECEP T ION

This page intentionally left blank

chapter 1

a rs pr ædica n di : theor ies a n d pr actice greg kneidel

At several points in the Christian Scriptures, Jesus’s disciples are told to go out and preach (see Matt. 10:27, Mark 16:15, Luke 9:12). But they are never told explicitly how to do it. While in practice there were innumerable sermons of various sorts delivered in the first millennium of the Christian Church, it was not until about 1200 that preaching began to be theorized as a technê or ars—that is, as a ‘set of rules that provide a definite method and system of speaking’ (Ars est præceptio, quae dat certam viam rationemque dicendi) ([Cicero] 1968: I.ii.3). The first section of this chapter will survey a few key discussions of preaching prior to 1200 in order to highlight some of the essential theoretical issues that would shape later treatises on the art of preaching. The second section will turn to the artes prædicandi or sermon manuals composed during the medieval and early modern periods. These manuals typically addressed (albeit unevenly) all the canons of classical rhetoric—that is, inventio, the discovery of things to say; dispositio, the arrangement of these discovered things; elocutio, the choice of style; memoria and actio, the memorization and the delivery of the speech. Since most of these canons will be discussed in greater detail elsewhere in this volume, I will focus primarily on the canon of dispositio or overall sermon structure. I hope to show that Jewish, classical, and early Christian rhetorical traditions were received and revised in the wake of both the Renaissance and the Reformation, so that, by the end of the seventeenth century, flexible versions of four basic sermon structures—the homily, the thematic sermon, the classical oration, and the doctrine-use scheme—had been theorized for the use of English preachers.

Augustine’s Legacy: Theory and Practice before 1200 Several Church Fathers discussed preaching in treatises written between the apostolic and medieval periods. Among the best known were John Chrysostom’s On the Priesthood



greg kneidel

(c.382) and Gregory the Great’s Book of Pastoral Rule (c.591). But these were tracts primarily on church governance, and they touch on preaching only within the purview of the Christian priest’s or bishop’s broader qualifications, obligations, and powers. The closest one gets to a rhetorical manual in the classical, Ciceronian sense is Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine (bks 1–3, c.396; bk 4, 427), and even it provided very little systematic, prescriptive, how-to guidance on the composition and delivery of sermons. What it offered instead was a massively influential theoretical justification for adapting basic concepts from the pagan rhetorical arts to Christian ends. So, for example, Augustine defines the Christian preacher’s officia or duties as essentially those of the classical orator: to teach, delight, and move (docere, delectare, and flectere, or movere) (1958: 136). The style of his preaching can be classified, provisionally at least, using a lexicon—low or subdued, moderate, elevated or grand—borrowed from classical sources (1958: 145–64). And his ability to move his audience is both validated and enhanced by the fact that he himself is moved, the fire of godly passion in his heart enflaming the hearts of his listeners, just as Horace had recommended (see Augustine 1958; 145, 150–1; cf. Shuger 1988: 227–40). Using an allegorical argument first devised by Origen, Augustine compared the pagan arts of discourse (that is, grammar, logic, rhetoric) to the so-called spoils of Egypt: just as the fleeing Israelites plundered the golden idols and jewellery of their Egyptian masters so that they had the raw materials with which later to honour their Lord as they wander through the desert, so too could Christian orators plunder the ideas and techniques of their pagan predecessors so that they had language skills with which to serve their Lord as they built up the worldly church (1958: 74–5; cf. Exod. 3–22, 12–35). Because of its explicitly syncretic agenda and broad influence, On Christian Doctrine has been lauded as both the last great treatise of the classical rhetorical tradition and the very foundation of Christian eloquence (Fumaroli 1980: 70–1). But the story of Augustine’s seminal contribution to the history of preaching is not quite so easily told. Augustine himself admitted that some crucial adjustments had to be made if Ciceronian rhetoric was to serve Christian ends, including the basic concession that rhetoric could only serve. It was useful but by no means essential. To take a more concrete example, while pagan rhetoricians dictated that an orator’s style should suit his subject matter, Augustine reasoned that, for Christian orators, there simply could be no low or even moderate subject matter: Among our orators . . . everything we say, especially when we speak to the people from the pulpit, must be referred, not to the temporal welfare of man, but to his eternal welfare and to the avoidance of eternal punishment, so that everything we say is of great importance, even to the extent that pecuniary matters, whether they concern loss or gain, or large or small amounts of money, should not be considered ‘small’ when they are discussed by the Christian teacher. (1958: 143–4; see also Mazzeo 1962: 183–6)

From concessions such as these, modern commentators have discerned a kind of false consciousness in Augustine’s attempt to baptize classical rhetoric. Most crucially, they have charged that his ultimate goal is not to teach, delight, or move a specific group of listeners, but to contemplate silently God’s eternal, immutable truth. Joseph Mazzeo, in

ars prædicandi: theories and practice



his 1962 essay on Augustine’s ‘Rhetoric of Silence’, was one of the first to highlight the incongruities between Augustine’s Ciceronian rhetoric and his Platonizing theology, and Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle has recently given his argument a more polemic formulation. Augustine, she writes: set the stage for the clerical resort to rhetoric as a sop to the laity. With intellectualist bias, Augustine reduced Scripture, already lamented as crude, to divine baby talk . . . Rhetoric was a condescension to the flesh, to motivate persons from the corporeal to the spiritual. Its metaphor of service was female and pejorative, a breastfeeding mother (contemplation was male and chaste). Ciceronian precepts were her toys. Truth was apprehended by contemplation, which ascended to the Word beyond words: to silence. (Boyle 2001: 665–6)

For Boyle, Augustine merely gave theological flavouring to the ancient attack on rhetoric by philosophy, and he sided with philosophy. But if ‘Augustine was ultimately, profoundly antirhetorical’ (Boyle 2001: 666), then a lot depends on the adverbs ‘ultimately’ and ‘profoundly’, which hugely discount the preacher’s other, more proximate and communal goals. Such goals are hard to articulate using the antitheses (for example, temporal versus eternal, mutable versus immutable, image versus idea, spoken versus silent, flesh versus spirit, words versus Word) that Augustine derived from one strand of Pauline thinking and that were, as Boyle insists, strongly coded in terms of gender, sex, and class difference. These antitheses recur in, and at times threaten to undermine, the Christian ars prædicandi altogether. But the preacher’s other goals, which might be called ecclesiastical as opposed to theological, could be formulated in equally Pauline and more rhetorically conducive terms: harmony, edification, accommodation, participation, and, above all, charity. Moreover, although it takes modern critics (typically ratiocinating silently and in solitude at their computers) only a handful of sentences to deconstruct Augustine’s logic, there is ample evidence in On Christian Doctrine that Augustine thought that preachers in the pulpit should desire neither contemplative silence nor, as their pagan counterparts had, congratulatory applause. Instead, he writes, the lasting effect of preaching is shown ‘through [the audience’s] groans, sometimes even through tears, and finally through a change of their way of life’ (Augustine 1958: 161; see also Schaeffer 1996 and John Chrysostom 1885: 73). Embedded within such critiques of Augustine’s anti-rhetorical rhetoric are assumptions about three topics—sacred scripture, priestly authority, and audience psychology— that figured centrally in medieval and early modern theories of preaching as well. It has been recognized that Christian oratory differs from classical rhetoric because it takes as one of its primary tasks the explication of a sacred text. That is, the idea that an authoritative, apodictic truth resides within a written text is alien to the classical rhetorical tradition that trafficked instead, even in its forensic aspects, in opinions, beliefs, and probabilities (Murphy 1974: 269–75; Edwards 2004: 3–26). Scripturalism is thus a measure both of the departure Christian rhetoricians took from their pagan predecessors and of the debt they owed to Jewish synagogue worship and rabbinical commentaries, which likewise centred on a sanctified written text. (The pagan grammarian, steeped in detailed philological understandings of canonical literary texts such as Homer and Virgil, is



greg kneidel

another mediating figure.) Scripturalism also gave form to one of the most long-standing structures of sermon discourse: the homily, a word-by-word or phrase-by-phrase explanation of the meaning (or levels of meaning) of a lengthy scriptural passage. Jesus himself presumably used this form to teach the elders in the Temple in Jerusalem at the tender age of 12; he adapted it later when he had to explain his own parables to his somewhat baffled disciples (Matt. 13). It is the form of numerous patristic sermons, including influential series by John Chrysostom on Paul’s Epistles, Augustine on the Gospels, and Bernard on the Song of Songs.1 As a compositional form, the homily defers to the written sequence of the scriptural text, so that it is sometimes treated as an inartistic, formless form (Spencer 1994: 235–6). Importantly, it also assumes that the scriptural text, no matter how perfect and divinely inspired, is or has become obscure. The Word is Truth; but it also needs careful explaining. (The tension between these two positions led, among other things, to the idea that the Bible is self-interpreting—that is, that obscure biblical texts can be explained by other, less obscure biblical texts.) Thus, as most later sermon rhetoricians would, Augustine devotes much of On Christian Doctrine to hermeneutics or the discovery of clear Christian meaning out of scriptural texts whose meaning is clouded by complex allegories, logical contradictions, and stylistic barbarisms. Indeed, Augustine argues that obscure scriptural texts are ‘useful and healthful’ because the ‘more these things seem to be obscured by figurative words, the sweeter they become when they are explained’ (1958: 132, 128–9). This counter-intuitive, pro-obscurity argument is striking, not least because, as Peter Brown has recently observed, Augustine seems to be attempting to create a God in his own image and likeness: We cannot help noticing the extent to which the ‘Divine eloquence’ of God is the eloquence of a Late Roman writer. For no one else would have made such a cult of veiling his meaning. Such a man lived among fellow-connoisseurs, who had been steeped too long in too few books. He no longer needed to be explicit: only hidden meaning, rare and difficult words and elaborate circumlocutions, could save his readers from boredom, from fastidium, from that loss of interest in the obvious, that afflicts the overcultured man. He would believe . . . that the sheer difficulty of a work of literature made it more valuable—a sinister way of thinking in an age when educated men tended to form a caste, rebuffing the outsider by their possession of the ancient authors. (P. Brown 2000: 256–7; emphasis added)

Although he is talking here specifically of scriptural interpretation, Brown’s characterization of Augustine—as an ‘overcultured man’ who cited or even invented the veiled meaning of scripture in order to ‘form a caste’ with other ‘educated men’ and, in so doing, to rebuff ‘the outsider’—speaks also to an important but sometimes concealed goal of theorizing preaching as an art: the creation of a distinct preaching caste. That is, rules about how to preach helped to delimit who could preach. Like Paul and later church 1 Mazzeo infers that Augustine addresses all the parts of rhetorical composition (i.e., inventio, elocutio, memoria, actio) except dispositio in On Christian Doctrine, because he would have taken the word-by-word, verse-by-verse homily as the assumed sermon form (Mazzeo 1962: 176 n. 5). See also Edwards (2004: 27–48).

ars prædicandi: theories and practice



officials, Augustine wrote against opponents who claimed the authority to preach on purely notional or non-artistic grounds such as esoteric knowledge (gnôsis or scientia), divine inspiration (pneuma or spiritus), or the receipt of an extraordinary gift (charisma or gratia). Augustine censures ‘those who exult in divine assistance’ and those who disparage any hermeneutic principles and rhetorical precepts as ‘superfluous’; ‘although they may rightfully rejoice in the great gift God has given them, they should remember that they have learned at least the alphabet from men’ (1958: 4; emphasis added). This argument ab origine discredits preachers who claim to operate beyond the pale of merely human pedagogy or institutional training. At the same time, however, the godly preacher is not simply the product of such a pedagogy or training. As Mazzeo explains, for Augustine ‘skill in speaking . . . precedes the rules, and eloquent men embody only those rules which are merely generalizations based on their practice. One cannot use rules to become eloquent and, if you do speak well, it is not by thinking of the rules as you speak’ (Mazzeo 1962: 177; cf. Augustine 1958: 119–21). Theologically, the idea that eloquence precedes the rules of art prevents the preacher from stealing God’s show by arrogantly claiming for himself the artistic achievements that are rightfully not his but His. Professionally, the same idea creates a barrier to entry that is all the more effective for being nebulously defined (if you have to ask what the rules are, you probably should not be playing). This idea had a long history in the related principle that the height of any art is to conceal itself (ars est celare artem) and would have a lasting legacy as a kind of sermonic sprezzatura or calculated effortlessness that some preaching traditions would valorize and others discredit. Taken to its extreme, this argument for concealing evidence of artistic effort or human learning threatened to sever efficacy from ethics altogether. Augustine framed the issue in moral terms: ‘it may happen that an evil and wicked man may compose a sermon in which truth is preached which is spoken by another not wicked but good’ (1958: 167). Questions about the vital link between rhetorical efficacy and professional ethics were chronic. They recurred, for example, in the late sixteenth century when Puritans and conformists debated the value of having unlearned preachers read sermons taken regularly from the First and Second Book of Homilies (1547 and 1571; see Null, Chapter 17, this vol.), which were promulgated by the Elizabethan church’s more learned bishops (and which, incidentally, were not homilies in the formal sense). Augustine raises the spectre of hypocrisy (bad man, good sermon) because the preacher was also ‘an example to others’ (1958: 166). Just as for Milton the poet is himself a poem, so too, from Paul onwards, the preacher has himself been a sermon. He should, according to the Franciscan slogan, preach constantly and use words only if necessary. The psychological and spiritual status of a preacher’s audience or, in a more pastoral context, his congregation was a perennial concern of theories of preaching. Like other rhetorics, theories of preaching needed to explain why we need preaching in the first place; why we need to be taught, delighted, and moved; why, in short, we get things wrong. In the Christian context the answer was, of course, the Fall and its deleterious effects on all the faculties of human psychology (for example, senses, understanding, will, memory, and, most centrally if elusively, emotions). Again, from the earliest days of the church, it was recognized that different members of the same church could be afflicted differently.



greg kneidel

Paul struggled to reconcile the ‘weak’ and the ‘strong’ in Corinth; Augustine talked of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ grades of spiritual and scriptural understanding (1958: 94); Gregory the Great organized his Book of Pastoral Care around some thirty-seven different antithetical character types that a preacher is likely to encounter (for example, novice and learned; habitual and wilful sinners). Updating this tradition near the end of the sixteenth century, the Puritan rhetorician William Perkins determined that ‘the divers condition of men and people’ was ‘sevenfold’: ‘Unbeleevers who are both ignorant and unteachable’; ‘Some are teachable, but yet ignorant’; ‘Some have knowledge, but are not as yet humbled’; ‘Some are humbled’; ‘Some doe beleeve’; ‘Some are fallen’; ‘There is a mingled people’ (Perkins 1607: 102–22).2 In his truncated catalogue, Perkins does not recognize, as Gregory does, differences in social status (for example, rich and poor, masters and servants, single and married). But recent historicizing scholarship has demonstrated that these differences mattered and, whether or not they were acknowledged in theory, they had taken institutional form as venues and occasions where one group could be reasonably assumed to predominate (for example, in rural parishes or outdoor pulpits, at court or in parliament, before clerical, academic, or other professional societies). Gregory also classifies listeners according to what we might now call personality traits (for example, talkative and silent; obstinate and fickle; fearful and brazen). These traits could be difficult to discern and, Gregory says, it is ‘indeed a serious labour for the preacher to keep an eye in his public preaching to the hidden affections and motives of individuals, and, after the manner of the palaestra, to turn himself with skill to either side’ (1885: 70; in the original the last clause reads ‘in diversi lateris arte se vertere’). Just as it served the preaching caste to veil the meaning of scripture (so it could be expertly unveiled), so too did it serve the preaching caste to differentiate the motives of listeners (so they could be expertly discerned). Gregory’s wrestler–preacher must be prepared to take on all-comers, pick up on their tendencies, strengths, and weaknesses, and skilfully adapt his tactics to succeed against anyone (the more common analogies were to a physician and his patients, or to a tailor and his clients). This emphasis on the preacher’s discernment and versatility would be underscored centuries later by George Herbert (see App. I.12): When [a country parson] preacheth, he procures attention by all possible art, both by earnestnesse of speech, it being naturall to men to think, that where is much earnestness, there is somewhat worth hearing; and by a diligent, and busy cast of his eye on his auditors, with letting them know, that he observes who marks, and who not; and with particularizing of his speech now to the younger sort, then to the elder, now to the poor, and now to the rich. This is for you, and This is for you; for particulars ever touch, and awake more then generals. (1945: 232–3; emphasis added)

Gregory’s and Herbert’s scriptural model for this skilled, prudent, and tactical minister—who is at the same time artful and earnest and diligent—was Saint Paul, who

2 By ‘unbeleevers’, Perkins does not mean pagans or heathens who have never heard of Christianity. Theories of preaching to non-Christians seem to have arisen because of missionary activities in the New World (cf. Valadés 1989: 163–227) and, later in England, the development of deism (cf. Care 1683: 67–82).

ars prædicandi: theories and practice



famously boasted that he had become ‘all things to all men, that [he] might by all means save some’ (1 Cor. 9:22). But one of the legacies of Paul’s totalizing rhetoric of ecclesiastical incorporation (‘So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another’ (Rom. 12:5)) was that sermon theorists also recognized the danger (towards which Herbert’s ‘This is for you, and This is for you’ seems to veer) of excessive accommodating and of minute particularizing—that is, the danger that charitable admonishing of particular individuals could lapse into divisive score-settling and scandal-mongering. The communal whole had to be edified as well as the individual part and, in the event, most often ‘there is a mingled people’. These then are some of the key recurrent issues—concerning scripture, preacher, and audience—that would come to shape theories and practices of preaching in early modern England. How could scriptures be at the same time sacred, authoritative, and obscure? How could a caste of skilled preachers distinguish themselves from the nonpreaching laity, from classically trained rhetors, and even from God Himself, whose divine artistry precedes and exceeds all human art? And how could the spiritual, social, psychological differences of a sermon audience be recognized and accounted for, in terms of both the individual believer and the communal church? These questions were discussed and even controverted in the early church. But they were broached primarily in treatises about what, not how, to preach. One reason was that, as James J. Murphy has pointed out, before 1200 the Christian preaching tradition lacked any ‘analytic spirit that would have enabled a rhetorical observer to distill a number of critical experiences into a statement of theory’ (1974: 311).

From Medieval to Early Modern: Theory and Practice after 1200 It was precisely an ‘analytic spirit’ that was suddenly manifested when, ‘within twenty years of 1200’, ‘a whole new rhetoric of preaching leaped into prominence, unleashing hundreds of theoretical manuals’ that standardized a ‘form of preaching’ (Murphy 1974: 310). The form that these artes prædicandi created is most often called the thematic sermon, and historians have struggled to understand where it came from and why it appeared when it did. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) had made annual confession compulsory, thus presumably necessitating more preaching to encourage compliance; such preaching could be provided by Dominican and Franciscan friars, whose orders were founded in 1216 and 1223, respectively. The thematic sermon was also closely linked to university culture (it is sometimes called the ‘university’ or ‘school’ sermon): the artes were written in Latin and assumed preaching would be done in Latin; they betrayed affinities with scholastic theological disputation, and their standards were used to evaluate the competence of candidates for theological degrees. Murphy has argued that the main components of the thematic sermon existed first outside the universities and were subsequently codified by academicians into a prescriptive form. Whether or not this



greg kneidel

was the case, the success of the Dominicans and Franciscans indicates that the form characterized not just learned Latin but popular vernacular preaching as well. It is dangerous to discuss a single form of the thematic sermon: hundreds of artes, each presumably with at least some minimal variations to offer, were written; yet few have been edited by modern scholars and fewer still translated. Nuances aside, the primary impact of the thematic sermon on later, early modern preaching can be stated in fairly basic terms. First, it foregrounds a single scriptural passage (the theme or thema); and, second, it structures the body of the sermon according to the all-important artistic division of the theme. Whereas the patristic homily addresses a fairly lengthy scriptural passage (usually derived from liturgical readings) and then proceeds to explicate this passage systematically according to the order of the text (secundum ordinem textus), the thematic sermon foregrounds a shorter scriptural verse that is usually announced after an introductory prelude (the antetheme) and then followed by a brief prayer. Then comes the divisio, which splits the theme into parts (between two and four; more parts were possible but felt to be egregious) that are then often further subdivided into subparts. These parts and subparts provide the skeletal structure of the sermon. Each part or subpart can be dilated or filled out by various kinds of proofs—scriptural interpretations, pagan and patristic authorities, elaborate allegories and personifications, moral exempla, popular fables. ‘The net effect,’ according to Murphy, ‘is a series of mini-sermons, each complete with its own proposition (the statement of subdivision) and its own proofs, yet relating to the original theme because all the divisions and subdivisions have been derived from it’ (1974: 316). A concluding peroration reiterates or recombines the original terms of the division in a way that underscores the relationship of all these mini-sermons to the sermon’s theme. From an artistic perspective, God (or the devil) was in the divisio. It could be made by treating in seriatim words or clauses from the thematic text. Or, in what was technically called a distinctio, it could be made by using terms not derived from the thematic text, in which case the burden was then on the preacher—and his concordances and dictionaries—to link his precise terms to those of the scriptural theme (Spencer 1994: 233–5). The two approaches could be mixed, as in John Fisher’s famous 1521 sermon against the ‘pernicious doctryn of Martin Luther’ (see App. I.1). Fisher’s theme is John 15:26, which he Englishes as: ‘whan the comforter shall come whom I shall sende unto you, the spyryte of trouthe that yssueth from my father, he shall bere wytnesse of me.’ Fisher’s antetheme picks up on John’s language of impeding danger and promised presence and it compares Luther to an approaching thunderstorm. Then he states the division, which partitions the theme into three ‘instruccyons’, which ‘shall undermyne. iii. great groundes wher upon Martyn dothe stable in maner all his articles, and the fourth shall answere to the defence that is made for hym by his adherentes’ (Fisher 2002: 77–8). After a brief prayer, Fisher proceeds to the first instruction, which corresponds roughly to the first two clauses of the theme (‘When the comforter shall come . . . from my father’). After the subparts of the first part are dilated (some with even further subdivisions), Fisher proceeds to the ‘seconde instruccyon’, on his theme’s final clause, ‘he shall bere wytnesse or gyve evydence of me’ (2002: 83). This part is not subdivided further. The third ‘instruccyon’

ars prædicandi: theories and practice



takes up the next scriptural verse (John 15:27). It is further subdivided according to the three persons of the Holy Trinity. Fisher jokes that if there were a fourth person of the Holy Trinity, ‘we myght yet be in some doute wheder Martyn Luther had met with this spiryte by the waye and conveyed hym from us’ (2002: 90). Luther, a heretical, antiTrinitarian fourth wheel, returns soon thereafter when Fisher breaks off from his pattern of scriptural divisions to begin his fourth ‘instruccyon’, which offers counterarguments to ‘thre poyntes’ English heretics often make in Luther’s defence (2002: 92). Fisher’s sermon is thus structured by his theme; but it also marshals all sorts of arguments in order to associate his central term (heresy) with the exact terms of his scriptural theme. Whether the division and subdivisions followed the text’s words (ad verbum), its sense (ad rem), or, as in Fisher’s sermon, both, the theory was that the division made the audience more attentive because it offered signals for listeners to watch for as the sermon developed—in theory with attentiveness but often, no doubt, with dread. To do that, the division and the subdivisions had to be memorable and, to make them more memorable and, not coincidentally, to demonstrate the preacher’s technical competence, the division could be phrased in highly contrived, ornate figures of speech such as homoioptoton, homoioteleuton, isocolon, paronomasia, polyptoton. Sometimes the parts of the division were made to rhyme; at others, their key terms formed acrostics. The rules for elegantly formulating the division of the theme became so arcane and so far removed from practical effect that one historian has compared them to breed standards applied by judges at a dog show (Edwards 2004: 221). As the lynchpin of the sermon’s structure and the fetish of its practitioners, the division eventually also became the focal point of attacks on the thematic form. On the one hand, the division catered to the intellectual prejudices of clerics by imitating the features of scholastic disputation (making distinctions, posing questions, quibbling over terms). On the other hand, it also tolerated and even encouraged the introduction of all manner of non-scriptural proofs—the much maligned allegories, personifications, legends, exempla, fables, and lore—that played to popular tastes. Among the clerics, it was too scholastic; among the people, it was too vulgar. These two critiques of the thematic sermon gained momentum in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries thanks to the Renaissance’s pursuit of eloquence and the Reformation’s pursuit of godliness. Walter O’Malley has shown that the first challenge to the dominance of the thematic sermon was offered by the cultural elite in fifteenth-century Rome, who, especially in their funeral orations and sermons delivered in the papal courts, revived the topoi and organizational principles of the classical demonstrativum genus (that is, speeches of praise and blame).3 For O’Malley, this revival led to a fundamental shift from scholasticism to humanism, from theology to history, and from minute disputation over abstract subtleties to rousing praise of exemplary lives (O’Malley 1979: 36–76). Extending O’Malley’s findings, Frederick J. McGinness has 3 For a countering argument—that the medieval ars prædicandi derived its penchant for subtle distinctions and exquisite wordplay from ancient demonstrative rhetoric—see Kinneavy (1986).



greg kneidel

shown that a continuity between early Italian humanists and late-seventeenth-century pulpit orators was established through ‘a new genre of preaching materials, the “ecclesiastical rhetoric” (rhetorica ecclesiastica)’ that ‘became prominent in the mid 1570s’ and ‘almost overnight . . . virtually displaced the older medieval preaching handbooks’ (1995: 49), especially in Italy, Spain, and other Roman Catholic regions. These ecclesiastical rhetorics, produced by learned humanist churchmen such as Luis de Granada, Diego de Estella, Agostino Valier, Ludovico Carbone, Carlo Reggio, and Nicholas Caussin, championed the ideal preacher as a ‘culture hero’ whose pursuit of eloquence led him to follow the paths blazed by ‘the orator-statesmen of Athens and Rome’ (McGinness 1995: 16; see also Caplan and King 1949). In the first half of the sixteenth century, church reformers, Catholic and Protestant alike, also rejected the thematic sermon, though for different reasons (see also Wooding Kostyanovsky, Chapter 16, this volume). Chief among these Catholic reformers was Desiderius Erasmus. His massive Ecclesiastes, sive de ratione concionandi (1535) signalled a permanent shift away from the medieval ars prædicandi towards the early modern rhetoricæ ecclesiasticæ, and so it exerted an influence on the later history of the art of preaching exceeded only by Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine. Erasmus laid out an art of preaching on a Ciceronian model. Book One covers the ‘dignity, purity, prudence, and other virtues of the preacher [ecclesiastes]’; Book Two concerns invention; Book Three discusses memory, delivery, and elocution; and Book Four catalogues frequently used subjects. He also advocates structuring sermons according to the model of the classical genus deliberativum so that they contain the following basic parts: exordium, narration, division, confirmation, refutation, and conclusion (see McCullough 2006). But in Book One of Ecclesiastes Erasmus explains at length that the proper model for the Christian preacher is not the ‘culture hero’ on the order of the great statesmen of classical antiquity, but rather Christ himself, whose dual nature allows him to reconcile the conflicting imperatives that commanded the humanist preacher to be both prudently circumspect and devoutly pure. In effect, Erasmus tries to integrate the humanist rhetorical curriculum into the medieval imitatio Christi tradition, and Ecclesiastes reads like a monumental refusal to perceive any fundamental fissure between classical humanism and Christian piety. Over and over again, Erasmus recognizes the potential conflicts between the preacher’s worldly methods and spiritual ends; but over and over again he asserts that these conflicts are surmountable, because human art and divine inspiration cooperate to guide the Christ-like preacher who is wise as a serpent and innocent as a dove. Though a generation younger, Erasmus’s counterpart as a sermon reformer among Protestants was Luther’s protégé, Philipp Melanchthon. Between 1529 and 1553 he published four, much shorter but seminally influential tracts on preaching. These too look to ancient models but with greater reservations. In the earliest, Melanchthon repudiates the genre of demonstrative oratory: the Italian preachers, like declaimers in their school exercises (in ludo), exploited its topoi to adorn their cult of saints and to exalt worksrighteousness (1968: 6). Melanchthon likewise rejects judicial oratory: why should the preacher use the procedures of courtroom argumentation (in foro) when he could simply point to the indisputable witness of scripture (‘certissima scripturæ testimonia’)

ars prædicandi: theories and practice



(1968: 6–7)? Of the three classical genres, there remained only deliberative rhetoric, the genre most explicitly concerned with exhorting listeners to good deeds (see Melanchthon 1968: 51). For this reason, deliberative rhetoric would become a mainstay in the later rhetorica ecclesiastica, even though it often travelled under more properly scriptural nomenclature. Later sermon theorists would describe the redargutive sermon—a term borrowed from a Latin verb that the King James Version of the Bible translates once as ‘to stop the mouths of ’ (Titus 1:11)—as one designed ‘to confute or overthrow an error or heresy’ (Bernard 1607: 6). A further taxonomy of sermon types was drawn from the concluding clause of Paul’s statement that ‘All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness’ (2 Tim. 3:16; cf. 1 Cor. 14:3; cf. Hyperius 1577: 54v; Perkins 1607: 126–9). The sermon ‘for doctrine’ (pros didaskalian or ad docendum) was so important that Melanchthon elevated it to its own genus (1968: 7–10). Under its title he defended the ancient homily as the form closest to catechism and so best suited to indoctrination. But Melanchthon does not advise imitating ancient homilists. Instead, he recommends instructing and exhorting, tasks that he combines and recombines in various ways. In one tract, Melanchthon states that the preacher should first divide, then define, and lastly argue (‘concionator primum dividat, deinde definiat, postremo argumentetur’ (1968: 17)); the first two tasks focus on doctrine and the last on exhortation (1968: 51; cf. 7–14). Melanchthon’s late tract On the System of Preaching (1553) begins with the plain assertion that the most useful of all rules of preaching is that the sermon on any text should go back and forth from thesis (a general doctrine or belief) to hypothesis (a particular activity or case) (1968: 59, 59 n. 1; Kreitzer 2001: 49–52). Later he states that this back and forth movement between hypothesis and thesis in effect structures the whole of the sermon, from the beginning to the middle and end (Melanchthon 1968: 75). Later Protestant sermon rhetoricians—Andreas Hyperius (see App. I.6), Niels Hemmingsen (see App. I.4), Gerhard Vossius, and, most influentially, Bartholomaus Keckermann—developed Melanchthon’s initial attempts to reform, not reject, the classical rhetorical tradition according to Protestantism’s scriptural ideals. Also in Melanchthon’s writings can be discerned the germ of the dominant sermon form among English Puritans from the late sixteenth century onwards, the doctrine-use scheme that resembles his thesis-to-hypothesis pendulum (cf. Morrissey 2002: 693). The doctrineuse scheme put great faith in method, though its idea of method owes less to Melanchthon than to the French dialectician Peter Ramus. The influence of Ramist method is everywhere apparent in William Perkins’s seminal Puritan preaching manual, The Arte of Prophecying (1592; trans. 1607; see App. I.8), which summarizes the ‘sacred and only methode of Preaching’ this way: 1. To read the Text distinctly out of the Canonicall Scriptures. 2. To give the sense and understanding of it being read, by the Scripture it selfe. 3. To collect a few and profitable points of doctrine out of the naturall sense. 4. To applie (if he have the gift) the doctrines rightly collected to the life and manners of men, in a simple and plaine speech. (Perkins 1607: 148)



greg kneidel

fig. 1 Diagram for sermon ‘explication’ from John Wilkins, Ecclesiastes (1646).

In keeping with steps 1 and 2, Perkins spends a good portion of The Arte discussing rules for biblical interpretation; he recommends especially the familiar interpretative trinity of comparison with the ‘analogie of faith’, explication of ‘circumstances’, and ‘collation or comparing of places’ (1607: 32). After reading and explaining the text, the preacher cuts it into doctrinal bits ‘whereby the word is made fit to edifie the people of God’ (1607: 90). Although Melanchthon had written that one of the preacher’s tasks was to divide the scriptural text, Perkins employs a more precise term, ‘right cutting’ (orthotomia) (cf. 2 Tim. 2:15), that ‘is a Metaphor taken . . . from the Levites, who might not cut the members of the sacrifices without due consideration’ (1607: 90). This ‘right cutting’ consists of two parts: resolution, ‘whereby the place propounded is, as a weavers web, resolved (or untwisted and unloosed) into sundrie doctrines’ (1607: 91); and application, ‘whereby the doctrine rightlie collected is diversly fitted according as place, time, and person doe require’ (1607: 99). The basic types of application are mental (that is, influencing how we think) or practical (that is, influencing how we act), and its chief aim is to

ars prædicandi: theories and practice



fig. 2 Diagram for sermon ‘confirmation’ from John Wilkins, Ecclesiastes (1646).

distinguish a ‘sentence of the Law’ that declares ‘the disease of sinne’ from a statement ‘of the Gospel’ that ‘speaketh of Christ and his benefits’. The binary opposition of law and gospel gives a theological grounding to Perkins’s methodical division-making, even if this binary opposition teeters a bit when Perkins admits that ‘many sentences, which seem to belonge to the Law, are by reason of Christ, to bee understood not legally . . . but with the qualification of the Gospell’. Nevertheless, Perkins insists that the ‘Law . . . is the first in the order of teaching; and the Gospell second’ (1607: 100–1). Perkins’s preacher delivers good news and bad news, and the bad news always comes first. Both the method and the theology that Perkins endorses can be discerned in a sermon by his contemporary, Samuel Hieron, entitled A Remedie for Securitie. Hieron takes as his text James 4:9: ‘Let your Laughter be turned into mourning, and your Joy into heaviness.’ His puritanical attack on the ‘sinne of Securitie’ (Hieron 1609: 1)—a term that, for all its modern political, military, and financial connotations, translates literally as ‘carelessness’ and tracks back eventually to the Epicurean ideal of ataraxia— follows Perkins’s law-then-gospel ordering by ironically inverting the usual value of



greg kneidel

fig. 3 Diagram for sermon ‘application’ from John Wilkins, Ecclesiastes (1646).

James’s key terms: the first main part of the sermon offers ‘a Restraint from something which is evill; Laughter and Joy’, and the second main part offers ‘a perswasion to a Good contrarie thereunto, Mourning and Heavines’ (Hieron 1609: 2). Each of these main parts is further subdivided (there is a ‘Holy Joy’ and a ‘Hellish Joy’; there is a ‘Worldly Mourning’ and a ‘Godly Mourning’ (1609: 2, 10)) and each of the four subparts is cloyed with scriptural references, some of which are arranged within lists of ‘reasons’ or ‘respects.’ At the conclusion of each of the two main parts, Hieron explains the uses that make the doctrines of evil joy and godly mourning ‘agreeth with the Times’ (1609: 8). After finishing the two main parts that he had initially laid out following the division of the text, Hieron enumerates by way of peroration God’s four ‘motives’ for promoting a gospel of mourning and heaviness in the first place. Hieron even ‘applies’ God’s benign motives to those of his particular audience, a group of Plymouth merchants. These merchants’ ‘trading stands upon exchange’, and they admire the prosperous man ‘who can put away some ill-conditioned ware for a more current commodity’. That is just what God has done and wants us to do: ‘Behold here the best excha[n]ge

ars prædicandi: theories and practice



which you ever made, Let your Laughter be turned into Mourning, and your Joy into Heavines’ (1609: 25–6). As Hieron’s brief and rather depressing concluding gesture towards his audience’s business activities suggests, the tension between preaching ‘rightly’ and preaching ‘diversely’ is especially taut in Puritan sermon rhetoric. The comparison that Perkins makes between a preacher cutting his text and the Levite priest cutting his sacrifice posits a model preacher who is qualitatively different from Gregory’s wrestler, Erasmus’s Christ, or the Catholic rhetorica ecclesiastica tradition’s ‘culture-hero’. Even though Perkins’s preacher ‘cuts the members of ’ his text with ‘due consideration’ (‘non temere’ in the Latin original), this must mean consideration for ceremonial law, which by definition does not vary, rather than consideration for the audience’s spiritual, social, or psychological needs, which very likely do. In keeping with his ritualistic imagery, Perkins argues that the methodical movement from text to doctrine to use largely eliminates the need for a canon of dispositio in the classical sense. Method, not art, structures the sermon, just as ceremonial laws, not priestly discretion, structure a ritual. In keeping with the Ramist programme of impoverishing the classical canons of rhetoric, Perkins likewise argues that method eliminates the need for anything resembling a canon of memory, especially the pictorial medieval ars memoria. This kind of ‘artificial memorie, which standeth upon places and images’, is easy to use but ‘not to be approoved’ because the ‘animation of the image, which is the key of memory, is impious’. It is impious because it ‘requireth absurd, insolent and prodigious cogitations, and those especially, which set an edge upon and kindle the most corrupt affections of the flesh’; Perkins concludes that the preacher should ‘diligentlie imprint in his mind by the helpe of disposition either axiomaticall, or syllogisticall, or methodicall the severall doctrines of the place he meanes to handle, the several proofes and applications of the doctrines, the illustrations of the applications, and the order of them all’ (1607: 130–1; emphasis added). Ramist method and the doctrine-use scheme supplant the canons of disposition and memory and (according to Perkins) thereby protect the preacher and listener alike from ‘the most corrupt affections of the flesh’ that are enflamed when their minds turn to images instead of to method. So, by the beginning of the seventeenth century, four basic sermon forms—the homily, the thematic sermon, the classical oration, and the doctrine-use scheme—had been theorized, taught to, and practised by English preachers. Some preachers, of course, especially those associated with the radical sects that flourished in the tumult of the Civil War years, rejected these sermon forms altogether and opted instead to mimic scriptural or prophetic forms instead. Many preachers added wrinkles to Perkins’s ‘sacred and only Method of preaching’—for example, reasons or proofs were required after a statement of doctrine; use and application were distinguished; objections or questions, along with corresponding answers, could be interposed, giving the sermon a touch of catechesis. But, while no one had nice things to say about the thematic sermon, English sermon theorists devoted most of their energy to refining or recombining the structuring elements of the other three forms. Richard Bernard, for example, takes an omnibus approach and outlines, in his rather homespun sermon manual The Faithfull Shepheard



greg kneidel

(see App. I.9), the following sermon structure: prayer, preface, text, analysis, doctrine, use, application, prevention of objections, and conclusion (Bernard 1607: 13–81). Later in the century, the Latitudinarian John Wilkins graphically presents three ‘chief parts’ of a sermon, which he entitles explication (Fig. 1), confirmation (Fig. 2), and application (Fig. 3) (see also Dixon, Chapter 23, this volume). This schematic presentation owes much to Ramus, but Wilkins’s terms are borrowed from Perkins and ultimately derive from Melanchthon. Yet Wilkins also adds briefly that these three chief parts should be stitched together with a preface, transitions, and a conclusion (1646: 7); and he notes later that he has chosen not to dwell on the possible help to be found in the three classical genres of oratory, not because they are not helpful but because they are already too well known to his readers (1646: 104). And at the end of the century, Gilbert Burnet, to take one final example, writes that ‘Sermons are reduced to the plain opening the Meaning of the Text, in a few short Illustrations of its Coherence with what goes before and after, and of the Parts of which it is composed; to that is joined the clear stating of such Propositions as arise out of it, in their Nature, Truth, and Reasonableness’ (1692: 216–17). Burnet goes on to explain that a preacher should aim ‘to make some Portions of Scripture to be rightly understood, to make those Truths contain’d in them, to be more fully apprehended; and then to lay the Matter home to the Consciences of the Hearers, so directing all to some good and practical end’ (1692: 217). This is essentially consonant with the sermon form outlined by Perkins and Wilkins, but Burnet, while singling out John Chrysostom’s homiletic form as exemplary, is also happy to steer the aspiring preacher to the rhetorical manuals of Cicero and Quintilian and, if the preacher can manage the Greek, to the orations of Demosthenes as well (1692: 181, 225; cf. Anon. 1655, and Chappell 1656). Burnet was also a noted church historian, and it is interesting that he still feels compelled to contrast the ‘due Simplicity’, ‘native Force’, ‘Strength of Reason’, and ‘Softness of Persuasion’ of contemporary English preaching with the pre-Reformation thematic sermon, whose ‘Mystical Applications of Scripture’, ‘Accumulation of Figures’, ‘Cadence in the Periods’, ‘playing upon the Sounds of Words’, ‘Loftiness of Epithets’, and ‘Obscurity of Expression’ had not been practised, much less championed, in England for at least a century and a half (1692: 215; see also Rapin 1672: 67–160; Fénelon 1750: 102–52). Perhaps Burnet insists on these differences—which are, by and large, stylistic—because, in terms of dispositio or overall sermon structure, there is surprisingly little to choose between the thematic sermon and the doctrine-use scheme, especially after its harder edges had been smoothed out with refining touches borrowed from the humanist rhetorical tradition.

Bibliography Anon. (1655). Officium concionatoris in quo praecepta utilissima de invenienda habendáque concione. Augustine (1958). On Christian Doctrine, trans. D. W. Robertson Jr. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

ars prædicandi: theories and practice



Bernard, R. (1607). The Faithfull Shepheard. Boyle, M. (2001). ‘Religion’, in T. Sloane (ed.), Encyclopedia of Rhetoric. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 662–72. Brown, P. (2000). Augustine of Hippo. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Burnet, G. (1692). A Discourse of the Pastoral Care. Caplan, H., and H. King (1949). ‘Latin Tractates on Preaching: A Book-List’, Harvard Theological Review, 42/3: 185–206. Care, H. (1683). The Darkness of Atheism Expelled by the Light of Nature, trans. H. Care. Chappell, W. (1656). The Preacher or Art and Method of Preaching. Chomarat, J. (1981). Grammaire et rhétorique chez Erasme. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. [Cicero] (1968). Rhetorica ad Herennium, trans. Harry Caplan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Edwards, O. (2004). A History of Preaching. Nashville: Abingdon Press. Erasmus, D. (1535). Ecclesiastes, sive de ratione concionandi. Basle. Fénelon, F. (1750). Dialogues concerning Eloquence, trans. William Stevenson. Fisher, J. (2002). English Works, ed. Cecilia Hatt. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ford, J. (2001). ‘Preaching in the Reformed Tradition’, in L. Taylor (ed.), Preachers and People in the Reformations and Early Modern Period. Leiden: Brill, 65–88. Fumaroli, M. (1980). L’Age de l’éloquence: rhétorique et ‘res literaria’ de la Renaissance au seuil de l’époque classique. Geneva: Droz. Gregory the Great (1885). Book of Pastoral Rule, in P. Schaff (ed.), Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (Series 2), xii. New York: Christian Literature Publishing Co. Herbert, G. (1945). Works, ed. F. E. Hutchinson. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hieron, S. (1609). Three Sermons. Cambridge. Hyperius, A. (1577). The Practise of Preaching, trans. John Ludham. John Chrysostom (1885). On the Priesthood, in P. Schaff (ed.), Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (Series 1), ix. New York: Christian Literature Publishing Co. Kinneavy, J. (1986). ‘A Sophistic Strain in the Medieval Ars Prædicandi and the Scholastic Method’, Medieval Perspectives, 1: 16–30. Kreitzer, B. (2001). ‘The Lutheran Sermon’, in L. Taylor (ed.), Preachers and People in the Reformations and Early Modern Period. Leiden: Brill, 35–64. Lanham, R. (1976). The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance. New Haven: Yale University Press. McCullough, P. (2006). ‘Donne as Preacher’, in Achsah Guibbory (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to John Donne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 167–81. McGinness, F. (1995). Right Thinking and Sacred Oratory in Counter-Reformation Rome. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mazzeo, J. (1962). ‘St Augustine’s Rhetoric of Silence’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 23/2: 175–96. Melanchthon, P. (1968). Supplementa Melanchthoniana 5.2, ed. Paul Drews and Ferdinand Cohrs. Leipzig, 1929. Repr. Frankfurt: Minerva G. M. B. H. Morrissey, M. (2002). ‘Scripture, Style and Persuasion in Seventeenth-Century English Theories of Preaching’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 53/4: 686–706. Murphy, J. (1974). Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: A History of Rhetorical Theory from Saint Augustine to the Renaissance. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. O’Malley, J. (1979). Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome: Rhetoric, Doctrine, and Reform in the Sacred Orators of the Papal Court, c. 1450–1521. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.



greg kneidel

Perkins, W. (1607). The Arte of Prophecying, trans. Thomas Tuke. Rapin, R. (1672). Reflections upon the Eloquence of these Times, trans. N. N. Schaeffer, J. (1996). ‘The Dialectic of Orality and Literacy: The Case of Book 4 of Augustine’s De doctrina christiana’, PMLA 111/5: 1133–45. Shuger, D. (1988). Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Spencer, H. (1994). English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Valadés, D. (1989). Rhetorica Christiana (1579). Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Wilkins, J. (1646). Ecclesiastes, or a Discourse concerning the Gift of Preaching. Worcester, Thomas, S. J. (2001). ‘The Catholic Sermon’, in L. Taylor (ed.), Preachers and People in the Reformations and Early Modern Period. Leiden: Brill, 3–34.

chapter 2

t h e pr e ach er’s bibl e s lori anne ferrell

The English Reformation transformed the English sermon, linking preaching to scripture in new, distinctively self-conscious ways. A single Latin version of the Bible became a myriad of new versions: most in English, but a significant number in new Latin translations and other ancient languages. Interpretative possibilities abounded for England’s post-Reformation clergy, who confronted not simply a rich treasury of competing texts to consult, but also a trove of different exegetical attitudes to adopt. But, while the Bible alone might have become the religion of most Protestants, the politics of the English church continued to reflect the fact that what was once a Roman church yet remained a state church from whose mandated practices no citizen was exempt. The state’s attitudes towards its worship and its bibles thus continued to be authoritarian and regulative. And the state’s reluctance to reform the basic framework of a church designed in the Middle Ages—its episcopal governance, liturgical standards, and social attitudes—rendered the place of the Christian Bible in English worship a site of continuing contest. This was the case whether the government in question was religiously conservative (Henry VIII’s, Mary’s, both Charles’s), religiously radical (Edward VI’s, Cromwell’s), or somewhere in between (Elizabeth’s, James VI & I’s, William III’s). This chapter offers a survey of the many bibles available to preachers in England from the early sixteenth century to the early eighteenth century. In this period of remarkable translational ferment (one unrivalled in its velocity until the twentieth century), the idea of ‘the Bible’ was entirely more stable than any particular bible, however distinguished by translation, production, distribution, and accessibility. This idea, moreover, was anchored by two essential if mildly paradoxical suppositions. First the singular authority of ‘the Bible’—as opposed to a bible—was by necessity bound to the singular authority of the English church. And, second, a bible in any particular English translation was ‘official’ in an entirely different, and more supple, way than had been its Latin Vulgate predecessor: authorized rather than orthodox. And so England’s Protestant Bible, like England’s Protestant Reformation, is most accurately expressed in plurality. English bibles, scripted the new religious age. None of these was intended or designed to stand the test of time like the fifth-century version they replaced.



lori anne ferrell

It had long been the Church of England’s contention that ordinary laypeople should not read the Bible because they could not understand the Bible, at least not without priestly intercession. It is better to say, therefore, that English preachers scripted proclamation out of their bibles, something they had been doing long before the sixteenth century. But ordinary laypeople already knew lots of scripture, thanks to the work of the medieval church. After all, it was the Roman Catholic Church that had sponsored lay access to the Scriptures for centuries through a number of innovative modes. People heard vernacular scripture in Sunday worship in the homely and vivid popular sermons preached by parish priests and wandering monks, and even in street theatre—the mystery plays—on long summer nights. How they would react to English words issuing directly from the Bible rather than mediated in vernacular preaching or plays—whether a new, powerfully intimate, folk-inflected, vernacular familiarity would breed contempt not for the Bible, but for the church—became a new subject of Protestant clerical scrutiny, often to their chagrin. The scriptural division between Latinate—ecclesiastical and vernacular—lay religious culture so lamented by the reformers may not have preceded the Reformation: that divide may well have been created only after the translated Bible was made accessible by law, and in language. In any case, the gulf was created between religious and political cultures rather than strictly linguistic ones. In 1530, Henry VIII stated that, while his subjects’ desire for the Bible in English was not in itself untoward, it could easily turn disruptive and destabilizing. Obedient subjects were best served by having their bibles, in the words of his proclamation, ‘expounded to them by preachers’ (Henry VIII 1530), not placed directly into their hands. Only ‘superiors’ could exercise the discretion to decide when, and how, the English people would get a bible in English: they would not get it by simply clamouring for it, which came too dangerously close to rioting for it. But clamouring for it they were, and in a political register to which the king and his advisers had recently become acutely sensitive. For Henry, his clerics, and his government ministers, the primary issue soon became not whether an English Bible, but which English Bible—and when. The vernacular scriptures now so dangerously familiar to Henry’s subjects were probably not fifteenth-century Wycliffite manuscripts but a printed translation of the New Testament made by the Gloucestershire native William Tyndale from older Hebrew and Greek versions of the testaments. Tyndale’s New Testament announced its distinctiveness from the start, on its title page: The New Testament Diligently Corrected and Compared with the Greek by William Tyndale: and Finished in the Year of our Lord God 1534 in the Month of November. The key words here are ‘Corrected and Compared’. Tyndale considered the Vulgate riddled with errors of both translation and transmission that had built up over centuries. He consequently went back to Greek New Testament texts that pre-dated the ones translated in the fourth century by Jerome (the ‘Vulgate’). The precise date ‘1534’ in the title thus fixed Tyndale’s humanist labours to a particular time and place, and announced a new biblical age that was not post- but pre-Vulgate. Tyndale replaced England’s Roman Catholic history with an older, purer past—in order, he believed, to ensure its future.

the preacher’s bibles



Tyndale’s locutions were to mark every subsequent version of the Bible in English, and it is clear from his writings that he intended them to make their primary and lasting impact on preaching. He pointedly entitled his earlier translation of the four Gospels and the Book of Acts: The New Testament as it was Written, and Caused to be Written, by them which Herde it. Whom also oure Saveoure Christ Jesus Commaunded that they Shulde Preach it unto all Creatures (emphasis added). Tyndale’s rendering of the second chapter of the Gospel of Luke displays just such a cadenced sensitivity to vernacular preaching: And ther were in the same region shepherdes abydinge in the felde and watching their flocke by nyght. And loo: the angell of the lorde stode hard by them / and the brightnes of the lorde shone rounde aboute them / and they were soore afrayed. But the angell sayd unto them: Be not afrayed. For beholde / I bringe you tydinges of greate joye that shal come to all the people: for unto you is borne this daye in the cite of David / a saveoure which is Christ the lorde. And take this for a signe: ye hall [sic] finde the chylde swadled and layed in a manger. And streight waye ther was with the angell a multitude of hevenly sowdiers / laudynge God and sayinge: Glory to God an hye / and peace on the erthe: and unto men rejoysynge. (1534: sigs Kiiiiv–vr)

In its championing of scriptural sources ‘as [they] were written . . . by them which herde it’, Tyndale’s translation ad fontes was humanist scholarship at its most characteristic. Congregations unversed in classical literatures (or in the intricacies of their own vernacular, for that matter) nonetheless would have recognized and responded to the sound and scan of the prose, which traded the modular stammer characteristic of late medieval Latin-to-English translations for a style that combined homely locution with elegant lyricism. When William Tyndale peered behind the Vulgate, he realized his vernacular literary ambitions and set the bar for subsequent generations of biblical exegetes very high indeed. Tyndale’s preface to the 1534 New Testament thus also expressed his acute sense of responsibility, not only to the lay readers and clerics to whom he had promised the saving word of God rendered more purely, but also to the very concept of what ‘purity of the scriptures’ would mean for those readers. The best and most perfect translation, he conceded, would not always yield up its meaning to even the best and most motivated reader. There were passages in the Bible that were simply impenetrable, in Latin or in English. He could not, in conscience, render any passage more comprehensible if to do so would be to wrench the meaning too far from what, in Tyndale’s reckoning, must have been its original meaning. Too much of that meaning was cloudy and contradictory; even in the languages of everyday life, this holy book was no open book. Far from settling theological issues, Tyndale acknowledged, any new translation of integrity would simply present new problems of comprehension and interpretation (1534: sig. *iiiir). No matter how radical or obscure, however, Tyndale’s translation of the Bible was not the reason he was burnt as a heretic in 1536: his translating of the Bible without official permission was. Tyndale’s assistant Miles Coverdale, however, managed to dodge Tyndale’s grisly end and even profit by the experience. Translating from the Latin Vulgate and the vernacular bibles of Martin Luther and (especially) his former master, Coverdale



lori anne ferrell

produced the first complete English Bible under the patronage of Henry’s new queen, the committed Protestant Anne Boleyn. The first edition of his Biblia was printed abroad in 1535, while Tyndale languished in prison. Politic additions to the text were aimed at ensuring its eventual safe passage into England: Coverdale’s preface wisely did not dally with Tyndalian metaphors of light and liberation but instead opened with a flattering dedication to Henry suggesting that, by reading the Bible in their own language, his subjects would learn to be more obedient to both God and king. From this point, the case for an official bible in English moved swiftly. Coverdale’s Bible was being produced in London by 1537, with each subsequent printing more openly suggesting royal approval, if not quite royal authorization, of the Book. In 1538, Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s vicar-general, issued an injunction requiring every church in England to purchase a copy of the Bible in English. And, in 1538, the government made secure provision for this proclamation by ordering into print The Byble in Englyshe, the first bible to announce its publication by monarchical authority on its title page. This validating claim has set English bibles apart from continental ones ever since. The royally approved English Bible offered no startlingly new translations of scripture. Its language, syntax, and tone were Coverdale’s, thus so indebted to Tyndale as to be nearly indistinguishable from the work of that Henrician martyr. This in itself can be seen as further evidence that what the Bible in English was designed to defy was not the Latin Bible, but the Latin church. This intent is boldly broadcast on the Great Bible’s title page, wherein the king is pictured sitting enthroned at upper centre (Fig. 4). He hands copies of his Bible to churchmen at left and statesmen at right. These worthies in turn pass the books down to the lesser clerics and pious laypeople populating the middle and bottom spaces of the page. At bottom left, we find a cleric preaching to a cross section of the people of England, young and old, male and female. At bottom right, even the bars on the windows of a prison fail to keep out the preacher’s saving Word. The people receive this vernacular preaching from a vernacular bible with upturned hands and cries of ‘Vivat Rex’. Praise for the king—in Latin. In fact, nearly every word in the long banderoles issuing from nearly every open mouth on this title page is Latin. The authorized Bible may have been translated into English, but it was designed to be read by priests, for whom this image and this Bible were intended. Never mind his laypeople: Henry VIII’s churchmen, all of whom had begun their careers as Roman Catholic priests under the papacy, were likely to have been the king’s most stubbornly resistant religious subjects, especially when it came to Henry’s assertion of his supremacy over the Church of England. With its pointedly non-vernacular title page, the first governmentally sanctioned English-language Bible reminds us that, even after their Reformation, English clerics would continue to be trained in Latin and read, primarily, Latin texts. Educated English clergy retained their Vulgate bibles along with their traditional vestments and ecclesiastical titles; even those who eventually lobbied to discard Romish trappings still kept their Romish bibles. What they did rescind was their dependence on a single orthodox version of scripture, a change of practice that had as much to do with the impact of Catholic and Protestant humanist scholarship on biblical learning as it had to do with ecclesiopolitical events. The post-Reformation Christian bible had become a book permanently

the preacher’s bibles



fig. 4 Engraved frontispiece of the Great Bible (1539).

under construction, and, for educated English clerics, the results did not necessarily have to be exclusively English vernacular. Material evidence of this new richness of exegetical possibility is found in the ‘polyglot’ bibles of the sixteenth century. One favourite, the ‘Complutensian’ of 1514–17 (named for the university where its scholars laboured under the direction of Cardinal



lori anne ferrell

Ximenes de Cisneros), displayed Hebrew, Chaldee, Vulgate, and Septuagint Greek (with Hebrew interlineations) in a beautiful orderly array of parallel passages. The Complutensian was distinguished not only by its impeccable scholarship and gorgeous typography but also by its useful layout, which employed parallel columns for comparative study. References to another favourite scholarly and pedagogical translation, the Latin Bible by the Jewish convert to Protestantism, John Immanuel Tremellius, who translated it out of early Hebrew and Syriac, can be found in the sermons of such theologically disparate preachers as Lancelot Andrewes (see Fig. 30) and William Perkins (who also advised fledgling Puritan preachers to devise similar organizational schema for private study of the Bible in their own commonplace books). The Restoration theologian Brian Walton simply forwarded a familiar political commonplace, then, when he defended the vast number of polyglot bibles and other translations extant in the later seventeenth century, by insisting on their ‘purity, integrity, and supream authority . . . gainst those of Rome’ (1659: 2). Clerical and lay culture after the Reformation remained divided by vast degrees of education. For laypeople whose literacies did not quite rise to match the polemical demands for them to read, scripture would have to be translated in yet another way: not simply into English words, but into English culture. This last venue was altogether a more volatile and shifting environment than the high-toned, still-Latinate world of ecclesiastical arts and letters. The English people faced unmistakable, destabilizing confessional changes to match the fluctuating fortunes, both religious and political, of the relicts of the Tudor dynasty. For eleven years, Henry VIII’s successors were childless and short-lived, their accession parliaments undoing and remaking religious legislation—including provisions for vernacular bibles and their authority, dispersal, and accessibility—with dizzying rapidity. A brief period of radical Protestantism under Henry’s only son Edward VI ended abruptly in 1553 with the unmarried king’s death at the age of 16. During this short reign, however, Edward’s archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, headed the effort to render all of the Church of England’s services into English—a decision that carried far-ranging consequences for the English Bible and its place in English worship. The 1549 Book of Common Prayer was a conservative affair, considered by stringent Protestants to be a bare translation of the traditional Catholic Mass into the vernacular. Their qualms, of little avail, underscored a prescient sense of how easily arrested the progress of reformation could become in England. Linking everyday words in familiar cadence to embodied practices of long standing, the new prayer book, not the Great Bible (as we shall see), was what finally made the Church of England and its parishes English, in the vernacular sense. And it placed Miles Coverdale’s translation of the Psalms at the heart of the Church of England’s ritual worship, where it remains to this day. No English bible was printed domestically during Mary I’s reign. The campaign to translate and print an English bible instead shifted to lands where ‘vernacular’ meant French or German. The most enduring of these exilic versions was commissioned by William Whittingham, a Protestant firebrand who, having fled the religious persecution of

the preacher’s bibles



Mary’s government, led English congregations in Frankfurt and Geneva. Whittingham (who advocated a form of Calvinist religion so uncompromising as to blight his later career in the Elizabethan church) oversaw the production of an English New Testament at Geneva in 1557. But by the time his bible had acquired an Old Testament to match its New in 1560, his nemesis Mary I was dead. The Bible and Holy Scriptures Conteyned in the Olde and Newe Testament, or the ‘Geneva Bible’, was instead dedicated to the Protestant successor, her younger sister Elizabeth. It soon became clear that Elizabeth’s Protestantism and the Geneva Bible’s would be at odds: for one thing, the margins of the Geneva provided on-the-job training in the religious and political controversies of a violent and volatile, but also now-bygone, age. In exile, the controversies had ceased being solely inter-confessional; many, if not most, turned intra-confessional, Protestant versus Protestant. (The marginal notes to the Geneva’s Exodus Chapter 14 include the following allusions to internal dissentions: ‘the ministers of God following their vocation shall be evil spoken of, and murmured against, even of them that pretend the same cause and religion that they do.’) In dangerous and unsettling times, Whittingham’s congregations had been liable to turn suddenly and savagely upon each other—and him—as congregational spats led to schisms. The Geneva Bible margins painted a lively word portrait of the earliest Geneva Bible readers, but their vivid, exilic sense of political embattlement and internal theological dissention were suddenly remapped onto a broader, domestic audience once the Geneva was printed in London. Return to the story of Jesus’s nativity (Luke 2), but now as rendered in the Geneva translation: 8. And there were in the same countrey shepherds, abiding in the field, and keping watch by night because of their flocke. 9. And lo, the Angel of the Lorde came upon them, and the glorie of the Lord shone about them, and they were sore afraide. 10. Then the Angel said unto them, Be not afraide: for beholde, I bring you tidings of great joye, that shalbe to all the people: 11. (That is,) that unto you is borne this day in the citie of {f} David, a Saviour, which is christ the Lord. 12. And {g} this (shalbe) a signe to you, Ye shal finde the childe swadled, and laid in a cratch. 13. And straightway there was with the Angel a multitude of heavenlie souldiers, praying God, and saying, 14. Glorie (be) to God in the high (heavens,) and peace in earth, and towards men {h} good wil. (Whittingham 1561: sig. EEi) There is little of significance to note here in terms of translation (although we may be cheered at the sight of the homely Anglo-Saxon ‘cratch’ that replaces Tyndale’s AngloFrench ‘manger’). What does distinguish this version are the letters in the text (indicated here in curly brackets). Figure ‘h’, for example, refers the reader to this marginal explanation of Luke 2.14: The free mercie & goodwill of God, which is the founteine of our peace and felicitie, & is chiefly declared to the elect. Here the story of the nativity of Christ is



lori anne ferrell

pressed into Calvinist service, as the margins declare scriptural evidence for a subdivision of Protestant theology rather than for Protestantism plain and simple. But the Geneva’s orderly verses made Whittingham’s fiery testimony to a very specific time and place into an enduring textual phenomenon. Complexly theological, deeply political, and entirely insider-ish as it was in its marginal words, the Geneva Bible was something else altogether in its overall user-friendly format. It was produced in handportable quarto rather than lectern-sized folio. It was the first English Bible to be printed in easier-on-the-eye roman type. It was also the first English Bible (and one of the first bibles in any language) to feature numbered verses in addition to chapter divisions, thus allowing people to find their places in the text with swiftness and ease. Alongside soonnotorious marginal lessons on Calvinist theology were general explanations of difficult words and citations of similar scriptures, and illustrations that strove to duplicate the descriptions in the books of Exodus and Leviticus of archaic buildings and devices in ancient times: the dimensions of the Temple, or what the Ark of the Covenant might have looked like. It even featured a series of maps, including one that tracked the wanderings of the children of Israel in the desert as described in Numbers 33 and one that disclosed the division of the land of Canaan as set out in Joshua 15. This multitude of aids, along with its compact size, made the Geneva the first bible designed to assist the common English reader, which in turn made it popular on an unprecedented scale. Its very user-friendliness ensured that religious radicalism would continue to be associated in the governmental mind with biblical accessibility. This notwithstanding, we rarely find direct quotations from the Geneva margins in early modern sermons, even from the hottest of Protestants—and this may well be because Puritan ministers, with their dedication to strictly biblical preaching, preferred to cite Genevan scripture, and trusted in their own characteristic ways of expounding doctrine and politics. In any case, the Geneva’s educational style and functionality guaranteed it a long, reasonably politically neutral run. Until the later seventeenth century, when its production finally slowed to a halt, even clerics of decidedly non-Puritan stripe, most strikingly Lancelot Andrewes, appreciated the Geneva’s pedagogical structure as much as they managed to ignore its marginal sentiments. Left unrevised, the Geneva Bible barely survived Britain’s wars of religion and fell out of print by the end of the seventeenth century. The bibles that crossed the Atlantic to a largely puritanical New England were nearly all the later Authorized Version. This fact confounds scholars who do not pause to consider material facts of production or even the more ethereal facts of religious tastes. A sixteenth-century Puritan bible would continue to meet the needs of a later evangelical age only if that later evangelicalism bore any close relation to an earlier Puritanism— which, indeed, it did not. The last of the Tudors, Mary’s half-sister Elizabeth, took the throne in 1558, speaking cautiously about the value of both her father’s and her brother’s religion and forcing her auditors in parliament and privy council to imagine what those vague and paradoxical claims might actually signify. They soon found out. Elizabeth had inherited Henry’s conservative religious temper along with his preference for being sole head of the

the preacher’s bibles



English church, and she intended to harness these characteristics to a style of worship scripted in a Book of Common Prayer that toned down the more radical elements of its 1552 predecessor. The queen tempered the Protestantism of her church throughout her long reign with a consistency that her father had never mastered. More than her practices of careful moderation, more even than the tireless work of the first well-educated parish clergy in the history of the English church, it is undoubtedly the simple fact of Elizabeth’s I’s longevity that accounts most for the success of governmentally moderated Protestant religion in England. Elizabethan Protestantism finally had world enough and time—and all the cultural stability that a lengthy reign confers—to play host to an array of English bibles, some more up to date than others, none universally beloved. By 1562, the Geneva was printed in London, occasionally by the queen’s own printer but never by royal authority. Still available, but badly in need of revision, Henry’s Great Bible proved poor competition to the Genevan upstart. Soon Elizabeth called upon her archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker, to produce a newly authorized text for her church. Produced in 1568 by Richarde Jugge, this lavish bible revised by the queen’s bishops largely out of the Great Bible was a counter-intuitive hybrid of Henry VIII’s and the Geneva exiles’ aims for the Bible. Reflecting the educative, forward-looking temper of the times (if not of the monarch) as much as had the Geneva Bible, The. Holie. Bible. Conteynyng the Olde Testament and the Newe offered many textual aids, handy maps, and verse divisions. Unlike the Geneva, however, it had no marginal commentary and featured a large number of lush woodcuts of a pictorial (rather than explanatory) nature. Despite its visual beauty, and its placement by order in every cathedral and most of the parish churches of England, the so-called Bishops’ Bible never achieved widespread popularity or usage. A hasty, half-hearted, and poorly executed revision, it resembled the Geneva just enough to suffer by comparison. At this time, another product of contradictory impulses appeared on the scriptural scene. The New Testament of Jesus Christ, Translated Faithfully into English, out of the Authentical Latin . . . in the English College of Rhemes (1582) was produced by members of the exiled English Catholic College in Douai, France. (Translating the Vulgate directly into English, they completed the New Testament in Rheims when the college moved to that French city in 1578.) This bible is evidence of two late-sixteenth-century realities: the persistence of illegal Catholicism in Protestant countries, and the general appeal of vernacular bibles. Given its minority and suspect audience, this Englished Vulgate would have remained fairly obscure but for the efforts of one determined and outraged Protestant, William Fulke, whose tireless efforts ensured that The Text of the New Testament of Jesus Christ, Translated out of the Vulgar Latine by the Papists of the Traiterous Seminarie at Rhemes was finally printed in London in 1589. In order best to display its stubbornly heretical differences, Fulke thoughtfully printed the whole text of the Douai Bible in columns parallel to the text of the Bishops’ Bible, replicating the scholarly affect of works like the Complutensian polyglot. This public exposure—which Fulke intended as an exercise in polemical, rather than humanist, pedagogy—made the Douai—Rheims much better known in England than it would have been otherwise.



lori anne ferrell

No doubt adding to Fulke’s gnawing discomfort was the fact that the Vulgate Bible in Latin had never really left the English Protestant pulpit. The sermons of Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne, among others, abound with references to the Vulgate: the Roman church’s Bible, unlike the Roman church, had never been banned outright in early modern England. Instead, following Henry VIII’s notions of authority and access, the Vulgate was condemned for its associations with Roman orthodoxy, not for its content in general—although, of course, certain of its translations (those that seemed to prop up Catholic ecclesiological claims) came under reliable attack from Protestant preachers, who, after all, needed to read the Vulgate in order to attack it. As for Donne, that witty preacher stoutly defended his selective use of the Vulgate, explaining that, while he could never disapprove of most of its content, he would always condemn the post-tridentine Roman Catholic Church’s insistence on its singular orthodoxy. But to stick to any one version, no matter how excellent, would also have cramped Dr Donne’s style. Donne’s ingenious defence of exegetical promiscuity reveals the impact of a near-century of humanist and Protestant biblicism in the homiletic practices of England’s protestantized clergy. By 1600, English preachers were consulting a number of different translations of the Bible—in Latin, Syriac, Greek, and Hebrew as well as the English of the Great, or Geneva, or Bishops’, or even Fulke’s. The fact that they were not constrained by a single ‘orthodox’ version of the Bible allowed them to compose exegetical arguments using the same processes of mix and match, comparison and collation, trying and testing, that were the exhilarating hallmark of Renaissance scholarship, whether sacred or secular. Not all ministerial scholarship proceeded on these heady but ultimately rational processes, however; at times it appears clerics worked from entirely emotional tugs and tousles. Donne seems, in fact, often to have chosen his Vulgate texts entirely on a visceral basis—the Word savoured in the mouth, blessed by long familiarity, craved by being bred in the bone. The Vulgate was, after all, part of an undeniably Catholic heritage— one John Donne shared with all England. And so the vocabulary of the Vulgate can even be detected in the language of the most famously ‘authorized’ version of the English Scriptures, the ‘Authorized Version’ of 1611. In 1604, James VI & I ordered into existence a bible that, standing the test of time like none before it, became for ever after associated with his name. The Holy Bible, Conteyning the Old Testament, and the New: Newly Translated out of the Originall Tongues: & with the Former Translations Diligently Compared and Revised, by his Majesties Speciall Commandement, printed by Robert Barker in 1611, is now considered a masterpiece of English prose. But this seemingly ageless and universally desirable bible was, like every English-language bible produced in this era, the product of a not particularly holy alliance of immediate political purpose and theological intent: to counteract the deeply Calvinist influence of the Geneva Bible on English Protestants—especially those uncompromising Protestants who were called ‘Puritans’ by their political enemies. The new bible was conceived at the royal palace at Hampton Court, where in January 1604 James presided over an elaborately staged debate between the clergy of the

the preacher’s bibles



increasingly divided and fractious church he had inherited from his cousin. His godly upbringing and theophilia probably encouraged the godly to think that their cause might actually get the fair hearing they had been promised. But after-reports reveal nothing less than a rout of the unfortunate ministers who served as the official ‘Puritan’ representatives to the conference. These coolest heads of the ‘hotter sort’ had been chosen for their respectable standing in the established church (one was dean of Lincoln) and their ability to accept institutional compromise. Their puritanism chiefly consisted in a principled refusal to disavow entirely the strict ideas about true doctrine and proper worship espoused by their lesspolitic brethren. Even so, the members of this Puritan party found themselves outmanœuvred, ridiculed, and bested at every turn until they finally advanced a petition that would have seemed a sure thing even to them, even at that point in the proceedings: that a new translation of the Scriptures be made to replace the many corrupt bits of the Church of England’s Bishops’ Bible. In a rare burst of easy acquiescence, the king acceded to their request. And, in so doing, he took game, set, and—eventually—match for the liturgy-loving, increasingly powerful conservative wing of the Church of England. For what the king went on so enthusiastically and determinedly to sponsor was a version of the Scriptures aimed at replacing, not the undistinguished and unlamented Bishops’, but the Geneva Bible, the best-selling English Bible of the era and the primary textbook for English reformed Protestantism. James VI & I’s Bible was eventually drawn from several base texts, including the discredited Bishops’ Bible and even the Rheims New Testament. Like the Protestant Church of England, this bible was designed by committee: forty-eight scholars assigned to six task groups (each with its own head, to make a total of fifty-four). Archbishop of Canterbury Richard Bancroft, an irascible hammer of the Puritans wherever he could find them (and he detected them everywhere, mostly hiding in plain sight in the English episcopate), oversaw the entire operation. The Puritan complaints at Hampton Court about the translations of certain words in the Bishops’ Bible were settled by broadly cast corporate decision-making. This in turn achieved a typical consensus-based conservatism, underlined by King James’s and Archbishop Bancroft’s determination that, the claims of its title page notwithstanding, the 1611 Bible was not a ‘translation’, a conversion into something new, but a ‘revision’: amendment only. The 1611 Bible thus favoured the institutionally inflected word ‘church’ over the Geneva translator’s ‘congregation’, but its loudest political statements were made from the silence created by textual absence. The Authorized Version (AV) lacked most of the maps, tables, and other edifying graphics that had been such a visible feature of both the Geneva and the Bishops’ Bibles. The margins of this so-called Authorized Version (it was never actually ‘authorized’ but only ‘appointed to be read’; to this day, the only truly ‘authorized’ English Bible remains Henry VIII’s) were wiped clean of interpretation or commentary. Its relatively few side notes dealt with matters of disputed Hebrew or Greek translation rather than theology or politics, simply offering the alternative translation that had lost out in the final tally.



lori anne ferrell

More important to the politics of a later age, however, was the fact that, after matters of translation and collation were copy-edited, the revisers read the new version out loud in a final quality-control check. Here is one fruit of their labours, again drawn from the second chapter of Luke, verses 8–14: 8. And there were in the same countrey shepheards abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flocke by night. 9. And loe, the Angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them, and they were sore afraid. 10. And the Angel said unto them, feare not: For behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. 11. For unto you is borne this day, in the citie of David, a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. 12. And this shall be a signe unto you; yee shall find the babe wrapped in swadling clothes lying in a manger. 13. And suddenly there was with the Angel a multitude of the heavenly hoste praising God, and saying, 14. Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good wil towards men. (AV 1611: sig. F3r) The only marginal note to this text is the brief ‘or, night watches’ at verse 8, indicating a final lack of unanimity among the revisers. The rejection by majority vote of ‘night watches’ in favour of ‘keeping watch over their flock by night’ suggests that here, as well as in many other passages of the 1611 Bible, imperatives of poetic scansion triumphed over pinpoint accuracy of translation. Most of the few and only seemingly insignificant changes in this bible in fact aimed at balancing and smoothing out scriptural lines for the purposes of making a beautiful noise. With its sonorous, rhythmic cadence, its success in mimicking the archaic, slightly eccentric (and thus distinctive) rhythms of traditional speech, the King James Bible was eminently more suited to liturgical than pedagogical life. In the end, then, the text to which this, the most successful of all bibles of the English Reformation, was most indebted was the English Book of Common Prayer, evidence that the Authorized Version of 1611 was not politically neutral. It was, in fact, artfully designed to replace a bible purpose built for individual edification and group study. After a century and a half of change, England’s Bible settled down: cue for the English sermon to do the same. Since the 1530s, members of the episcopate, higher clergy, and their supreme governors had split over the place of the sermon in worship. Was it to replace the old Mass (albeit one writ new in the prayer book) altogether? Was it to claim equal status? After the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the sermon instead ceded place to the Book of Common Prayer, which was to play a far more enduring part in the structure and aims of worship than might once have been intended in the Edwardian and Elizabethan reformations. For its part, the Authorized Version, now adjutant to rather than replacement for the liturgy, played the supporting role so well that no serious calls for its revision issued until well into the nineteenth century, when attention to

the preacher’s bibles



the universities’ findings in higher biblical criticism led to criticism of the AV that would have sounded familiar to the early modern monarchs. For their part, retaining the humanist scholarly habits acquired in the early modern period, England’s preachers would continue to consult a polyglot of scriptural versions—in the study. In the pews of the Church of England, however, the Authorized Version remained.1

Bibliography Av (1611). The Holy Bible Conteyning the Old Testament, and the New: Newly Translated out of the Originall Tongues: & with the Former Translations Diligently Compared and Revised, by his Majesties Speciall Commandement. Appointed to be Read in Churches. Robert Barker. Crockett, Bryan (2006). ‘Geneva Bible’, in Francis J. Bremer and Tom Webster (eds), Puritans and Puritanism in Europe and America. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. Daniell, David (2003). The Bible in English. New Haven: Yale University Press. Ferrell, Lori Anne (2009). The Bible and the People. New Haven: Yale University Press. Henry VIII (1530). A Proclamation Made and Divysed by the Kyngis Highnes, with the Advise of his Honorable Counsaile, for Dampning of Erronious Bokes and Heresies, and Prohibitinge the Havinge of Holy Scripture, Translated into the Vulgar Tonges of Englisshe, Frenche, or Duche, in such Maner, as within this Proclamation is Expressed. Nicolson, Adam (2003). The King’s Secretaries. New York: HarperCollins; also published as Power and Glory: Jacobean England and the Making of the King James Bible. New York: HarperCollins. Tribble, Evelyn (1993). Margins and Marginality: the Printed Page in Early Modern England. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Tyndale, William (1534) (trans.). The Newe Testament Dylygently Corrected and Compared with the Greke by Willyam Tyndale: and Funesshed in the Yere of Oure Lorde God A. M. D. &xxxiiii in the Moneth of November. Antwerp. Walton, Brian (1659). The Considerator Considered. Whittingham, William (1561) (trans.). The Bible and Holy Scriptures Conteyned in the Olde and Newe Testament. Geneva.

1 This chapter is partly taken from Ferrell (2008: ch. 3). The author is grateful to Yale University Press for permission to quote from this work.

chapter 3

t h e pr e ach er a n d patr istic s katrin ettenhuber

For what is the doctryne of the churche but the doctryne of the fathers. (Fisher 1526: sig. Fiv)

On 11 February 1526, John Fisher (see Fig. 27) preached at St Paul’s on Luke 18:42: ‘Receive thy sight: thy faith hath saved thee.’ In the first decade after Luther initiated the continental Reformation, any scripture text that addressed the question of saving faith would have carried considerable polemical potency. As the title page of his sermon reveals, Fisher’s choice of text was by no means accidental: openly advertising the controversial occasion, he explains that his discourse targets ‘certayne heretickes whiche than were abjured for holdynge the heresies of Martyn Luther that famous hereticke and for the kepyng and reteynyng of his bokes agaynst the ordinance of the bulle of pope Leo the tenthe’ (see also Kneidel, Chapter 1, and Wooding, Chapter 16, this volume). Chief among this group of ‘heretickes’ was Robert Barnes, a Cambridge divine who had been arrested a week previously, on the charge of preaching a sermon on the corruption of the clergy in general and that of Cardinal Wolsey in particular. After a hearing in London, Barnes was made to do public penance by carrying a faggot to Paul’s Cross and then abjuring his perceived heresies. Barnes’s punishment was symbolic of the state’s determination to enforce religious orthodoxy; arguably, however, it was the controversial rhetoric of Fisher’s sermon that proved to be of lasting influence in the attack on the more ‘famous hereticke’, Martin Luther, and his doctrinal legacy. Fisher’s attack on Luther in the 1526 sermon was based on a defence of—and subsequent appeal to—the authority of the church. This authority in turn rested on two interconnected assumptions, the force of doctrinal consensus and the concept of the church’s uninterrupted descent from patristic tradition:

the preacher and patristics



for us it is certeyne that we come derectly of this succession [i.e., the ‘churche catholicke’] and joyne fully with the fathers in all their doctrynes. Contrariwyse Luther dispiseth them and their doctrynes . . . and there he devideth hym selfe from the doctryne of the churche and from this good erthe. For what is the doctryne of the churche but the doctryne of the fathers. (Fisher 1526: sig. Fiv)

In Fisher’s account, unity of belief and doctrine is the essential precondition for the argument that the Roman Catholic Church stands in true ‘succession’ to Christ’s mission. To be, as Luther was, ‘of an other mynde and sentence’ (Fisher 1526: sig. Fiv), automatically disqualified him from laying any claim to the authority of the early church, and thus to doctrinal authority tout court. This, however—despite Fisher’s insistence that Luther ‘dispiseth’ the Fathers—was precisely the reformers’ project. Unlike Roman Catholic divines, who presented the Fathers as bulwarks of a stable and continuous institutional history, Reformed controversialists saw them as prime representatives of a primitive church that had been brought to the brink of destruction by centuries of Roman corruption and could be salvaged only through a decisive break with the past. In a fundamental sense, then, the post-Reformation debates between Catholics and reformers involved a struggle over the history of the church—over which faction could establish itself as the most convincing successor to the primitive tradition. Throughout the period, in sermons, doctrinal treatises, and pamphlets alike, the early church was associated primarily with the writings of the Church Fathers: patrological controversy thus emerged as one of the major battle grounds in the polemical exchanges between Catholic and Protestant divines. This chapter will survey the various incarnations of the patristic debate between 1517 and 1720, focusing on the hundred or so years between John Jewel’s Challenge sermon (1559) and the Restoration of the monarchy. It will revisit, in chronological order, a number of significant controversial debates of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with a view to illuminating their major doctrinal flashpoints from a patrological perspective. My chapter, however, also seeks to consider the Fathers as a field of discourse in the broader sense. Early modern polemic—whether in the shape of a sermon or a controversial tract—tends to draw on patristic writing not simply as a diverse and variegated set of theological positions. The Fathers, cited collectively or individually, offer models of thought and argument that transcend specific issues of doctrine and inform the textual, rhetorical, and hermeneutic deep structure of the polemical discourses into which they are absorbed. Importing the Fathers into the controversial economy of postReformation England is, therefore, a complex and multifaceted transaction, shaped by a variety of interests, objectives, and perspectives. Among these, the material and textual forms through which the Fathers were disseminated are of paramount importance. The doctrinal uses of patristic theology in the period are inextricably bound up with its bibliographical politics, as editions, translations, and compilations of the Fathers came to be associated with different kinds of approaches to controversial argument and thought. After defining the basic outlines of the early modern patristic corpus, therefore, the chapter will give a brief overview of the types of text through which preachers encountered the Fathers.



katrin ettenhuber

Attending to the Fathers as resources for polemical argument and rhetoric—rather than simply as repositories of specific doctrinal positions—also has more wide-ranging implications for considering the uses of patristic theology in early modern sermon practice. Preachers in the period frequently focus on the Fathers’ strategies of discursive selflegitimation and self-construction: patristic sources are figured as commenting proleptically on their own status as ecclesiastical authorities, and this is a principal source of their polemical power. One of the main consequences of this approach is a difficulty in distinguishing doctrinal and polemical uses of the Fathers from other forms of appropriation, especially literary or aesthetic ones. The two main ‘literary’ case studies in this chapter, Jewel’s ‘Challenge’ sermon of 1559 and Thomas Lawrence preaching on Exodus 3:5 in 1637, serve as forceful illustrations of this principle. Jewel and Lawrence employ a broad spectrum of references and allusions, ranging from a focus on individual patristic commonplaces or axioms, to examples of more sustained emulation and elaboration—the thoroughgoing imitatio of patrological modes of argument, stylistic habits, and mentalities. In all the examples cited in this chapter, however, the appropriation of patristic material serves specific exegetical, structural, or doctrinal purposes, and thus ultimately folds back into the broader controversial framework, either reflecting its concerns or, as in the most rewarding cases, actively shaping and redefining them.

Classifying the Fathers Who or what did early modern divines refer to when they invoked the authority of the primitive church? The first thing to note here is that ‘primitive’ was not a constant or stable term: depending on the doctrinal convictions of its user, it could mean anything between the first 200 or 1,200 years of the church’s history. Roman Catholics, in line with their greater estimation of human authority and custom, characteristically took a rather more inclusive and generous view of the patristic tradition, extending the early church’s reach into the eighth century (with the death of St John of Damascus in or around 749 as an end point) or even, more rarely, into the twelfth century (the death of St Bernard of Clairvaux in 1153 marks the watershed here). In post-Reformation England, the Westminster Disputation of March/April 1559 defined the primitive church as encompassing the first 500 years after Christ; Jewel’s ‘Challenge Sermon’, first preached in November 1559, influentially argued for an extension of the patristic period to the year 600 (Haugaard 1979: 37). Renaissance divines did not, on the whole, recognize the modern distinction of patristic theology into ante-Nicene and post-Nicene periods (before and after the Council of Nicaea in 325), nor did they operate with a strict sense of geographical association, separating the ‘Eastern’ (or Greek) from the ‘Western’ (or Latin) Fathers. For ease and clarity of reference, however, the following list of major early modern patristic authorities follows the East/West distinction. On the Western side, seven Fathers emerge as the chief polemical weapons in the controversies between Catholics and Protestants: Jerome,

the preacher and patristics



Augustine, Ambrose, Gregory the Great, Cyprian, Tertullian, and Irenaeus (the latter here classified as a Latin Father by virtue of his ecclesiastical office as bishop of Lyons; his birthplace, Smyrna (in modern Turkey), has sometimes led scholars to count him among the Eastern Fathers). Within the internal hierarchy of this taxonomy, Jerome, Augustine, Ambrose, and Gregory take precedence over the other three—a process no doubt facilitated by their being named, in 1298, the ‘Four Great Doctors of the Church’ by Pope Boniface VIII. Among these four Fathers, the evidence of early modern controversial writing reveals Augustine as the clear favourite for Protestants and Catholics alike. On the Eastern side, frequent reference is made to Basil, Gregory of Nazianzen, and John Chrysostom (now often referred to collectively as the three Cappadocian Fathers), as well as Origen, Justin Martyr, Gregory of Nyssa, and Athanasius. It is possible to draw some broad preliminary distinctions between Catholic and Protestant approaches to the Fathers in the early modern period. Catholic controversialists, in their effort to foreground the unbroken continuity between the primitive and early modern church, tended to elide historical, geographical, and doctrinal differences between the Fathers in favour of an appeal to the collective consensus of patristic opinion. Protestants, on the other hand, in an equally determined drive to undermine this sense of continuity, stressed the difference of the past and the consequent need to reassess individual Fathers in the fullness of their cultural, social, and theological contexts. While broad distinctions such as this one have their uses, they require constant and careful evaluation when set against the controversial practices of early modern divinity. In the complex and shifting polemical climate of our period, the most characteristic feature of patristic discourses is a sense of rigorous occasionality—a willingness to construct and exploit classic factional positions on the Fathers, but an equally strong appetite for modifying and undermining these assumptions as the situation demands. Protestants had little compunction in appealing to a patristic consensus when it suited their purposes, nor did Catholic controversialists shy away from invoking the authority of individual Fathers, especially in cases where there was little hope of achieving collective patristic assent. The same principle applies to doctrinal positions associated with a particular Father or group of Fathers. While it is certainly helpful to highlight some general trends—the early reformers’ reliance on Augustine’s anti-Pelagian writings, for instance, or the Laudian use of the Greek Fathers’ views on episcopal dignity—we should be wary of overestimating the solidity of identifications which, in practice, were almost always open to strategic manipulation.

Texts What were the textual forms through which English preachers encountered the Fathers? For the purposes of my discussion, the answer to this complex question will have to be brief and relatively schematic. The Fathers could be accessed directly, through Latin or (less commonly) Greek editions of their works; alternatively, patristic doctrine could be



katrin ettenhuber

absorbed through a whole range of mediating or secondary sources: theological tracts, vernacular translations (see Vessey 1997), scriptural commentaries, patristic handbooks, and various types of excerpt collections (chrestomathies).

Editions In the sixteenth century, English divines did not produce a single major edition of a patristic author (Haugaard 1979: 40); preachers were thus entirely dependent on continental editions (for a brief survey of patristic literature in Thomas More’s library, see Marius 1968). Many of these were the work of Catholic theologians. At Basle, in the second to fourth decades of the sixteenth century, Erasmus was involved in editing the writings of Arnobius, Athanasius, Ambrose, Augustine, Cyprian, Hilary of Poitiers, Irenaeus, Jerome, and John Chrysostom (Olin 1979). Erasmus’s work on the Fathers represents a marked advance in philological and textual scholarship; his editions of the Latin Fathers in particular were the first port of call for English divines on both sides. Other significant contributors to sixteenth-century patristic scholarship include John Oecolampadius, Wolfgang Musculus, and Conrad Pellicanus (Musculus provided the first Greek text of Gregory Nazianzen and translated other Greek Fathers—including Chrysostom and Basil—into Latin). In 1575, the French theologian Marguerin de la Bigne (c.1546–c.1595) published the first comprehensive collection of patristic texts. The Paris edition of the Sacra bibliotheca sanctorum patrum initially appeared in nine volumes (eight plus index), and was expanded and revised numerous times over a period of 200 years (Petitmengin 1985). Between 1660 and 1750, the French Benedictine monks of the Congregation of St Maur produced the first complete patrology, which remained the standard reference work until Jacques Paul Migne’s nineteenth-century Patrologia Latina and Patrologia Graeca (Hurel 1997). English divines made their chief contributions to patristic editing at the beginning of the seventeenth century. At Eton, Henry Savile and Richard Montagu published, respectively, the works of Chrysostom and Nazianzen between 1610 and 1613. Thomas James, the first custodian of Sir Thomas Bodley’s new library at Oxford, had ambitious plans to produce a complete corpus of patristic writings that would make Protestant controversialists independent of the Catholic textual tradition. ‘I am verelie perswaded’, James opined, ‘that if the Fathers works were once trulie let forth by the Protestants, with fit Censures and Annotations, and especiallie, if the times were preciselie set downe when everie Treatise was written . . . the greatest Controversies of these times, would soone be determined, and have a happy end’ (1611: pt 5, sig. B3v). After a promising beginning in 1610 with the publication of the collected manuscript variants of Gregory’s Pastoral Care, the scheme soon encountered financial difficulties, and over the coming years, as Bodley himself observed, met many ‘promises but not performers’. The project was discontinued after James’s death in 1629 (Wheeler, in Bodley 1926: p. xv). The last significant contribution to patristic editions in our period were the works of Cyprian by the bishop of Oxford John Fell in 1682, and an edition of Irenaeus by John Ernest Grabe, a Lutheran

the preacher and patristics



scholar who had settled in Oxford (see Quantin 1997 for a more extensive account of English editions of the Fathers, especially in Oxford at the end of the seventeenth century).

Mediators Early modern preachers also encountered the Fathers through a range of secondary or mediating sources: theological tracts, vernacular translations, Bible commentaries, handbooks of patristic theology, and excerpt collections. For the purposes of the present discussion, the last three categories are the most significant. The handbooks fulfilled a variety of purposes, providing summaries of key doctrines, textual commentary, choice passages for polemical combat, and prescriptive advice on how the Fathers were to be used. The first decades of the seventeenth century saw an increase in both output and sophistication, with key texts including, on the Catholic side, Robert Bellarmine’s Liber de scriptoribus ecclesiasticis (1613). On the Protestant side, André Rivet’s Critici sacri (1612) was marked by a strong emphasis on textual scholarship, while Abraham Scultetus’s Medullae theologiae patrum (four parts, 1598–1613) focused on the polemical uses of patristic doctrine (Backus 1997: 856–8). Among medieval scriptural commentaries, Aquinas’s Catena aurea (a continuous commentary on the Gospels, composed between 1262 and 1266), Lyra’s Postilla litteralis super totam bibliam (1322–31), and the twelfth-century Glossa ordinaria provided the most popular mode of access to the Fathers; the latter two, of course, were frequently included with printed Bibles from 1495 onwards. The patristic excerpt collection is the most diverse category of mediating sources, and also perhaps the least well understood in modern sermon scholarship. It includes a vast spectrum of textual forms and practices, from the sustained exegetical and conceptual engagement of Lombard’s Sentences (1163; this was the most popular of the medieval excerpt collections), to anthologies compiled for specific polemical occasions (for example, Tunstall’s De veritate of 1551, a catena of patristic citations on the Eucharist), to florilegia with no discernible structuring principle or purpose. Among the large group of anthologies organized by doctrinal topics, three early sixteenth-century chrestomathies proved particularly fruitful resources for preachers and controversialists in our period: Hermann Bodius’s Unio dissidentium (1527); Johann Piscator’s three-volume Omnium operum divi augustini epitome (1537); and Andreas Musculus’s Enchiridion sententiarum of 1528 (Lane 1993). This material, alongside patristic information gleaned from handbooks, scripture commentaries, and theological tracts, was often condensed further and copied into a preacher’s personal commonplace book. In the doctrinal debates of the period, these various modes of accessing the Fathers were frequently turned into polemical weapons. In the Cartwright–Whitgift controversy of the 1570s, for instance, Cartwright’s acknowledgement of his debt to an influential patristic catena—Flacius Illyricus’s Catalogus testium veritatis (1562)—was quickly converted into a sign of bumbling incompetence by his episcopal adversary, who took him



katrin ettenhuber

to task for ‘having scarce read any one of the authors that you have alleged’ (Haugaard 1979: 54; citing Whitgift 1851: i. 448–9). In fact, however, we should be wary of assuming that a patristic reference derived from a secondary source is a sign of ignorance or incompetence, or that the uses of the reference—doctrinal, literary, or otherwise—were less significant for being some way removed from the original text. Lombard’s Sentences offer a sobering lesson in this respect. Augustine is the leading patristic authority in the Sentences, with a total of 680 citations; Ambrose comes in second, at some distance, with 66 references. Of the 680 Augustinian quotations, 310 (nearly half) have been gleaned from De trinitate. Astonishingly, however, none of these 310 quotations is taken from the Augustinian original: Lombard relied exclusively on a ninth-century mediator, Florus of Lyons, apparently without notable distortions or misrepresentations of the original (Wetzel 1991: 33). Moreover, there is evidence to suggest that early modern preachers saw primary and secondary sources as complementary, rather than as mutually exclusive alternatives. John Donne, for instance, was frequently encouraged by his mediating sources to revisit a passage in the original; conversely, close study of a primary text could send preachers to patristic anthologies and commonplace books, where topical indices offered corroborating evidence from other patrological sources. Finally, a study that focuses on the reception of the Fathers must carefully negotiate the complex relations of textual fidelity and rhetorical significance. While not necessarily offering a faithful representation of a Father’s theological position in its original textual and cultural setting, the mediating sources—precisely through their varying degrees of de- and recontextualization—offer rich and diverse opportunities for reinventing and rearticulating patristic ideas and forms of argument, especially in the literary sphere. By refocusing our attention on the uses to which the Fathers were put, we can better understand the multiple relationships constructed by preachers between these different types of patristic access, and appreciate the interplay between primary and secondary sources as a profoundly enabling rhetorical process, rather than as potential corruptions of the source text.

The Protestant Patristic Challenge: John Jewel Any account of the presence of the Fathers in English preaching must attend in detail to the work of John Jewel, and to his ‘Challenge’ sermon in particular (Hunt, Chapter 18, this volume). Preached by Jewel as bishop-elect of Salisbury at Paul’s Cross on 26 November 1559, repeated at court on 17 March, and again at Paul’s Cross on 31 March 1560, the sermon initiated one of the most significant, prolonged, and textually prolific controversies of Elizabeth’s reign. It also represents a defining moment in the patristic debates of the subsequent decades: Jewel’s sermon turns the Fathers into one of the crucial battlegrounds over which the doctrinal wars of the following century were to be fought. As Jewel proclaimed in characteristically combative style to his Protestant

the preacher and patristics



audience, ‘the doctors and old catholic fathers . . . are yours: ye shall see the siege raised, ye shall see your adversaries discomfited and put to flight’ ([1560] 1845: 22). The rhetorical strategies associated with Jewel’s patristic discourse shaped polemical language on both sides of the religious divide. It is no exaggeration to say that, after Jewel, the question of which faction represented the one true church was irrevocably intertwined with the question of who owned the Fathers. The broader polemical exchange provoked by Jewel’s sermon produced twenty-eight tracts and printed sermons over a period of twelve years (Milward 1977: 1–8).1 It was sparked off by Jewel’s vigorous and sustained attack on the ‘faults and abuses’ of the Catholic Mass ([1560] 1845: 7). Although he focused nominally on a limited set of liturgical concepts and procedures, Jewel’s ultimate aim was to formulate a more fundamental critique of Roman doctrine and practice. The climactic section of his sermon, having listed twenty-seven articles of the Catholic faith, announces the challenge that was to become eponymous with the performance: ‘if any man alive were able to prove any of these articles by any one clear and plain clause or sentence, either of the scriptures, or of the old doctors, or of any old general council, or by any example of the primitive church . . . I am content to yield unto him, and to subscribe’ (p. 21). Jewel’s benchmarks for religious orthodoxy here are the Scriptures and the testimony of the early church; any Catholic claims to doctrinal and institutional supremacy must be derived from these superior witnesses. Within this collective experience of early Christianity, the role of the Fathers could not be more crucial. First (and most straightforwardly), patristic writing is a key source for primitive doctrine and practice, and Jewel builds a large part of his argument on the stated conviction that, in all their articles of faith, the Catholics have ‘not one father . . . to make for them’ (p. 20). Secondly, the Fathers provide the most eloquent expression of Jewel’s foundational claim that the earliest traditions are the best. The sermon’s epigraph is taken from Adversus Praxean, one of Tertullian’s anti-heretical tracts: ‘This is a prejudice against all heresies: that that thinge is true, what soever was first: that is corrupt, whatsoever came after.’ This quotation recurs in the concluding section of the sermon, as the final patristic witness in Jewel’s argument. This is no coincidence. Circular structures and repetitions abound in Jewel’s sermon, and lend rhetorical solidity to his expressed desire to return ad fontes: to the sources of his own argument, and to the origins of the Christian faith. The third, and by far the most important, part of Jewel’s patristic strategy, however, is the way in which he presents the Fathers’ own views of human tradition. The Fathers emerge as supreme exegetes of Christ’s institution precisely because of their constant and explicit attempts to limit human authority, and their systematic efforts to channel doctrinal power back into the Scriptures. It is, paradoxically, in this very determination to relinquish interpretative influence that the Fathers reveal themselves to be the true descendants of the apostolic line. 1 Jewel’s main opponent on the Catholic side was Thomas Harding, formerly Regius Professor of Hebrew and warden-elect of New College, Oxford. Harding had retracted his Protestantism under Mary, and had received a benefice in the diocese of Salisbury, only to be ejected by the new bishop, John Jewel (Milward 1977: 3).



katrin ettenhuber

(The papal succession from St Peter, by the same token, disqualifies itself through its excessive emphasis on human custom and opinion.) This is why, throughout the sermon, Jewel feels able to place scriptural and patristic witnesses in an intimate, quasi-causal relationship with one another: ‘according to the doctrine of St Paul . . . Therefore St Augustine’ (p. 12) is a formulation that frequently recurs in Jewel’s discourse. His argument about patristic humility and hermeneutic self-limitation, about patient forbearance and dutiful submission to true authority, seeks to bestow on the Fathers qualities found in the Scriptures, and above all in Christ himself. Thus, the Fathers are turned into a gateway to God’s word; they become uniquely reliable mediators of his dispensation. And it is for this reason that, for almost a century after Jewel, the battle over the Fathers was considered so crucial to winning the larger polemical war. After Jewel, owning the Fathers emerges as a necessary prerequisite to proofs of doctrinal orthodoxy. In many ways, the Fathers are the architects of the Christian religion: they are the early church. As we have seen, Jewel’s principal means of vindicating the English church is a return to the sources of the Christian faith. By demonstrating the Catholic failure to conform with ‘Christ’s first institution’ (p. 4)—that is, with the doctrinal and liturgical injunctions set out in the Scriptures and the writings of the early church—he aims to undermine Roman claims to antiquity and establish the superior orthodoxy of the Protestant faith. Jewel’s argument is thus in no small part an exercise in terminological redefinition and redescription: at the heart of his case lies a struggle between competing versions of tradition, authority, and continuity. His attempt to bestow antiquity upon the young and fragile Protestant consensus involved, above all, a radical reinterpretation of the history of Christianity. Catholicism bases its claims to antiquity on a narrative of historical continuity: the Roman religion has evolved and survived unbroken to the present day, whereas Protestantism has barely a half-century to its name. Jewel seeks to undermine this claim by countering it with an alternative model of tradition, authority, sequence, and lineage. He reinterprets Catholic teleology and development as a story of decline, a progressive entrenchment of corrupt human custom and concomitant subversion of divine authority. The Catholics, Jewel scathingly notes, have no compunction in citing the authority of Honorius, a pope ‘about three hundred years past’ (p. 10), and ignoring the more venerable testimony of ‘St Cyprian, St Chrysostom, St Ambrose, St Hierome, St Augustine, and others, that received the sacrament at the apostles’ hands’ (p. 10). The Roman faith, for Jewel, rests on nothing more than human ‘inventions and phantasies’ (p. 24): it is a fallacy, broken reason, a non sequitur writ large. This idea of false continuities underlies Jewel’s preoccupation with Catholic logic, his desire to ‘rip up . . . their reasons’ (p. 14). A substantial portion of the sermon is devoted to exposing the shaky argumentative foundations upon which the Roman defence rests: ‘When the infidel shall come to Christ, the veil of darkness shall be taken from his heart; ergo, he that becometh a priest must shave his crown’ (p. 14). Jewel’s aim is to uncover the chasm of bad faith that separates scripture precept from Roman practice. This idea of a historical non sequitur is the master-trope at work here: Catholicism simply does not follow from Christ’s original dispensation, whether in doctrine, liturgy, or spirit.

the preacher and patristics



In the face of such false traditions, Jewel proposes decisive action: ‘Thus, whensoever any order given by God is broken or abused, the best redress thereof is to restore it again into the state that it first was in at the beginning’ (p. 4). The Protestant faith, according to this model, marks a breach with the false continuities of human custom, and a return to the beginnings of Christianity: the Scriptures as mediated through the early church. Where Catholicism has ‘broken or abused’ the first orders ‘given by God’, Reformed religion restores purity in doctrine and practice. Jewel’s language, characteristically, performs these ideas as well as articulating them. At a simple level, it should be noted that the sentence just quoted ends with the phrase ‘at the beginning’, thus lending rhetorical substance to Jewel’s project of returning ad fontes. More effective still, however, is the use of grammatical reduplication to give direction and form to Jewel’s argument. The repetition of the preposition in the phrase ‘restore it again into the state that it first was in at the beginning’ (emphasis added; reinforced by the doubling of ‘restore . . . again’ and ‘first . . . in the beginning’) has deictic implications, as Jewel attempts to bypass 1,500 years of historical developments and plants his vision of the English church alongside the single stable source of faith: the original practices of primitive Christianity, inspired by the Scriptures themselves. A preposition (literally ‘a thing placed before another’) establishes grammatical relations of time, space, and causality. In Jewel’s project of reversing historical and doctrinal priorities, of revising previous assumptions about antiquity and tradition, the strategic manipulation of grammatical details such as prepositions is crucial. Jewel’s sermon, then, seeks to give concrete rhetorical form to the idea of a Protestant return ad fontes: the recuperation of a scriptural model of worship through patristic pronouncement and example. Repetition, at the verbal, grammatical, and syntactical level, is a principal part of this strategy. Jewel, of course, was Reader in Rhetoric at Oxford long before he was appointed to the see of Salisbury, and would have been familiar with the rhetoric of repetition, both in theory and in practice. A brief glimpse at an influential account of repetition in Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria gives us a sense of how thoroughly and systematically Jewel planned every detail of his performance. Among a list of figures of repetition in book 9 of the Institutio, epanodos figures prominently as a way not only ‘to reaffirm the same meaning, but [also] . . . to mark a contrast’ (Quintilian 1993: 9.3.36). Epanodos literally means ‘on the way again’; its Latin counterpart regressio signifies the action of returning to a point of departure. Jewel’s patterns of repetition and antithesis—reiterating Protestant fidelity to a genuine tradition while at the same time emphasizing Roman deviations from it—is thus part of an utterly self-conscious and systematic orchestration of argument and rhetorical effect. Every detail of the sermon is employed in the service of a single idea: to establish the primacy of the earliest Christian witnesses, and to place the English church, via the Fathers, in a direct line of descent from this ideal. The invocation and, indeed, the impersonation of scriptural and patristic voices are crucial to this endeavour. Jewel’s ventriloquism of St Paul and the Fathers in the climactic final section of the sermon, with its insistent refrain ‘Did I ever teach you’, once again gives palpable expression to his desire to bypass historical and cultural difference, and to establish a direct rapport with the earliest apostolic teachings.



katrin ettenhuber

At the beginning of a sixteenth-century discourse on the Fathers, then, we find, not so much the exploitation of a single set of doctrinal positions, but the establishment of a patristic mentality that encompasses doctrinal and liturgical elements, while at the same time seeking to transcend them. In fact, this attempt to claim the spirit of the Fathers, their moral, religious, rhetorical, and hermeneutic substance (as well as specific opinions), is one of the greatest polemical strengths of Jewel’s argument, and one that was frequently exploited by subsequent Protestant controversialists. In Jewel’s model, the Fathers are valuable precisely because they exhibit the virtuous disregard for human custom that the Roman church so signally lacks. This means that, for all their venerable and authoritative status in the church, the Fathers always already offer a critique of nonscriptural traditions—that is, of the Catholic practices and institutions that are the principal target of Jewel’s sermon. The patristic mentality I have outlined here defines the entire rhetorical framework of the sermon, and extends into minute grammatical, verbal, and structural detail. In the debates that followed Jewel’s performance, the master-trope of returning to the source also determines broader textual practices. In the preface to Jewel’s 1583 collected sermons, his literary executor John Garbrand notes that the controversial pressures of the 1560s encouraged Jewel to review his approach to patristic and biblical scholarship. When preparing to do battle against Harding, Garbrand reports (with a touch of hyperbole), Jewel discarded his cribs, intermediaries, and notes, and went back to the patristic texts themselves: he had purpose to set downe the aucthorities out of the Fathers, and the quotations, truely and playnely: whereas in times before, hee had gathered sundrie bookes of common places out of the Greeke, and Latine, and later writers, he did peruse afresh the authors themselves, and made every where in them speciall markes, for the difference of such places, whereof hee made choice. (1583: sig. qiiir)

Owning the Fathers, then, entails disentangling them from their early modern context— the commonplace book—and relocating them to their original textual environment. The return ad fontes in the ‘Challenge’ sermon is a return to the spiritual, rhetorical, and theological foundations of patristic thought. Jewel’s performance marks a foundational moment in early modern patrological discourse, to the further developments of which I now turn.

1560–1632: Anti-Catholic Uses of the Fathers and Intra-Protestant Discourses The Jewel–Harding controversy, and its polemical aftershocks in the 1570s, placed the Fathers at the centre of a debate about doctrinal and institutional authority, as well as establishing some of the key arguments and rhetorical strategies through which that debate was to be conducted. During Elizabeth’s and James’s reigns, the Fathers continue

the preacher and patristics



to be an important rallying-point for anti-papal divines: in the 1599 edition of his Bellum papale, for instance, Thomas James insisted that the Fathers were the ‘hinges’ upon which the Roman controversy turned (cited by Windsor 1967: i. 237). Graham Windsor has argued that, in the period between 1606 and 1632, the appeal to the authority of the primitive church became increasingly widespread; divines of varied doctrinal allegiances were eager to prove the orthodoxy of their teachings according to the standards set by the early church (1967: i. 250). And Anthony Milton notes that, by the Jacobean period,‘English Protestant polemic contained few of the sort of anti-patristic remarks in which [previous] divines . . . had occasionally indulged, and which Roman Catholic authors had exploited when challenging Protestant claims to “antiquity”’ (1995: 273). Anti-papal writings of the Jacobean period frequently returned to the topoi of patristic polemic established by Jewel’s sermon. John White’s A Defence of the Way to the True Church (1614), for example, shows a characteristic determination to legitimate the English church by redefining the concept of antiquity: ‘Our Adversaries . . . may, in some points possible, pretend antiquitie; but PRIORITIE, which is the first and best antiquitie, they cannot in any one thing wherein they refuse us’ (1614: sig. **4v). While serving as an important point of consensus and unification in the polemical confrontation with Rome, the Fathers also played an increasingly significant part in the internal debates regarding the character and heritage of the English church. Between the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries, English divines consistently used the Fathers as a means of claiming the religious high and middle ground, a way of placing their own cause at the centre of the church, while dispatching a variety of dissenting factions to the margins of the religious scene. The collective weight of patristic opinion was mobilized to ward off a bewildering array of sectarian threats, often in one and the same work. The title page of Thomas Tuke’s A Very Christian, Learned, and Briefe Discourse, concerning the True, Ancient, and Catholicke Faith (1611), for instance, applies the Fathers as a panacea for ‘all wicked and up-start Heresies . . . Papists, Anabaptists, Arrians, Brownists, and all other Sectaries’. A formative episode in the anti-puritan use of the Fathers was the exchange between Whitgift and Cartwright during the Admonition Controversy (1572–5). John K. Luoma has argued that, in the aftermath of this debate, Hooker forced ‘an abandonment of the Fathers as a source of authority for the Puritans’ (1977: 45), but, if this was the case, his success turned out to be relatively short-lived. In 1604, the Puritan controversialists resurfaced in the shape of William Perkins, whose Problema have been characterized by Graham Windsor as ‘the first English monograph on the Fathers’ and ‘a real icebreaker in English theology’ (1967: i. 226). It is true nonetheless that, in the first decades of the seventeenth century, many radical Protestants defined their doctrinal stance in explicit opposition to patristic opinion, often resorting to an extreme form of scripturalism. The physician and card-carrying ‘anti-pater’ John Bastwick, for instance, presents a popular Puritan subversion of Jewel’s argument that the authority of the Fathers resides in their submission to the Scriptures: ‘if the learnedst of all the Fathers themselves, have continually made the word of God the onely rule of all their writings, why should any now leave their example in that, especially when God himself sendeth us to



katrin ettenhuber

Moses, the Prophets, Christ, and his Apostles’. And, adding insult to injury: ‘There is not the poorest Ministers, that is called a Puritan, but upon a weeks deliberation, will make a Sermon, that shall have more true learning and matter of edification in it, then all the Fathers Homilies together’ (1637: 21, 22). Among moderate Calvinist commentators and preachers, the Fathers were seen in a far more positive light. Yet, while patristic testimony was regarded as a strong weapon in the controversial battle against Catholics and radical Puritans, this did not mean that the Fathers’ views and opinions were accepted unconditionally. The most important feature of the mainstream Protestant approach to the Fathers was its insistence on the historical dimension of patristic thought. In order to illustrate this position, I will examine a selection of passages from the sermons of John Donne. Donne’s doctrinal pronouncements on the Fathers strongly echo the patristic manuals published by moderate Protestants on the Continent at the beginning of the century, especially those by Scultetus and Rivet and, to a lesser extent, Daniel Tossanus’s Synopsis de patribus (Latin edition 1603; English translation 1635). He rejects the reformist zeal of Puritans and antiCalvinists alike, opting instead for a pragmatic accommodation of primitive doctrine that is tempered by a sense of historical and geographical difference.2 First, the Fathers are subordinate to the Scriptures in terms of chronological and doctrinal priority. They are not infallible, and Donne is unequivocal in asserting the supremacy of God’s word over human tradition. This position is expressed with great rhetorical energy in a sermon preached at Whitehall in February 1620/1: ‘It is the Text that saves; the interlineary glosses, and the marginal notes, and the variae lectiones, controversies and perplexities, undo us’ (1953–62: iii. 208). Donne follows up with a swipe at Trent and ‘the Idolaters of that Council’, clarifying his views on the doctrine of patristic infallibility: ‘The Gospel was delivered all together, and not by Postscripts. Thus it is, If we go to the Record, to the Scripture: and thus it is, if we aske a Judge (I do not say, The Judge, but A Judge) for, the Fathers are a Judge; a Judge is a Judge, though there lie an appeal from him’ (1953–62: iii. 209). As so often for Donne, the difference between idolatry and true devotion lies in minute linguistic detail. The choice of the indefinite article places the Fathers firmly in the realm of humanity: they may sit in judgment, but will always be overruled in the supreme court of divine authority. With the insistence that patristic testimony is part of a human tradition, albeit of the most exalted and venerated kind, comes the recognition that the Fathers’ pronouncements are essentially context bound. Careful study of the Fathers’ linguistic usage and polemical concerns, of audience and occasion, reveals not a timeless, stable doctrinal consensus, but a complex and shifting set of rhetorical priorities and exigencies. A St Paul’s sermon of 21 June 1626 highlights the risks of approaching patristic argument

2

It is important to note that, in practice, Donne does not necessarily consider himself to be bound by the precepts that follow; as with many other aspects of his preaching, Donne habitually accommodates abstract rules to particular occasions. Nor is this brief synopsis designed to suggest that Donne’s views on the Fathers are chronologically constant and stable.

the preacher and patristics



from a monolithic perspective. Donne lists four principal reasons ‘why we may suspect the Fathers’ (1953–62: vii. 202), and offers some tentative solutions: Quia glaciem sciderunt, because the Fathers broke the Ice, and undertook the interpretation of many places, in which they had no light, no assistance from others, and so might easily turne into a sinister way: And then Rhetoricati sunt . . . The Fathers often applyed themselves in figurative, and Hyperbolicall speeches, to exalt the devotions, and stir up the affections of their auditory, and therefore must not be called to too severe, and literall an account, for all that they uttered in that manner: And againe, Plebi indulserunt, as S. Augustine sayes of himselfe, sometimes out of a loathnesse to offend the ignorant, and sometimes the holy and devout, and that he might hold his auditory together, and avert none from comming to him, he was unwilling to come to such an exact truth, in the explication and application of some places, as that for the sharpnesse and bitternesse thereof, weaker stomachs might forbeare. So also . . . that ex vehementia declinarunt, In heat of disputation, and argument, and to make things straight, they bent them too much on the other hand, and to oppose one Heresie, they endangered the inducing of another, as in S. Augustines disputations against the Pelagians . . . and the Manicheans . . . we shall find sometimes occasions to doubt whether S. Augustine were constant in his owne opinion, and not transported sometimes with vehemency against his present adversary, whether Pelagian, or Manichean. (1953–62: vii. 203)

What emerges from this passage is a preliminary interpretative protocol: the need to consider historical context, devotional purpose, and the demands of controversial debate. Because of these occasional specificities, it is important not to be ‘too severe, and literall’ in our exegesis and estimation of patristic opinion. Contextual, differentiated reading is imperative. The Fathers are furthermore to be treated as authoritative only when they speak in explicitly doctrinal terms, when they ‘deliver any thing dogmatically, for matter of faith’ (Donne 1953–62: ii. 103). Among moderate Calvinists, such methodological reflections were regarded as instrumental to polemical success: historical context proved an invaluable tool for exposing inconsistencies in the Catholic use of the Fathers, as well as the idea of patristic consensus itself.

Anti-Calvinist Containing Tactic and Positive Emulation: The Case of Thomas Lawrence Graham Windsor has argued that the anti-puritan use of the Fathers reached a high point in the first three decades of the seventeenth century. During this period, antiCalvinist divines mobilized the early church as part of a broader ‘containing tactic’: the Fathers were cited in defence of the episcopacy and the liturgy, and of the mediated, institutionally controlled interpretation of scripture (1967: i. 228–9). At the same time, however, divines such as Overall, Andrewes, and Montagu also encouraged a more



katrin ettenhuber

dogmatic form of patristic emulation, and were ‘more emphatically promoting the strict imitation of patristic doctrine and practice as normative for the present Church of England’ (Milton 1995: 274–5). In the Laudian period, divines drew particular support from the writings of the Greek Fathers. Laud himself did much to popularize the study of the Greek Fathers over the Latin Fathers: in 1631, as Julian Davies notes, Laud ‘established a press in London for the printing of Greek works, and projected another for Oxford, which failed to materialize’ (Davies 1992: 52). The views of Chrysostom, John Damascene, and Gregory Nazianzen now became a crucial rallying-point for the new ceremonialism, and Laudian preachers of the 1630s were keen to articulate these developments by forging new kinds of patristic rhetoric. To elucidate the Laudian approach to the Fathers, we need to look no further than Thomas Lawrence’s infamous sermon on Exodus 3:5, preached before Charles I on 7 February 1636/7, and printed by royal command later that year (on the Laudian style more generally, see Lake 1993). Like Jewel’s performance at Paul’s Cross, Lawrence’s sermon concerns itself explicitly with the doctrinal and liturgical foundations of the Mass; and, like Jewel, Lawrence reflects in detail on the status and authority of the Fathers. This, however, is where the parallels between the two sermons end; more illuminating by far are the contrasting textual, polemical, and rhetorical strategies that shape Lawrence’s discourse. At a superficial level, Lawrence could be seen to glorify the ‘dumbe gestures and ceremonies’ (Jewel [1560] 1845: 24) against which Jewel excoriates: his sermon caused a stir because it was read, in many quarters, as a defence of the real presence. But the most striking difference lies in Lawrence’s approach to the status and value of patristic argument. Where Jewel presents the Fathers as a source of collective human wisdom, tutelary spirits that can connect a community of believers with the earliest witnesses of Christ’s dispensation, for Lawrence the Fathers are magisterial in status: distant and remote, they embody the mysteries of the Christian faith and demand fear as well as reverence. This attitude towards the Fathers in turn serves to buttress the dual exaltation of priestly and royal dignity upon which the sermon is built, its insistence on ‘reverentiall distance’ in worship, and its constant reminders that ‘remoteness. . . is required here’ (Lawrence 1637: 1, 4). Lawrence exploits the patristic tendency, particularly pronounced in the Greek Fathers, to stress the inherent sanctity of consecrated places and objects. Lawrence’s contention that the altar ought to be venerated, for instance, is supported by an impressive array of patristic opinion: And in this beliefe, as the Primitive Christians used prostration to God at their Eucharisticall devotions; so did they, at their ordinary too . . . For our addresse must be with dread and horror . . . saith that Rhetoricall Bishop [Chrysostom]. Because he shall depart hence, without joy, that comes hither without feare. More yet, we have . . . an honour due to the Altar, in Ignatius, and adgeniculari aris, a kneeling to Altars, in Tertullian . . .We have . . . a salutation of the Table in Dionysius, and . . . a Veneration of the Table in Damascen’. (1637: 28–9)

It is important to point out that Lawrence interprets patristic testimonies not as loose analogues and parallels, but as dogmatic and exemplary in the strict sense: ‘as the Church of England assumes the same premisses, so doth she inferre the same conclusion

the preacher and patristics



the Church of God hath ever done before’ (1637: 24). Equally crucial to the patristic philosophy of Lawrence’s sermon, however, are the construction and presentation of patristic testimony. The best way of putting this is to say that the sermon is deliberately, strategically, and systematically off-putting. In the printed version, any residual sense of orality and performative immediacy has been carefully excised: instead, the sermon advertises and celebrates its status as a mediated, textual document, carefully guarded against the curious gazes of an uninitiated reader. Visually, the pages of Lawrence’s text bear closer resemblance to a twelfth-century glossed Bible than they do to a seventeenthcentury sermon: the margins are crammed full of notes, references, and quotations, with harshly abbreviated titles, in minuscule type, and often in Greek or Latin. Although Lawrence’s references are by no means always accurate, the cumulative effect of his scholarly apparatus is daunting. It would be impossible for all but the most initiated to reconstruct the full scope of patristic citations, and that, of course, is one of the main purposes of Lawrence’s textual politics. In structure, diction, and exegetical approach, the sermon consistently cultivates exclusivity, distance, and, at times, functional obscurity. It evinces a strategic contempt for preaching as a means of communing with a broad spectrum of believers, seeking to convert words into ceremonial acts and gestures instead. A characteristic example of this mindset is Lawrence’s tendency to conclude sections of his argument with so-called illations, often coupled with a rather idiosyncratic form of ‘tropological’ interpretation. An illation, of course, is at one level simply an inference, deduction, or conclusion. In a sermon obsessed with the sacramental dimensions of the Mass, however, another meaning of the Latin term illatio may have resonated in the background of Lawrence’s reflections. In the early Christian liturgies—such as the Iberian or Mosarabic rite codified by Isidore of Seville in the sixth century—illatio was the part of the eucharistic prayer that preceded the account of institution. Thus, in the context of eucharistic adoration and consecration, Lawrence’s choice of the word ‘illation’ almost seems to project a ‘real presence’, as his doctrinal convictions are inscribed into the linguistic and structural matrix of the discourse. A sermon may have to operate with the word, but, in Lawrence’s brand of preaching, that word is already invested with ceremonial significance. Lawrence’s tropological interpretations imbue his sermon with an equally strong sense of sacramental reverence and exclusivity. Rather than elaborating on the broader moral implications of the biblical text, Lawrence’s tropology extracts highly specific liturgical instructions, often with little or no visible connection to the scriptural template. These exegetical non sequiturs occur with almost provocative frequency and have the effect of presenting scripture interpretation as a mystery of faith, rather than as a hermeneutic procedure requiring a certain degree of transparency and justification. As with the use of the patristic magisterium, then, Lawrence’s rhetorical and exegetical manœuvres thus relentlessly rearticulate the message of its source text, Exodus 3:5: ‘Draw not nigh hither’. There is some evidence to suggest that Lawrence’s sermon was part of a broader Laudian attempt to control the textual and bibliographical politics of the 1630s. The year 1637, more particularly, saw Laud’s censorship policy work at its most effective pitch, with



katrin ettenhuber

the prosecution of Burton, Bastwick, and Prynne as the key event. In the same year, a member of the Scots covenant also noted with some resentment the ongoing polemical success of Andrewes’s XCVI Sermons. The publication of this text, as Peter McCullough has shown, was marked above all by the perfect orchestration of bibliographical, doctrinal, and rhetorical elements—a textual event that involved the editors, Laud and Buckeridge, and the printer, Richard Badger, in what was in many ways the creation of a Church Father for a new age (McCullough 1998). The same printer, Badger, was responsible for overseeing the publication of Lawrence’s sermon eleven years later. It is not, then, too fanciful to assume that Lawrence’s discourse may have been intended to contribute to the consolidation of Laud’s textual and religious politics: the ‘reverentiall fear’ of ecclesiastical authority and ceremony expressed in Lawrence’s sermon is based on the construction of a patristic magisterium, and on the rhetorical philosophy that derives from it.

1640–1709: Revolutionary Scripturalism and Restoration Rearguard Action Laud’s dogmatic approach to patristics was by no means uncontested. We have already had occasion to observe a prominent anti-pater in action; a year after the publication of Bastwick’s treatise, William Chillingworth—a former protégé of Laud’s (his godson, no less) who had recently recanted his conversion to Rome—published The Religion of Protestants (1638; 4th edn 1674), which vigorously asserted the doctrinal primacy of scripture and rejected the theological value of human tradition: ‘The bible, I say, the bible only, is the Religion of Protestants’ ([1638] 1674: sig. Rrv). Between 1642 and 1658, the Fathers made very few appearances in print, as the scripturalism of the Puritan party became firmly entrenched as the dominant religious discourse of the revolutionary years. After the Restoration, however, this situation changed drastically. The Act of Uniformity in particular marked a watershed in the English use of the Fathers. After 1662, patristic theology increasingly became the preserve of a High Church clergy concerned above all with the suppression of dissent: ‘Church of England divines wrote and preached tirelessly against schism, and patristic learning came to be largely, perhaps predominantly, used for that purpose’ (Quantin 1997: 1002; see also Goldie 1991). Patristic arguments were routinely cited in defence of order and peace, and of an elite clergy eager to consolidate its recently re-established institutional power. As George Hickes remarked in a 1680 sermon preached before the University of Oxford, ‘the Church built Her faith not on present, but past Miracles, and her Hieroms, Augustins, and Chrysostoms like us were not inspired, but studied divines’ (Hickes 1709: 52). The Fathers are used here in defence of the notion that theology should be the exclusive domain of the specialist: not of the ‘inspired’ individual, but of the superior class of ‘studied divines’. In this sense, as Quantin observes, the Fathers ‘played a major part in the radicalisation of episcopalism’ (1997: 1002).

the preacher and patristics



At the same time, however, the High Anglican approach to the Fathers came under attack from the rationalist wings of the Catholic and Protestant factions (the latter chiefly represented by the Socinians). In Sure-Footing in Christianity, or Rational Discourses on the Rule of Faith (1665), the Catholic controversialist John Sergeant advocated a return to religion’s first principles, in particular the oral and pragmatic traditions, whose value he regarded as ‘scientifically Evident’ (1665: sig. G7v).3 Compared to the ‘demonstrative use’ of such data, patristic testimony was of small force: ‘tis no more but reciprocating a Saw . . . or, if any new production be made, generally tis nothing but some note collected from some Historical book unobserved by others’ (1665: sigs A8r–A8r-v). After 1688, the champions of patristic doctrine were relegated even further to the margins of the religious spectrum. The Fathers became the province of the Nonjurors— those members of the clergy who had refused to take the oath of allegiance to William and Mary—and of other divines who hankered after a more sacramentally exalted and ‘mysterious’ model of Christianity. Among the latter group, the Oxford theologian Robert South advocated a strict adherence not only to the doctrines, but to the words of the Fathers (Quantin 1997: 1005). Patristic argument was once again perceived as a means of warding off sectarian threats: South’s views—which took him far beyond the patristic approaches adopted by continental Protestants—grew out of his contempt for those ‘sly, sanctified Sycophants’, the dissenters (South 1692–8: ii. 620). By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Fathers were no longer part of the common polemical currency. William Reeves’s patristic manual of 1709 makes one last attempt to elevate them to a position of controversial potency, but in retrospect his rhetoric sounds a note of nostalgic recollection rather than aggressive polemical zeal: And therefore when I see some Men playing their whole Artillery against ’em [the Fathers], and running Riot upon the absolute Perfection of Scripture, the better only to run down the Use of the Fathers . . . it puts me in mind of the like Practices upon their Sovereign, as upon the Scripture: For just such hollow Panegyricks came whistling from the same Quarter, that a good King wou’d reign most gloriously without his Guards, alone secure in the Hearts and Affections of his People, and when they had importun’d him out of his Forces, how they decided his Person I need not tell. (Reeves 1709: i, p. xxxv)

This is a far cry from Jewel’s notion of a patristic army, the shock troops that will ‘raise’ the Catholic ‘siege’ and ensure the triumphal restoration of primitive Christianity. Reeves’s version of the Fathers reads like an old-fashioned Cavalier fiction: like Charles I’s ‘Guards’—and despite conspicuous displays of gallantry—Reeves’s patristic weapons ultimately proved ineffectual, and saw little action in the polemical battles of the eighteenth century.

3 This anti-patristic momentum was countered, to some extent, by Latitudinarian works such as Edward Stillingfleet’s Rational Account of the Grounds of the Protestant Religion (1664), which argued that ‘the Fathers admitted the claim of reason and proceeded by way of rational inference’ (Vaughan Bennett 1971–2: 72).



katrin ettenhuber

Bibliography Backus, Irena (1997). ‘The Fathers and Calvinist Orthodoxy: Patristic Scholarship. The Bible and the Fathers according to Abraham Scultetus (1566–1624) and André Rivet (1571/3–1651). The Case of Basil of Caesarea’, in Irena Backus (ed.), The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West: From the Carolingians to the Maurists. 2 vols. Leiden: E. J. Brill, ii. 839–65. Bastwick, John (1637). The Vanity and Mischeife of the Old Letany. Bodley, Thomas (1926). Letters . . . to Thomas James, First Keeper of the Bodleian Library, ed. G. W. Wheeler. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bury, E., and Meunier, B. (1993) (eds). Les pères de l’église au xviie siècle. Paris: Cerf. Chillingworth, William ([1638] 1674). The Religion of Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation. 4th edn. Davies, Julian (1992). The Caroline Captivity of the Church: Charles I and the Remoulding of Anglicanism, 1625–1641. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Donne, John (1953–62). The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson. 10 vols. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Fisher, John (1526). A Sermon Had at Paulis by the Commandment of the Most Reverend Father in God My Lorde Legate. Goldie, Mark (1991). ‘The Theory of Religious Intolerance in Restoration England’, in Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan Irvine Israel, and Nicholas Tyacke (eds), From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 331–68. Haugaard, W. P. (1979). ‘Renaissance Patristic Scholarship and Theology in Sixteenth-Century England’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 10/3: 37–60. Hickes, George (1709). The Spirit of Enthusiasm Exorcised: In a Sermon Preach’d before the University of Oxford, etc. the Fourth Edition, Much Enlarg’d. Hurel, Daniel-Odon (1997). ‘The Benedictines of St.-Maur and the Church Fathers’, in Irena Backus (ed.), The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West: From the Carolingians to the Maurists. 2 vols. Leiden: E. J. Brill, ii. 1009–38. James, Thomas (1612). A Treatise of the Corruption of Scripture, Councels, and Fathers, by the Prelats, Pastors, and Pillars of the Church of Rome, for Maintenance of Popery and Irreligion. Jewel, John ([1560] 1845). The Copie of a Sermon Pronounced by the Byshop of Salisburie at Paules Crosse . . . Shortly Setforthe as Nere as the Authour Could Call it to Remembraunce, without Any Alteration or Addition, in The Works of John Jewel, ed. John Ayre. 4 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1845–50, i. 2–25. —— (1583). Certaine Sermons Preached before the Queenes Majestie, and at Paules Crosse, by the Reverend Father John Jewel, Late Bishop of Salisburie. Lake, Peter (1993). ‘The Laudian Style: Order, Uniformity and the Pursuit of the Beauty of Holiness in the 1630s’, in Kenneth Fincham (ed.), The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 161–85. Lane, Anthony N. S. (1993). ‘Justification in Sixteenth-Century Patristic Anthologies’, in Leif Grane, Alfred Schindler, and Markus Wriedt (eds), Auctoritas Patrum: Contributions on the Reception of the Church Fathers in the 15th and 16th Century. Mainz: Zabern, 69–95. Lawrence, Thomas (1637). A Sermon Preached before the Kings Maiestie at White-Hall, the VII. of February, 1636. Luoma, J. K. (1977). ‘Who Owns the Fathers? Hooker and Cartwright on the Authority of the Primitive Church’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 8/3: 45–59.

the preacher and patristics



McCullough, Peter (1998). ‘Making Dead Men Speak: Laudianism, Print, and the Works of Lancelot Andrewes, 1626–1642’, Historical Journal, 41/2: 401–24. Marius, Richard (1968). ‘Thomas More and the Early Church Fathers’, Traditio, 24: 379–407. Milton, Anthony (1995). Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–40. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Milward, Peter (1977). Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age: A Survey of Printed Sources. Scolar Press. Old, Hughes Oliphant (1975). The Patristic Roots of Reformed Worship. Zurich: Theologischer Verlag. Olin, John C. (1979). ‘Erasmus and the Church Fathers’, in Six Essays on Erasmus and a Translation of Erasmus’ Letter to Carondelet, 1523. New York: Fordham University Press, 33–47. Petitmengin, Pierre (1985). ‘Les Patrologies avant Migne’, in A. Mandouze and J. Fouilheron (eds), Migne et le renouveau des études patristiques. Paris: Beauchesne, 15–38. Quantin, Jean-Louis (1997). ‘The Fathers in Seventeenth-Century Anglican Theology’, in Irena Backus (ed.), The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West: From the Carolingians to the Maurists. 2 vols. Leiden: E. J. Brill, ii. 987–1008. —— (2009). The Church of England and Christian Antiquity: The Construction of a Confessional Identity in the 17th Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Quintilian (1993–6). Institutio oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler. 4 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Reeves, William (1709). The Apologies of Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Minucius Felix in Defence of the Christian Religion . . . Together with a Prefatory Dissertation about the Right Use of the Fathers. 2 vols. Sergeant, John (1665). Sure-Footing in Christianity, or Rational Discourses on the Rule of Faith. South, Robert (1692–8). Twelve Sermons Preached upon Several Occasions. 3 vols. Southgate, W. M. (1962). John Jewel and the Problem of Doctrinal Authority. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tuke, Thomas (1611). A Very Christian, Learned, and Briefe Discourse, concerning the True, Ancient, and Catholicke Faith. Vaughan Bennett, Gareth (1971–2). ‘Patristic Tradition in Anglican Thought, 1660–1900’, Oecumenica, 6: 63–87. Vessey, Mark (1997). ‘English Translations of the Latin Fathers, 1517–1611’, in Irena Backus (ed.), The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West: From the Carolingians to the Maurists. 2 vols. Leiden: E. J. Brill, ii. 775–835. Wetzel, Richard (1991). ‘Staupitz Augustinianus: An Account of the Reception of Augustine in the Tuebingen Sermons’, in Heiko A. Oberman and Frank A. James III (eds), Via Augustini: Augustine in the Later Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation: Essays in Honor of Damasus Trapp, O.S.A. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 72–115. White, John (1614). A Defence of the Way to the True Church. Whitgift, John (1851). Works, ed. John Ayre. 3 vols. Cambridge: University Press. Windsor, G. (1967). ‘The Controversy between Roman Catholics and Anglicans from Elizabeth to the Revolution’. 2 vols. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Cambridge.

chapter 4

pr e ach er s a n d m edieva l a n d r ena issa nce com m en ta ry carl trueman

Much work has been done over recent decades in addressing the literary, cultural, and political place of the English sermon in the world of the ‘long Reformation’, which covers the lion’s share of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Given the excellent coverage in these various fields, the agenda of this chapter is to be somewhat different: to examine how the polemical context of the period shaped theological attitudes to the resources of the Christian (and Jewish) traditions and thus provided the pedagogical background to the content of sermons during this time (McCullough 1998; Ferrell and McCullough 2000; Wabuda 2002). British preaching in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was determined both by the wider polemical context of European Christianity in general, and by the more immediate ways in which this context was played out, as the established churches of England and Scotland responded to the religious policies of the Crown. Theologically, of course, the Reformation witnessed first a break with medieval Catholicism on the sacraments, authority, and justification, then an increasingly complex and variegated church situation as Protestantism itself proved fragile and divided into Lutheran and Reformed, then Phillipist/Gnesio-Lutheran, and Reformed/Remonstrant/Socinian. In addition, from the 1560s onwards, the theological confessionalization of Europe, driven in large part by the Catholic retrenchment at Trent, both clarified and solidified the boundaries between the various traditions. To all this, one might add that English Protestantism in particular was also divided by debates over ceremonialism, the matter of Christian assurance, and the nature and status of Christian experience. Of course, preaching is more than just theology; and we know from the records of church sessions that the day-to-day life of the parish was often far removed from the

preachers and biblical commentaries



rarified debates about the communication of attributes that frequently convulsed Christendom; but the polemical and pedagogical context of Protestantism undoubtedly shaped the minds of the preachers as they variously approached the common biblical text (Todd 2002).

The Impact of Early Lutheranism The impact of Lutheranism on the English church was never particularly extensive, and as a theological impulse it had very limited influence in terms of the direct appropriation of medieval commentary and theological tradition by English theologians (Trueman 1994; Ryrie 2002). Luther himself was, of course, steeped in medieval exegesis, and his Reformation theology rests upon the development of exegetical trajectories that can be traced back to the twelfth century (Steinmetz 1980; Thompson 2005: 31–46). Significant in this regard was the increasing emphasis given in later medieval exegesis to the literal, historical, grammatical–syntactical meaning of the biblical text, something that was evident in writers such as Thomas Aquinas and Nicholas of Lyra, and that also fuelled interest in, and appropriation of, rabbinical exegesis (Lubac 1959–64: ii, pt 2, pp. 348–53; Preus 1969: 65–6; Merrill 1975; Thompson 2005: 40). Jewish exegesis also had a significant impact on Victorine exegesis in the late twelfth century (Smalley 1941: 121–44). In short, there was a positive connection between Jewish and Christian exegesis on a number of fronts from the twelfth century onwards, and this continued into the Reformation and post-Reformation periods. Yet in England early debates about Luther’s theology were arguably more focused on the antiquity of his theology relative to patristic testimony than on its relationship to medieval commentaries and exegesis. For example, the earliest significant English response to Luther is Bishop John Fisher’s The Sermon . . . Made again the Pernicious Doctryn of Martin Luther (1521; see Kneidel, Chapter 1, this volume, and App. I.1). This represents an important, though perhaps surprisingly late (Luther had been a figure of international significance since at least 1519), counterblast to the winds of doctrine blowing from Germany across the Channel into England (Hatt 2002: 77–97). Richard Rex has helpfully listed all the works that are cited by Fisher throughout his entire literary corpus, and these indicate not only a knowledge of both Greek and Latin Fathers, but also extensive reading of medieval and Renaissance works, as one would expect of an educated church leader of Fisher’s generation (1991: 192–203). Nevertheless, references in the sermon against Luther to other sources are limited entirely to early Fathers. There is, of course, the typical litany of previous heretics who provided the intellectual genealogy of Luther, starting with Arius and ending with Wyclif (Hatt 2002: 77, 92–6). Beyond this fleeting reference to Wyclif, however, Fisher focuses exclusively on patristic writers, particularly Augustine. At one point he even divides them into Latin and Greek Fathers in order to make a polemical point about the



carl trueman

catholicity of his own position, reflecting the typical desire of both Catholics and early Protestants to claim the grand theological tradition of the church for themselves and deny it to their opponents. Indeed, one might perhaps say that the polemical exigencies of the early Reformation made exegesis of patristic texts of almost as much importance as that of biblical texts (Hatt 2002: 80–2; Ettenhuber, Chapter 3, this volume). Neither medieval nor Renaissance commentators are acknowledged as sources at any point. Indeed, the amount of exegesis itself is minimal: Fisher is interested in articulating a pneumatological understanding of the church and the Christian life that refutes Luther’s view of justification, but does not engage in detailed examination of any individual biblical text. As a counterpart to Fisher, we have the work of Robert Barnes. Barnes’s earliest defence of Luther, Sentenciae ex doctoribus collectae, quas papistae valde impudenter hodie damnant (1530), is a book of patristic sentences designed to support various Lutheran propositions. Then there is his infamous 1524 sermon, preached on Christmas Eve at St Edward’s in Cambridge, and traditionally regarded as marking the start of the English Reformation, typically in Lutheran terms. Barnes was probably the closest thing England ever had to a high-profile true Lutheran, if Lutheranism is defined in terms of its views on the nature and non-negotiable importance of the Lord’s Supper. Indeed, Barnes appears to have been involved in the arrest of at least one Reformed theologian in England in the 1530s, and William Tyndale feared his influence among English Protestants (Foxe 1847: v. 227–8; Gairdner 1892: no. 851; Trueman 1995). We do not have the original text of Barnes’s sermon, only the charges and Barnes’s defence as recounted in the 1531 edition of A Supplicatyon Made by Robert Barnes Doctoure in Divinitie unto the Most Excellent and Redoubted Prince Kinge Henrye the Eyght. This prevents any firm conclusions on sermonic form, but two things are noteworthy: first, the authorities Barnes uses to defend his position are patristic authors (Augustine, Athanasius, Jerome, and so on), while medieval references are confined to canon law; and, second, given Barnes’s reputation as a Lutheran, the articles are of a remarkably generic reformist, rather than specifically Lutheran, variety (Barnes 1531: fos. xxiii–xxxvi; Trueman 1994: 50–1).1 This reflects the limited impact of Lutheran theology, at least in terms of its specific distinctives (that is, its understanding of the Lord’s Supper) in Britain. Barnes would himself go on to be a rather belligerent advocate of Lutheran sacramentalism; but as such was really to enjoy a more positive reception only in the more ceremonially inclined Anglicanism later associated with Andrewes (see Fig. 30; App. I.11) and Laud, rather than with the more Reformed elements within the church. Indeed, as continental Lutheranism itself rapidly moved beyond Luther and his writings and focused increasingly on that which distinguished it from the Reformed (that is, sacramental theology), Luther’s role in Europe in general, and certainly in Britain, became little more than that of a symbol of theological protest (Kolb 1999). 1 Barnes’s 1525 sermon led to him being prosecuted ‘over a series of articles no single one of which was within a thousand miles of any central issue of the Christian truth’ (Rupp 1949: 36).

preachers and biblical commentaries



The Establishment of Protestantism Of more significance in the development of English and Scottish theology and preaching than this early appropriation of Luther were those who returned to the island after periods of exile. These exiles had been located, by and large, either in Geneva, cities of the Swiss cantons such as Zurich, or imperial cities such as Frankfurt am Main. While there, they imbibed various forms of Reformed theology, and, upon their return, they imported agendas from the Continent that guaranteed that Protestantism in the British Isles was to be both more divided within itself, and more intimately connected to continental developments, than had hitherto been the case. The net result of this was that the emerging Anglican settlement of the Elizabethan era was to meet with less than universal approval on a number of fronts, primarily ecclesiological and liturgical but, because of the connections of these issues to wider theological concerns, also soteriological (Trueman 1994: 215–35; Grell 1996). Thus, English and Scottish Protestantism came to embody many of the tensions and trajectories that one finds on the Continent in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Debates over vestments, first adumbrated in the clash between John Hooper and Nicholas Ridley and Thomas Cranmer in the early 1550s, revealed the problems that the importing of the simple aesthetics of a Zurich-style worship and its way of understanding and applying scripture could cause to the kind of Anglican project being developed under the Tudor Reformation. This issue of vestments and worship aesthetics was to continue to be a problem up until the Act of Uniformity under Charles II in 1662 (Milton 1995; MacCulloch 1999: 195–6). While vestments, ecclesiology, and aesthetics were important polemical pressure points in Britain, there were also the larger theological questions that dominated European Christendom as a whole (Tyacke 1987; Milton 2008). Thus, as the Protestantism of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries came to address increasingly complex issues relative to classical theological loci, such as Christology, and hardy perennials, such as grace and free will, it exhibited an increasing sophistication in argument, a significant appropriation of theological metaphysics, and a renewed appreciation for the method and language of medieval scholasticism. Further, given the zeal of Catholics for accusing Protestantism of innovation, the Reformation emphasis upon the use of traditional authorities, particularly in the area of exegesis, was continued. In addition, the emphasis upon the biblical text as the word of God and as the norming norm (or ‘norm within the norm’) of all theological statements fuelled a surge of interest in linguistics, and also created a situation whereby the traditional canon of Christian exegetes was supplemented by increasing attention to rabbinic commentators.

University Curricula These polemics on ecclesiological and soteriological issues were played out against the more general background of the establishment of Protestantism within the universities,



carl trueman

a phenomenon that was common to large parts of Western Europe in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this context, it is useful to address issues of university curricula in order to understand what education formally trained preachers would have undergone. Typically, a theology student would have completed an undergraduate degree in the Arts and then proceeded to take his BD. Thus, a standard Arts-based education undergirded the more specific theological training (Feingold 1997a; Tyacke 1997). The standard mythology of post-Reformation Protestantism sees this period as one of the ossification of theological thought and the abandonment of the earlier Reformation emphasis upon biblical exegesis (see, e.g., Reid 1962). Over recent decades, however, much scholarly ink has been spent in demonstrating that the seventeenth century represented a period of remarkably fruitful text-linguistic study, when the exegetical tradition of both church and synagogue was intensively studied and extensively appropriated for the Christian cause. In part, this was the result of the essential stability of educational institutions and pedagogy, even in the wake of the Reformation. Certainly, it is true that university curricula were undergoing some significant modifications during this period, with logic being simplified and playing a less central role, and rhetoric becoming more important; but it is the continuities of university curricula from the twelfth century to the seventeenth that provide the broad pedagogical background for theological activity during this period, not least the training of ministers. While the Reformation period introduced changes of theological direction, some of which had a distinct and dramatic impact, particularly in the field of linguistics, on the whole it was less dramatically disruptive of the staple of education than might at first be thought. Material continuities, such as library resources, and established pedagogical practices, particularly the scholastic disputation, ensured that both Protestants and Catholic would have continued to deploy both dialectic and established authorities (including exegetical authorities) in the manner that had been typical during the medieval period (Fraenkel 1961; Muller 2003a). Developments in wider pedagogical concerns, not least the rising ideal of the generalist and an increasing emphasis upon rhetoric and prose style, also ensured that historical texts continued to have a significant role in education and in thought (Feingold 1997a: 246–50). Further, given the increasing importance placed on the literal sense of scripture as basic to all interpretation that is found in Western theologians, and specifically commentators, since the twelfth century, it is important to understand the exegesis of the Reformation and post-Reformation periods as a continuation of medieval trajectories, and even as an intensification of them in terms of Christological and eschatological implications. Protestant myths notwithstanding, exegesis was a central part of medieval theological training, and those often known today as philosopher theologians, such as Thomas Aquinas, also delivered extensive exegetical lectures on books of the Bible. Indeed, Aquinas wrote commentaries on Psalms, Job, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Matthew, John, Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon, and Hebrews. In addition, early catalogues cite a commentary on the Song of Songs (which, if it existed, is now lost), two inaugural lectures are discussions of scriptural texts, and he

preachers and biblical commentaries



also composed a continuous gloss of all four Gospels, commissioned by Pope Urban IV (Stump 1993). Protestant theology reflected this respect for exegetical tradition even at a principial/ pedagogical level. While William Perkins could omit mention of the need to engage with the commentary tradition in his standard guide to preaching, The Arte of Prophecying (1607), this should be understood against the background of Protestant theology and education in general, which placed a high premium on the tradition and which was presumably assumed by Perkins (see Kneidel, Chapter 1, this volume, and App. I.8). Thus, William Whitaker, in his defence of scriptural sufficiency and perspicuity, still recommended that preachers consult the works of past exegetes in order to deepen their own knowledge of the meaning of the biblical text (1588: 353–4). Edward Leigh, in his massive A Systeme or Body of Divinity, provides an extensive list of recommended commentators on each of the canonical books (1662: 41–65; Fig 29). This interest in the tradition is also indicated by the large number of translations and compendia of earlier authors that were produced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The partial dependence of reformers such as John Calvin on these has been well documented (see, e.g., Lane 1999), and we can assume that this practice continued into the seventeenth century, when works by scholars such as Matthew Poole provided convenient, if somewhat massive, synopses of historical commentary on the Bible—in Poole’s case, the entire Bible (1669–76). In addition, other medieval authors were translated, presumably to provide edification for a popular audience rather than sermonic models for a learned constituency, but we can reasonably assume that then, as now, the learned were not averse to using translations as and when available. Particularly widely read (given the range and frequency of their publication) appear to have been the works of Bernard of Clairvaux, whose popularity at the time of the Reformation, both as a source for cross-centred theology and as a model preacher, continued into the seventeenth century. In addition to these compendia, however, early modern preachers would have had direct access to complete editions of many medieval and Renaissance commentators. Indeed, from the late fifteenth century, printed editions of writers such as Bernard of Clairvaux were readily available. Also, Thomas Aquinas, having been somewhat eclipsed in the later Middle Ages by the Franciscans, enjoyed something of a personal renaissance in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with his biblical commentaries being made available in multiple editions throughout the period. Such works would have been easily accessible to an educated audience, and the fact that these theologians were not only available in new editions, but were repeatedly reprinted, indicates their popularity. References to more contemporary Renaissance writers, such as Cajetan and Erasmus, are also common, although the Council of Trent’s declaration that the Vulgate was definitive for points of exposition and preaching inevitably limited the usefulness of postTridentine Catholic commentary for Protestant exegetes (Muller 2003b: 402). Evidence of the catholicity of theological education in Britain during the seventeenth century, particularly as it relates to the medieval exegetical and theological tradition, is found in an interesting document composed by Thomas Barlow, philosophical theologian, one-time tutor at Oxford, bishop of Lincoln, and a thoroughly Reformed



carl trueman

Episcopalian. This document, Autoschediasmata, de studio theologiae: or, Directions for the Choice of Books in the Study of Divinity (1699), published posthumously, was found among his papers at his death, and represents his expectations for students moving on to the study of Divinity. Thus he presupposes the basic degree in Arts, which all candidates for theology would have had, but assumes that what he is writing represents only the most basic material with which the theological student would be expected to be familiar. The document is most instructive. On understanding the biblical text, he refers first to those who have commented on the whole Bible, referencing particularly Jesuit commentators (including Cornelius à Lapide) and also the Reformed annotator, Giovanni Diodati (Barlow 1699: 9).2 Thus, it is clear that the sharply drawn lines of polemical engagement at an ecclesiastical level are somewhat blurred when it comes to theological education. The typical Protestant student should, according to Barlow, be familiar with Jesuit exegesis; and in the bibliography this is not set within the specific context of current polemics, for which he has separate sections. Then, as he proceeds to talk generally about linguistic, exegetical, and historical issues, he cites typical philological authors, such as Johannes Buxtorf, alongside rabbis, Catholics, Reformed, and the occasional Lutheran, indicating that he regarded good exegesis as no strict monopoly of any one tradition (even though he indicates a preference for Catholics of the thirteenth century and earlier, before he sees the papacy as fully formed, and for Protestants condemned by the Spanish Inquisition, the negative imprimatur clearly being something of a guarantee of theological quality!). He even recommends Conrad Vorstius on Paul’s Epistles (excepting Hebrews) and Peter Lombard on the same, given that he is a Catholic writing before the official confirmation of transubstantiation as a dogma (Barlow 1699: 10–15). If Barlow’s recommendations are typical—and there is no reason to doubt this, given the catholic nature of the reading he suggests—it is clear that a theological education in seventeenth-century England would have left students familiar with the broad contours of exegesis in a variety of Christian traditions, transcending any particular confessional boundaries. This is of a piece with the trajectories of early Reformation thinking on scripture, which, for all of the emphasis upon scripture’s unique authority and sufficiency, did not wish to be vulnerable to accusations of theological novelty and did not neglect the value of studying the testimony of the church and its exegetes throughout the ages, or see this as damaging scripture’s supreme status (Thompson 2005: 219–20, 231–2). This is confirmed by the various library catalogues that are available to us. The libraries of both John Owen, Bibliotheca Oweniana (1684), and Richard Baxter contained holdings that follow the kind of emphases and content outlined by Barlow, including a significant number of medieval exegetical and theological titles, along with works of rabbinic exegesis (Nuttall 1951, 1952). Baxter’s is perhaps particularly significant: he was not university trained, and so the close parallels between his autodidactic library and that of contemporaries like Owen and the curricular bibliography of Barlow, indicates something of the depth of penetration of these emphases in the Protestant world. Indeed, 2 Diodati’s Annotations were translated into English in 1643 and were influential on the deliberations at the Westminster Assembly that convened in that year.

preachers and biblical commentaries



these bibliographical preferences are not the preserve of any one theological party: these catalogues are indistinguishable on these fronts not only from similar examples from the Continent, but also from English contemporaries of a different theological persuasion. For example, the library of John Tillotson, archbishop of Canterbury, Bibliotheca Tillotsiana (1695), is similarly impressive in its holdings of historic theology, general literature from throughout the ages, and contemporary linguistics.

The Polemical Context and the Rise of Linguistics Given all the above, there were strong contextual reasons for the catholicity of theological education, beyond the obvious help that the exegetical tradition might impart. The polemical nature of theology in this period, and the role of historical precedent in those polemics clearly offer a major reason for mining the tradition for ammunition, if not wisdom. Yet there were more subtle pressures at work as well. Protestant emphasis on scripture as the word of God and as the perspicuous cognitive ground of theology inevitably made the biblical text, as given in the original language, a focal point of scholarly interest, and this in turn fuelled interest in the original languages and the various cognates. This might well seem to later generations to be the preserve of an elite few, but in fact this issue had immediate polemical urgency that made it a significant concern for all churchmen. Increasingly, Protestant arguments for scriptural perspicuity and sufficiency became a target of major Catholic polemicists, such as Robert Bellarmine, and encouraged Catholics to address issues relating to translation and variant readings in manuscripts, with a view to showing the implausibility of Protestant claims. Protestant theologians and linguists, such as William Whitaker, then in turn attempted counterrefutations (Bellarmine 1581–93; Whitaker 1588). The inevitable result was a burgeoning of interest not simply in the history of Christian exegesis, but in all the linguistic disciplines that would help in the examination of the biblical texts. This embraced not simply the tradition of Christian commentary, but also that of the rabbis, given their significance for understanding both the content of the biblical text and the historical development of the Hebrew language, a point of great polemical significance in, for example, the vexed discussions over the antiquity of the Masoretic vowel points (Muller 2003a: 146–55). Indeed, interest in Jewish exegesis was typical of West European Christianity as a whole from the sixteenth century onwards, as evidenced in the early Reuchlin controversy and Erasmus’s textual work. In England, the importance of semitic linguistics is evidenced by the fact that both Oxford and Cambridge established Regius Chairs of Hebrew under Henry VIII (Logan 1977). Under Edward VI the Cambridge chair was held by Immanuel Tremellius, a convert from Judaism and an outstanding Hebraist who was to hold chairs at other distinguished European universities and, as much as anyone,



carl trueman

through his teaching and above all his writings, was to help establish the importance of Hebrew linguistic studies in the sixteenth century (Austin 2007). The developing importance of the study of Hebrew, and its increasing sophistication, was to reach its peak in the seventeenth century with the establishment of linguistics as a major part of Protestant pedagogy, and is witnessed in the careers of the great Hebraists of the day, such as Johannes Buxtorf in the Netherlands, and John Lightfoot and Brian Walton in England (Burnett 1996; Muller 2003b: ii. 131). Unlike the study of Greek, this was almost exclusively for biblical and theological reasons, given that the language was not deemed significant in helping to develop rhetorical and stylistic skills (Feingold 1997b: 449). Of course, one might ask at this point the extent to which the development of such studies within the rarified settings of universities had an impact on typical ministers. Such a question cannot be answered in terms of each and every pulpiteer, but the Protestant emphasis upon the Bible in the original languages as the Word of God, combined with the centrality of preaching, inevitably forged a close link between linguistics and the pulpit. This can be confirmed by looking at various examples in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Recent work on John Donne has served to draw attention to the depth of his learning in the Hebrew language and his ability to deploy this within the homiletic context of his preaching. Thus, his Sermon 50 on Psalm 6 uses detailed knowledge of the original Hebrew text, along with the interpretation of that text throughout history by Jewish, Catholic and, latterly, Protestant commentators, to construct a distinctively Christological, and Protestant, reading of the passage (Goodblatt 2003). Of particular note is Hugh Broughton, a preacher of Puritan sympathies whose extensive writings, including works on biblical history, translations, and various pastoral and theological issues, demonstrate striking linguistic prowess. His extensive studies on the Continent had included interaction with leading Christian and Jewish Hebraists, and, when his works were reprinted in a collected edition in 1662, it was with a biographical preface by another great Hebraist, John Lightfoot (Broughton 1662). Moreover, while Broughton was clearly a man of exceptional learning, there is evidence that the high linguistic expectations of the typical theological course of study could be met in remarkable ways even by relatively unknown figures. Lazarus Seaman, for example, a minor delegate to the Westminster Assembly and not a man of any great personal distinction, is noted as always carrying around an unpointed Hebrew edition of the Old Testament, because this was his preferred text for personal devotions. In addition, the development of bible study tools, such as the Westminster Annotations and the annotations of Diodati and those on the Dutch Statenvertaling, both of which were translated into English in the seventeenth century, indicate an assumption that ministers will be comfortable working with Hebrew, and also evidence knowledge of the rabbinic traditions of commentary on the biblical text. Ironically, the Westminster Annotations have been almost entirely neglected by scholars, who have been quick to dismiss the seventeenth century as an era of dogma, not exegesis; yet they represent one of the most significant and comprehensive analyses of the biblical text in the seventeenth century. They went through three full editions (1645, 1651, 1657), a volume of augmentations (1655), and a volume of further annotations (1658) (Muller and Ward 2007: 11–29).

preachers and biblical commentaries



In this context, a figure such as Thomas Gataker, while no doubt an exceptional linguist in terms of his ability, was in a sense also representative of the high end of the kind of culture that seventeenth-century Christianity embodied in relation to linguistic issues as they touched upon the biblical text and upon exegesis. This was, after all, the century of the great polyglot Bibles, not the least of which was that of Brian Walton, published between 1653 and 1657. Thus, while Gataker is perhaps best known as a somewhat controversial delegate to the Westminster Assembly (because of his views on justification), he was also deeply involved in some of the great textual and linguistic tasks of the day, such as the production of the Westminster Annotations. In addition, he produced a series of monographs on more or less abstruse aspects of biblical linguistics, including a commentary on the tetragrammaton, on diphthongs, and on the Hebraic underpinnings of New Testament Greek: De nomine tetragrammato dissertatio (1645); De diphthongis (1646); and De novi instrumenti stylo dissertatio (1648). The appropriation of this rabbinic exegesis and Hebraic scholarship within a specific sermonic and polemical context is found in various controversies in the English church in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For example, Peter Baro demonstrates knowledge of rabbinics and of contemporary Christian Hebrew scholarship in his (in) famous sermons on the Book of Jonah, In Jonam prophetam praelectiones 39 (1579), which brought him under suspicion for his views on free will and predestination in Cambridge in the 1570s. Baro cites, among others, David Kimchi and Mercerus. David Daiches has also pointed out that the Geneva Bible, beloved of the more radically inclined English churchmen, was the first bible translation that made considerable use of the commentary of Kimchi, ensuring that rabbinics was indirectly significant for the next several generations of Presbyterian-inclined preachers within the Anglican Church (1941: 180). Further, rabbinics played a very significant role in the arguments over church polity that took place in England and Scotland in the first half of the seventeenth century. This was particularly the case after the signing of the National Covenant in 1638, when hermeneutical and ecclesiological interests were intertwined. In simple terms, and addressing the matter purely at the level of theological argument, much of the debate hinged on the nature of the government of ancient Israel, and how this Old Testament paradigm was to be understood as being transformed under the dispensation of the New Testament. The issues were played out on a popular level through sermons and pamphlets; but these were built on intricate debates about Old Testament texts, and an examination of writings by key protagonists in the debates indicates that rabbinic exegesis of relevant bible texts was given significant weight within the discussions. For example, George Gillespie’s major work on Presbyterian government, Aarons Rod Blossoming (1646), drew heavily on rabbinic commentary on the Old Testament. When we compare this to a famous sermon he preached before the English Parliament on the same theme on 27 August 1645, A Sermon Preached before the Right Honourable House of Lords (1645), we do not find the extensive interaction with the rabbis, but he does cite Hebrew and speak about the status of the church under the Old Testament in a manner that points clearly to his underlying knowledge of rabbinic exegesis. He also cites, among others, Cajetan, Bullinger, Gualther, and the Chaldee paraphrase, and the text contains



carl trueman

an appendix critiquing Thomas Coleman, a contemporary Erastian–Presbyterian, fellow delegate to the Westminster Assembly, and Gillespie’s principle opponent in the debates over church government in the mid-1640s. When we turn to Coleman, we find he too uses the rabbis. Indeed, so proficient was he as a Hebraist that he was nicknamed ‘Rabbi’ Coleman. Thus, preaching in the context of the signing of the Solemn League and Covenant in 1643, he takes Jeremiah 30:21 as his text, and opens the sermon with reference to the various meanings of the term translated by the Authorized Version as engaged, comparing this with both Kimchi and Jerome (Coleman 1643: 1). The particular sermon that earned Gillespie’s ire, principally for its attack on de jure Presbyterianism, took as its text Job 11:20 and, in its published form, actually featured a midrash quotation in Hebrew on its frontispiece. Then, at the very start of the sermon, Coleman refers in a marginal note to Rabbi Ben Ezra as supporting the idea of the book’s Mosaic authorship (1645: 1). While the main text is in English, the marginal notes are full of citations in Hebrew, in order to allow the learned to see the semantic issues he is wrestling with. Coleman also refers at one point in the marginalia to ‘Jewish expositors’, presumably rabbis, for a reading of Balak’s motives in Numbers 22, though only to reject their position (1645: 14). The main text of his sermon is, therefore, straightforward, in the vernacular and unburdened with technical learning; but the marginalia indicate the depth of scholarship on which the text itself rests.

The Polemical Context and Appropriation of the Medieval Tradition Of course, ecclesiology and the role of ceremonies were not the only issues that affected Protestant theology in England and Scotland in the seventeenth century; the fragmentation of continental Protestantism, and the increasingly complex debate that that caused, also impacted on British theologians. The limited influence of Luther and Lutheranism in Britain meant that the battles over Luther’s legacy between Gnesio-Lutherans and Phillipists on the Continent was of little more than passing interest to British preachers; but the split between Arminians and Calvinists over issues of grace and predestination did have an impact with regard to the appropriation of medieval theology and exegesis, and, indeed, of more contemporary Catholic exegetical and theological work. The Leipzig Disputation of 1519 is most famous today for the clash between John Eck and Martin Luther over the nature of church authority; in fact, earlier in the debate an equally momentous debate took place between Eck and Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt over the nature of the freedom of the human will. Karlstadt is generally regarded to have come off worst in that encounter, primarily because of his lack of knowledge of medieval distinctions surrounding this issue. This was a mistake that Protestantism rectified in later years, paying careful attention to medieval and Catholic discussion of these ideas. In this context, it is important to understand that the debates

preachers and biblical commentaries



between Calvinists and Arminians not only paralleled similar debates in Catholicism between Dominicans, Jansenists, and Jesuits, but also that Protestants on both sides of the discussion were aware of these parallels and, indeed, used Catholic writers as sources for many of the concepts and arguments that they deployed. Indeed, leading Puritan theologian John Owen at one point expressed his desire to write a history of the conflict between Jesuits and Jansenists, and also wrote an introduction to Theophilus Gale’s The True Idea of Jansenisme (1669). Owen’s own works are replete with references, many positive, to Jesuit authors, especially Francisco Suarez (Muller 1991; Dekker 1996; Trueman 1998). Theologically this makes perfect sense; these kind of ontological questions about the relationship between God and creation, and between divine foreknowledge and human action, had been staples of Western Christian thought for centuries. Indeed, much of the thinking on these issues put forward by medieval theologians was not challenged by the basic Reformation agendas on church authority, sacraments, and justification by faith. Further, the conceptual issues surrounding notions of causality, understood within broadly Aristotelian frameworks, were also left unchallenged by Reformation thinking, no matter what the anti-Aristotelian rhetoric of some reformers might, on the surface, appear to suggest (Schmitt 1981, 1983; Trueman 1998: 34–44). In fact, much of what was developed in the medieval period on these and related matters, such as human psychology, was consistent with dominant patterns of Protestant science and philosophy and could be appropriated wholesale. In addition, the work of Jesuits on the problematic connection between divine foreknowledge and human free will, resolved as it was by the use of the concept of middle knowledge, adumbrated precisely a significant area of debate between Calvinists and Arminians. Indeed, the scholarly consensus now seems to be that Arminius drew directly upon the work of Jesuits such as Molina in his move away from Calvinist orthodoxy (Dekker 1996). Given this, it is not surprising to find English and Scottish Protestant texts full of references to medieval and contemporary Catholic theologians, as both provided a rich conceptual vocabulary for discussing pressing current polemical issues. While debates about free will in the English context started in a fairly prosaic and unsophisticated form in the clash between Bishop Hooper and Bartholomew Traheron, and between John Bradford and the so-called free will men, in the 1550s (Trueman 1994: 218–30, 243–76), the debates continued through the controversy surrounding Peter Baro and onwards into the late 1600s, when sophisticated discussions of sin, God, and causality were deeply embedded in disputes between men like John Owen, Richard Baxter, John Goodwin, and their contemporaries. Thus we find extensive use of writers such as Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Francis Suarez, Luis de Molina, and Robert Bellarmine throughout the Protestant literature of the time. Typical in this regard is John Owen, who, in his very first published work, A Display of Arminianisme (1643), cites medieval authors, particularly Thomas, extensively. The same is true of Richard Baxter in his Methodus theologiae (1681) and John Goodwin in Redemption Redeemed (1641), who does not explicitly cite medievals as frequently as Owen, but still deploys the standard medieval vocabulary on God’s essence and his will that was the stock-in-trade of Protestant debates by this point.



carl trueman

In addition, those polemicists such as William Whitaker and Lancelot Andrewes, who engaged directly with the polemics of men such as Bellarmine, inevitably demonstrate a vast and impressive knowledge of medieval and Renaissance Catholic authors (Whitaker 1588; Andrewes 1967b). The polemics of the time were deeply rooted in conceptual and theological traditions that made such references inevitable; and the increasing sophistication of each side’s criticism of the other made the use of rarified and long-established theological vocabulary and concepts unavoidable. It is against this pedagogical, theological, and polemical background that seventeenth-century sermons need to be assessed, though this has not typically been the case. One factor that has perhaps led to a certain eclipsing of the significance of this context, particularly relative to those holding to more Calvinistic understandings of grace and a more aesthetically austere form of worship, is the rhetoric against rhetoric that one finds in some of the Reformed literature of the early seventeenth century, which exhibited a high degree of suspicion of elaborate language in favour, ostensibly at least, of a more simple sermonic form. From the very start of the Reformation, the reformers had consciously sought to wear their learning very lightly in the pulpit. Luther’s sermons abound with homely images and are remarkable for their lack of technical discussion, and Calvin famously did not quote Hebrew or Greek from the pulpit in order to avoid placing a barrier between himself and his congregation. In post-Reformation Protestantism, a professed fear of overly ornate oratory was a pulpit staple, and in England those who leaned towards Calvinistic doctrine and simple ecclesiastical aesthetics would parade their commitment to ‘simplicity’ for all to see. Thus, in A Discovery of D. Jacksons Vanitie (1631), by William Twisse, the first prolocutor of the Westminster Assembly, one finds polemical asides on the use of rhetorical artifice by his opponent, the Platonic and Arminian theologian Thomas Jackson (Twisse 1631: 237). This emphasis upon simple, plain style found its primary methodological expression in the extremely influential handbook on preaching by William Perkins, The Arte of Prophecying (1607). Perkins gives detailed attention to grammatical analysis of the biblical text, the spiritual qualities of the preacher, and even to pitch of voice and hand gestures, but, with the exception of a reference to past theological works as sources for combating perennial heresies, there is no suggestion that the exegetical tradition of the church should be a source for the preacher. This stated simplicity of approach, however, should not be taken at face value, for it presupposed precisely the kind of education in the exegetical and theological tradition outlined above. Thus, Thomas Gataker, whom we noted earlier as both a Westminster Divine and one of the outstanding biblical linguists of his day, was also a regular preacher. His published sermons indicate clearly his learning through references to Greek and Hebrew, but these references are confined to marginalia and presumably did not feature in the original oral delivery in the same way that they do not feature in the printed text. Indeed, when the original languages are significant to what he wishes to say in the sermon, he will use vernacular explanations to make the point, thus avoiding any hint of blinding his audience with science. The learning on which the vernacular sermon rests is, however, clear (Gataker 1637).

preachers and biblical commentaries



Another good example is John Owen, one-time chaplain to Oliver Cromwell, who was quite happy not only to litter his theological works with classical allusions and the occasional personification, but also to deploy medieval theologians and exegetes as and when it suited his purpose. He was equally able to engage in significant linguistic analysis of biblical texts in the original languages, as demonstrated supremely in his commentary on Hebrews (Rehnman 2002: 21–45; Trueman 2007). Yet when we turn to his published sermons we see this learning only occasionally present in an explicit form (Owen 1850–5: viii–ix). Thus, he will on occasion cite clauses in scripture in the original, but he always immediately translates the clause in order to avoid elaborate linguistic discussion; the citation of authorities is done only sparingly. For example, in one sermon, he cites phrases from 1 Peter 4:10 and Romans 2:5 in Greek before immediately translating them (Owen 1850–5: viii. 134); then in another (viii. 217), he does the same with Matthew 21:21, 1 Corinthians 11:29, and Acts 10:20. I have been unable to find similar citations from Hebrew in the main text. Both instances are a marked contrast to his approach in the theological treatises. On this point, we can contrast a Puritan like Owen with a more mainstream Protestant preacher such as Lancelot Andrewes (see Reisner, Chapter 5, this volume, and App. I.11). While both men would have had a similar education and were committed to essentially the same basic Protestant principles, the published sermons of Andrewes wear their learning much less lightly than Owen. Again, typical theological sources are referenced in the margin (Augustine, Theodore, and so on), which indicates the very generic nature of Protestantism when it comes to the sources of discussion and attitudes to the medieval writers; but the texts of the Andrewes sermons are themselves replete with statements in Latin and, indeed, direct exegesis of the Vulgate text of the Bible. This would have been anathema to a Puritan writer, for whom the Vulgate would have had no more status than any other translation. If the Puritan ideal was, at least as stated, simplicity and clarity, it is clear that not all Protestants agreed with them (see, e.g., Andrewes 1967a). Nevertheless, such commitment to simplicity was not always evident, at least in the published texts of sermons. For example, we might compare Owen’s preaching with the slightly later sermons of Stephen Charnock, a nonconformist, excluded from the post-1662 Anglican settlement. Charnock, like Owen, emerged from the kind of pedagogical and polemical context described above, and any notion of ‘Puritan simplicity’ needs to be read through this lens. In the printed editions of his sermons he does indeed occasionally quote Hebrew in the main text, though we cannot know for sure that this was not added between oral delivery and publication in print form (Charnock 1682). In addition, his sermons reveal that, despite his claims to simplicity, complex theology, careful use of exegetical and theological traditions, and powerful deployment of rhetorical devices were all part of his stock in trade as a preacher (Trueman 2008). Charnock’s sermons were delivered to a congregation made up of nonconformists; thus there is no reason to assume that they were particularly well educated or theologically well read. Yet we find significant use of rhetorical questions, alongside references to contemporary scientific developments such as



carl trueman

the discovery of the arterial valve system of the heart; and, while the main text of the sermons generally avoids direct citation of medieval authorities, marginal comments in the published editions allow the reader to see on which authorities and sources he bases his arguments. References to theologians such as Theodoret, Aquinas, Cocceius, and Voetius abound (Charnock 1682). We also find deployment of the medieval notions of nature and grace, and proofs of God’s existence, explicitly drawn from medieval sources such as Aquinas, though with references in such contexts also being made to other writers from the ancient to the contemporary such as Philo, Ayraut, and Gassendi. Crucially, however, this sermonic use of the proofs is distinctly early modern, in that the power of the argument lies not so much in the metaphysical strength of the proofs themselves, but in the context in which they are placed. In seventeenth-century Reformed dogmatics, the proofs are typically part of an argument based on the consent of the nations, a classic rhetorical device. The sermons of men such as Charnock provide a fine rhetorical context for just such a use of medieval theology (Charnock 1682: 6–9).

Conclusion The exegetical and theological background to the early modern sermon is complex. The Reformation was decisive in a number of ways, not least in placing the vernacular sermon at the centre of Christian worship. In Britain, however, it was not so much the Lutheran emphasis on justification that was significant, given that Lutheranism never really became a force within English Protestantism and its teaching on justification was subsumed within a broader Protestant consensus. Rather, it was Protestantism’s emphasis on the Bible as the word of God and on scripture as perspicuous that pushed both Protestants and Catholics towards a deeper examination of the biblical text in the original languages and to a more thorough study of the history of exegesis, Christian and Jewish. In addition, the establishment of Protestantism within the universities, along with the demands of the polemical context for greater terminological and metaphysical precision in debates about, for example, the nature of human freedom and divine predestination, led to engagement with, and appropriation of, aspects of medieval theology. The parallels between contemporary Protestant debates in these areas and those taking place within Catholicism also meant that there was significant use made by Protestants of contemporary Catholic, especially Jesuit, writings. Much of this sophistication can be gleaned from the marginalia of printed sermons; rarely does it appear in the main text, presumably because of the desire to present Christian teaching in a clear form to the congregation. But the study of marginalia, library catalogues, and university curricula, and, indeed, examination of how such devices as medieval proofs are used in sermons, reveal not only the depth of learning of many preachers, but also their ability to engage with both the theological tradition at its most sophisticated and the ordinary people in the pew.

preachers and biblical commentaries



Bibliography Andrewes, Lancelot (1967a). The Works of Lancelot Andrewes, i. Sermons, ed. J. P. Wilson and James Bliss, repr. New York: A.M.S. Press. —— (1967b). The Works of Lancelot Andrewes, viii. Responsio ad Bellarminum, ed. J. P. Wilson and James Bliss, repr. New York: A.M.S. Press. Austin, Kenneth (2007). From Judaism to Calvinism: The Life and Writings of Immanuel Tremellius (c.1510–1580). Aldershot: Ashgate. Barlow, Thomas (1699). Autoschediasmata, de studio theologiae: or, Directions for the Choice of Books in the Study of Divinity. Oxford. Barnes, Robert (1531). A Supplicatyon Made by Robert Barnes Doctoure in Divinitie unto the Most Excellent and Redoubted Prince Kinge Henrye the Eyght. Antwerp. Bellarmine, Robert (1581–93). Disputationes de controversiis Christianae fidei adversus huius temporis haereticos. 4 vols. Ingolstadt. Broughton, Hugh (1662). The Works of the Great Albionean Divine . . . Mr Hugh Broughton. Burnett, Stephen G. (1996). From Christian Hebraism to Jewish Studies: Johannes Buxtorf (1564–1629) and Hebrew Learning in the Seventeenth Century. Leiden: Brill. Charnock, Stephen (1682). Several Discourses upon the Existence and Attributes of God. Coleman, Thomas (1643). The Hearts Ingagement: A Sermon Preached at the Taking of the Covenant, September 29, 1643. —— (1645). Hopes Deferred and Dashed. Daiches, David (1941). The King James Version of the English Bible. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dekker, Eef (1996). ‘Was Arminius a Molinist?’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 27/2: 337–52. Feingold, Mordechai (1997a). ‘The Humanities’, in Nicholas Tyacke (ed.), The History of the University of Oxford, iv. The Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 211–357. —— (1997b) ‘Oriental Studies’, in Nicholas Tyacke (ed.), The History of the University of Oxford, iv. The Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 449–503. Ferrell, Lori Anne, and McCullough, Peter E. (2000) (eds). The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History 1600–1750. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Foxe, John (1847). Acts and Monuments. Fraenkel, Peter (1961). Testimonia patrum: The Function of the Patristic Argument in the Theology of Philip Melanchthon. Geneva: Droz. Gairdner, James (1892) (ed.). Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, Vol. 13. Pt. 1, [Jan.–Jul., 1538]. Eyre and Spottiswood. Gataker, Thomas (1637). Certaine Sermons, First Preached, and after Published. Goodblatt, Chanita (2003). ‘From “Tav” to the Cross: John Donne’s Protestant Exegesis and Polemics’, in Mary A. Papazian (ed.), John Donne and the Protestant Reformation: New Perspectives. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 221–46. Grell, Ole Peter (1996). Calvinist Exiles in Tudor and Stuart England. Aldershot: Ashgate. Hatt, Cecilia A. (2002) (ed.). English Works of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester: Sermons and Other Writings 1520 to 1535. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kolb, Robert (1999). Martin Luther as Prophet, Teacher, and Hero: Images of the Reformer, 1520–1620. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker. Lane, Anthony N. S. (1999). John Calvin: Student of the Church Fathers. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark.



carl trueman

Leigh, Edward (1662). A Systeme or Body of Divinity. Logan, F. D. (1977). ‘The Origins of the So-Called Regius Professorships: An Aspect of the Renaissance in Oxford and Cambridge’, in Derek Baker (ed.), Renaissance and Renewal in Christian History. Oxford: Blackwell, 271–8. Lubac, Henri de (1959–64). Exgégèse médiévale: les quatre sens de l’écriture. 4 vols. Paris: Aubier. MacCulloch, Diarmaid (1999). Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation. Allen Lane. McCullough, Peter E. (1998). Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Merrill, E. H. (1975). ‘Rasho, Nicholas de Lyra and Christian Exegesis’, Westminster Theological Journal, 38: 66–79. Milton, Anthony (1995). Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (2008). ‘Puritanism and the Continental Reformed Churches’, in John Coffey and Paul H. C. Lim (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 109–26. Muller, Richard A. (1991). God, Creation, and Providence in the Thought of Jacob Arminius: Sources and Directions of Scholastic Protestantism in the Era of Early Orthodox. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker. —— (2003a). After Calvin: Studies in the Development of a Theological Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— (2003b). Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics. 4 vols. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker. ——, and Ward, Rowland S. (2007). Scripture and Worship. Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed. Nuttall, Geoffrey F. (1951).‘A Transcript of Richard Baxter’s Library Catalogue: A Bibliographical Note’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 2: 207–21. —— (1952). ‘A Transcript of Richard Baxter’s Library Catalogue (Concluded)’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 3: 74–100. Owen, John (1850–5). Works. 24 vols. Johnstone and Hunter. Poole, Matthew (1669–76). Synopsis criticorum aliorumque S. Scripturae interpretum. Preus, James S. (1969). From Shadow to Promise: Old Testament Interpretation from Augustine to the Young Luther. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rehnman, Sebastian (2002). Divine Discourse: The Theological Methodology of John Owen. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker. Reid, J. K. S. (1962). The Authority of Scripture: A Study of Reformation and Post-Reformation Understanding of the Bible. Methuen. Rex, Richard (1991). The Theology of John Fisher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rupp, E. Gordon (1949). Studies in the Making of the English Protestant Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ryrie, Alec (2002). ‘The Strange Death of Lutheran England’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 53: 64–92. Schmitt, Carl B. (1981). Studies in Renaissance Philosophy and Science. Variorum Reprints. —— (1983). John Case and Aristotelianism in Renaissance England. Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Smalley, Beryl (1941). The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

preachers and biblical commentaries



Steinmetz, David C. (1980). Luther and Staupitz: An Essay in the Intellectual Origins of the Protestant Reformation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stump, Eleonore (1993). ‘Biblical Commentary and Philosophy’, in Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 252–68. Thompson, Mark D. (2005). A Sure Ground on Which to Stand: The Relation of Authority and Interpretive Method in Luther’s Approach to Scripture. Carlisle: Paternoster. Todd, Margo (2002). The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland. New Haven: Yale. Trueman, Carl R. (1994) Luther’s Legacy: Salvation and English Reformers, 1525–1556. Oxford: Clarendon Press. —— (1995). ‘“The Saxons Be Sore on the Affirmative”: Robert Barnes on the Lord’s Supper’, in W. P. Stephens (ed.), The Bible, the Reformation, and the Church. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 290–307. —— (1998). The Claims of Truth: John Owen’s Trinitarian Theology. Carlisle: Paternoster. —— (2007). John Owen: Reformed Catholic, Renaissance Man. Aldershot: Ashgate. —— (2008). ‘Reason and Rhetoric: Stephen Charnock on the Existence of God’, in M. W. F. Stone (ed.), Reason, Faith and History. Philosophical Essays for Paul Helm. Aldershot: Ashgate, 27–44. Twisse, William (1631). A Discovery of D. Jacksons Vanitie. Tyacke, Nicholas (1987). Anticalvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c.1590–1640. Oxford: Clarendon Press. —— (1997). ‘Religious Controversy’, in Nicholas Tyacke (ed.), The History of the University of Oxford, iv. Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 569–619. Wabuda, Susan (2002). Preaching during the English Reformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whitaker, William (1588). Disputatio de sacra Scriptura. Cambridge.

chapter 5

t h e pr e ach er a n d profa n e l e a r n i ng noam reisner

When early modern preachers speak of ‘profane’ learning, they usually have in mind the classical learning of pagan antiquity without which Christianity could never manage, but with which it never quite decided how to live. For the English early moderns especially, many of whom received some form of liberal arts education in the humanist grammar schools and royal colleges, a display of ‘profane’ learning—‘profane’ in the sense of extra-biblical or non-sacred (OED2)—was a mark of cultivated urbanity. Trained from a young age in graded Latin composition and taught to emulate and memorize the style of carefully edited classical, mostly Latin, authors, many of the boys who would grow up to become educated preachers, even with just a basic grammar-school education to their name, would have known their Cicero and Horace, Virgil and Ovid, Terence and Seneca, Lucretius and Pliny the Elder, as well as many of the ancient historiographers, including Livy, Tacitus, and Suetonius (Leach 1911; Baldwin 1944; Grafton and Jardine 1986). Where proper instruction in Greek was also available, for example, at many of the elite London grammar schools such as St Paul’s, or Merchant Taylor’s (which flourished under the headmastership of the humanist educationalist Richard Mulcaster and numbered Spenser and Lancelot Andrewes among its pupils), they would have had numerous passages memorized from Homer, Plato, Xenophon, Demosthenes, Theocritus, Callimachus, and Lucian as well. Those who continued to university and the theology faculties of Oxford and Cambridge, which by then were gradually adopting humanist teaching methods in logic, rhetoric, and grammar, would have also studied, side by side with the Church Fathers, many Jewish exegetes and pagan philosophers as well, with increasing emphasis on moral philosophy and Platonic theism. And yet, despite the widespread availability of classical learning in the period, or maybe because of it, we know that many educated ministers within the English evangelical movement objected to the exhibition of profane learning in sermons; numerous preaching manuals, sermons, and polemical treatises in the period exhort the godly preacher to avoid an ostentatious display of worldly learning when preaching the gospel message.

the preacher and profane learning



The early modern English debate about the use of profane quotations in preaching was often bundled up with the broader, well-documented debate about whether or not a preacher ought to use in his sermons the so-called three languages of the Cross, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, more generally, and, if so, whether these ought to be translated for the benefit of an uneducated auditory. A common assumption, then and now, is that puritans—in the broadest pejorative sense of the term—placed a wholesale ban on Greek and Latin pedantry in preaching (Morrissey 2002: 693–6). When, for example, John Howson, a noted anti-Calvinist and the future bishop of Oxford and Durham, was brought before Archbishop George Abbot and King James I in June 1615 to answer charges of crypto-popery cooked up by Abbot, Howson’s long-time Calvinist adversary, Howson confessed to having preached against those at Oxford who sought to place a ban on Latin and Greek erudition in preaching. When Abbot complained that it was ‘absurd’ to accuse anyone of holding such a negative view of Greek and Latin erudition, ‘The King said hee knewe puritans hould it’ (Cranfield and Fincham 1987: 333), and if the king held such a view it is safe to assume many at the time shared it. Cranfield and Fincham point out in their commentary on Howson’s recollection of the exchange that, based on an earlier statement Abbot made against the use in sermons of Greek and Latin quotations from the Church Fathers, he was clearly bluffing here. However, evidence from some of Abbot’s own sermons suggests that perhaps he was not bluffing after all. When in 1608 Abbot preached a funeral sermon in honour of the late earl of Dorset, he took care to please his aristocratic auditory with a staggering and unapologetic display of profane erudition. In the sermon Abbot expounds Isaiah 40:6, with its meditation on the transience of flesh, especially the words ‘All flesh is grasse’ (1608: 1). While Abbot draws heavily on scriptural references in developing this theme, he soon turns to his classical learning as well in a series of linked thematic digressions on the idea of life’s transience. He not only goes against his earlier conviction and cites with abandon from numerous Church Fathers in the original Greek and Latin, but also quotes, in succession, anecdotes from Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus, pithy sayings from Cicero, the simile likening men’s lives to fallen leaves from Homer’s Iliad, aphorisms about the comfort of death from Seneca’s epistles, numerous anecdotes from Xenophon, Lucan, Plutarch, Livy, and Pliny, and, most striking of all, a platitude about the equal fate in death of rich and poor from Horace’s Ode 4.7 and a line from Horace’s Epistle 1.7, which Abbot rewrites to recommend service to princes. We should not be surprised about this apparent anomaly. For all his principled commitment to the tenets of evangelical Calvinism, Archbishop George Abbot was also a highly educated man (BA, MA, Balliol College, Oxford) and an intellectual who knew how to impress a discerning audience when he had to. After all, as we shall see, a significant number of conformist preachers in elite academic and royal circles, the so-called ‘scholar princes of the Anglican Church’ (Collinson 1982: 93), some of whom increasingly departed during James’s reign from mainstream evangelical theology and worship, stridently defended the use of profane learning in sermons. In fact, much of the more conclusive evidence in support of the assumption that puritans favoured a wholesale ban on profane learning in preaching comes from the later dissenting movements of the



noam reisner

mid to late seventeenth century and many of the nonconformist radicals who moved outside elite circles (Hill [1972] 1991: 14, 95, 362; 1993: 196–250). But here, too, as Nicholas McDowell has shown (2003), such evidence tells only half the story. Many of the radicals who celebrated in print the simple spirituality of the ‘Mechanical’ godly were themselves well-read, university-educated men striking an anti-intellectual spiritual pose. In trying to account, therefore, for the diversity in approaches to profane learning in the period, many important questions about the impact of humanist education on preaching, the varied didactic and spiritual aims of different preachers addressing different types of auditories, and the politics of intellectual and cultural elitism in the formation and projection of a preacher’s authority naturally come to mind. Although these questions invite tempting distinctions between, say, High Church and Low Church preachers, or between Calvinists and anti-Calvinists, when it comes to the actual use of classical sources in preaching such simple dichotomies are difficult to sustain, as the example of Abbot already indicates. Moreover, while it is true that most of the habitual offenders were university graduates who moved in elite circles and whose cultivated humanism was only marginally overruled by their religious sensibilities, the overall definition of what might constitute ‘profane’ classical learning is so broad, and the ways in which it can be deployed are so varied, that the phenomenon as a whole defies simple classification. Nevertheless, patterns do emerge and this chapter will trace some of them, offering insight into how a number of individual preachers known in the period for their classical erudition exploited profane learning in a variety of different contexts in their sermons.

Egyptian Gold From the time of the early church, Christians have always fretted about the application of pagan philosophy and literature to Christian teachings. While the early Greek Fathers, Clement, Justin, and Origen, borrowed heavily from Platonism in their efforts to demonstrate the logocentric profundity of Christianity, the ante-Nicene Latin apologists, Tertullian and Lactantius, militated against what they perceived as the idolatrous overintellectualization and Hellenization of the Christian faith. Tertullian is especially famous in the Latin West for his rigorous insistence on the need for the Christian community (then an isolated minority) to be segregated absolutely from pagan culture, which, he argued, was decadent, immoral, and idolatrous. In his combative De praescriptione haereticorum VII.xii, he follows 1 Timothy 4:1 in branding all pagan learning as the ‘doctrines of “men” and “of demons”’, and goes on to raise the famous cry, ‘what indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’ Based on Colossians 2:8, he then concludes that the answer is absolutely nothing: ‘we want no curious disputation after possessing Christ Jesus, no inquisition after enjoying the gospel’ (Tertullian 1870: ii. 9–10). Tertullian and Lactantius, however, represent a minority position in the overall history of the Western church. It was Augustine rather, himself a convert from Manichaeism, and at one time a dedicated student of the teachings of Plotinus and Porphyry, who set the tone for all

the preacher and profane learning



future engagement with the classics when he successfully transformed the pietism of his ante-Nicene Latin predecessors into something far more profound. In the monumental twenty-two books of his City of God, pagan wisdom is marginalized and brought to heel under the authority of the Bible, but it nevertheless clings to the margins in the very structure and terminology of Augustine’s argument (Russell 1981). This is also echoed in Augustine’s seminal and widely influential preaching manual, On Christian Doctrine (see Kneidel, Chapter 1, this volume), which not only promotes the use of Platonic semiotics and Ciceronian rhetorical techniques in exegetical and preaching practices, but also bequeaths to Christian posterity—especially Reformed posterity—one of the most quoted arguments about the legitimate use of some profane pagan learning in preaching. After surveying towards the end of book II the potential relevance and usefulness to Christian preaching of pagan astronomy, history, and logic, he concludes by adding the following guarded approval of pagan learning: Like the treasures of the ancient Egyptians, who possessed not only idols and heavy burdens which the people of Israel hated and shunned but also vessels and ornaments of silver and gold, and clothes, which on leaving Egypt the people of Israel, in order to make better use of them, surreptitiously claimed for themselves . . . similarly all the branches of pagan learning contain not only false and superstitious fantasies and burdensome studies that involve unnecessary effort, which each one of us must loathe and avoid as under Christ’s guidance we abandon the company of pagans, but also studies for liberated minds which are more appropriate to the service of the truth, and some very useful moral instruction, as well as the various truths about monotheism to be found in their writers. These treasures . . . must be removed by Christians, as they separate themselves in spirit from the wretched company of pagans, and applied to their true function, that of preaching the gospel. (Augustine 1995: 125)

As it happens, Augustine’s ‘Egyptian gold’ in this case refers only circumspectly to some aspects of Neoplatonic and stoic philosophy, not, one imagines, to Ovid’s Amores. Nevertheless, it was an analogy that echoed down the centuries in Western Christianity and was soon taken out of context. It implied in a very broad sense that any profane text, within the bounds of decency of course, was legitimate fodder for preachers provided it was used judiciously in lending support to the preaching of the gospel message. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the question was readdressed with renewed focus following the revival of classical learning in the wake of the humanist revolution in educational methods and practices, and the concurrent, if not corresponding, revival in preaching. To what extent the rise of humanism facilitated or even encouraged the Reformation movement and its heightened interest in preaching is a question that is still hotly debated among historians, and one that I cannot propose to enter into in this chapter, but it is certainly striking that many of the reformers, both continental and English, received some form of humanist education (McGrath 1999: 57–60; 2004: 34–66; Rex 1999; Trueman, Chapter 4, this volume). Nevertheless, the impact of Luther’s and Calvin’s respective teachings on the salvific efficacy of reading and hearing the scriptural words of God and the sacred office of preaching, coupled with the emphasis on the justification



noam reisner

of sinful man by faith alone, resulted in a peculiar evangelical anxiety for many of the reformers educated in the humanist tradition. Whereas for Erasmus and other Roman Catholic Christian humanists theology remained a profoundly literary and philological activity of engaging colloquially and spiritually with the textual record of God’s speech as opposed to his Word, for Calvin and his English heirs understanding the one true sense of scripture was increasingly a matter of inner illumination through the operation of the Holy Spirit on the heart of believers. Philology could help prepare an adequate vernacular biblical text for a preacher to draw on, but the religious encounter with the words of God was seen as something altogether more mysterious, interior, and radically ineffable. By insisting, therefore, on the corresponding salvific exclusivity of the sermon, the Lutheran and Swiss reformers placed an extraordinary burden of responsibility on the preacher, who must act as the mouthpiece of God in conferring grace on believers through the preaching of the gospel message, in whichever language is most readily understood. In the emerging evangelical tradition, the perspicuity and pedagogic clarity of a sermon was therefore of vital salvific importance: the laity must understand the sermon in order to participate in its working of grace, and, if the sermon is cluttered with too many abstruse quotations in Greek and Latin, whether from the Fathers or from profane authors, the preacher not only risks alienating his auditory, but also betrays his chief office of allowing the words of God to operate on the hearts of believers. It is important to bear in mind, however, that the evangelical objection to profane learning is rarely an objection to profane learning itself. Though not strictly speaking a humanist, Luther led by example in the Reformation movement when he reiterated his belief that a revival in learning in all fields was necessary before Reformation would be possible (Spitz 1963: 237–66; Kittelson 1992). Similarly Calvin, who was a distinguished humanist scholar and the author of several commentaries on Seneca long before he was a theologian, never did quite turn his back on his worldly learning (Partee [1977] 2005). It helped, of course, that Calvin came to believe that pagan wisdom—like all worldly thing—is finally a gift from God, and so he never did agonize over its relevance to Christian teachings, as Augustine did. Indeed, many of the English humanist reformers recognized the value and importance of an educated preaching ministry, some going so far as to insist that a thorough grounding in the liberal arts was vital in preparing ministers for their actual pastoral care. As the Flemish reformer Andreas Hyperius (1511–64; see App. I.6), puts it in his De formandis concionibus sacris (1533, 1562), to quote the English translation of 1577: ‘Those therefore that endevour themselves to teache the people in sacred assemblies, have neede of a double doctrine and understandinge: The one of thinges divine . . . The other of things humaine’ (1577: 4). However, acquiring liberal knowledge and displaying it openly in preaching are two different things. The overall consensus among evangelical ministers seems to have been that, while worldly learning was profitable, it nevertheless ought to be concealed when preaching the gospel. William Perkins, for example, Elizabethan England’s premier Calvinist theologian, is often quoted as taking a strict stand against the ostentatious display of profane learning in preaching. In his evangelical preaching manual The Arte of Prophecying (see Kneidel, Chapter 1, this volume, and App. I.8), Perkins indeed urges the godly preacher to ‘hide’

the preacher and profane learning



his ‘Humane wisdome’ in preaching ‘because the hearers ought not to ascribe their faith to the gifts of men, but to the power of Gods word’ (1626–35: ii. 670).1 In order for there to be a ‘demonstration of the spirit’ in the sermon, the preacher’s speech must be both simple and perspicuous, fit both for the peoples understanding, and to expresse the Majestie of the Spirit . . . Wherefore neither the words of arts, nor Greeke and Latine phrases and quirkes must be intermingled in the sermon. 1. They disturbe the minde of the auditors, that they cannot fit those things which went afore with those that follow. 2. A strange word hindreth the understanding of those things that are spoken. 3. It drawes the minde away from the purpose to some other matter. Here also the telling of tales and all profane and ridiculous speeches must bee omitted. The speech is gracious, wherein the grace of the heart is expressed. (Perkins 1626–35: ii. 670–1)

However, hiding or concealing one’s ‘humane’ wisdom was simpler said than done. In fact, much of Perkins’s preaching manual assumes a high degree of humanistic education in its readers. The section in which Perkins designates the spiritual value of a long list of classical rhetorical figures, and his suggestion that preachers may look for thematic examples in classical sources, for example, Homer’s Iliad or Plato’s Timaeus, for pagan accounts of creation, all suggest that for men like Perkins the distinction between sacred and profane was difficult to sustain in practice. This is all the more glaring in Perkins’s case when we consider that he originally wrote and published the Arte in highly polished Latin. The Latin original, Prophetica, sive de sacra et unica ratione concionandi tractatus (1592), was clearly aimed at an educated international Reformed readership, consciously limiting its domestic appeal and accessibility. Only after Perkins’s death, when the Arte was translated into English for the benefit of many poorly educated parish ministers who had little or no competency in Latin, did it become the evangelical English best-seller Perkins never intended it to be. Certainly the irony about many of the evangelical theorists who are on record against the use of profane learning in sermons is that for the most part they could not do without profane learning themselves and were not very good at hiding it. Granted, some of the more nonconformist members of this educated elite, like the Devon minister Samuel Hieron, practised what they preached and left the ivory towers of academia and the hope of preferment to preach to the uneducated godly in the rural parishes. Hieron (king’s scholar at Eton, graduate and Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge), echoes Perkins when in his printed sermon, The Dignity of Preaching (1615), he condemns ministers who seek to embellish their sermons ‘with the gleanings of all manner of authors, sacred, prophane, any thing which may bee thought to smell of learning, and may raise an opinion of Eloquence, profoundnes, varietie of reading in the hearers’ (1615: 15). How ironic, then, that to prove this point Hieron cites Demosthenes (with a marginal note pointing to 1 For the complicated valence of the word ‘humane’ and ‘humanist’ in the period and its close association with the liberal arts, see Pincombe (2001: 10–11, 40–4).



noam reisner

Cicero as well) as an example that even a heathen orator rated the prestige that comes with abstruse embellishments as a vanity (1615: 16). Perhaps this self-contradictory gesture proves Hieron’s point that even a highly learned Cambridge man such as himself is willing to sacrifice his considerable classical erudition in the interests of a deeply spiritual calling, but it also reveals how difficult such a sacrifice really was. Many of the educated evangelical preachers may have avoided citing the classics in their sermons, but their thinking remained thoroughly grounded in classical modes of thought. The result of this anomaly is a sharp dichotomy between evangelical theory and practice. In theory, men like Perkins and Hieron must insist on the need to keep sermons pure from profane contamination in order to safeguard what they see as the centrality of preaching in the salvific economy of the English church. In practice, however, the ban on profane learning at best translates into a pragmatic concern for rhetorical decorum: a simple auditory requires a simple sermon; a learned auditory requires something more refined, and refinement usually involved a suitable display of sacred as well as profane learning. It is all the more understandable, therefore, that when, in the course of the early seventeenth century, a growing number of educated divines began to depart from the evangelical belief in the salvific exclusivity of the sermon, they targeted for attack the perceived puritan ban on the use of profane texts in preaching. Predictably, a common tactic in such targeted attacks was to cite Augustine’s Egyptian gold analogy as an example that the primitive church, which the reformers claimed to have restored, fully condoned the qualified use of pagan authors in preaching. Lancelot Andrewes (see App. I.11, and Fig. 30), for example, in a 1593 sermon preached in his church of St Giles Cripplegate (long before his ascendancy as a popular court preacher and prelate), mocked the evangelical dislike of profane erudition in preaching as an ‘imagination’ by reminding his hearers that St Paul himself quoted from pagan writers when it suited his doctrinal or spiritual argument: But, especially no heathen example or authority . . . a matter which the Primitive Church never imagined unlawfull . . . and last of all S. Augustine most plainly, De doctrinâ Christianâ. 2.40. And these all reckoned of the contrary, as a very imagination. Which they did the rather, for that, besides divers other places, not so apparant, they find S. Paul, in matter of doctrine, alleaging Aratus a heathen Writer, in his Sermon at Athens. And againe, in matter of life, alleadging Menander, a Writer of Comoedies, in his Epistle: And thirdly, in matter of report onely without any urgent necessity, alleaging Epimenides, or as some think Callimachus. And surely, if it be lawfull to reason from that which Nature teacheth, as S. Paul doth against mens wearing long hayre; it is not unlawfull neither, to reason from the wisest and most pithy sayings of naturall men. Especially, with the apostle, using them (as in a manner they only are used) thereby to provoke Christian men to emulation, by shewing them their owne blindnesse in matter of knowledge, that see not so much as the heathen did by the light of Nature: or, their slackness, in matter of conversation that cannot be got so farre forward by god’s Lawe, as the poore Pagan can by his Philosophie. That if Grace will not move, shame may. (Andrewes 1629: ii. 31–2)

Andrewes effectively outlines in this passage the standard method for use of profane learning in preaching—that of the negative analogy that relies on the formula of ‘even

the preacher and profane learning



the heathen . . . so much more the Christian’. However, this was a formula all educated preachers often relied on, regardless of their actual religious and political views on godly preaching. John King, for example, Abbot’s protégé and the future bishop of London, was an evangelical Calvinist who opposed the proto-Arminian theology and High Churchmanship promoted by men like Andrewes. However, that did not stop King (educated at Westminster and Christ Church, Oxford) from displaying his humanistic erudition in his court sermons or from echoing Andrewes’s defence of such practices. In his voluminous lectures on the Book of Jonah given in York in 1594, for example, having digressed at length about the theme of anger and how even the heathens knew it was best to avoid it, King typically invokes Augustine (in this case quoting the grape and withered branch metaphor from his De baptismo contra Donatistastas 6.1) to defend the use of profane learning in preaching: Therfore I am not of opinion with those men who thinke that all secular and prophane learning should be abandoned from the lips of the preacher, and whither he teach or exhort, he is of necessity to tie himselfe to the sentence and phrase of onely scripture. Good is good wheresoever I finde it. Upon a withered and fruitlesse stalke, saith Augustine, a grape sometimes may hange. Shall I refuse the grape because the stalke is fruitlesse and whithered? (1599: 541)

It is clear, therefore, that, although Andrewes represents a small group of elite High Church preachers who tied the case for profane learning with the case against too much emphasis on the salvific exclusivity of preaching, there were many elite evangelical preachers who equally saw no contradiction between the one and the other. In the majority of cases, a preacher’s fondness for profane learning was a direct symptom of his humanistic education and of his desire to project a suitably intellectual authority when preaching to elite auditories.

Profane Text, Sacred Context When considering the actual impact of profane learning on preaching, it is important to bear in mind that there are, of course, degrees of profanity within the greater corpus of classical authors. Plato, for example, who always appealed to Christian intellectuals on account of the overt theism of his philosophy, was hardly considered profane by most early moderns, just as Cicero, whose rhetorical and philosophical teachings shaped all humanist theories of education and ethics, was considered nothing short of ‘divine’. Seneca, who for centuries was believed to have been a closet Christian based on a set of forged letters he allegedly exchanged with St Paul during the latter’s captivity in Rome, was similarly viewed as a morally edifying author—a fact not complicated it seems by the popularity at the time of the violent and morally confusing tragedies transmitted down the ages in his name. Among the classical poets and dramatists as well there were degrees of profanity. Homer and especially Virgil were both believed to have been



noam reisner

inspired by God to see hidden divine truths before the coming of Christ, while Horace was considered to be far more respectable than Ovid and Catullus, Terence more than Plautus. However, when looking at the actual use of profane quotations in early modern sermons, one is immediately struck by the eclectic randomness with which many of the educated preachers approached the classics. The possible immorality or profanity of the original classical text is rarely of any consequence to early modern preachers, because such quotations are almost always taken out of their original context to lend support to the unfolding homiletic argument. When, for example, as noted above, George Abbot quotes from Horace’s Ode 4.7 a platitude about the levelling power of death (‘whither Aeneas with his piety, and Tullus with his riches, and Ancus with his valour did go . . . we are but dust and shadow’ (1608: 9)), he consciously transforms the original Ode’s sad Epicurean meditation on the absolute finality of death into a sober Christian reflection precisely on the promises and rewards of life after death. It is extremely unlikely that Abbot expected his auditory, learned though they were, to remember the original Ode. The quotation exists independently at the expense of the profane original; reduced to a pithy saying, it is nothing more than the faint echo of a lost and insignificant pagan world now on a sudden made to live again in the light of the gospel promises of salvation. Indeed, in the majority of cases, a preacher’s disregard for the original context of a profane quotation is not a calculated evangelical gesture, but a symptom of the literary culture of the time more generally. Grammar-school boys were often encouraged to disregard the original context of classical texts, which were consulted not for their own sake, but for the purpose of plundering fine examples of Latin or Greek poetry and prose that students were then asked to translate into English and memorize for future imitation. The contemporary penchant for proverbial wisdom and the widespread use of mnemonics in education produced a culture of quotation and allusion, which in turn cultivated a fondness for arbitrary and eclectic collection: men of letters and avid readers collected, noted, and committed to memory numerous profane, as well as biblical, proverbs, pithy sayings, apothegms, and aphorisms, often listing them in commonplace books for future use. There was also a thriving book market for collections and miscellanies of learned ‘fruit’ or ‘flowers’ (florilegia) culled from ancient poetry and moral philosophy, containing hundreds of useful quotations, wrenched out of their original context and often arranged according to Christian moral themes (Moss 1996; Miola 2000). Such books would have been especially useful to preachers who could easily consult them for a whole host of classical quotations from poetry and prose, say, on the theme of death, or constancy, or patience in suffering, and so on. The early modern practice of reading across fragmented texts in the interests of copia, or abundance, while drawing unlikely analogies and parallels, often in the light of Christian morality and doctrine, certainly accounts for the majority of profane quotations that pepper many early modern sermons. However, it is possible to single out sophisticated exceptions to this rule, where the learned preacher addressing an elite auditory could count on his similarly educated hearers to remember the original profane context as well and make the necessary links with the religious theme before them. Many of the preachers who were well known in the period for their dramatic preaching style—the

the preacher and profane learning



eccentric Thomas Playfere, the erstwhile satirist Joseph Hall, the linguistic virtuoso Andrewes, the thundering Thomas Adams, or the humanist scholar-cum-preacher Thomas Gataker (to name only a few)—occasionally rely on a more sophisticated use of profane learning in their sermons. Their interest in a profane quotation often extends also to the original context, and what appears as yet another disembodied platitude actually expands the sermon’s thematic appeal by gathering around its implicit profane subtext the various strands of the sacred homiletic message. While there are several compelling examples of such practices in early modern preaching, I have chosen to focus briefly in conclusion on three striking examples from sermons by Lancelot Andrewes and the Civil War and Restoration preacher Nathaniel Hardy, where both preachers engage creatively not only with a seemingly proverbial profane quotation, but also with the implicit profane context in which it is found. In all three cases, a single quotation from Ovid—the most radically profane of all classical poets—serves as the basis for a sustained and deeply allusive homiletic engagement with the chosen scriptural theme and the immediate religious or political occasion. These similar, but actually very different, examples aptly illustrate just how varied and unpredictable the creative use of profane learning in early modern preaching could be. On Christmas Day 1616 Lancelot Andrewes preached before the royal court gathered in Whitehall a nativity sermon on the messianic verses of Psalm 85. The choice of Psalm 85 as a nativity proof text was common enough, but the sermon itself was unfashionably allegorical in its prolonged meditation on the iconographic conceit (well known at the time in verbal as well as figurative art) of ‘The Four Daughters of God’ (Hope 1907). Translating from the Vulgate the famous verses ‘Mercie and Truth shall meet: Righteousnesse and Peace shall kisse one another. Truth shall budde out of the earth; and Righteousnesse shall looke downe from Heaven’, Andrewes engages his auditory in the central mystery of the incarnation through the allegorical exegesis of the Old Testament text. He does so by personifying and allegorizing the four abstract nouns of Truth, Mercy, Righteousness, and Peace as the four divine attributes, or virtues, of God. The four virtues in turn implicitly reflect the ineffable integrity of the Tetragrammaton, which broke apart, as it were, at the moment of the Fall and the utterance of the first lie, only to be reintegrated at the birth of the incarnated logos in the God–man Christ. Interestingly, as Andrewes begins to dissect the scriptural verses and unpack his allegorical–anagogical exegesis, he inserts a seemingly casual allusion to Ovid’s mythical account from book 1 of the Metamorphoses of the world’s four ages, so that the resonance of his homiletic meditation on a fallen, fragmented world on a sudden restored to prelapsarian bliss assumes a richly allusive literary dimension. Having described the Fall as the moment when Truth was exiled from the world, ‘as a stranger upon the earth’, Andrewes immediately cites the classical pagan equivalent in the famous words of Ovid, ‘Terras Astraea reliquit’: ‘Truth went into exile, as a stranger upon the earth:——Terras Astraea reliquit, she confined herselfe in Heaven: where, so aliened she Was, as she would not so much as looke downe hither upon us’ (1629: i. 99; dashes and italics original to the text). It might be objected that this sort of Ovidian quotation is little more than a proverbial aside and has nothing to do with the original



noam reisner

context of Ovid’s poem. Andrewes is certainly not unique in taking the allegorical path with Ovid, and citing the Roman myth about the virgin Astraea, patron goddess of justice, abandoning the blood-soaked earth as an analogy for the Judaeo-Christian myth of the Fall was also commonplace. But the allusion to Ovid’s dire account of the Iron Age instantly conjures Ovid’s equally memorable depiction of the lost Golden Age and its eternal spring as well. The reference to Ovid’s Astraea links up, through an implicit recollection of Ovid’s evocative poetry, with Andrewes’s seemingly pedantic analysis in the sermon of the Vulgate deponent verb orior (to rise, spring forth, be born) and the pasttense construction orta est behind his English translation,‘Truth shall budde’. By harping on the multiple valences of the words ‘bud’ and ‘spring’, Andrewes expands the Ovidian association so that it shades his main allegorical theme by describing the miraculous birth of Christ from the womb of a virgin as the self-budding of Truth from the sinless earth: And, there is more in Orta. For . . . that is (properly) when it springeth forth of it selfe, as the field flowers doe, without any seed cast in by the hand of man; so (saith he) should the messias come: Take His nature not only in, but de, of the earth. Not bring it with Him from heaven (the error of the brainesick Anabaptist), but take it of the earth: be the womans Seed, made of a woman, out of the loines of david. (1629: i. 102)

The link between this passage and Ovid is not obvious at all, but, having been reminded of Ovid’s Metamorphoses earlier in the sermon with ‘Terras Astraea reliquit’, one cannot escape the suggestive comparison between the incarnated Word’s ‘springing’ forth, or rising, and Ovid’s self-perpetuating eternal spring when the earth yielded its fruit on its own accord: The Springtime lasted all the yeare, and Zephyr with his milde And gentle blast did cherish things that grew of owne accorde, The ground untilde, all kinde of fruits did plenteously avorde. (Ovid 1567: 2)

The extended homiletic conceit, which sees Andrewes breaking the verse into four corresponding parts and then allowing the parts to come together in an ecstatic crescendo in a celebration of Christ’s miraculous birth, depends therefore on the idea that the meeting of Truth, Mercy, Righteousness, and Peace is a matter not simply of the reconstituted logos, but of the very essence of Christianity in which these four Christlike virtues inhere. Throughout, the idea of an Ovidian Golden Age and the Pythagorean notion of cyclical flux associated with it in Ovid’s poem lends the miracle of the incarnation a dreamlike, timeless quality, where eternity can be celebrated in a day, or, as it happens in Andrewes’s sermon, on Christmas Day, ‘the day we hold holy to the memorie of this meeting; the day of orta est, the occasion of it’ (Andrewes 1629: i. 106). Throughout this playful, but in fact deeply spiritual meditation on ‘orta est’ or a ‘springing forth’, the power of Ovid’s poetry and Andrewes’s assumption that his auditory will be familiar with its images determines not just his use of a single profane quotation, but the affective energy of the sermon as a whole.

the preacher and profane learning



A similar degree of allusive sophistication can be found in the sermons of Nathaniel Hardy, a deeply learned Calvinist conformist (BA Magdalene Hall, MA Hart Hall, Oxford) and a very popular London preacher who was, during the revolutionary years, ‘one of the few unsequestered ministers in puritan London whom we know to have remained loyal both to the church and to the crown’ (Liu 2004). The few sermons by Hardy that survive in print, all of which were preached to elite audiences either before the House of Lords or later to the restored royal court of Charles II (see Jenkinson, Chapter 22, this volume), are highly elaborate show pieces of scriptural, patristic, and profane learning. Unlike Andrewes, however, Hardy tends to use profane quotations to sharpen the political, rather than the devotional, dimension of his homiletic arguments. For example, in his politically charged sermon preached before the House of Lords, 24 February 1646, on the theme of ‘licentious liberty, and oppressing tyranny’, Hardy condemns both the religious radicals for their nonconformity and the nation’s ‘princes’ for their excessive suppression of the radicals by continually appealing to exempla from pagan antiquity to drive home his encomium of religious toleration and conformity in the state. Calling on ‘both Princes and People’ to ‘endeavour by all good means to prevent the effusion of [God’s] wrath’ by looking to their own sinfulness and seeking God’s mercy rather than persecuting one another, he then quotes in garbled Latin without a translation the following lines from Ovid’s Fasti V.301–2: ‘Often have I seen Jupiter, when he was about to launch his thunderbolts, hold his hand on the receipt of incense’ (Hardy 1647: 26–7).2 It might seem odd that Hardy should choose to recommend penitent prayer using this fanciful quotation about Jupiter, spoken in Ovid’s poem by the goddess Flora, over a more sober quotation from scripture. However, the link with Ovid’s Fasti is crucial to his sermon. It sustains the sermon’s prolonged reflection on comparable pagan religious practices and evokes contemporary republican and counter-republican Augustan discourse, which often turned to Roman political tropes to call for greater or lesser liberty in the state, as well as for conformity to, or abstinence from, its formal religious observances. If we consider that Ovid addressed his Fasti to Augustus’s religious conservatism and that one of the aims of the poem is to celebrate Roman state religion, we begin to see that Hardy’s choice of a pagan subtext for his sermon is far more calculated than it initially might seem. Even more striking is Hardy’s memorial sermon on the anniversary of Charles I’s execution, preached before the House of Commons on 30 January 1661. Choosing Zechariah 12:11 as the sermon’s epigraph (‘In that day shall there be a great mourning in Jerusalem, as the mourning of Hadadrimmon in the valley of Megiddon’), Hardy delivers an elaborate and impassioned lament for the ‘execrable murther’ of the late monarch and preaches on the need to reconnect every year with an overwhelming sense of grief and mourning on the anniversary of the late king’s ‘murder’. Hardy divides the sermon into two parts along the division in the verse between the great mourning in Jerusalem, which is to be 2

Either the Latin is garbled because Hardy misquoted from memory, or, which is more likely, it is a printer’s error. I have supplied James G. Frazer’s English translation of these lines from the Loeb Classical Library edition of Ovid’s Fasti (1931: 283).



noam reisner

understood literally, and the mourning of Hadadrimmon, which is to be understood as an analogy for the former. Appropriately, when Hardy discusses Jerusalem, he keeps well within scriptural bounds, but, when he moves on to discuss the analogy of mourning offered by the pagan place name of Hadadrimmon, he suitably expands the range of his allusions to encompass memorable pagan accounts of inconsolable grief and mourning. Following the Jewish exegetical tradition recorded in the Peshitta (Syriac Old Testament), which links the mourning at Hadadrimmon with the death of King Josiah who fell at Megiddo (2 Kings 23:29), Hardy waxes lyrical on the need for perpetual and renewed mourning for Charles I equal in its intensity to the public mourning for the saintly figure of King Josiah. He then enhances the pathos of the analogy by surprisingly turning to Ovid’s Metamorphoses: But the whole scope of that Book plainly refers to the Captivity, which was after Josiahs death, and therefore it was some other which Jeremy composed, thereby endeavouring that what Venus saith in the Poet concerning her Adonis, —— Luctus monumenta manebunt. Semper Adoni mei repetitaq; mortis imago, Annua plangoris peragent simulamina nostri.3 the mourning for Josiah might be continually renewed. No wonder if upon all these considerations, in progressu temporis abiit in proverbium, as one well observeth, it became a Proverb among the Hebrews, planctus Hadadrimmon, as planctus Adonidis was among the Gentiles, and both designed to expresse an exceeding great sorrow. (Hardy 1662: 19–20)

Although initially surprising, Hardy’s decision to cite Ovid in this case is once again carefully considered. The link with Ovid’s Adonis is quite ingenious, since it proceeds from the proverbial equation of two public laments, one for the Phoenician Tammuz, traditionally identified with the Greek Adonis, the other for King Josiah, who fell at ‘Hadadrimmon’.4 But the use of Ovid here goes further, since it also implicitly equates Charles I with the chaste Adonis of Ovid’s poem, the king’s executioners to feral beasts and animals, and a grieving, unworthy nation to the fickle, sensual Venus. This fleeting allusion is crude to be sure, but it nevertheless evokes a sense of grief that transcends the immediate proverbial quotation and depends for its pathos precisely on the auditory’s implicit memory of Ovid’s moving poetry and its full account of Venus’s unrequited desire and inconsolable grief. More importantly, it silently alludes to the conclusion of the Ovidian tale, which sees the blood of the slaughtered Adonis metamorphosed into the anemone flower, a perennial symbol of renewal and anticipation soon taken over in Christian iconography to represent the blood shed by Christ on the cross. In the final 3 ‘My grief, Adonis, shall have an enduring monument, and each passing year in memory of your death shall give an imitation of my grief ’ (Ovid, Meta. X. 725–7; [1916] 1984: 117). 4 The proverbial link is probably stronger than Hardy realized, since the Semitic idol Hadad-Rimmon worshipped in the environs of Megiddo was actually another name for Tammuz-Adonis. In any case, the identification of the Syrian Thammuz with the Greek Adonis originates with Jerome’s Commentary on Ezekiel 8.14.

the preacher and profane learning



analysis, therefore, it is precisely the profane context of the quotation and not the quotation itself that reinforces Hardy’s typology, where the pathetic image of the executed king becomes a redeeming Christ figure shedding his blood on the cross of national strife. Even these very brief examples from sermons by Andrewes and Hardy indicate that the use of profane learning in early modern preaching in elite circles was widespread, and often allowed the preacher not just to exhibit his considerable humanistic sophistication, but more importantly perhaps to expand the affective and associative register of his sermons far beyond the confines of the scriptural text. While many of the profane quotations to be found in such sermons were quoted out of context as detached proverbial maxims, there were equally many instances in which the meditation on a profane text depended on the original profane context as well. Instances like these reinforce the sense that such practices were not only tolerated in elite, educated circles, but routinely expected from a suitably learned preacher as part of a sermon’s literary and rhetorical decorum and its ability to captivate and move the auditory to reflect on the sermon’s homiletic theme in surprising and creative ways.

Bibliography Abbot, George (1608). A Sermon Preached at Westminster May 26. 1608 at the Funerall Solemnities of the Right Honorable Thomas Earle of Dorset, Late L. High Treasurer of England. Andrewes, Lancelot (1629). XCVI. Sermons by the Right Honorable and Reverend Father in God, Lancelot Andrewes. Augustine (1995). De doctrina christiana, trans. R. P. H. Green. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Baldwin, Thomas Whitfield (1944). William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke. 2 vols. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Collinson, Patrick (1982). The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559–1625. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cranfield, Nicholas, and Fincham, Kenneth (1987) (eds).‘John Howson’s Answers to Archbishop Abbot’s Accusations at his “Trial” before King James I at Greenwich, 10 June 1615’, Camden Miscellany XXIX. Offices of the Royal Historical Society, 319–41. Grafton, Anthony, and Jardine, Lisa (1986) (eds). From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe. Duckworth. Hardy, Nathaniel (1647). The Arraignment of Licentious Liberty, and Oppressing Tyranny in a Sermon Preached before the Right Honourable House of Peers . . . Febr. 24. 1646. —— (1662). A Loud Call to Great Mourning in a Sermon Preached on the 30th of January 1661, being the Anniversary Fast for the Execrable Murther of Our Late Soveraign Lord King Charles the First. Hieron, Samuel (1615). The Dignity of Preaching: in a Sermon upon I. Thessal. 5. 20. Hill, Christopher ([1972] 1991). The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin. —— (1993). The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution. Penguin. Hope, Traver (1907). The Four Daughters of God: A Study of the Versions of this Allegory with Especial Reference to those in Latin, French, and English. Philadelphia: J. C. Winston.



noam reisner

Hyperius, Andreas (1577). The Practise of Preaching, Otherwise Called the Pathway to the Pulpet; Eng. by J. Ludham. King, John (1599). Lectures upon Jonas Delivered at Yorke in the Yeare of Our Lorde 1594. Kittelson, James M. (1992). ‘Humanism in the Theological Faculties of Lutheran Universities during the Late Reformation’, in Manfred P. Fleischer (ed.), The Harvest of Humanism in Central Europe: Essays in Honor of Lewis W. Spitz. St Louis: Concordia, 139–57. Leach, Arthur F. (1911) (ed.). Educational Charters and Documents, 598 to 1909. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Liu, Tai (2004). ‘Hardy, Nathaniel (1619–70)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online edn. McDowell, Nicholas (2003). The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630–1660. Oxford: Clarendon Press. McGrath, Alister E. (1999). Reformation Thought: An Introduction. 3rd edn. Oxford: Blackwell. —— (2004). The Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation. 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell. Miola, Robert S. (2000). Shakespeare’s Reading. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Morrissey, Mary (2002). ‘Scripture, Style and Persuasion in Seventeenth-Century English Theories of Preaching’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 53/4: 686–706. Moss, Ann (1996). Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ovid (1567). The XV. Bookes of P. Ovidius Naso, Entytuled Metamorphosis, Translated oute of Latin into English Meeter, by Arthur Golding. —— ([1916] 1984). Metamorphoses IX–XV., trans. Frank Justus Miller. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —— (1931). Fasti, trans. James G. Frazer. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Partee, Charles ([1977] 2005). Calvin and Classical Philosophy. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Perkins, William (1626–35). The Works of that Famous and Worthy Minister of Christ . . . William Perkins. 3 vols. Pincombe, Michael (2001). Elizabethan Humanism: Literature and Learning in the Later Sixteenth Century. Harlow: Longman. Rex, Richard (1999). ‘The Role of English Humanists in the Reformation up to 1559’, in N. Scott Amos et al. (eds), The Education of a Christian Society: Humanism and the Reformation in Britain and the Netherlands. Aldershot: Ashgate, 19–40. Russell, Robert (1981). ‘The Role of Neoplatonism in St Augustine’s De Civitate Dei’, in H. J. Blumenthal and R. A. Markus (eds), Neoplatonism and Early Christian Thought: Essays in Honour of A. H. Armstrong. London: Variorum, 161–70. Spitz, Lewis W. (1963). The Religious Renaissance of the German Humanists. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tertullian (1870). The Writings of Tertullian, trans. Peter Holmes. 2 vols. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark.

chapter 6

pr e achi ng v en u e s: a rchitect u r e a n d au ditor ie s emma rhatigan

It is a commonplace in scholarship of the early modern theatre that, when Prospero, meditating on the ephemeral nature of his masque, describes how ‘the great globe itself ’ will ‘dissolve; | And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | Leave not a rack behind’ (The Tempest, iv. i. 153–6), he is punning on the literal theatre of the Globe, drawing the architectural performance space into a richly allusive, meta-theatrical dialogue with the world of the play. The argument put forward by Tiffany Stern that ‘the theatres of early modern London are not simply referred to in Shakespeare’s works; they are part of their fabric’ is now a well-established orthodoxy (2004: 11). In studies of the early modern sermon too, the architectural locations of sermon delivery have been at the forefront of recent scholarship. While studies of sermon performance are, like those of theatrical performance, dogged by the difficulties of recapturing what is, by definition, a genre as ephemeral as Prospero’s masque, studies such as Peter McCullough’s Sermons at Court and Mary Morrissey’s work on the Paul’s Cross pulpit have demonstrated the rich rewards to be gained from situating pulpit oratory in the architectural and institutional contexts in which it was delivered (McCullough 1998; Morrissey 2001, 2003, 2006; see also Armstrong, Chapter 7, this volume). In the light of this work, the main objective of this chapter is to provide a survey of the major preaching venues of the early modern period: from the local parish, to the vast crowds attracted by the outdoor pulpits at St Paul’s Cross and the Spital, to the elite pulpits in the royal courts, the Inns of Court, and the universities. In addition to addressing the most basic questions of early modern preaching—where, when, and to whom sermons were delivered—my chapter will also seek to suggest why these questions are so crucial to scholarship of the early modern sermon, considering the ways in which preachers sought both to shape their oratory to a particular congregation and to exploit the architectural and spatial dynamic of their performance space in order to enhance the rhetorical potential of



emma rhatigan

their sermons (for an extended contextual reading of an early modern sermon, see McCullough, Chapter 12, this volume).

The Parochial Setting Medieval churches were designed for the celebration of the Mass, not as theatres for preaching. Thus they tended to consist of a long chancel, which was separated from the nave by a rood screen. The clergy, housed in the chancel, were kept apart from the main congregation in the nave. Indeed, many members of the laity must have struggled to follow the liturgy of the Mass, perhaps witnessing the elevation of the consecrated host only through a perforation in the rood screen or ‘squints’ built into walls (Fig. 5). As Lucy Wooding’s chapter in this volume demonstrates, however, the pre-Reformation church’s focus on the eucharist did not preclude preaching. Rather, as she emphasizes, preaching was integral to religious life in fifteenth-century England, and this was reflected in the provision of pulpits in medieval churches. Generally the medieval pulpit would stand to one side of the chancel screen, though it was sometimes attached to a pier on one or other side of the nave (Figs 6 and 26). Those examples that survive demonstrate that it was clearly meant to engage the attention of worshippers, frequently featuring intricate sculpture and carving or coloured images (Figs 26 and 27; Cox 1915: 30–2). Nonetheless, the Reformation was to bring about a dramatic change in the architectural setting of parish worship. The iconoclasm of the late 1530s was, on the accession

fig. 5 All Saints, North Cerney, Gloucestershire. Pre-Reformation focal points: early sixteenthcentury stone pulpit, with view through squint to chancel altar (l.) and medieval brass lectern (r.).

preaching venues



of Edward VI in 1547, transformed into a more general policy of demolition, including the destruction of the altar and, in many cases, the levelling of the chancel (Fincham and Tyacke 2007: 8–38). This movement gained particular momentum with the appointment of Nicholas Ridley as bishop of London in 1550, and, where the London parishes led, other English counties soon followed. Having demolished the altar and opened up the chancel, parishes were left to decide what sort of structure should replace the altar and how the architectural space of the church should be organized to reflect the changing liturgical priorities of Reformed worship. The rubric of the 1552 Prayer Book attempted to resolve the confusion by detailing how the communion table should ‘stande in the body of the Churche, or in the chauncell, where Morning prayer and Evening prayer be appoynted to bee sayde’, with the priest ‘standing at the north syde of the Table’. In other words, the communion table would stand east–west and communicants would receive the sacrament kneeling around it. Changes in Scotland were even more extreme. There the vast majority of Scots kirks built after the Reformation were rectangular

fig. 6 All Saints, North Cerney, Gloucestershire. Historically accurate early twentieth-century fittings, including rood loft with figures, returned this parish church to its medieval appearance.



emma rhatigan

buildings with no structural difference between the nave and the chancel. Indeed, when larger medieval churches were adapted for Reformed worship, the chancel was sometimes simply blocked off. The pulpit was given a central location against the middle of the south wall, and long tables were placed in the nave for communion. Eventually, in the seventeenth century, this setting was to develop into the distinctive Scots design of T-shaped kirks, where an aisle was built out at right angles to the nave facing the pulpit. George Yule cites Weem, built in 1609, as being, most likely, the earliest of such kirks and also gives the examples of Aberdour, Duddingston, and Stow (Yule 1994: 204–6; see also Hay 1957).1 To return to England, after the death of Edward and the brief restoration of Catholic worship under Mary, the Elizabethan Prayer Book and Injunctions of 1559 introduced a more conservative version of the Edwardian architectural solution. The chancel was to be maintained as a separate space, with the lower part of the screen, known as the partition, remaining in place, though stripped of its upper stage, the rood (Fig. 7). The altar was to be replaced with a communion table, but this was to stand where the altar would have stood, against the east wall, except during communion, when it would be moved out into the centre of the chancel, with the celebrant standing on the north side. Communicants would leave their seats in the nave in order to gather around the communion table. This, as Fincham and Tyacke term it, ‘novel peripatetic principle’ was, however, routinely flouted, not least because of the obvious inconveniences of moving a heavy and unwieldy communion table (2007: 34). Frequently, parishes chose to keep their communion table fixed in an east–west direction either in the chancel or even in the nave, depending on where it was most convenient for communicants to kneel. This Elizabethan solution was given apparent endorsement in the Jacobean Canons of 1604, which stated that the communion table should be placed ‘in so good sort within the church or chancel as thereby the minister may be more conveniently heard . . . and the communicants also more conveniently, and in more number, may communicate with the said minister’ (Bray 1998: 377). As a result, the chancel was usually reserved solely for services such as communion, weddings, or churchings. Indeed, although the Prayer Book rubric stated that the communion service was to be said in the chancel unless otherwise determined, in practice the priest often took offices in the nave, either in the pulpit or in a special seat or reading desk made for the purpose (Fig. 7). Communion tended, moreover, to be held only infrequently (usually anything between once a month and once a quarter), and so on most Sundays the service, generally taken from the reading pew or the pulpit, would have consisted of matins, the litany, and altar prayers, in which the communion office was said as far as the end of the prayer for the Church Militant and then concluded with one or more collects and the blessing. The sermon would come after the Nicene Creed (Addleshaw and Etchells 1948: 31–2, 69–74). Consequently, the nave and the pulpit emerged as the focus for the Reformed liturgy, and the scene was set for the sermon to 1 On the specific differences shaping preaching in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, see Gribben, Chapter 13; Gillespie, Chapter 14; and Roberts, Chapter 15, this volume, respectively.

preaching venues



fig. 7 St Saviour, Foremark, Derbyshire. Built in 1662 by the local Burdett family, a perfect and unaltered expression of the Restoration settlement: chancel screen, box pews, and ‘triple-decker’ pulpit with separate desks for (l. to r.) reading lessons, reading the liturgy, and preaching.

become the dominant mode and focus of worship. Still, weekly Sunday morning sermons constituted just the bare minimum of preaching provision. Parishioners would also attend sermons at funerals, weddings, fast days, and celebrations, not to mention other provincial occasions such as assizes, visitations, and sermons sponsored by particular institutional bodies such as the town corporation (for a detailed discussion of parochial preaching see Green, Chapter 8, this volume). Moreover, although sermon provision in some rural areas remained patchy throughout the period, at the same time many parts of the country demonstrated a huge appetite and enthusiasm for preaching, creating extra-parochial lectureships to provide additional preaching in the form of a Sunday morning sermon in towns and parishes where there was a non-preaching incumbent, and a supplementary Sunday afternoon or weekday sermon in parishes where there was already a morning sermon (Seaver 1970; Collinson 1983: 467–98). Also popular were ‘prophesyings’, in which a group of clergy would gather on a regular basis to preach three or four sermons on the same text, frequently before a lay audience, to practise and then discuss their pulpit skills. Although prophesyings were officially suppressed in the southern province in 1577, they were often replaced by ‘exercises’, which were similar in structure except that they were usually restricted to a single sermon (Collinson 1967: 168–80, 209–14; 1983: 175–80, 473). The cathedrals too provided a mainstay of preaching, frequently maintaining statutes that required dignitaries and prebendaries to preach on a regular basis. Thus Green’s chapter in this volume draws attention



emma rhatigan

to the prestigious Six Preacher sermons at Canterbury Cathedral and in particular to Thomas Jackson’s monumental series of weekday expositions preached there from the late 1610s to the 1630s. To this could be added the example of bishops like Arthur Lake, whose posthumous 1629 folio contains a significant number of sermons preached at Wells Cathedral on a range of occasions, including feast days such as Easter Day and Whitsuntide, ordinations, acts of penance, and civic celebrations such as that for the accession of James I (A. Lake 1629). Throughout the country, then, the Reformation witnessed an explosion of preaching. Sermons were not only wherever possible a key feature of regular Sunday worship, but they were also free-standing events in their own right. Indeed, it is worth emphasizing that, although most sermons were delivered in a church or cathedral, the majority were preached somewhat or entirely separately from liturgical services. In the context of this dramatic shift to a sermon-centred piety, the pulpit emerged into the limelight. The 1604 Canons specifically stated that pulpits should be ‘seemely kept for the preaching of God’s word’, and parish accounts throughout both the Elizabethan and the Jacobean periods list payments not just for the construction and repair of pulpits, but also for the purchase of pulpit hangings and cushions (App. III.9; Yule 1994: 189–91). The pulpit could either stand alone or be combined with the reading desk and clerk’s seat. When a separate piece of furniture, it tended to stand to one side of the screen opposite the reading pew. George Herbert famously set the fashion for making both the reading pew and the pulpit the same height and size, so that ‘neither have a precedency or priority of the other; but that Prayer and Preaching, being equally useful, might agree like Brethren’ (Walton 1670: 33). Where the pulpit was combined with the reading desk, elaborate ‘three decker’ pulpits were constructed, with the clerk’s seat, the reading pew, and the pulpit placed one above the other. Some of these were so capacious that they housed not just the priest, but his family as well (Addleshaw and Etchells 1948: 75–80). These newly built and beautified pulpits were not just utilitarian pieces of church furniture. Rather, with their commanding positions and refined carved work (often recording the date and name or initials of the churchwardens), they were potent expressions of a parochial identity that found its primary expression through hearing the word preached (Fig. 8). This is further indicated by the increasingly fashionable trend of decorating some part of the pulpit with biblical texts that declared the importance of preaching itself (Fig. 9). A particularly popular choice was the text that adorns the pulpit in Yaxley, Suffolk: ‘Necessity is laid upon me, ye woe is me if I preach not the Gospel’ (Yule 1994: 190). For a preacher addressing a congregation from such a pulpit, the very furniture inflected his words and his vocation with divine authority. Above all, however, these pulpits were stages, providing an opportunity for sometimes histrionic and emotive performances, as exploited, for example, by John Rogers of Dedham, who was described as ‘taking hold of the supporters of the canopy over the pulpit with both hands at one time and roaring hideously, to represent the torments of the damned’ (Heywood 1825–7: i. 521; quoted in Collinson 1982: 244). Undoubtedly Rogers took the performative potential of the early modern sermon to unusual extremes, but, whatever preaching style clergy chose to adopt, it was from the pulpit, raised up and exposed before their congregations,

preaching venues



fig. 8 St Peter, Bishop’s Waltham, Hampshire. A particularly fine Jacobean pulpit—the gift of Bishop Lancelot Andrewes c.1625—with tester, delicate carving, and turned baluster rail.

that all preachers—whether humble clerics reading the homilies or nationally renowned lecturers such as Henry Smith at St Clement Danes or William Gouge at Blackfriars— had to forge a pastoral relationship with their flock. Mounted in his pulpit, a preacher had available to him a full array of preaching aids. Pulpits were frequently fitted out with a range of furnishings, including seats, cushions, a desk for books, a pulpit cloth, an attached candlestick, a psalm board, and a music stand for the clerk’s seat. The pulpit at Kedington, Suffolk, even features a stand for that de rigueur Georgian accessory, the parson’s wig (Addleshaw and Etchells 1948: 78–80). Most notably, it was conventional for pulpits to be fitted with an hourglass, which served to regulate the length of the sermon. The use of such an hourglass is vividly illustrated in the frontispiece of the Bishops Bible of 1569, which portrays Archbishop Parker with an hourglass on his right-hand side. A glass is also depicted, with rather different connotations, in Hogarth’s satirical The Sleeping Congregation (1736), where it is fixed to the preacher’s capacious double-decker pulpit. The sixteenth-century example surviving in



emma rhatigan

fig. 9 All Saints, Pavement, York. A ‘speaking’ pulpit in ‘wineglass’ form. The tester, dated 1634, declares ‘It pleased God by the foolishness of preaching, to save them that beleeve’ (1 Cor. 1:21); the upper legend of the main pulpit urges ‘Preach the word, be instant in season, out of season’ (2 Tim. 4:2); and the lower legend warns ‘Where there is no vision, the people perish’ (Prov. 29:18).

Pilton, Devon, has almost equally comic potential (Fig. 10). Indeed, the hourglass was, perhaps, the preacher’s most richly allusive prop, if for its more sombre associations. As demonstrated by the scroll affixed to the pulpit in Hurst, Berkshire—‘As this glasse runneth, So man’s life passethe’—the image of the sands running through the glass was a potent reminder of human mortality, a fitting backdrop to a sermon’s call for repentance and one that preachers routinely exploited. Thus John Preston, seeking to incite his congregation to ‘actions and good workes’, encouraged them to ‘set upon the doing of it while there is sand in the houre-glasse’, gesturing no doubt to the glass before him (1630: 205). Indeed, as a timepiece that could be viewed by both the auditory and the preacher, the hourglass lay at the heart of the theatre of the sermon, with both preacher and congregation keeping a close eye on the preacher’s timing. In the hands of a rhetorically

preaching venues



fig. 10 St Mary, Pilton, Devon. Early sixteenth-century stone pulpit, with contemporary iron hourglass stand and ‘arm’ holder.

sophisticated preacher such as Donne, the passing of the sands through the glass could be developed into a competitive meta-drama. Thus Donne, racing to the finish of a Lenten court sermon, questioned his congregation: ‘If there be a minute of sand left, (There is not) If there be a minute of patience left, heare me say, This minute that is left, is that eternitie which we speake of; upon this minute dependeth that eternity’ (1953–62: vii. 368). With a glance at his empty hourglass, Donne not only harnessed the temporal urgency of his sermon, and preached right up to the last minute of sand to draw his listeners to a consideration of eternity, but also reinforced the close preaching rapport that he had developed with his auditory over the course of the hour, engaging, fulfilling, but also challenging their expectations of his sermon delivery. Of course, with a shift of emphasis from the communion table to the pulpit, parishes often also needed to make changes to the pewing, adapting the old medieval benches to ensure that congregations could see and, most crucially, hear the preacher. Julia Merritt has detailed a particularly strong wave of church renovations in Jacobean London, stressing that, while there was undoubtedly a range of causes for such work, including



emma rhatigan

the need to accommodate greater numbers of people and expressions of local pride, crucial too was the need to redesign church interiors in line with the needs of postReformation worship (Merritt 1998; Fincham and Tyacke 2007: 92–110). Thus Merritt draws attention to parochial documents that record various experiments with the location of the pulpit and even modifications to the position of the pillars to improve the church’s acoustics (1998: 946). Proximity to the pulpit also became a marker of social status, and in many parishes the gentry chose to assert their rank by constructing pews in privileged positions with the best views of the pulpit (Fig. 11). Indeed, while before the Reformation it was conventional for clergy to be buried in the chancel or under the altar, the Reformed reverence for preaching found expression in requests for burial beneath the pulpit, as, for example, in the will of Timothy Pryor, John Donne’s curate at

fig. 11 St Peter, Croft-on-Tees, N. Yorkshire. Pew (c.1680) of the Milbanke family, symbolically looming over those of the villagers’ pews. The focal point from the pew is the nave pulpit across the central aisle, not the chancel and communion table.

preaching venues



St Dunstan’s in the West (London), who requested that he be buried ‘as neere vnto the Pulpitt post as may bee that I maye touch it’ (TNA: PRO PROB 11/155). There are also examples of Jacobean funeral monument iconography featuring a deceased preacher as if in his pulpit (Fig. 12). These monuments gave architectural expression to a Reformed sense of clerical identity that was founded on an evangelical commitment to preaching the gospel, as epitomized in Donne’s pious (and also conventional) claim that ‘It hath been my desire, (and God may be pleased to grant it me) that I might die in the Pulpit’ (1651: 243). This construction of the parish church as a theatre for preaching was, however, to be dramatically modified amid the changing religious climate of the 1630s. From the 1620s onwards men such as Lancelot Andrewes and John Buckeridge had been pioneering a new style of worship. Recently termed avant-garde conformity, this movement aggressively reasserted the primacy of the sacraments, emphasizing particularly the efficacy of the Eucharist over preaching (P. Lake 1993; McCullough 1998: 155–67). Neither man

fig. 12 Magdalen College, Oxford, Chapel. Monument to Laurence Humphrey (d. 1589). Humphrey, one of the greatest of the Elizabethan reformers, was memorialized in the act of preaching—Bible in left hand, and a decorous gesture correctly with the right.



emma rhatigan

would have wished to be thought an enemy to preaching—witness their great labours in the pulpit, and Andrewes’s gift of a fine one to the parish church of Bishop’s Waltham (Fig. 8)—but rather an advocate of redressing a perceived dangerous imbalance between preaching, prayer, and sacrament. Thus Buckeridge scathingly attacked those who ‘turne Oratories into Auditories, and Temples into scholes, and all adoration and worship into hearing of a Sermon: As if all, soule and body, were turned into an eare’ (1618: 10.) When, under the supervision of William Laud (appointed archbishop of Canterbury in 1633), this theology was given architectural expression, it brought about a radical realignment of church interiors throughout England, with a particular focus on reorientating churches towards sacrament-centered worship (Fincham and Tyacke 2007: 176–226). Thus communion tables were replaced with altars, which were positioned north– south in the chancel and railed off. Every effort was made to enforce precisely that distinction between chancel and nave that had been in abeyance since the accession of Edward; seating was removed from the chancel, and communicants would come no closer than the sanctuary rail. Meanwhile, far from being a focal point, the pulpit, along with the minister’s seat, was literally sidelined, frequently relocated to ensure the visibility of the altar. At the heart of these changes were the cathedrals, which were meant to function as showcases of Laudian piety. Among the earliest to introduce changes was Durham Cathedral, where in 1620, under the initiative of Dean Richard Hunt, the communion table was replaced with a stone altar of black and pink marble. When John Cosin was appointed prebendary in 1624, he introduced yet more elaborations, including the decoration of the cathedral choir with fifty angels painted in scarlet and gold (Fincham and Tyacke 2007: 137–9). In the 1630s other cathedrals started to follow Durham’s lead; York Minster was refurnished in 1632–3, and in Chester Cathedral steps were installed leading up to the altar and stained glass was placed in the east window. The 1630s also saw new energy injected into the long-anticipated project to rebuild St Paul’s Cathedral in London (2007: 232–7). These newly beautified cathedrals were to set the tone for the architectural and liturgical transformations that took place throughout the country. These changes were not, of course, destined to last. The religious revolution of the 1640s abolished all the symbols of the Laudian reformation; altars gave way again to tables in the middle of the chancel and turned east–west, and communion rails were dismantled and destroyed.2 Meanwhile pulpit and preaching were restored to their former prominence; the Directory for the Publique Worship of God (1645) stated that ‘preaching was one of the greatest and most excellent works belonging to the ministery of the gospel’. East end galleries, an anathema to Laud, were frequently built to cater for growing sermon congregations. In St George Tombland in Norwich, for example, the church was redesigned as a centre for Independent preaching, with a gallery built across the east end of the chancel and the pulpit situated in the middle of the chancel (Fincham and Tyacke 2007: 280–1). Nonetheless, the changes in church architecture introduced under Laud were still significant in shaping the Restoration church in the 1660s (2007: 2

What follows is largely indebted to Fincham and Tyacke (2007), esp. chs 7 and 8.

preaching venues



305–52). In the initial years of the Restoration, parish church architecture was not an urgent priority. Bishops were preoccupied with the task of reconstructing the church in their dioceses, and, since no emendations were made to the relevant prayer book rubric, the communion table could be placed either in the chancel or in the nave. When change did come, it was, once again, galvanized by the example set by the cathedrals. The cathedral altars were quickly railed in following the Restoration, and throughout the 1660s efforts were made to restore the fabric and furnishings and to reintroduce elaborate liturgical worship. As in the 1630s, this played an important role in setting the tone for the rest of the diocese (2007: 313–16). It was, however, developments in London that were most significant in generating change. The Great Fire of 1666 severely damaged or destroyed eighty-six churches, and the process of rebuilding fifty-one of these placed the architectural setting of worship back on the agenda. The architect in overall charge of rebuilding the churches was Sir Christopher Wren, although it is likely that he was guided by senior church men such as Gilbert Sheldon, archbishop of Canterbury, Humphrey Henchman, bishop of London, and Willian Sancroft, dean of St Paul’s. As Fincham and Tyacke have described, the arrangements for the communion table in these rebuilt churches seem to have followed a uniform pattern; the communion table was placed on a raised ascent with steps leading up to it, rails were erected at the top of the steps, and an altarpiece on which was written the Lord’s Prayer, the decalogue, and the creed was placed behind the table (2007: 325). Although this design might appear to be a perfect expression of Laudian architectural sympathies, it is significant that Wren himself described his churches as ‘auditories’, writing in 1708 that it was important to him that the congregation could both ‘hear distinctly, and see the Preacher’ (1750: 319–21; cited in Addleshaw and Etchells 1948: 247–50). Thus Wren developed a church plan in which, even when his churches have aisles, they are in essence still single rooms with the altar against the east wall or in a shallow recess. Only two of his London churches have a screen dividing the church into separate parts (Addleshaw and Etchells 1948: 53–8). Indeed, the pulpit was frequently an elaborate focal point, with turned balusters on its stair, carved panelling, and a decorated canopy or sounding board. Particularly elaborate is the pulpit at Christ Church Newgate Street, which features a representation of the Last Supper and four evangelists (Fincham and Tyacke 2007: 347). More typical, and very well preserved, is the interior of Wren’s St Martin Ludgate (Fig. 13). So-called auditory, or single-room churches had been built earlier in the period (for example, St Paul’s Covent Garden, by Inigo Jones, consecrated in 1638), but Wren’s post-fire London churches established a model that was to be influential throughout the country, with many bishops imitating London practice in their dioceses (Addleshaw and Etchells 1948: 52–63). Thus from the 1670s onwards versions of Wren’s city churches began to appear in the provinces. For example, Ingestre Staffordshire, probably designed by Wren, All Saints Northampton, built by Henry Bell, and the church of King Charles the Martyr at Tunbridge Wells (Fincham and Tyacke 2007: 348–9). Although Restoration church architecture did, then, have some important roots in the Laudian tradition of the 1630s, the Civil Wars and Interregnum had also liberated a



emma rhatigan

fig. 13 St Martin Ludgate, City of London. The best preserved interior of Wren’s City churches (1677–86). The east-end fittings decorously emphasize both pulpit and shallow railed chancel.

dissenting tradition of worship that developed its own very distinctive setting for preaching in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Prior to the 1689 Act of Toleration, most nonconformists did not meet in specifically constructed meeting houses, but rather would use private dwellings, barns, or rented rooms. In London many congregations would hire city guildhalls, thus gaining names such as Haberdashers Hall and Joiners Hall (Watts 1978: 303). A few meeting houses were built in London during the reign of Charles II. The ejected minister Thomas Doolittle, for example, opened a meeting house in Bunhill Fields in 1666, and when this proved too small had a new meeting house with galleries built in Monkwell Street, near Cripplegate. A number of these buildings, however, were seized by the established church after the Great Fire, and others were closed down by Christopher Wren in his post of Surveyor of Works. Doolittle’s Monkwell Street meeting house was confiscated for use by the lord mayor as a chapel (Watts 1978: 303; Black 2004). Outside London, dissenting congregations also used chapels of ease. These had originally been built in areas such as Lancashire in the 1650s as a response to the inadequate number of parish churches, but

preaching venues



in a number of cases the chapels were maintained by Presbyterian ministers (Watts 1978: 279, 303–4). The obvious disadvantages of meeting in private residences (not least the cramped conditions and the fact that the owners became an obvious target for persecution) meant that after 1689 the majority of nonconformist congregations sought to establish a permanent place of worship, and meeting houses were built in most towns and many villages in England and Wales. Nonetheless, these buildings were not always purpose built. The oldest Quaker meeting house at Broad Camden, Gloucestershire (purchased by the Friends in 1664), was converted from two bays of housing, and the oldest Baptist chapel in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, was converted from several tenements in Millington’s Alley (Watts 1978: 304–5; Stell 1986: 78, 98–100). The first purpose-built Quaker meeting house was erected at Jordans, Buckinghamshire (Fig. 14), in 1688, in direct and immediate response to the Declaration of Indulgence issued by James II in 1687 (Stell 1986: 7–8). Usually rectangular in shape, the chapels and meeting houses were governed by simplicity, with whitewashed walls and plain-glass windows. In most independent chapels pews were arranged along three walls, facing a raised pulpit and a central communion table, and it was customary for men and women to sit apart. In Quaker meeting houses there was no pulpit or communion table, but, as meetings became more dependent on itinerant Friends who would visit other meetings, benches tended to be arranged facing a raised bench or gallery on which these ‘Public Friends’ or ‘Recorded Ministers’ would be seated (Watts 1978: 307–8; see also Lindley 1969).

fig. 14 Jordan’s Meeting House, Buckinghamshire. One of the first purpose-built Quaker meeting houses; the first meeting (September 1688) was held in it only four months after James II’s Declaration of Indulgence. The only visible hierarchy in the simple interior is the slightly raised bench against the walls for elders.



emma rhatigan

It was partly in response to the growth in the number of nonconformist meeting houses that concerns began to be raised about improved provision for worship within the established church, anxieties that were given particularly strong expression in parliament after the Tory victory in 1710 (Port 1986: pp. ix–x). London, and its exploding suburban population in particular, was desperately short of churches. Jonathan Swift complained in 1709 that it was a scandal that ‘so little care should be taken for the building of churches, that five parts in six of the people are absolutely hindered from hearing divine service. Particularly here in London, where a single minister, with one or two sorry curates, hath the care sometimes of above twenty thousand souls incumbent on him’ (1709; quoted in Port 1986: p. x). Galvanized by a petition from the parish of Greenwich regarding damage caused to their church in a storm, parliament responded by forming a committee to consider ‘what Churches are wanting within the cities of London and Westminster, and the Suburbs thereof ’ (quoted in Port 1986: p. xi). This Committee reported back that fifty new churches were required, a recommendation that parliament accepted, passing a bill to impose an additional duty on coal in order to finance the church building and creating the Fifty Churches Commission (Colvin 1950; Port 1986). In the end, hopes of building fifty churches proved overly optimistic. However, the Commission did build twelve churches by the architects Nicholas Hawksmoor, James Gibbs, John James, and Thomas Archer, and partially subsidized a further five (Port 1986: p. xl). Like Wren’s city churches, these Queen Anne churches were built with the requirements of High Church worship firmly in mind. An emphasis on the congregation’s active corporate participation meant that ensuring both visibility and audibility was always a guiding principle. Thus the Commission stipulated that all pews ‘should be single and of equal height, so low that every person in them may be seen either kneeling or sitting, and all facing the communion table’ (Port 1986: 12). As this proviso also indicates, the communion table was to be a focal point, and it was further required that the chancel should be ‘raised three steps above nave or body of church’. However, as Downes points out, it was not intended that the communion table entirely monopolize attention, and the pulpit and reading desk were also constructed and located in such a way as to draw the congregation’s attention (Downes 1979: 160–4; Port 1986: 12). Of the six churches designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor, the one that survives closest to its original appearance is St Alphege, Greenwich (1712–18; Fig. 15). This is rectangular in shape, with a simple, symmetrical interior. The chancel is formed by a small, but ornately decorated apse at the east end. In front of the apse is a large open space where the pulpit would originally have stood (Downes 1979: 167–70). As Downes stresses, however, the Queen Anne churches were not only designed with liturgical and purely pragmatic requirements in mind. They were also ‘by definition, a manifesto’, intended to function as ‘paragons of High Church planning’ (1979: 166). It was this sense of aspiration and confidence that lay behind the Commission’s insistence that the churches be ‘insular’ (free standing), with towers and steeples. In other words, the architectural design of the churches was to give expression to what must be one of the most ambitious church-building projects of the period (Port 1986: 12).

preaching venues



Fig. 15 St Alphege, Greenwich (1712–18). One of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s most distinguished contributions to parliament’s ‘Fifty New Churches’ scheme. Note the conception of the space as a single room, the baroque pulpit (originally against the chancel arch), and quantity of gallery seating.

Outdoor Pulpits and Preaching Crosses The parish church was not, however, the only location for preaching; further opportunities for sermon hearing existed, quite literally, outside cathedrals and parish churches. Outdoor pulpits had been traditional since mediaeval times, when, as Susan Wabuda describes, they were erected throughout the country, frequently located alongside cathedrals, hospitals, and the convents of medicant friars. A surviving example can be found beside the ruins of the Dominican friary in Hereford. This is a six-sided structure with a stone canopy over the pulpit and a cross at the peak of the roof (Wabuda 2002: 40–1). Outside Norwich Cathedral the preaching place known as Green Yard remained in use right into the seventeenth century. This was furnished with a covered pulpit, sheltered seating for the more socially elevated, and benches for everyone else. There was no endowment for these sermons in the early part of the period, but in the 1620s a group of Norfolk gentry joined together to finance combination sermons (an event where a panel of ministers would preach in rotation) to be delivered on Sunday afternoons. It eventually became the custom for the bishop of Norwich to organize a roster of preachers,



emma rhatigan

drawing on Suffolk clergy in the summer and Norfolk clergy in the winter (Collinson 1983: 472). In London the city’s most important outdoor pulpits were St Mary’s Spital and Paul’s Cross. Paul’s Cross (see Fig. 21) was undoubtedly the largest and, outside of the court, the most politically influential pulpit in the country.3 A two-hour sermon was given there each week, delivered by a rota of preachers overseen by the bishop of London. Such preachers could include, in addition to the bishop of London and the dean of St Paul’s, aspiring clergy from the universities. Indeed, it was a condition of the bachelor of theology degree in Cambridge that candidates preach a sermon at Paul’s Cross. The pulpit was located in ‘The Cross Yard’ to the north-east of Old St Paul’s, and its location at the heart of the political news culture surrounding the cathedral, together with the fact that it attracted large crowds, meant that it was also used for the publication of proclamations. It was from Paul’s Cross that news of the defeat of the Spanish Armada was proclaimed in 1588. Indeed, this political dimension was frequently present in the sermons themselves, which often marked anniversaries such as Accession Sunday or the Gunpowder Plot (Morrissey 2003: 159). The first cross was erected on the site in 1241, and it was being used as a pulpit by at least the mid-fourteenth century. Then in 1449 the cross was replaced with the pulpit that was to stand there throughout the Elizabethan and Jacobean reigns. This was an octagonal structure, roofed, but open at the sides. Initially the congregation would sit or stand wherever they could hear best, but from the 1590s onwards seating arrangements started to become more formal. In 1595 a low wall was built, partially enclosing the pulpit, and in 1608 this was extended, creating an enclosed space where people could pay for a seat near the pulpit. Paul’s Cross attracted a socially heterogeneous congregation. Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I all attended a sermon there during their reigns and, as Morrissey has detailed, there are also regular references to attendance by members of the Privy Council, the bishop of London, lawyers and students from the Inns of Court, members of parliament, as well as citizens and more humble members of London’s population. The most visible and consistent members of the congregation, however, were the lord mayor and the aldermen of London, and arrangements for their attendance became increasingly elaborate throughout the period. For example, in 1569 a ‘sermon house’ was built, paid for by the lord mayor to accommodate the mayor’s and the aldermen’s wives. Then, from around 1600, a custom was developed whereby the mayor and aldermen would hear prayers in the choir before processing from the cathedral to their ‘sermon house’ facing the outdoor pulpit. Together with the Spital (the pulpit in the former churchyard of St Mary’s Hospital in Spitalfields), Paul’s Cross was the pulpit from which the City’s most famous Easter sermon series was preached. On Good Friday there was a sermon at Paul’s Cross on the Passion of Christ. This was then followed by sermons on the Resurrection at the Spital 3

What follows is largely indebted to Mary Morrissey’s monograph Politics and the Paul’s Cross Sermons, 1558–1642 (Oxford University Press, 2011). I am extremely grateful to Mary Morrissey for sharing this work with me prior to publication.

preaching venues



on the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday after Easter. Then, on the following Sunday, another preacher would mount the Paul’s Cross pulpit to review these four sermons before preaching one of his own. While the Paul’s Cross preacher was appointed as usual by the bishop of London, the Court of Aldermen appointed the preachers at the Spital. The series was central to the Corporation’s religious attendance, and they would process to the Paul’s Cross sermons in violet livery on Good Friday and scarlet on Low Sunday. At the Spital they would be accompanied by the children of Christ’s Hospital. As McCullough has detailed, a central theme of the Spital sermons would be almsgiving, drawing attention to the charitable collections to ransom captive merchants and mariners and to support the City’s hospital that were taken during the sermons (2005: 303–7). The specific occasion of these Easter Spital sermons is given vivid expression in Lancelot Andrewes’s 1588 sermon. Andrewes constructs his sermon around a punning conceit on the Court of Aldermen before him. Preaching on the text I Timothy 6:17 (‘Charge them that are rich in this world’), he tells the merchants that, ‘in such Assemblies as this, the Lord of Heaven doth hold His Court, whereunto all men . . . owe both suit and service’. The entire sermon is figured as a legal ‘charge’ delivered to the ‘court’ before him (McCullough 2005: 41–2, 303–7). Andrewes thus weaves the specific occasion of his sermon, with the visual prominence of the Court of Aldermen, and the exegesis of his, appropriately charitably themed, biblical text into a witty and rhetorically sophisticated relationship. The self-conscious acknowledgement of his wealthy congregation’s presence works both to flatter the aldermen and, of course, to encourage them to loosen their purse strings. The Corporation’s patronage of Paul’s Cross continued into the reign of Charles I, but, as Morrissey describes, from the early 1620s the prestige of Paul’s Cross sermons seems to have been on the wane. Not only did the congregation start to shrink as Paul’s Cross sermons faced competition from the increasing number of lectureships that were being created in the city, but the calibre of the preachers also seems to have diminished. Moreover, sermons at outdoor pulpits like Paul’s Cross, which took place outside a liturgical context, were running against the tide of the new avant-garde conformity of the 1630s. In 1633 the long-awaited renovations of St Paul’s Cathedral began, and it seems likely that it was as part of this building work that Paul’s Cross was finally pulled down, along with the houses adjoining the cathedral. According to Henry Peacham, the plan was for the Cross to be rebuilt. This, however, never happened, and neither sermons at Paul’s Cross nor those at the Spital were revived at the Restoration (Peacham 1641: sig. A4r; cited in Morrissey 2011).

Court Pulpits At the other extreme from the large and diverse urban gatherings attracted by these outdoor pulpits were the pulpits of the royal courts, the Inns of Court, and eventually parliament in London, and the college chapels in Oxford and Cambridge. Obviously these



emma rhatigan

elite, London and Oxbridge pulpits represented only a small proportion of the sermons delivered in the period; most sermons were given in the parochial and provincial context outlined above. However, not only were court and university sermons delivered in particularly distinctive architectural settings, but these elite contexts also provide, in an especially well-documented way, a sense of the sheer range and variety of preaching occasions in the period. The most august of these pulpits was obviously that at court (McCullough 1998). Sermons at court were provided by the chaplains in ordinary and by special invitation of the monarch. Court chaplains were members of the clergy who held other posts but would attend or reside at court for at most two months in the year and preach on a rota organized by the lord chamberlain or clerk of the closet. Under Elizabeth, sermons were held once a week; with the accession of James, however, preaching was to gain new prominence. A sermon enthusiast and keen connoisseur and patron of preaching, James expanded the number of sermons, adding to Sundays a weekly Tuesday sermon to commemorate his escape from the Gowry conspiracy (the subsequent foiling of the Gunpowder Plot also on a Tuesday providing apparent divine endorsement). During this period sermons were also delivered before Queen Anne at Denmark House and Prince Henry and later Prince Charles at St James’s Palace (McCullough 1998: 169–209). The regular royal residences in the period—Whitehall, St James’s Palace, Greenwich, Richmond, Hampton Court, and Windsor—all featured a pulpit and all, with the exception of Richmond, shared the same architectural arrangement, which was unique to the court chapel (1998: 11–49). The monarch would be seated in a gallery, the ‘royal closet’ over the west end of the chapel, with the householders (court officers and titled nobility) seated in facing stalls below, divided by gender. At Richmond the ‘royal closets’ were located, not at the west end, but on opposite sides of the choir at the east end. On Sundays and holy days the monarch would process from the privy chambers, through the presence chamber, to the chapel in a major ceremonial event designed to parade the wealth and splendour of the court. They would then hear services and sermons seated at the closet window, framed by heraldic devices of the monarchy. From there, as McCullough describes, ‘the sovereign was a kind of present absence, a hovering, presiding genius, removed but more keenly felt because of that removal’ (1998: 21). At the same time, it was possible for the monarch to open the window and either to thank or to criticize the preacher, an opportunity taken by Elizabeth when, having been subjected to a sermon by Anthony Rudd in 1596 telling her to prepare her soul for death, she opened the window to issue the response that ‘the greatest Clerks are not the wisest men’ (Harington 1979: 172, 153, quoted in McCullough 1998: 21). This architectural arrangement created, of course, a clear expression of the Royal Supremacy, literally placing the monarch above the rest of the congregation. Indeed, the whole event of sermon attendance at court was designed to fuse spiritual and secular authority, and preachers, especially those developing defences of the Royal Supremacy, were quick to exploit this spatial dynamic. Andrewes, for example, preaching at court on Easter Day 1614 on the text Philippians 2:8–11, drew on the chapel architecture to illustrate his biblical exegesis. Thus he described to his congregation how:

preaching venues



[God] Exalted His Person, in stead of the Crosse, to His owne high throne of Majestie. And in stead of Pilates title, gave Him a Title of true honour, above all the Titles in the world . . . And sure, when men are so high, as higher they cannot bee (as Kings) there is no other way to exalt them, left us, but this; to spread abroad, to dilate their names. (Andrewes 1614: 14–15)

Andrewes elaborates on precisely that analogy of spiritual and secular authority that the occasion of the court sermon was designed to evoke, and the fact of James sitting above in his closet, apart from the rest of the congregation, would have physically echoed the upward movement of his rhetoric, in which the successive clauses, each reaching higher than the other, culminate in the vision of the king, a man ‘so high, as higher they cannot be’. In performance, the self-conscious interjection ‘as Kings’ would have provided ample scope for Andrewes to gesture directly to James, raising his eyes upwards towards both heaven and the monarch. An alternative pulpit at Whitehall was the outdoor preaching place known as the Sermon Court, Chapel Court, or ‘Preaching Place’. This pulpit was constructed in Henry VIII’s reign and located in the centre of the Whitehall palace in a courtyard facing the council chamber. The monarch would listen to the sermon from the windows of the council chamber, with other members of the congregation gathering in the courtyard or in the elevated terrace or walk that stood on the north and east sides. Far greater numbers could be accommodated here than in the court chapel, and the congregation would have been far more ‘public’, with middle-class Londoners outnumbering the courtiers. This meant that the pulpit provided an ideal opportunity for the monarch to project a display of public piety, as is clearly illustrated in the Foxe woodcut in which Edward VI is depicted giving careful attention to the sermon of Hugh Latimer (Fig. 19). It was also a stage taken full advantage of by that doyenne of public relations, Elizabeth I. The principle use of the pulpit was for the traditional Lenten sermon series, which supplemented the regular weekly sermons at court, providing an additional three sermons before the monarch in each of the six weeks of Lent. Camden described how Elizabeth would attend these sermons ‘dress’d in Mourning, as the gravest and most primitive Habit’ (1706: ii. 371, quoted in McCullough 1998: 48). Fully aware of the theatricality of the occasion, Elizabeth ensured that the spectacle of her listening to the sermon was of at least equal importance as the sermon itself. The royal chapels in London stood unaltered throughout 1641–2 and were also recreated when Charles established his wartime headquarters in Oxford, where the cathedral at Christ Church doubled as the chapel royal. The chaplains continued the usual Sunday and Tuesday preaching throughout this period, with the addition of a sermon preached at the monthly fast instituted in 1643 (Fincham and Tyacke 2007: 286). The institution of court preaching was also maintained by the court in exile in Paris, with the chapel of Sir Richard Browne, Charles II’s resident in Saint-Germain, functioning as the chapel royal. John Evelyn records regularly attending sermons by erstwhile Laudians such as John Cosin, Eleazar Duncon, Richard Steward, John Castillion, and Edward Wolley during his time in Paris (1955: iii. 1–54). On departing from Paris in 1652, Charles specifically ordered Browne and Cosin to maintain worship in the chapel (Fincham and



emma rhatigan

Tyacke 2007: 288). Such continuity meant that, on the Restoration, the institution of court preaching was re-established. On Charles’s return to England, the chapel in Whitehall was immediately refitted, including a new pulpit, and, as Mathew Jenkinson’s chapter in this volume demonstrates, preaching was an important and vibrant component of public worship at the Restoration court.

The Inns of Court Beyond the royal courts, the Inns of Court provided three of the most prestigious pulpits in early modern London. The Inner and Middle Temple were the first of the Societies to establish a lectureship, appointing a ‘Reader of Divinity’ at the Temple Church in 1571 to supplement the preaching of the Master of the Temple. The benchers at Gray’s Inn soon followed suit, appointing a preacher in 1576 to preach two Sunday sermons, and by 1581 Lincoln’s Inn was also employing a permanent preacher. Initially the Lincoln’s Inn preacher was to preach once on a Sunday morning and once on a Wednesday, but in 1602, under the influence of the godly preacher Thomas Gataker, the Wednesday sermon was moved to Sunday afternoon in order to thwart those lawyers who were profaning the sabbath by the ‘entertaining of their Clients’ (Gataker 1654: 16–17). The Societies’ motivations in appointing these preachers are left unrecorded, although, as Prest speculates, the desire to counter Catholic proselytizing in the Inns was undoubtedly significant (1972: 192–3; see also Fisher 1978). The willingness of the Societies to pay relatively high salaries for their preachers (Lincoln’s Inn, for example, paid £40 up to 1610, then £60 to 1632, and then £80 up to 1642) does, however, demonstrate a strong commitment to preaching, and we should not underestimate the role played by institutional pride and the desire of the benchers, like the aldermen at the Spital, to project a display of corporate piety (the stipends of the preachers and chaplains at the Inns of Court are listed in Prest 1972: 188–9). The opportunity to preach to a select, highly educated congregation, not to mention the high salary, meant that the Inns of Court pulpits attracted some of the most renowned divines of the period. Preachers at the Temple included Laurence Chaderton, Walter Travers, and William Crashawe; the Gray’s Inn pulpit was occupied by Roger Fenton, Richard Sibbes, and William Charke; and Lincoln’s Inn could boast Richard Field, Thomas Gataker, John Donne, John Preston, Edward Reynolds, James Ussher, and John Tillotson. Although the Inns were careful to gain the approval of the civil and ecclesiastical authorities when first appointing preachers, these clerics held their positions entirely at the pleasure of the bench. Moreover, since the Inns were self-governing, extra-parochial peculiars, a preacher in one of the Society’s pulpits would have enjoyed far greater freedom than in a more politically exposed pulpit such as the royal court or Paul’s Cross. As Gataker wrote, Lincoln’s Inn was a ‘priviledged place’ where he was less exposed to disturbance (1654: 37–8). This independence was slightly more perilous at the Temple, where the Divinity Reader appointed

preaching venues



by the benchers had to coexist with the Master of the Temple, an appointment in the gift of the Crown. This always potentially fragile relationship became particularly explosive in 1585 when Hooker was appointed Master and found himself sharing the pulpit with the Reader in Divinity, Walter Travers. The ongoing theological debate that this collision generated inspired the comment that ‘the forenoon sermon spoke Canterbury and the afternoon Geneva’ (see Walton 1670: 77). The situation was not resolved until Archbishop Whitgift intervened, prohibiting Travers from preaching, and the Temple lectureship remained vacant until 1605. The congregation for sermons at the Inns of Court would have consisted mainly of members of the Inn: the benchers (the governing body of the Society), the barristers, and also the students, some of whom were studying the law, while others were using the Inns as a convenient base from which to launch themselves into the social and administrative life of the City and royal court. This division between lawyers and students and the different pastoral needs of the two constitutions of the congregation were clearly recognized in the Lincoln’s Inn pulpit by Preston, who, having reprimanded those ‘Young Gentlemen’ who ‘waste their precious opportunities in sports, in idle visitations, in gaming’, then turned ‘to those that are of more yeares . . . that are so drowned in businesse, so overwhelmed with imployment, so occupied with outward things abroad, that they have no vacancie to feede their soules within’ (1630: 113–14). Donne offered a less acerbic and more witty vignette of his congregation when he opened one of his Lincoln’s Inn sermons by mapping his divisio onto the hierarchically arranged auditory before him: This is truly to be a good Student, Scrutari Scripturas, To search the Scriptures, in which is eternall life: This is truly to be called to the Barre, to be Crucified with Christ Jesus: And to be called to the Bench, to have part in his Resurrection, and raigne in glory with him. (1953–62: v. 35)

At the same time, however, the congregation at the Inns of Court could be relatively fluid. Members of one Society would frequent another Society’s pulpit as well as sampling other pulpits in the city. Simonds D’Ewes, a student at the Middle Temple, describes attending sermons at Lincoln’s Inn, Blackfriars, Gray’s Inn, Serjeant’s Inn, Whitehall, St Paul’s, and Paul’s Cross, as well as sermons at the Temple (1974: 138, 143, 170, 146, 180, 185, 171). The more popular the preacher, of course, the greater the influx of visitors. Writing of Preston’s time at Lincoln’s Inn, Ball claims that ‘at first the numbers that attended on his minestry, besides their own society, were few; but when the chapple was new built . . . the numbers were exceeding great that were his constant hearers’ (1885: 78). The importance of preaching within the Inns of Court is given particular expression by the building of the new chapel at Lincoln’s Inn between 1616 and 1623. This extremely prestigious, and expensive, building project is testimony to the important part preaching played in the Society’s institutional identity and, as the quotation from Thomas Ball’s biography of John Preston above demonstrates, it also gave the Lincoln’s Inn pulpit a prominent place in the preaching topography of early modern London. The details of



emma rhatigan

the furnishing of the chapel indicate that it was clearly designed as an evangelical theatre for preaching. Rather than adopting the collegiate style of seating used in the chapel royal and university college chapels, the layout chosen by Lincoln’s Inn was far closer to parochial pewing. According to the benchers’ seating orders, there were three blocks of seating in the main body of the chapel, facing east towards the chancel. There appear also to have been seats on all three walls of the chancel, behind the pulpit, along with the preacher’s seat and the chaplain’s seat. This, combined with the positioning of the pulpit in the centre of the chapel, in front of the communion table, placed the main focus on the word preached, rather than liturgical ceremonies. The benchers were allocated seats in the central block in the main body of the chapel, thus ensuring not only that they had the best view of the pulpit and were in the best place to hear the preacher, but that they would also be seen to be listening to the sermon. As for the aldermen in full livery at the Spital, or Elizabeth I framed in the Council Chamber window over the Preaching Place, sermon attendance for the benchers was an important means of constructing a very public religious identity.

Preaching in Parliament In the 1620s a further institutional context for preaching in London developed: parliament. A motion for a public fast with ‘Prayer and Preaching’ was first made in 1581. There are earlier references to members attending sermons at Westminster Abbey, Temple Church, or the court, but this seems to be the first attempt by the House independently to sponsor preaching. The House agreed that the Privy Council would nominate the preachers and that the sermons would be delivered in the Temple Church (House of Commons 1802: i. 118). This plan was, however, quashed decisively by Elizabeth I, who expressed her ‘great Misliking’ of the motion and instructed the House ‘to bestow their Time and Endeavour hereafter . . . in Matters proper and pertinent for this House to deal in; and to omit all superfluous and unnecessary Motions and Arguments’ (House of Commons Journal 1802: i. 118–19; Wilson 1969: 22–3). In James I’s reign, however, the House made a further, and this time successful, attempt to sponsor preaching. On 9 April 1614 James Perrott put forward a motion for the members to receive communion, and four days later it was agreed that this would take place in St Margaret’s, the parish church of Westminster, and ‘Mr Speaker would bespeak a Preacher’ (House of Commons Journal 1802: i. 457–8, 463–4). From this point onwards the House intermittently sponsored sermons delivered in St Margaret’s. When in 1621 James Ussher’s sermon was ordered into print, an additional tradition began of requesting the preacher to publish the sermon. With the parliament of 1623–4, the nature of parliament sermons began to change. On 23 February Sir Edward Cecil moved that the Commons should hold a fast, citing practice in the Low Countries. He also stated that this fast should be ‘general through all the Kingdom’. Communion was administered on this occasion, but there was also a

preaching venues



strong focus on preaching, with William Bulstrode nominating Isaac Bargrave, a chaplain to Prince Charles, to deliver the sermon (House of Commons Journal 1802: i. 671–2; Wilson 1969: 26–8). Significantly Bargrave gave particular emphasis to parliament as a corporate and representative body, telling them ‘Yee now present the whole body of the Land, and therefore now before you approach the Altar, Repent for the whole body of the Land’ (1624: 17; quoted in Wilson 1969: 27–8). During the early years of Charles I’s reign, the Commons held fasts during each session, so that eventually they became an established tradition. Thus in 1625 a fast was held on 2 July with sermons delivered by Josias Shute, Richard Holdsworth, and John Preston. This was meant to be a general fast throughout the country, although it was noted in parliament that the bishops failed to enforce it (House of Commons Journal 1802: i. 809–10). King Charles also celebrated the fast with a sermon at court, though given that his choice of preacher was William Laud, the tenor was no doubt very different from the offerings of Shute, Holdsworth, and Preston. By the time of the Short Parliament, it was considered acceptable to hold a fast with preaching but without communion. One of the first actions of the Short Parliament was to arrange a fast for 2 May with sermons to be given by Richard Holdsworth and Stephen Marshall. A communion service was scheduled for the following day. As Wilson argues, although neither the fast nor the communion service was actually held, the plans were still important in separating preaching from the communion service and thus implying that there was no limit to the number of parliament sermons that could be organized (1969: 35–6). The precedent was thus set for fast sermons to become a frequent and regular feature in the Long Parliament (for detailed discussion see Webster, Chapter 20, this volume; also Trevor-Roper 1964a). The first fast of the Long Parliament was held on the anniversary of Elizabeth I’s accession, 17 November, and featured sermons by Cornelius Burges and Stephen Marshall (House of Commons Journal 1802: ii. 20, 23; Wilson 1969: 36–41; Webster, Chapter 20, this volume). Then through the spring of 1641 there was, as Wilson describes, a concerted effort to sponsor parliament sermons (1969: 43–52). These were not delivered on formal occasions, but arranged by individual members. Thus the printed texts state that they were preached before ‘sundry of the House of Commons’. Change came on 24 December 1641, when the Commons initiated a request to the king for ‘a monthly Fast’ to ‘be kept and observed by both Houses of Parliament, and the whole Kingdom, while the Troubles continue in Ireland’ (House of Commons Journal 1802: ii. 356). Charles agreed and, by thus authorizing a structure of monthly fasts, also introduced a regular pattern of parliament sermons. On these fast days normal parliamentary business was usually suspended and members were expected to attend both a morning and an afternoon sermon at St Margaret’s. These sermons no doubt played an important role in fashioning the image of parliament as a unified corporate body. They also, as Webster’s chapter in this volume demonstrates, provide crucial evidence of the changing political and religious climate throughout the Civil War period. Monthly fast sermons to parliament continued through to 1649, when the regular fast was abolished. This was not the end of preaching to parliament; parliament sermons at special fasts continued into the 1650s, and the practice can be traced through to the Restoration.



emma rhatigan

These parliament sermons in the 1650s and after the Restoration were, however, considerably less frequent (Trevor-Roper 1964a: 135–8).

University Sermons Outside London the universities were central to the elite preaching culture of early modern England. Not only did the universities hold responsibility for educating prospective clergy, but pulpits of college chapels and university churches also provided formative religious experiences for whole generations of students. The links between the preaching culture of the universities and that in London were, moreover, numerous. As has already been discussed, preaching at Paul’s Cross was a necessary rite of passage for all B.Th. candidates at Cambridge, and the universities were fertile ground when it came to recruiting preachers to fill the weekly rota. Equally, as McCullough has demonstrated, James I was keen to cherry-pick court preachers from the universities, exploiting the proximity of Cambridge to his hunting grounds at Newmarket and Royston to indulge his two favourite interests. Young hopefuls from the Cambridge colleges were frequently given a chance to please the royal ear in the hunting lodge pulpit, with future court preachers such as John Preston and John Williams gaining patronage this way (McCullough 1998: 125–6). Not surprisingly, the Inns of Court also looked to the universities. In 1601, for example, Lincoln’s Inn enticed Thomas Gataker away from a Hebrew Lectureship at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (Gataker 1654: 33–4). University sermons themselves were, moreover, intensely engaged with public affairs. Not only was it in the university pulpits that new theological ideas were frequently aired and debated, but these pulpits also hosted some of the most politically notorious sermons of the period. In April 1622, for example, the Oxford MA John Knight, prompted by the wars of religion on the Continent, preached a sermon in which he defended the right of resistance against ungodly rulers. This sermon not only led to immediate imprisonment for Knight, but was also a contributing factor to the Directions for Preachers that were issued later that year (App. III.10). Again, in 1630, it was in an Oxford university sermon that Peter Heylyn denounced the Feoffees for Impropriations, in a sermon preached on Act Sunday, during the celebrations that marked the end of the academic year—a clear attempt on Heylyn’s part to ensure a large and public congregation (Fincham 1997: 180–1; Shami 2003: 45–8). Thus, as Fincham emphasizes, far from being inward looking, ministering only to enclosed academic enclaves, preaching at the universities was a very public and not infrequently politically incendiary activity. The usual layout of a college chapel featured two facing sets of stalls against the north and south walls, with the communion table and the pulpit at the east end, a form adapted, like that in the chapels royal, from monastic and cathedral choirs (see Fig. 22). There is little information about the position of the communion table in the initial years of the Protestant settlement, although Fincham and Tyacke point out that few, if any, college chapels had east-end, altarwise tables by the accession of Charles I in 1625 and it seems

preaching venues



fig. 16 Charterhouse Chapel, London, monument to Thomas Sutton (d. 1611), founder of the Charterhouse, by Nicholas Stone.

likely that this situation dated back to the Elizabethan period. Some of the earliest evidence comes from a plan (c.1609) of King’s College chapel in Cambridge. This shows the communion table positioned east–west, but in the middle of the choir with the pulpit positioned to its east end (Fincham and Tyacke 2007: 61). Presumably, as in the chapel royal, a movable pulpit stood centrally in the space as well. Precisely this arrangement can be seen in the remarkable (and understudied) contemporary carving by Nicholas Stone on the monument to Thomas Sutton in the chapel of the Charterhouse in London (c.1611; Figs 16 and 17). Stone’s relief sculpture of a sermon being preached in Charterhouse chapel is a unique record of an all-male Jacobean congregation gathered around and behind three sides of a pulpit, as in college chapels and those Inns of Court like Lincoln’s Inn. The exception to this layout, which proves the rule, is Exeter College chapel in Oxford, completed in 1624 (Salter and Lobel 1954: 116–17; Newman 1997: 143–4). Built under the close supervision of the college’s staunch Calvinist rector, John Prideaux, and funded in the main by the equally Calvinist Fellow of the college, George Hakewill, this chapel was designed with an evangelical congregation firmly in mind. It



emma rhatigan

fig. 17 Charterhouse Chapel, London, Sutton monument (detail). Nicholas Stone here captured in striking deep relief the only known representation of a sermon preached in a space arranged ‘chapel-wise’. The old men in black gowns (some holding Bibles) are pensioners of the Charterhouse; young men fashionably dressed in doublet and hose (l.) also attend.

was not only square in shape, but was unique among Oxbridge chapels in having two aisles. The pews faced each other across one central aisle, but there was then a further aisle, running down the north side. The communion table was placed east–west. This arrangement, combined with the chapel’s striking pulpit, ensured that the emphasis was clearly on hearing the word preached. As with the rest of the country, the college chapels were to see dramatic changes in the late 1620s and early 1630s. Signs of things to come were apparent in St John’s College, Oxford, where in 1619 Laud used his influence as college president to make improvements to the college chapel. This included a communion table furnished with crimson and purple cloths, a painted ceiling over the table, and a painted glass window with the life of St John the Baptist at the east end behind it. An organ was also installed and, eventually, in 1634, the college would employ an organist and a choir (Newman 1997: 164). When Laud became chancellor of the university in 1630, these efforts to beautify religious worship spread throughout the university. Laud focused particular attention on St Mary’s, forbidding the use of this university church for secular activities. The south porch was rebuilt in 1637 at the expense of Morgan Owen, Laud’s chaplain, including a statue of the virgin and child, which constituted one of the accusations of superstitious idolatry made against Laud at his trial (Newman 1997: 160). Meanwhile the college chapels were also receiving attention; rails were erected, carpets purchased to adorn the

preaching venues



altar, and stained glass installed. Ironically, one of the best examples of the sort of changes that were being introduced is Lincoln College chapel, built in 1629–30 by Laud’s arch-enemy John Williams, bishop of Lincoln. The chapel included a depiction of the crucifixion in the east window, beautiful cloths on the communion table, and black and white marble paving, which was to become a favourite feature of many chapels. Given Williams’s involvement, it seems likely, though, that the altar was placed east–west, and the chapel also featured a fine pulpit, which stood in the centre of the chapel floor (Newman 1997: 165; Fincham and Tyacke 2007: 186). Thus, more controversial was the reconstruction of the east end of Magdalen College chapel in 1631. There the communion table was converted into an altar, and behind this was placed a hanging featuring scenes from Christ’s life. So distasteful was this to the Calvinist clergy in the university that the changes generated a series of university sermons preached against Arminianism (Newman 1997: 165–6; Tyacke 1997a: 586). Similar changes were also being made in Cambridge. Several college chapels were beautified during the 1630s, including Pembroke and Jesus. Undoubtedly, however, the most spectacular Laudian innovations were introduced in the new chapel built at Peterhouse by the master Matthew Wren, a former chaplain to Lancelot Andrewes. It was consecrated in 1633 and the subject of further improvements by Wren’s successor John Cosin, who filled the east window with stained glass picturing a crucifixion derived from Ruben’s Le Coup de Lance. Positioning directly above the altar this image of Christ’s blood flowing from his side obviously exploited all its eucharistic significance. The altar itself was situated on a marble ascent and adorned with a silk covering, and no one beneath the rank of doctor of divinity was allowed access to the sanctuary. In the main body of the chapel the walls were decorated with paintings of the life of Christ, with painted angels at the east end and on the ceiling. Cosin also acquired an organ and a choir (Fincham and Tyacke 2007: 230). The completed chapel was probably one of the most extreme examples of the Laudian innovations that were being introduced in the 1630s. Thus, as Fincham and Tyacke emphasize, at the same time that avant-garde theology was being debated within the divinity schools, the colleges were experimenting with ways of expressing this theology architecturally. All these innovations were, of course, destroyed following the fall of Laud. William Dowsing, who was given the task of dismantling Laudian worship in East Anglia, started his campaign with the college chapels in Cambridge, while in Oxford too, after the surrender of the city in 1646, altars were once again turned east–west and the chapels purged of offensive imagery. The Restoration, however, saw a return to a number of the changes that had been first introduced in the 1630s. In Cambridge, for example, the chapel of Corpus Christi, consecrated by Bishop Wren in 1662, featured a railed altar and in King’s College the altar was repaired and the rails re-erected (Fincham and Tyacke 2007: 316). Oxford, too, saw a number of new building initiatives. In All Souls the chapel was modernized, with an image of the Resurrection painted by Isaac Fuller installed at the east end. Fuller was also engaged to paint a picture of the Last Judgement at Magdalen College and a painted altar cloth at Wadham. In University College the east window was



emma rhatigan

filled by Henry Gyles with a scene of the adoration of the shepherds, and black and white paving once again returned to fashion and was laid in Wadham in 1670, Corpus Christi in 1676–7, and Oriel in 1677–8 (Newman 1997: 171–2; Fincham and Tyacke 2007: 316–17). It is, perhaps, not surprising that the one college that did not reintroduce an altarwise communion table was Exeter College, Oxford; in 1683 this east–west communion table was the subject of a complaint from James II (Wood 1891–1900: iii. 52–3). As in London, the influence of Christopher Wren on these new architectural projects was significant. Wren had an Oxford academic background (Downes 2009). His first architectural commission was to design the new chapel that his uncle, Bishop Matthew Wren, was building at Pembroke College Cambridge, in 1663. Although in Oxford his most famous building is undoubtedly the Sheldonian theatre, his design for the Pembroke chapel, with its commitment to a new classicism, set a trend that many Oxford colleges followed. Wren also designed screens for All Souls in 1664, St John’s c.1670, and Merton in 1671–3 (Newman 1997: 173–6). Given the importance of university sermons in both religious and political terms, it is striking that there has, as yet, been no sustained research into the institutional history of preaching at the universities, a gap in early modern scholarship that means that a number of basic questions concerning when, where, and by whom sermons were delivered remain to be answered. It should be an important priority of future sermon studies to explore in more detail the relationships between the pulpits in the university churches, college chapels, and city parishes, considering what approach preachers took in them, in terms of both religious and political content and rhetorical style.

Conclusion Much of this chapter has been devoted to preaching in London, and it was certainly in the capital that sermon provision was at its most intense. Paul Seaver estimates that by 1600 there must have been over one hundred sermons delivered each week, enough surely to satisfy even the most enthusiastic sermon gadder (1970: 125). The variety of auditories and preaching occasions in London does, however, exemplify, albeit it in a particularly concentrated way, the occasions and settings for preaching that pertained across the country, demonstrating the extent to which the early modern sermon reached across social and geographical boundaries.

Bibliography Addleshaw, G. W. O., and Etchells, F. (1948). The Architectural Setting of Anglican Worship: An Inquiry into the Arrangements for Public Worship in the Church of England from the Reformation to the Present Day. Faber and Faber. Andrewes, L. (1614). A Sermon Preached before His Majestie, at Whitehall.

preaching venues



—— (2005). Lancelot Andrewes: Selected Sermons and Lectures, ed. P. McCullough. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ball, T. (1885). The Life of the Renowned Doctor Preston, ed. E. W. Harcourt. Oxford: Parker and Co. Bargrave, I. (1624). A Sermon Preached on Ps. XXVI 6 before the Lower House of Parliament. Black, W. J. (2004). ‘Doolittle, Thomas (1630/1633?–1707)’, in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online edn. Bray, G. (1998) (ed.). The Anglican Canons 1529–1947. Church of England Record Society, 6. Woodbridge: Boydell. Buckeridge, J. (1618). A Sermon Preached before His Maiestie at Whitehall. Camden, W. (1706). The History of Queen Elizabeth, in A Complete History of England. 3 vols. Colclough, D. (2003) (ed.). John Donne’s Professional Lives. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Collinson, P. (1967). The Elizabethan Puritan Movement. Cape. —— (1982). The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559–1625. Oxford: Clarendon Press. —— (1983). Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism. Hambledon Press. Colvin, H. (1950). ‘Fifty New Churches’, Architectural Review, 107: 189–96. Cox, J. C. (1915). Pulpits, Lecterns and Organs in English Churches. Humphrey Milford. D’Ewes, S. (1974). The Diary of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, 1622–1624, ed. E. Bourcier. Paris: Didier. Donne, J. (1651). Letters to Severall Persons of Honour. —— (1953–62). The Sermons of John Donne, ed. G. R. Potter and E. M. Simpson. 10 vols. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Downes, K. (1979). Hawksmoor. 2nd edn. A. Zwemmer. —— (2004). ‘Wren, Sir Christopher (1632–1723)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online edn. Evelyn, J. (1955). Diary, ed. E. S. De Beer. 6 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ferrell, L. A., and McCullough, P. (2001) (eds). The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History, 1600–1750. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Fincham, K. (1993) (ed.). The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642. Basingstoke: Macmillan. —— (1997). ‘Oxford and the Early Stuart Polity’, in N. Tyacke (ed.), The History of the University of Oxford, iv. Seventeenth-Century Oxford. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 179–210. ——, and Tyacke, N. (2007). Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Religious Worship, 1547–c.1700. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fisher, R. M. (1978). ‘The Origins of Divinity Lectureships at the Inns of Court, 1569–1585’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 29: 145–62. Fletcher, A. J., and Roberts, P. (1994) (eds). Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Patrick Collinson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gataker, T. (1654). A Discours Apologetical. Harington, J. (1979). A Supplie or Addicion to the Catalogue of Bishops to the Yeare 1608, ed. R. H. Miller. Potomac, MD: Porrua Turanzas. Hay, G. (1957). The Architecture of Scottish Post-Reformation Churches, 1560–1843. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Heywood, O. (1825–7). The Whole Works of Oliver Heywood, ed. W. Vint. 5 vols. Idle. House of Commons Journal (1802). Lake, A. (1629). Sermons with Some Religious and Divine Meditations. Lake, P. (1993). ‘The Laudian Style: Order, Uniformity and the Pursuit of the Beauty of Holiness in the 1630s’, in K. Fincham (ed.), The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 161–85.



emma rhatigan

Lindley, K. (1969). Chapels and Meeting Houses. John Baker. Houlbrooke, T. (2006) (ed.). James VI and I: Ideas, Authority, and Government. Aldershot: Ashgate. McCullough, P. (1998). Sermons at Court, 1559–1625: Religion and Politics in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (2005) (ed.). Lancelot Andrewes: Selected Sermons and Lectures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Merritt, J. F. (1998). ‘Puritans, Laudians, and the Phenomenon of Church-Building in Jacobean London’, Historical Journal, 41: 935–60. Morrissey, M. (2001). ‘Elect Nations and Prophetic Preaching: Types and Examples in the Paul’s Cross Jeremiad’, in L. A. Ferrell and P. McCullough (eds), The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History, 1600–1750. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 43–58. —— (2003). ‘John Donne as a Conventional Paul’s Cross Preacher’, in D. Colclough (ed.), John Donne’s Professional Lives. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 159–78. —— (2006). ‘Presenting James VI and I to the Public: Preaching on Political Anniversaries at Paul’s Cross’, in R. Houlbrooke (ed.), James VI and I: Ideas, Authority, and Government. Aldershot: Ashgate, 107–22. —— (2011). Politics and the Paul’s Cross Sermons, 1558–1642. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Newman, J. (1997). ‘The Architectural Setting’, in N. Tyacke (ed.), The History of the University of Oxford, iv. Seventeenth-Century Oxford. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 135–78. Peacham, H. (1641). A Dialogue between the Crosse in Cheap, and Charing Crosse. Port, H. M. (1986) (ed.). The Commissions for Building Fifty New Churches: The Minute Books, 1711–27: A Calendar. London Record Society. Prest, W. R. (1972). The Inns of Court under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts, 1590–1640. Longman. Preston, J. (1630). The Breast-Plate of Faith and Love. Salter, H. E., and Lobel, M. D. (1954) (eds). The Victoria History of the County of Oxford, iii. The University of Oxford. Oxford University Press for the University of London Institute of Historical Research. Seaver, P. S. (1970). The Puritan Lectureships: The Politics of Religious Dissent, 1560–1662. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Shami, J. (2003). John Donne and Conformity in Crisis. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Stell, C. (1986). An Inventory of Nonconformist Chapels and Meeting-Houses in Central England. HMSO. Stern, T. (2004). Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page. Routledge. Swift, J. (1709). A Project for the Advancement of Religion, and the Reformation of Manners. By a Person of Quality. TNA: PRO (The National Archives, Public Record Office) PROB 11/155. Will of Timothy Pryor, Curate of St Dunstan’s-in-the-West (proved 1629). Trevor-Roper, H. R. (1964a). ‘The Fast Sermons of the Long Parliament’, in H. R. Trevor-Roper (ed.), Essays in British History Presented to Keith Feiling. Macmillan, 85–138. —— (1964b) (ed.). Essays in British History Presented to Keith Feiling. Macmillan. Tyacke, N. (1997a). ‘Religious Controversy’, in N. Tyacke (ed.), The History of the University of Oxford, iv. Seventeenth-Century Oxford. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 569–620. —— (1997b) (ed.). The History of the University of Oxford, iv. Seventeenth-Century Oxford. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

preaching venues



Wabuda, S. (2002). Preaching during the Reformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walton, I. (1670). The Lives of Dr John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Mr Richard Hooker, Mr George Herbert Written by Izaak Walton. Watts, M. R. (1978). The Dissenters, i. From the Reformation to the French Revolution. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wilson, J. F. (1969). Pulpit in Parliament: Puritanism during the English Civil Wars, 1640–1648. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wood, A. (1891–1900). The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, ed. A. Clark. 5 vols. Oxford: For the Oxford Historical Society at the Clarendon Press. Wren, C. (1750). Parentalia: Or Memoirs of the Family of the Wrens. Yule, G. (1994). ‘James VI and I: Furnishing the Churches in his Two Kingdoms’, in A. J. Fletcher and P. Roberts (eds), Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Patrick Collinson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 182–208.

chapter 7

ser mons i n per for m a nce kate armstrong

In November 1617 the letter-writer and gossip John Chamberlain wrote to his long-term correspondent Dudley Carleton that: On Wensday the fifth of this present younge Kinge the bishop of Londons eldest sonne of the age of 23 yeares preacht at Paules-crosse. Yt was thought a bold part of them both that so younge a man shold play his first prises in such a place and such a time, beeing as he professed the primitiae of his vocation, and the first sermon that ever he made, but this world (as they say) is made for the presumptuous: he did reasonablie well but nothing extraordinarie, nor neere his father, beeing rather slow of utterance orator parum vehemens. He hindered me from hearing the bishop of Ely whose text that day at court was: that we beeing delivered out of the handes of our ennemies might serve him without feare: and they say handled yt excellently. (1939: ii. 114)

Chamberlain’s astonishment at bishop of London John King’s choice of his son Henry to preach this sermon was unquestionably justified. By 1617, 5 November was well established as a day of thanksgiving for James’s deliverance from the 1605 Gunpowder Plot. Preaching on this day required the ability to make an emotionally compelling, but politically acceptable, sermon from the slippery combination of nationalism, tolerance of loyal Catholics, and fear of treacherous ones that was central to James’s perception of his kingdom. Young Henry King’s venue, Paul’s Cross, was the most prominent preaching place in London, the pulpit from which political events had been announced and enacted for centuries (see Fig. 21; Rhatigan, Chapter 6, this volume; Morrissey 2011); and not only was he young, but this, his first Paul’s Cross sermon, was the first sermon he had ever preached. Clearly Chamberlain was sufficiently intrigued by the prospect of King’s sermon to choose it over that of his friend Lancelot Andrewes, bishop of Ely (see Fig. 30). Yet, though he was clearly interested in Andrewes’s content, his analysis of the younger man’s

sermons in performance



ability to fulfil the requirements of pulpit and occasion has a different focus; apparently it was primarily King’s delivery, his performance of his sermon, that struck him. Chamberlain’s judgement that King ‘did reasonablie well but nothing extraordinarie, nor neere his father, beeing rather slow of utterance orator parum vehemens’, makes very clear that delivery was something on which both new preachers, like Henry King, and experienced ones, including his father, the bishop of London, were judged. But on what basis did Chamberlain and his contemporaries assess the delivery of a sermon? In couching his scant praise of King in the phrase ‘orator parum vehemens’ (rather a spiritless orator), Chamberlain is quoting from Cicero’s De officiis (1913: I. i. 3). This text was recommended by the schoolmaster John Brinsley, not only for its moral content, but also as a suitable basis in the grammar school for ‘witty and pleasant disputations’ (1917: 207). Similarly, William Kempe considers ‘Tullies Offices’ a particularly apt source for the learning of rhetoric: in studying this text, the schoolboy ‘shall obserue not only euery trope, euery figure, aswell of words as of sentences; but also the Rhetoricall pronounciation and gesture fit for euery word, sentence, and affection’ (Kempe 1966: 233). In citing Cicero directly, and this line of Cicero in particular, Chamberlain therefore judges King specifically against standards of the fifth part of rhetorical delivery, actio, as taught formally in late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century grammar schools and universities. Chamberlain clearly assumes that Carleton will understand his judgement that King was ‘rather slow of utterance orator parum vehemens’; it is similarly incumbent upon modern scholars to avoid the lazy assumption that King simply spoke a bit slowly and to understand why this in particular is the detail Chamberlain mentions. To enable such understanding this chapter explores the centrality in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods of classical rhetorical delivery in the formal education of future preachers. It examines the ways in which actio is perceived in manuals of rhetoric and of preaching, and finally discusses the importance of rhetorical delivery to James I. By demonstrating why Henry King should have known how to deliver his sermon, what ‘rather slow of utterance orator parum vehemens’ might mean, and how James valued delivery, this chapter provides the background against which similar anecdotes of actio from this period can be read rigorously. Our understanding of early modern sermon performance is greatly complicated by the varied early modern terminology used to describe it. Standard modern works, including Lanham’s Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, translate the Latin parts of composition (inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, actio or pronunciatio) as invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery (1991: p. vii). While translation in these terms is an accurate rendition of the Latin in modern English, in early modern manuals and other discussions of rhetoric they are rarely used. Instead, actio is variously translated by a rather imprecise selection of terms including ‘action’, ‘delivery’, ‘gesture’, ‘voice’, ‘utterance’, ‘pronunciation’, and ‘elocution’. Knowledge of Jacobean actio or pronunciatio is dependent upon an understanding of the distinctions and overlaps between these terms; the next section of this chapter therefore aims to explore and define them.



kate armstrong

Defining Actio in Early Modern England The author of the seminal 1553 Arte of Rhetorique, Thomas Wilson, writes that ‘eloquence’ is attained through the practice of all the parts of rhetoric, and translates the specific part of actio as ‘utterance’: Now before we use either to write, or speake eloquently we must dedicate our myndes wholly, to folowe the moste wise and learned menne, and seke to fashion, aswell their speache and gesturying, as their wit or endityng . . . Utteraunce therefore is a framyng of the voyce, countenaunce, and gesture, after a comely maner. (1553: sigs a3r, a4r)

In 1607 Richard Bernard, author of a godly preaching manual The Faithfull Shepheard, similarly makes use of the term ‘utterance’, but, rather than subordinating it to ‘eloquence’, he equates the two; discussion of ‘the gift of uterance’ is accompanied by a marginal note reading: ‘Godly eloquence, and how to be attended unto’ (1607: sig. M3v; see also App. I.9). For this schoolmaster and rhetorician, therefore, ‘eloquence’ can denote actio. Dudley Fenner’s 1584 Ramist manual The Artes of Logike and Rethorike states that: Rhetorike is an Arte of speaking finelie. It hath two partes, Garnishing of speache, called Eloqution. Garnishing of the maner of utterance, called Pronunciation. (1584: sig. D1v)

This translation of elocutio as ‘Eloqution’ and actio as ‘Pronunciation’ had previously appeared in John Ludham’s translation of Andreas Hyperius’s highly influential The Practise of Preaching (see App. I.6). Yet, although Hyperius begins by including both voice and gesture under actio as he lists ‘the partes of an Orator, whiche are accounted of some to be, Invention, Disposition, Elocution, Memory, and Pronounciation’, he soon distinguishes between ‘Pronounciation’ and ‘gesture’ (1577: sig. C1r). For William Perkins this definition is reversed, and the catch-all becomes the term that to the modern reader denotes merely bodily movement: ‘Gesture is either in the action of the voyce or of the bodie’ (1607: 143; see also App. I.8. While the ease with which manuals slip between ‘pronunciation’, ‘gesture’, ‘voice’, and ‘utterance’ itself provides sufficient reason to evaluate carefully even the most obvious reference to use merely of the voice or of the body, it can be assumed that in a rhetorical context these terms refer only to actio. Overlap in terminology between the five parts of classical rhetoric presents a more thorny methodological problem. In particular, Dudley Fenner’s clear distinction between ‘Eloqution’ and ‘Pronunciation’ is deeply misleading as an indicator of contemporary usage. For Fenner, the third part of Ciceronian rhetoric, elocutio, is ‘Garnishing of speache, called Eloqution’, while the fifth part, actio, is ‘Garnishing of the maner of utterance, called Pronunciation’. At first sight the translation of elocutio as ‘elocution’ seems so obvious as to require no comment. Yet, while

sermons in performance



unambiguous uses of ‘elocution’ often do denote the third part of rhetoric, they refer equally frequently to the fifth part, actio; by not noticing this, scholars have rendered a good deal of early modern reference to actio invisible. Examples in which the context demonstrates clearly that ‘elocution’ means elocutio fall into three main categories: first, reference to the parts of rhetoric in the classical order, and where ‘elocution’ is placed third; secondly, mention of ‘elocution’ and delivery as separate and distinct skills; and, thirdly, use in texts only ever intended to refer to the printed page. Revising his history of Elizabeth’s reign, William Camden did not confuse future scholars of rhetoric when he retired ‘to my intermitted study, read all over againe, corrected, added divers things, refined the eloquution, yet without affectation’; clearly here ‘eloquution’ can mean only written style, not delivery (1625: The Author to the Reader). Texts written to be performed were not necessarily more confusing. Preaching in Canterbury in 1607, James’s chaplain Martin Fotherby demonstrated a precise knowledge of the use of the parts of rhetoric in preaching: the whole frame and structure of that speech which we cal a Sermon, that is truly and properly the worke of a man. The Invention is mans; the Disposition mans; the Elocution mans; the Action mans; the Application, and Allusion mans: and the joyning of all those things together, in one artificiall body (which giveth to the whole speech the name of a Sermon) that likewise is mans. (1608: 51)

Of the five parts of Ciceronian rhetoric, Fotherby mentions four in the order in which Cicero presents them: ‘elocution’ here clearly means elocutio, or, in the modern translation,‘style’. Similarly, Angel Day’s The English Secretorie describes ‘Invention firste . . . Then Disposition . . . Thirdly Eloquution’ (1586: 19–20). Here all three terms merely anglicize the Latin inventio, disposition, and elocutio. The use of these terms, however, is in itself no guarantee of clarity. The preacher Thomas Walkington amalgamates different categories of terms in his praise of good rhetoric: for a nimble dextericall, smirke, praegnant, extemporary invention, for a suddain . . . pleasant conceit, a comicall jeast, a witty bourd, for a smug neat stile, for delightsome sentences, vernished phrases, quaint and gorgeous eloquution, for an astounding Rhetoricall veine, for a lively grace in delivery, hee can never bee aequivalent with a sanguine complection, which is the paragon of all, if it go not astray from his owne right temper and happy crasis nay the former must not so much as stand at the barre, when the latter whith great applause can enter into the lists. (1607: sigs K2v–K3r; emphasis added)

Here ‘invention’ and ‘delivery’ are clear. While ‘stile’ probably means elocutio, ‘eloquution’ and ‘Rhetoricall’ (both placed between ‘stile’ and ‘deliuery’) are rendered obscure by the context. The distinction between Fotherby and Walkington is not one of education; Fotherby was a royal chaplain, but it was Walkington who preached an entire sermon on Solomon’s eloquence before James in 1608, ‘wherein both Cleargie and Laitie may learne how to speake’ (1608: title page). The interpretative possibility that by ‘eloquution’ Walkington means actio is justified by examples in a variety of texts in which this is indisputably the case. Thus a 1631 handbook



kate armstrong

for gentlewomen remarks that, ‘though our tongues, hands, bodies, and legges be the same, our Elocution, action, gesture, and posture are not the same’ (Brathwaite 1631: 69); correspondences between legges/posture, bodies/gesture, and hands/action suggests ‘Elocution’ here refers not merely to actio in general, but specifically to the use of ‘our tongues’ or the voice. From an entirely different polemical standpoint William Prynne concluded two years later that: The acting therefore of Playes is no wayes necessary or usefull for an Orator, it being no furtherance but an apparant obstacle to true oratory, action, elocution; there being no analogie betweene the wanton amorous gestures, speeches, Pastorals, jests, and florishes of a Poet, an Actor; and the sad, grave, serious elocution or action of an Orator. (1633: 933)

Even manuals could be clear in their use of ‘elocution’ to refer to actio. Although also writing in the Ramist tradition, John Barton rejects Fenner’s bipartite model of rhetoric: I say not, the parts of Rhetorick are Elocution and Pronunciation; for both these are but utterance, and neither implie the gesture. (1634: sig. A3v)

These three examples all date from the early 1630s. However, ‘elocution’ could mean actio early in the Jacobean period. In 1608 William Smith dedicated his sermon The Black-Smith to James with the words: May it please your Majesty to take a second Survey of this sillye Sermon. When it was first uttered, you did not onely heare, but hearken, & incline your eare: as it were with your gratious attention to help out my bad elocution. Pittie so bad a voice should ever offer so great a wrong to the moste learned and judicious eare of so good a King. (1606: sig. A2r–v)

In choosing to preach on the text ‘Then there was no Smith found throughout all the land of Israel’ (1 Sam. 13:19), William Smith made a particularly overt bid for court patronage. That the sermon was ‘by commandment put to print’ suggests that this witty proof of his own necessity to the court was well received. Yet, as the dedication makes clear, even this degree of success was compromised by ‘my bad elocution’, for actio was particularly important in sermons preached within range of ‘the moste learned and judicious eare of so good a King’. These examples demonstrate beyond doubt that ‘elocution’ often referred to actio. In the vast majority of cases, however, the meaning is not clear-cut. This is true across the theological spectrum. In a sermon dedicated to the proto-Laudian John Overall, John Boys writes that ‘by speech is meant the gift of tongues, or the gift of elocution, or the gift of preaching in every kind’ (1613: 121). Similarly, Lancelot Andrewes, preaching on Whitsunday 1606, told his audience that the Pentecost wind brought inspiration, ‘but there be also sent tongues with it, which serve for eloquution (that is) to impart the benefit to more then themselves’ (1629: 603). Thomas Adams recognized that ‘Learning to divide the Word, Elocution to pronounce it, Wisdome to discerne the truth, Boldnesse to deliver it, bee all parts requireable in a Preacher’ (1626: 60). Attacking the use of rhetoric at the expense of true devotion the Puritan Samuel Ward asked:

sermons in performance



What else gained John, the name of the Divine, and Paul of a wise Master Builder, but that hee regarded not as the fashion is now adayes, to have his Reading, Memory, or Eloquution, but Christ knowne, and him crucified. (1622: 34)

In all these cases actio would be as relevant a meaning of ‘elocution’ as elocutio: where the context does not clearly reveal the author’s intended meaning, the possibility must be entertained that the reference is to actio. As these complex contemporary definitions of key rhetorical terms make clear, anecdotes of actio cannot merely be taken at face value. Patrick Collinson has commented in passing that ‘“powerful”, “edifying” preaching sometimes meant an electrifying, histrionic performance’. He also considers the adjective ‘sweet’ to denote ‘demonstrative or emotional preaching techniques’. ‘Sweet’, ‘powerful’, and ‘edifying’ he considers opposed to ‘grave’ and ‘reverent’ (Collinson 1982: 244–5). However, early modern terminology is considerably more fickle than Collinson suggests; to understand sermon delivery accurately, it is necessary to go well beyond the readings that common sense might suggest.

Rhetorical Delivery in Early Modern Education Convoluted terminological discrepancies aside, delivery was central to educated seventeenth-century culture. As T. W. Baldwin and Foster Watson have amply demonstrated, Elizabethan and Jacobean grammar schools existed primarily in order to teach Latin. Intended to be practical rather than literary, this skill enabled boys ‘to answer any learned man in Latine, or to dispute ex tempore’ (Brinsley 1917: 211). Throughout the period, the ability to speak Latin correctly was the primary skill denoting an educated and cultivated man, and so, as the schoolmaster Roger Ascham made very clear, ‘all men covet to have their children speake latin’ (1904: 185). It has long been accepted that evidence of the education in logic and rhetoric integral to the teaching of spoken Latin can be found in written texts. Most recently, Peter Mack has traced schoolroom rhetoric comprehensively through the different genres of notebooks, letters, narratives, histories, conduct manuals, romances, political argument, parliamentary oratory, and ‘religious discourse’. Yet, though Ascham and Brinsley make clear the importance of spoken Latin in a society that is still semi-oral, Mack avoids this area; even a description of a parliamentary speech as ‘almost Marlovian in its stylistic intensity and excess’, followed by comment on the emotion it raises, receives no discussion of actio at all (2002: 237). The next section of this chapter aims to fill this hole in Mack’s otherwise comprehensive and excellent survey. Since the grammar and vocabulary of Latin are almost entirely unaffected by whether the language is written or spoken, it is the aspects of Latin teaching specific to the spoken language that are discussed here. Across Britain and northern Europe the means by which spoken Latin was taught were largely uniform; in particular, invariably boys declaimed orations and acted out



kate armstrong

plays. In his study of gesture in eighteenth-century acting, Dene Barnett notes that, ‘Already in the 16th century, acting in the plays of Terence and Plautus was a central part of humanist education’. Barnett quotes the ordinances of the school at Breslau which stated that: We . . . consider it good, that the boys in [the second from the top grade] learn Terence by heart, as their principal and special author. And that the roles are allotted to the young people who have heard the comedies to the end, and they are made to declaim [them] for an hour or two each week after dinner, and [one] thus exercises them in pronunciation and action. We consider this no less useful and necessary, than any other good lesson . . . because the pronunciation and gesture of the boys is formed, and they learn civility and manners, which is most important, as Rhetoricians concerned with action teach in their precepts. (1987: 12)

This concern with rhetorical delivery (‘pronunciation and action’) at the grammarschool level remained constant in England and elsewhere throughout the early modern period. In 1588 William Kempe’s schoolboy at age 13 ‘shall observe not only euery trop, every figure, aswell of words as of sentences; but also the Rhetoricall pronounciation and gesture fit for every word, sentence, and affection’. He should demonstrate ‘fit pronounciation and gesture for composed exercises as well as imitations’ (1966: 233). John Brinsley, in 1612, values disputation in schools because ‘it shall bring audacity, helpe gesture, pronunciation, memory, and much provoke them to an ingenuous emulation and contention’. Similarly, ‘capping’ verses (completing the master’s lines) ‘will much helpe capacitie and audacitie, memory, right pronunciation’. Indeed, among the things to be learnt by a boy in a grammar school is ‘to pronounce naturally and sweetely, without vain affectation; and to begin to doe it from the lowest fourmes’ (Brinsley 1917: 206, 300, xvi). Even as late as 1660, by which point dramatic delivery was frowned upon as too populist in elite preaching, Charles Hoole writes that, if teaching Terence: When you meet with an act or scene that is full of affection and action, you may cause some of your scholars—after they have learned it—to act it first in private amongst themselves, and afterwards in the open school before their fellows. Herein you must have a main care of their pronunciation and acting every gesture to the very life. This acting of a piece of comedy or a colloquy sometimes will be an excellent means to prepare them to pronounce orations with a grace. (quoted in Watson 1968: 315–16)

The ‘pronunciation’ and ‘gesture’ taught was that of classical rhetorical delivery, actio, as formulated primarily by Cicero and Quintilian and revived by the early humanists. Giving advice on teaching delivery specifically to a child, Robert Whittinton considered that: It is a rude maner, a chylde (have he never so fyelde a tongue / and pleasaunt pronunciacyon) to stande styll lyke an asse: & on the other syde (as a carter) to be wanderynge of eyes. pykyng / or playenge ye foole with his hande / and unstable of foote . . . Therfore take hede. yt the contenaunce be made conformable to ye purpose: now with gravyte. now cherefull now rough. now ameable. shapen mete unto ye

sermons in performance



mater (as I maye say) lyke a glove to the hande . . . Also se yt the gesture be comely with semely & sobre movynge: somtyme of the heed / somtyme of the hande / & fote: and as the cause requyreth with all the body. (quoted in Baldwin 1944: ii., 29)

Beginning with faults of delivery, this 1520 text does not merely warn that a child should not fidget while declaiming. However good his ability to speak fluently and to pronounce his words correctly, a boy’s facial expressions must be ‘conformable to ye purpose’, and his gesture ‘comely with semely & sobre movynge’. For Whittinton, a child’s speech is ‘rude’ or uncivilized without a proper delivery; the content and delivery must be tailored to each other as a glove is to the hand. Making his source absolutely clear, Whittinton goes on: ‘Of this thynges who playse to have more full knowledge. let hym loke upon Tullyes rhetorye’ (quoted in Baldwin 1944: ii. 29). By the time he reached the universities, therefore, a boy had learnt basic formal classical rhetorical delivery. He had declaimed orations and performed colloquies and plays, Latin and English, in the schoolroom and often also in public. In all of these he had been required to demonstrate controlled, appropriate, and decorous use of voice and gesture. In the words of Boyet in Love’s Labour’s Lost: ‘Action and accent did they teach him there; | “Thus must thou speak,” and thus thy body bear”’ (v. ii. 99–100). Further training in rhetorical delivery in the universities was both formal and informal. Undergraduates gained knowledge of decorous delivery from watching disputations and sermons. However, as in schools but to a greater extent, the prime source of training in delivery was plays. To the extent that Henry King had received this training in actio as a pupil at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford, John Chamberlain was justified in expecting competent and decorous delivery of his first Paul’s Cross sermon in 1617. Our understanding of what this delivery comprised—what, among other things, it meant to be ‘rather slow of utterance orator parum vehemens’—is dependent upon a detailed reading of the vast amount of advice on actio in the texts by which the subject was taught and learned. In classical texts this advice ranged from formalized discussions in the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium, Cicero’s De oratore and Orator and, above all, Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, to the more anecdotal descriptions of the most notable classical orators that comprise Cicero’s Brutus. From the former, the educated early modern public speaker knew that actio, defined as ‘bodily carriage, gesture, play of features and changing intonation of the voice’, is ‘the dominant factor in oratory; without delivery the best speaker cannot be of any account at all, and a moderate speaker with a trained delivery can often outdo the best of them’ (Cicero 1942: i. v. 18; ii. 169). From the latter, he understood that an orator such as Gaius Fimbria ‘did not succeed for long in making himself conspicuous [i.e., renowned]’; he shouted everything at the top of his voice, and though his vocabulary was not bad he raged along with such a torrent of words that you wondered what the people could be thinking of to give a madman place in the ranks of orators’ (Cicero 1962: lxvi. 233). On the other hand, Antonius displayed ‘a delivery of peculiar excellence’: if we divide delivery into gesture and voice, his gesture did not seek to reflect words, but agreed with the course of his thought—hands, shoulders, chest, stamp of the



kate armstrong

foot, posture in repose and in movement, all harmonizing with his words and thoughts; voice sustained, but with a touch of huskiness. This defect however, he had the unique skill to turn into a merit. For in passages of pathos it had a touching quality well-suited to winning confidence and to stirring compassion. (Cicero 1962: xxxvii. 141–2)

The spectre of Gaius Fimbria is raised when in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1614) there appears an apothecary who ‘makes alum of his wife’s urine, and sells it to puritans that have sore throats with over-straining’ (1976: iv. ii. 83–5), or when the essayist John Earle says of his ‘young rawe Preacher’: The pace of his Sermon is a full careere, and he runnes wildly over hill and dale, till the clocke stop him. The labour of it is chiefly in his lungs. And the onely thing hee ha’s made of himselfe, is the faces . . . His action is all passion, and his speech interjections. (1628: sigs B3v–B4r)

Similarly, the common praise of ‘moving’ delivery demonstrates an appreciation of the same skills employed by Antonius in ‘winning confidence and stirring compassion’; when explicating ‘moving’ delivery we must, therefore, consider the possible role of ‘hands, shoulders, chest, stamp of the foot, posture in repose and in movement, all harmonizing with his words and thoughts’. The classical manuals’ emphases on actio as the most important part of rhetoric and on its division into ‘voice and gesture’ provide the backbone of advice in all early modern manuals. The majority of them actively wish to advertise this influence, and quotation of a particular classical anecdote was the accepted means of doing so. In De oratore Cicero writes that: ‘The story goes that when Demosthenes was asked what is the first thing in speaking, he assigned the first role to delivery, and also the second, and also the third’ (1942: ii. 169). In the mid-sixteenth century Thomas Wilson rendered this: Demosthenes . . . beyng asked what was the chiefest point in al Oratorie, gave the chiefe and onely praise to Pronunciation, being demaunded, what was the seconde, and the thirde, he stil made answere, Pronunciation . . . declaryng hereby that Arte without utteraunce can dooe nothyng, utteraunce without Arte can dooe right muche. (1553: sig. Gg1r)

Similarly, Hyperius used Demosthenes to provide classical rhetorical authority for a manual whose stated purpose, in Ludham’s translation, was to improve the preaching resources in the vernacular available to the English clergy. Unsurprisingly, the advice Hyperius then gives on actio is Ciceronian: it cannot bee dissembled, but that the moderate pronunciation of a lyvely voyce togither with a decent and comely gesture of the speaker, doth adde greate force and importaunce to the movinge of affections. Which thinge to bee true the very Gentiles also themselves doe testifie. (1577: sig. Giiiir)

Anti-rhetorical manuals ignore both the Demosthenes anecdote and this syncretist acknowledgement of the classical orators’ competence in persuasive speaking. However,

sermons in performance



even these texts do not escape Cicero’s influence. Richard Bernard ostentatiously advertises his interests as pastoral rather than rhetorical, both in the title of his manual, The Faithfull Shepheard or The Shepheards Faithfulnesse, and in the standard godly description of himself as ‘Preacher of Gods Word’. However, although like Perkins he avoids Demosthenes, he follows up his brief instruction on the use of the voice by advising that, ‘if farther direction be herein required, let those peruse the rules given for this in learned mens labours’ (Bernard 1607: title page, sig. M4v). No such detailed advice is provided in other godly manuals. The ‘learned mens labours’ to which Bernard refers must therefore be the classical and overtly classically founded manuals: once again it is to Cicero that writers turn for advice on actio. The result of this thoroughgoing classical influence in early modern manuals is a basic congruence in advice on actio, whatever the author’s doctrinal position, churchmanship, or intended auditory. In both classical and early modern texts, at the most basic level decorous voice and gesture reflect and intensify the emotional content of the speech, be it a parliamentary oration, an academic disputation, or a sermon. In Thomas Wilson’s words: ‘Gesture is a certaine comely moderacion of the countenaunce, and al other partes of mans body, aptely agreeyng to those thynges whiche are spoken’ (1553: sig. Ggiir). Here, as throughout his manual, Wilson is vague and unsophisticated. However, his direct source, Cicero, clarifies that this ‘apt agreement’ requires ‘not this stagy gesture reproducing the words but one conveying the general situation and idea not by mimicry but by hints’ (1942: iii. lix. 220). Within this requirement that gesture reflect the emotional mood of a speech, rather than acting out its content, certain parameters ensure decorum. According to Quintilian: The experts . . . tell us never to raise our hand above eye-level, or lower it below the chest; so it is indeed wrong to have to pull your hand down from above your head, or to lower it to the bottom of your belly! It may be moved to the left as far as the shoulder; anything beyond that is unseemly.

Quintilian here writes primarily of the right hand, for ‘the left hand never rightly makes a Gesture on its own, but it often lends support to the right’ (2001: 11.3.112–14; cf. Fig. 12). In restricting use of the hand to ‘thy right hand onely’, Richard Bernard therefore both acknowledges its primacy in classical manuals, and demonstrates his own relative conservatism in gesture, which comprises: The bodie stable and right up, as nature hath framed it. The head not wagging, the eies moveable, and thy right hand onely as occasion shall be offered, but not alway moving. (1607: sig. M4v–N1r)

The ‘comely moderacion’ required by Wilson in the use of gesture applies equally to decorous use of the voice. Here variety is critical, but excessive vocal range, in volume or in pitch, condemned. According to Bernard: The voice must bee so farre lift up, as it may alwaies be heard; but not strained above natures power, neither one sound throughout, but tuneable, rising or falling as the matter requireth; sometimes more roundly, but ever distinctly, sometimes more



kate armstrong

deliberately. The voice is so to be guided as the hearers not understanding the matter, may yet by the manner discerne where about you are: wee may not be loud where we should be low, nor speake cheerefully in lamentable matters, nor mournfully in causes of rejoicing. (1607: sig. M4r–v)

The embarrassingly obvious statement that ‘the voice must bee so farre lift up, as it may alwaies be heard’ should not lead the modern reader to overlook the importance accorded to correct use of voice. Avoiding the strained, incomprehensible speech also condemned by Webster and Earle, Bernard’s ideal preacher uses his tone of voice to convey his meaning to parishioners unable to understand the sermon’s content: ‘The voice is so to be guided as the hearers not understanding the matter, may yet by the manner discerne where about you are.’ Good delivery is hence employed to solve the problem critical to the Reformed church of conveying complex theological messages to those not fitted to understand them. As in Wilson’s manual, Bernard’s banal general warning not to speak ‘mournfully in causes of rejoicing’ is supported by other manuals that provide more detailed information. Following Quintilian, Wilson and Bernard both also list common faults in the use of the voice that detract from decorous delivery. The manner in which these decorous tropes of voice and gesture are to be applied is restricted by the structures of both the oration as a whole and its individual sentences. An oration should begin calmly and gain in emotional intensity. In Wilson’s words: they that mynde to gette praise in tellyng their minde in open audience must at the first beginnyng speake somwhat softely, use meete pausyng, and being somewhat heated, rise with their voice, as the tyme & cause shal best require. (1553: sig. Ggir)

Bernard applies this injunction specifically to a sermon: rejecting ‘an inconsiderate zeale at the beginning’, he notes that,‘to bee loud in doctrine and low in exhortation, or alike in both, is to make discord betweene the matter and proper maner, belonging thereunto’ (1607: sigs N1r, I1r). Bernard in turn is quoting the anti-rhetorical Perkins: ‘In the doctrine [a preacher] ought to bee more moderate, in the exhortation more fervent and vehement’ (1607: 143). In addition to this overarching structure of delivery, Quintilian places emphasis upon the needs of different sentence structures: We must also note where our speech should be held up and as it were left in the air . . . and where it should be brought to rest . . . Pauses sometimes occur, even in periods, without a new breath . . . [There can be] a case for short pauses between . . . phrases, not for breaking up the structure of the whole. Conversely, it is sometimes necessary to recover breath without a perceptible pause, in which case it has to be snatched surreptitiously, because if we regain our breath awkwardly, this produces just as much obscurity as faulty punctuation. (2001: 11.3.35–9).

Although when considered individually a number of the precepts discussed so far appear unsophisticated, they form together the basic foundation on which educated decorous actio was built in early modern England: on the evidence of these manuals, no decorous public speaker strained his voice, spoke excitedly in the opening sentences of his speech and then calmly while exhorting his audience, or used his left hand alone. It is

sermons in performance



for these reasons, and on these grounds, that ‘histrionic’ preaching is so frequently attacked.Within such limits as these, however, speakers’ styles varied.When Chamberlain condemned Henry King as ‘orator parum vehemens’, he was defining him, not only against his father (whose preaching Chamberlain elsewhere praised), but against a specific Ciceronian preaching style, as it was interpreted in early modern England. According to Cicero, there are three oratorical styles: the grandiloquent, the plain, and, between these two, the moderate. The crucial factor in delivery, regardless of the style chosen, is that it should be appropriate and dignified. The plain or Attic orator, for example, must be aware that,‘if repetition of words requires some emphasis and a raising of the voice, it will be foreign to this plain style of oratory’. Rejecting the high artifice of the grandiloquent Asiatic style, this orator will not represent the State as speaking or call the dead from the lower world, nor will he crowd a long series of iterations into a single period. This requires stronger lungs, and is not to be expected of him whom we are describing or demanded from him. For he will be rather subdued in voice as in style . . . His delivery is not that of tragedy nor of the stage; he will employ only slight movements of the body, but will trust a great deal to his expression. This . . . must reveal in a well-bred manner the feeling with which each thought is uttered. (Cicero 1962: xxv. 85–6).

For Cicero, the ideal orator is one who can use all these styles with integrity, as they are appropriate to audience and context. However, as classical orators such as C. Licinius Calvus favoured the Attic style, while Hortensius, Cicero’s great rival, was famed for Asiatic exuberance, so educated early modern rhetoricians adopted differing styles. A preacher such as John Donne did not only ‘crowd a long series of iterations into a single period’, but also accepted the usefulness of the theatre in preaching; his technique therefore justifies comparison with that of Cicero’s Asiatic orator (see also App. I.10). Conversely, following Perkins’s recommendation that the preacher, though free to use rhetorical arts, ‘ought in publike to conceale all these from the people, and not to make the least ostentation’ (1607: 133), or Bernard’s that ‘thy right hand onely’ should be used, resulted in a restrained style of delivery in the practice of which preachers are more likely to have looked to descriptions of the Attic orators.

‘a King a preacher’: James I and Sermon Delivery As Gregory Kneidel has shown elsewhere in this volume, such eloquence in the pulpit was entirely acceptable in a number of contexts in seventeenth-century England. But with reference to the elite auditories that have been the main focus of this chapter, it can be traced beyond the educated courtiers’ desire for obviously accomplished preaching to the influence of King James himself. As Peter McCullough has demonstrated, James had an active personal interest in sermons and patronized preachers extensively



kate armstrong

(McCullough 1998). Preachers seeking such patronage played on both James’s appreciation of sermons and his accomplishment in rhetoric. When Thomas Walkington, Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge, and chaplain to Thomas Howard, Earl of Suffolk, chose to preach before James on the text ‘The preacher sought to finde out pleasant words’ in 1608 and, more than this, when he later entitled his sermon Salomons Sweete Harpe, Walkington tapped into his monarch’s carefully cultivated vision of himself. Where Elizabeth had been the untouchable Virgin Queen, willing star of pageants, James was ‘Great Britain’s Solomon’, royal scholar and theologian-king. Within Walkington’s sermon itself flattering allusions to James-as-Solomon are plentiful: in Solomon is found ‘a rare example, a King a preacher, a Monarch a teacher’, for ‘a king should be a preacher as well as a Prince, to feede the flocke of Jesus Christ as well by spiritual example and instruction, as by a corporall Majestie to manage and rule them’ (1608: 31, 34). Indeed, the text itself may be ‘The Princes patterne, The preachers platforme, or, The Laymans lesson: for it is a schoole-master to teach us all how to speake, even from the tall Cedar of Lebanon unto the hysope that springeth on the wall’ (1608: 8–9); it is, however, assumed that this ‘tall Cedar of Lebanon’ has already learned its lesson. Unquestionably James was skilled in ‘The Art of Speaking’; his interest in literary patronage, and in preaching in particular, was founded in a thorough knowledge of rhetoric. Henry Wotton’s 1602 portrait of Elizabeth’s likely successor noted that ‘his own discourse has much of the learned and even more of the eloquent about it’ (1907: i. 315). James’s speech on the proposed union with Scotland in 1606 was similarly described as a ‘long eloquent Oration’ (Ashton 1969: 67). Sir Roger Wilbraham matched James’s eloquence to more specific rhetorical criteria, declaring that ‘The King is of sharpest witt & invencion, redie & pithie speche, an exceding good memorie’ (Ashton 1969: 8). Dedicating On the Advancement of Learning to James in 1605, Francis Bacon wrote that: I have been touched, yea and possessed with an extreme wonder at those your virtues and faculties, which the philosophers call intellectuall; the largeness of your capacity, the faithfulness of your memory, the swiftness of your apprehension, the penetration of your judgement, and the facility and order of your elocution. (1857–74: iii. 261)

Bacon clearly was concerned to praise not just James’s rhetoric, but also his abilities in all areas of intellectual debate. Even in this context, however, he paid sustained attention to James’s oral ability: And for your gift of speech, I call to mind what Cornelius Tacitus saith of Augustus Caesar, Augusto profluens, et quae principem deceret eloquentia fuit: for if we note it well, speech that is uttered with labour and difficulty, or speech that savoureth of the affectation of art and precepts, or speech that is framed after the imitation of some pattern of eloquence, though never so excellent,—all this hath somewhat servile and holding of the subject. But your Majesty’s manner of speech is indeed Prince-like, flowing as from a fountain, and yet streaming and branching itself into nature’s order, full of facility and felicity, imitating none, and inimitable by any. (1857–74: iii. 262)

sermons in performance



Similar focused attention is paid to James’s rhetoric by other authors. There are few substantial passages praising rhetorical ability in the funeral sermons of statesmen and preachers in this period. It is therefore striking that in 1625 John Williams devoted a considerable length of time to the subject in his funeral panegyric entitled ‘Great Britains Salomon’: To beginne with his Reliquum verborum, his wordes, and Eloquence; you know it well enough, it was rare, and excellent in the highest Degree . . . His Invention was as quicke as his first thoughts, and his Wordes as ready as his Invention . . . He would first winde up the whole Substance of his Discourse into one solid, and massy conception; and then spread it, and dilate it to what compasse he pleas’d . . . in a flowing and a princely kinde of Elocution. Those Speeches of his in the Parliament, Starre-Chamber, Councell Table, and other publique Audiences of the State . . . doe prove him to bee the most powerfull Speaker, that ever swayed the Scepter of this Kingdome. In his Style you may observe the Ecclesiastes, in his Figures the Canticles, in his Sentences the Proverbs, and in his whole Discourse, Reliquum verborum Salomonis, all the rest that was admirable in the Eloquence of Salomon. (1625: sigs F1v–F2r)

Williams’s emphasis is not only on the quality of James’s orations, but also on the process by which he produced them. Of the five stages in the preparation of a classical oration Williams explicitly mentions three: first,‘His Invention was as quicke as his first thoughts, and his Wordes as ready as his Invention’; secondly, ‘He would first winde up the whole Substance of his Discourse into one solid, and massy conception’; and, thirdly, ‘then spread it, and dilate it to what compasse he pleas’d . . . in a flowing and a princely kinde of Elocution’. The various meanings of ‘elocution’ have been discussed earlier in this chapter; here the reference to ‘Style’ as a separate area in which James excelled suggests that Williams intends ‘Elocution’ to denote delivery. ‘Flowing’ is clearly more suitable as a description of delivery than of diction; and flow was, of course, essential in skilled delivery. ‘Princely’ also seems more applicable to the manner of James’s utterance than to the words themselves. For Williams, it was only by his skill in delivery, as well as in composition, that James demonstrated ‘all the rest that was admirable in the Eloquence of Salomon’. Certainly James considered delivery critical to others’ rhetoric. Preaching at the funeral of William Cokayne in 1626, John Donne reminded his audience of James’s opinion ‘That he never heard any man of his breeding, handle business more rationally, more pertinently, more elegantly, more perswasively’, continuing: And when his purpose was, to do a grace to a Preacher, of very good abilities, and good note in his owne Chappell, I have heard him say, that his language, and accent, and manner of delivering himselfe, was like this man. (1953–62: vii. 274)

Here elegance and persuasiveness are not characterized by the arguments Cokayne chooses; as, in Cicero’s words,‘without delivery the best speaker cannot be of any account at all, and a moderate speaker with a trained delivery can often outdo the best of them’ (1942: iii. lvi. 213), so it was the merchant’s ‘language, and accent, and manner of delivering himselfe’ that earned his monarch’s praise (on this sermon, see also McCullough, Chapter 12, this volume). It is hard to avoid the supposition that Donne himself was the



kate armstrong

‘Preacher, of very good abilities’ to whom James once purposed ‘to do a grace’ by this comparison. More important, however, is the prominence given to delivery in Donne’s picture of Cokayne and of James; the year after Charles’s accession, Donne wished to remind his audience not only of Cokayne’s excellent delivery, but of the value James placed upon it. James’s interest in delivery may have had an additional foundation. We should be careful in describing Jacobean preaching as ‘theatrical’. It is, however, indubitable that sermons and plays or masques shared the quality of being performed. Indeed, as McCullough has pointed out, during Lent sermons replaced plays as the public events to which Londoners swarmed (1998: 134). Despite this concern, however, to my knowledge the emphasis placed by manuals and patrons alike on a preacher’s natural physical appearance has been overlooked. According to theorists, including the influential Roger Ascham and Richard Bernard, good looks were essential to praiseworthy ‘language, and accent, and manner of delivering [one]selfe’. Ascham notes with distress that, ‘if a father have foure sonnes, three faire and well formed both mynde and bodie, the fourth, wretched, lame, and deformed, his choice shalbe, to put the worst to learning, as one good enoughe to becum a scholer’ (1904: 195). Similarly, for Bernard: Unseemelinesse in countenance and gesture, is to be avoided, which deformed persons, either so by defect in nature, or by accident, cannot avoid: and therefore not so fit to be set up in the roome of God, and to stand before the face of the Congregation, such especially as have great blemishes in the face, want of eies, or one eie, a scarre on the mouth, but a peece of a lippe, the want of a nose, and such like, which cannot be hidden; but are great eiesores to the beholders, so hucklebackt, want of an arme. These sorts must needs want countenance and gesture, which no waies can be amended, though some such be sometimes in the Ministerie, and happely blessed therein. (1607: sig. N1r)

Although astounding to a modern reader, this rejection of deformity in the pulpit is the natural concomitant of the importance of rhetorical delivery in early modern culture. On this basis, Elizabeth’s noted preference for attractive preachers (McCullough 1998: 84) was not only one of the sexual undercurrents forming her flirtatious image, but also entirely rhetorically justified. James’s predilection for handsome young men in the persons of his favourites Esmé Stuart, Robert Carr, and George Villiers is well known; indeed Thomas Howard’s advice on obtaining royal favour went so far as to state that ‘The King . . . dwelleth on good looks and handsome accoutrements’ (Ashton 1969: 234). In this context, it would be unsurprising if he valued his preachers’ appearance in addition to their ability to explicate doctrine acceptably, and it is plausible that the Jacobean emphasis on rhetorical delivery derived in part from James’s homosexual interests. In The Black-Smith William Smith flattered James with the suggestion that ‘with [his] gratious attention’ he improved his delivery even as ‘so bad a voice’ spoke from the Whitehall pulpit (1606: sig. A2r–v). Fanciful as Smith’s flattery appears, there is no lack of evidence for James’s own proficiency in delivery and his praise of this skill in other men. During the Elizabethan period actio was crucial in the schoolroom, and the monarch preferred rhetorical, visually attractive preaching. The following reign, however, also saw

sermons in performance



a king who privileged the sermon over all other literary genres. The ‘heyday of preaching’ to which McCullough has referred (1998: ch. 3) was consequently also a heyday of rhetorical sermon delivery. John Chamberlain, Dudley Carleton, and Henry King were all three steeped in this culture of rhetorical delivery in the schoolroom and universities, and in the elite Jacobean pulpits. It is therefore in this context that scholars must assess the meaning of Chamberlain’s judgement of King. The phrase ‘orator parum vehemens’ appears to suggest an (unsuccessful) attempt at a style that would align King more with Cicero’s Asiatic orator than with his Attic counterpart, and with Walkington rather than Perkins. Central to this style were the creation and expression of strong emotion, which was unmistakably a crucial aspect of the sermon’s meaning for its audience, and one that modern scholars should attempt to re-create in order to understand fully sermons of this period.

Bibliography Adams, Thomas (1626). Five Sermons Preached upon Sundry Especiall Occasions. Andrewes, Lancelot (1629). XCVI. Sermons by the Right Honorable and Reverend Father in God, Lancelot Andrewes. Ascham, Roger (1904). English Works, ed. William Aldis Wright. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ashton, Robert (1969) (ed.). Bowyer’s Parliamentary Diary. Hutchinson. Bacon, Francis (1857–74). The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding et al. 14 vols. Longman. Baldwin, Thomas Whitfield (1944). William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke. 2 vols. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Barnett, Dene (1987). The Art of Gesture: The Practices and Principles of 18th Century Acting. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag. Barton, John (1634). The Art of Rhetorick. Bernard, Richard (1607). The Faithfull Shepheard or The Shepheards Faithfulnesse. Boys, John (1613). The Autumne Part from the Twelfth Sundy [sic] after Trinitie, to the Last in the Whole Yeere Dedicated unto the Much Honoured and Most Worthy Doctor John Overal. Brathwaite, Richard (1631). The English Gentlewoman. Brinsley, John (1917). Ludus literarius or the Grammar Schoole, ed. E. T. Campagnac. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Brown, Howard J. (1933). Elizabethan Schooldays: An Account of the English Grammar Schools in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century. Oxford: Blackwell. Camden, William (1625). Annales, the True and Royall History of the Famous Empresse Elizabeth Queene of England France and Ireland &c. Chamberlain, John (1939). The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. Norman Egbert McClure. 2 vols. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society. Cicero (1913). De officiis, trans. Walter Miller. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —— (1942). De oratore, trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham. 2 vols. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.



kate armstrong

—— (1962). Brutus, trans. G. L. Hendrickson; Orator, trans. H. M. Hubbell. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Collinson, Patrick (1982). The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559–1625. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Day, Angel (1586). The English Secretorie wherin is Contayned, a Perfect Method, for the Inditing of All Manner of Epistles and Familiar Letters. Donne, John (1953–62). The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson. 10 vols. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Earle, John (1628). Micro-Cosmographie; or, A Peece of the World Discovered; in Essayes and Characters. Fenner, Dudley (1584). The Artes of Logike and Rethorike Plainelie Set Foorth in the English Tounge. Middelburg, VA. Fotherby, Martin (1608). Foure Sermons, Lately Preached. Hyperius, Andreas (1577). The Practise of Preaching: Otherwise Called the Pathway to the Pulpet; Eng. by J. Ludham. Kempe, William (1966). The Education of Children in Learning 1588, in Robert D. Pepper (ed.), Four Tudor Books on Education, a Facsimile Edition. Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints. Lanham, Richard A. ([1968] 1991). A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. 2nd edn. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. McCullough, Peter E. (1998). Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mack, Peter (2002). Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morrissey, Mary (2011). Politics and the Paul’s Cross Sermons, 1558–1642. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Perkins, William (1607). The Arte of Prophecying. Prynne, William (1633). Histrio-Mastix The Players Scourge, or, Actors Tragaedie. [Quintilian] (2001). Institutio oratoria, trans. Donald A. Russell. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Shakespeare, William. (1951). Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. Richard David. 4th edn. Arden Shakespeare. London: Methuen. Smith, William (1606). The Black-Smith: A Sermon Preached at White-Hall before the Kings Most Excellent Majestie. Walkington, Thomas (1607). The Optick Glasse of Humors. —— (1608). Salomons Sweete Harpe. Cambridge. Ward, Samuel (1622). All in All. Watson, Foster (1968). The English Grammar Schools to 1660: Their Curriculum and Practice. Frank Cass. Webster, John (1976). The Duchess of Malfi, ed. John Russell Brown. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Williams, John (1625). Great Britains Salomon. Wilson, Thomas (1553). The Arte of Rhetorique for the Use of All Suche as are Studious of Eloquence, Sette Forth in English. Wotton, Henry (1907). The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, ed. Logan Pearsall Smith. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

chapter 8

pr e achi ng i n t h e pa r ish e s ian green

What was preached in English parish churches from the 1560s to the 1630s is likely to remain elusive, for two reasons. First, there is little first-hand evidence of the content, style of delivery, or reception of parish sermons. Most of the sermons that survive were given at court or in the capital or a cathedral or other large church, by a leading cleric who was both highly educated and had considerable experience as a preacher; and many of the extant texts were modified for publication by the author or editors who were hoping to drive home the message to an imagined community of readers (Green 2000: 194–216; 2006; 2009b: 27–9). Style of delivery was certainly discussed in manuals on preaching, but the best known of these handbooks stated an ideal, and were possibly studied by zealous or ambitious high-flyers rather than those inexperienced or diffident ordinands with limited years in higher education who were appointed to isolated livings (Perkins 1592; Bernard 1607; Wilkins 1646; Hunt 2010: ch. 2). Indeed, compared to the continental insistence on ministers having Greek and Hebrew as well as Latin, and the amount of training and testing that many Lutheran and Calvinist preachers had to undergo before being given a cure of souls, most English clergy had little or no specialized training (Green 1989: 264–5; 2009a: 119–21, 254–61, 299–331). The recorded reactions of the contemporary English laity to the sermons they heard tend to fall into extremes: adulation of the best preachers of the day, and criticism or satire of weaker or unpopular preachers (Earle 1628: sigs B3r–6v; Green 2000: 196–8; Haigh 2007: 165–7, 176). It is only by looking at the reverse image of what was said by parishioners, on those occasions when relations with a minister had broken down to the point that complaints were lodged in a church court or in the 1640s a county committee, that we may see what many of the laity had come to expect. Sermons should be regular, audible, informative, and uplifting; they should be neither too long nor too short, and preferably not be read out verbatim. Preachers should be learned but not flaunt their education; and, while denouncing specific sins was acceptable, preachers who targeted individual members of the congregation were often deemed divisive (Green 1979: 509, 511, 519–20; Haigh 2007: 19–23, 90–2).



ian green

Secondly, while the ideal may have been a single pastor preaching regularly to a single flock, the reality was often very different. In the ‘dark corners’ of the north and west sermons remained rare for some time, unless there was a peripatetic incumbent like Bernard Gilpin nearby or an evangelical dean or bishop like Tobie Matthew who was prepared to endure the rigours of frequent journeys on exposed tracks to pay a flying visit (Marcombe 2004; Sheils 2004). Even in the south and east, it proved hard to fill many of the poorer livings with a licensed preacher, and many of those who were licensed had to serve two, three, or more churches or chapels on a temporary or permanent basis. Others combined pastoral duties with cognate roles—as cathedral clergy, chaplains to the royal family or landed elite, or schoolteachers. This meant that, during a typical clerical career of twenty-five to thirty years, a licensed preacher had to adjust to the needs and responses of a variety of congregations. He had to be able to provide regular sermons on Sundays and holy days in one or two places, deputize for a sick or absent colleague in a third, give a funeral sermon in a fourth, and (if sufficiently well regarded) give a weekday lecture or assize or visitation sermons in yet others, often with some highly educated clergy as well as laity present. Did he consciously preach in different ways in different situations, as Luther and Zwingli had done? Did he have the time, the books, and the skills to prepare brand new sermons each time he preached, or did he cultivate a series of useful headings and tropes that could be applied extemporaneously to a variety of texts and contexts? How many clergy, as ordinands or newly ordained incumbents, composed sets of sermons that they could later rework, supplementing them with other men’s ideas that they had meanwhile encountered in manuscript or printed form (Green 2009b: 4, 11–18, 21–4)? There are some shafts of light for the late Elizabethan and early Stuart periods. As we shall see, from the 1580s to the 1630s there survive some preaching diaries and a small but increasing number of collections of manuscript sermons; and at least some of the sermons then deemed worthy of printing, for example, by Robert Harris and Humphrey Sydenham, were short sermons that were aimed at ‘poor people’ and the ‘simple’. Moreover, some of the publications for budding preachers, such as Richard Bernard’s Faithfull Shepheard and John Boys’s Exposition of the scripture texts deployed regularly in church services, were targeted at the less well qualified or less confident (Harris 1611: sigs A2v–3r; Green 2000: 212; 2006: 243). These enable us to get an at least partial view of the types of sermons likely to have been given in the pulpits of smaller towns and rural areas. What we are probably faced with is a shift from a transitional phase lasting from the 1540s to the 1580s to a more settled but diverse one from the 1590s to the 1630s. In the first phase, there was at the top a corps of graduates and other licensed preachers who probably opted to preach more often than ‘every three months of the year’, which was the official minimum in the 1560s. But beneath them there was a much larger body of foot soldiers, ranging in different areas at the outset from three-fifths to four-fifths of the clerical army. Although some of these ministers were encouraged by diocesans or experienced local clergy to attempt modest expositions of their own, the great majority probably did no more than read out the official homilies (Green 2003: 160; 2006: 241–2).

preaching in the parishes



Divided into two, three, or four parts, each of which took no more than ten minutes to read, these homilies used simple language and scriptural material to cover the basics of faith, good works, sacraments, and major festivals such as Christmas and Easter. Almost certainly the most common use of the pulpit from the 1540s to the 1580s was for reading out loud these homilies: the thirty editions of volume 1 of the homilies published between 1547 and 1587, and the sixteen editions of volume 2 published between 1563 and 1587, probably represent at least 60,000–70,000 copies—more than enough for the needs of both parishes and clergy (Green 2000: 209–10; 2006: 242–3; see Null, Chapter 17, this vol.). Other works may have been read out on the principle of ‘better a good sermon read than none at all’: the English translation of Bullinger’s Decades was described as being ‘fit to be read out of the pulpit unto the simplest and rudest people of this land’ by the many clergy who ‘cannot make better themselves’. But this passed through only three editions (Bullinger 1577: sig. q3v; Green 1994: 45, 404, 604–5). In the second phase we have a much more complex picture, in terms both of preachers and of preaching. The Canons of 1604 had raised the frequency of sermons to ‘once in every month at the least’, and the proportion of graduate clergy and licensed preachers, which had already risen to about half by 1600, reached three-quarters or more in most areas by 1640. However, we should expect a difference between the most gifted and best-equipped preacher, using the full range of aids to bible study by then available, and the average preacher with little or no formal training and fewer resources who turned to Bernard for advice or Boys for material. Moreover, Canon 46 still insisted that the homilies be read by the incumbent or his curate ‘upon every Sunday when there shall not be a sermon preached’; and the half a dozen new editions of the homilies published between 1591 and 1640 would have filled any gaps in parish needs (Green 2003: 160; 2000: ch. 3; 2006: 242–3). In this second phase we also find three other trends. One was a change in focus, from trying to remove the last vestiges of the old religion towards urging Protestants to greater awareness and commitment. Another was a growing diversity of sermons, not just routine Sunday sermons, but sermons to support catechizing, to prepare for communion, to accompany weddings, baptisms and funerals, and sermons given on the great festival days and selected saints’ days, and on a growing variety of special occasions for jubilation, commemoration, or mourning that had been nominated by the Crown or the local community. Thirdly, we find growing evidence of the distinction hinted at in the Bullinger edition between, on the one hand, what contemporaries called ‘plain country divinity’—a suitably plain expression of a body of doctrine that was strong on moral exhortation, kept difficult or controversial matter to a minimum, and that even ‘the simples and rudest people’ could grasp—and, on the other hand, the type of fare expected at court or by what Richard Baxter called the ‘more curious stomachs’ of Londoners—sermons which had the same prime function of advising and persuading congregations of ‘other-worldly’ concerns, but did not avoid ‘this-worldly’ topics such as matters in controversy, and which in many cases were designed to leave an impression on the mind as well as the soul (Baxter 1655: sigs A2r–v; Sanderson 1656: 3; Stout 1986: 4–6).



ian green

Sermon Topics: Scriptural Texts and Themes What did an average congregation hear on those occasions when there was a sermon? In the case of those clergy who were licensed to preach and had the materials and confidence to preach more often than quarterly or monthly, they would probably have heard a sequence of sermons, either an open-ended exposition, lectio continua, of a short passage of scripture teasing out all the useful lessons it contained, or a series of sermons on a selection of texts chosen to illuminate a single theme, such as faith and righteousness, reassurance, or putting on the whole armour of God (Green 2009b: 36–9). The first kind had been adopted by many early reformers and perfected by Calvin, and in England we know that Edward Dering preached twenty-seven ‘lectures, or readings’ on the first six chapters of Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews in London in the 1570s, John King delivered thirty-eight sermons on the first three chapters of Jonah in York in the 1590s, and Arthur Hildersham gave at least two sets of expositions in the small market town of Ashbyde-la-Zouch in Leicestershire: 108 Tuesday lectures on John 4:9–53 between 1609 and 1611, and 152 lectures on Psalm 51:1–7 between 1625 and 1631. Similarly, Thomas Jackson delivered long courses of expositions on weekdays in Canterbury Cathedral from the late 1610s to the 1630s, and may have reused some of this material in the other Kentish pulpits in which he regularly preached (Green 2009b: 37, 40; CCA DCc/Miscellaneous Accounts 52, reverse, pp. 256–245). But it will be noted that all the expositions just named originated either in major towns or as weekday lectures, and were given by preachers of recognized talent. The second kind of sequence—focusing on a theme derived from one or more texts—can also be found in England in the manuscript sermons of conformists like Anthony Higgin and Brian Walton, and in the published work of both moderate ‘godly’ such as Richard Sibbes and John Preston and high Calvinists such as Robert Bolton and Thomas Hooker. But in these cases we often find that the original sermons had been either extended by the author into a treatise or edited after the author’s death, so we cannot be absolutely sure what had been delivered or to what kind of congregation (Green 2000: ch. 6). Again these were mostly preachers of much experience and high renown, and it remains unclear how many less-qualified incumbents dared embark on such a sequence. Before we leave sermon sequences, however, we may look at the intriguing case of Thomas Lydiat, which may represent an intermediate level of parish preaching. Lydiat came late to the ministry. Having spent his twenties as a fellow of New College, Oxford, and acquired a good grounding in Greek and Hebrew as well as Latin, he then relied on his personal wealth to pursue his interests in astronomy and chronology, which brought him first to the attention of Prince Henry, whose chronographer and cosmographer he became, and then James Ussher, who used Lydiat’s research when constructing his own chronology of world history. It was only in 1612, after Henry’s death, that Lydiat became rector of a small rural parish, Alkerton in Oxfordshire, the parish to

preaching in the parishes



which his family had moved from London. He remained there (with gaps) writing and preaching until his death in 1646 (Sherlock 2004). What is interesting about Lydiat is not just that he has left traces of his Sunday preaching—three bound volumes of sermons survive of a collection that probably ran to over twenty volumes (Bodl. MSS Rawlinson E75–6 and 168)1—but that he knew his limits as a preacher, and, despite his scholarship, did not set his sights too high. According to Wood, Lydiat had ‘a great defect in his memory and utterance’, which probably explains why he wrote out his sermons in full in advance, sometimes inscribing a ‘prayer before sermon’ as well (Wood 1813–20: iii. 186; Bodl. MSS Rawlinson E76, fols 2r–4v; E168, fo. 64r). In one of the surviving sermons, on Matthew 23:34 (God saying ‘Behold, I send unto you prophets, and wise men, and scribes’), Lydiat gave a stout defence of those ‘scribes’ who might lag well behind ‘prophets’ ‘in the gift of memory and utterance’, but who were used by God in His infinite wisdom to edify His church. This defence was based partly on the etymological ground that he could find ‘no other word in Hebrew that signifies to preach, but the very same that signifies to read’, so that the prophets had possibly read out their texts, and partly on the basis of examples in the Old and New Testament of ‘scribes’ used by God to edify the faithful in church, as was the case with Paul’s Epistles, which had been sent to be read out to persuade the humble and terrify the proud (Bodl. MS Rawlinson E75, fos 213v–215v). Wood also knew that Lydiat painstakingly composed a harmony of the Gospels in three languages which took him twelve years, during which he composed ‘thereon above 600 sermons’—that is, one for every Sunday. As it happens, the first of these sermons survives: it was given at Alkerton on 23 August 1612, and was on the opening verses of Luke, which, he felt, ‘may serve for a general preface unto all four Gospels’. As he told his congregation then, he proposed to ‘expound and declare according to the order of time of every particular action and event’, as God should give him the ability and opportunity (Bodl. MS Rawlinson E168, fos 19r, 32r: two attempts at the same text). Taking only a few verses at a time, he composed 32 sermons on the first 2 chapters alone of Luke, and by the time he had reached the end of Matthew (which he seems to have left till last) his sermon tally had reached 611.2 Sadly most of the sermons between numbers 54 and 490 are lost, but enough survive to permit some comments. Whereas the first sermons in the sequence were written out with margins wide enough to contain headings such as ‘Doctrine’ and ‘Use’ and supporting scripture texts (as we find in growing numbers of printed sermons of that period), Lydiat soon abandoned this generous layout and the racking-up of doctrines and uses in favour of simpler structures and phrases suggested to him by the particular verse he had reached. In the majority of his sermons, he rarely exceeded two or three divisions or conclusions per verse, and also adopted a style that avoided technical terms in favour of simpler dichotomies such as ‘ends and means’ or ‘fruits and benefits’, which he presumably

1 2

See Lydiat’s numbering inside the covers, and the cross reference in MS E168 no. 27. See numbered lists at the start of Rawlinson MSS E75, 76, and 168.



ian green

thought his listeners would understand. His sermons also soon grew shorter—from sixteen to eighteen sides of quarto down to eleven or twelve of quarto or in later volumes a regular sixteen sides of octavo. (That this was deliberate is suggested by the survival of a much longer and more scholarly sermon, which he addressed to ‘right worshipful and well beloved’ listeners, perhaps the assembled clergy of two deaneries at a visitation at Chipping Norton in 1624 (Bodl. MSS Rawlinson E75, fos 200r–215v; E76, fo. 1r).) A typical sermon at Alkerton ended when he approached the end of his quota of verses or sheets, and sought a way of applying it to his flock, sometimes one might think a mite clumsily but with the best of intentions. Having preached on Christ asking questions in the Temple, he urged parents to realize that children were the gift of God and should be brought to be ‘consecrated’ to the Lord. And he told the children present to ‘apply themselves to good instruction, that, so being grafted into Jesus Christ by faith’, they might grow in knowledge and godliness into ‘perfect men’, ‘and at length be made joint heirs with him of his heavenly kingdom’. At the end of another sermon, on the Annunciation, he urged his flock to imitate Mary’s many virtuous qualities and especially her faith: ‘so shall it come to pass that we also shall be graciously accepted of God, and shall obtain true blessedness’ (Bodl. MS Rawlinson E168, fos 180v, 88r). This emphasis on duty and application as a means to salvation was a regular motif of his perorations. Lydiat was an intriguing mixture. He was well disposed towards ‘godly’ neighbours such as John Dod, Robert Cleaver, and Sir Anthony Cope; in the early 1620s he was worried by the threat from popery abroad, and in the 1630s would be critical of ‘altars’ and bowing at the name of Jesus. But he avoided the highly introspective terms of high Calvinism, and, when he did mention God’s eternal decree or predestination, it was usually to apply it to God’s foreknowledge of all that would come to pass, and His appointing a saviour to redeem fallen mankind (Sherlock 2004; Bodl. MSS Rawlinson E75, fos 91v–92r, 57v; E168, fo. 152r). He was also suspicious of ‘false prophets’ among sectaries and millenarians. He dated his first sermons by the liturgical calendar (‘11 Trin[ity]’, ‘12 Trin.’, and so on), and his longest prayer before sermon is strongly reminiscent of the Book of Common Prayer, not only in its phrasing but also in thanking God for offering the means of salvation ‘by the ministry of thine holy Word and sacraments’. In many ways he was an example of what Anthony Milton has called ‘conformist drift’ among Calvinist conformists: moving away from sympathy with Puritan shibboleths towards defence of the established church. During the 1640s he was so persistent in speaking out in favour of episcopacy that his house was pillaged four times by parliamentarian troops from Banbury, and he was carted off and maltreated twice, which may have hastened his death (Bodl. MSS Rawlinson E168; E76, fos 2r–4v; Milton 1995: 536; Sherlock 2004). By the ‘godly’ standards of the 1640s he was possibly considered an ‘insufficient’ preacher—reading from a text, probably for less than an hour, and focusing on the gospel story rather than listing doctrines and uses or stressing the need for spiritual introspection—but, for an insight into what a scholarly minister thought a rural congregation should be told and would understand, his surviving sermons are well worth a closer look.

preaching in the parishes



Sermon Topics: Prayer Book-Appointed Texts and Services The alternative to long sequences of Hildersham’s and Lydiat’s type was either short sequences or single sermons, and many of these were probably linked either to a significant date in the church’s calendar or to a celebration of Holy Communion. The manuscript preaching diary of Tobie Matthew provides bare details of the 720 sermons he gave in 11 years as dean of Durham from 1584 to 1595, the 550 in the next 11 years as bishop of Durham, and the 720 in 16 years as archbishop of York. It has been persuasively argued that, while he was in Oxford and London, or at court, Matthew chose to give sermons in different styles: more rhetorical for the court, more scholastic for judges on assize, but simple for a mixed congregation (YMA MS Add. 18; Oates 2003; Sheils 2004). This was probably even more true when Matthew moved north. For what is striking about the entries in the diary is the discrepancy between, on the one hand, the scripture texts he chose for the sermons delivered in his cathedrals or to prestigious or informed congregations, before the Council of North or the judges on assize, and, on the other hand, those texts he chose for the vast majority of his sermons, delivered before rural or smalltown congregations, many of which still contained significant numbers of ‘church papists’ or recusants. An analysis of texts and dates in the diary suggests that, whereas the set-piece sermons were one-offs with texts chosen to suit a particular occasion (and possibly a style to go with it), the routine ones were increasingly given on texts taken from the appropriate section of the lectionary in the Book of Common Prayer, usually a verse or two from the Gospel or Epistle for the day, sometimes from one of the lessons or psalms specified for that day. We know that Matthew had sufficient experience to be capable of preaching ‘extempore’ as he put it in his diary (for example, when a prebendary in the cathedral missed his turn at short notice) and we may suspect that, when on his endless tours of outlying parishes, away from his study, he did something similar by offering a well-honed interpretation of a section of the Gospel or Epistle for the day, perhaps relating it to the Protestant form of celebration of Holy Communion that followed. That Matthew was not acting untypically in his choice of texts can be readily demonstrated. Of the sermons of Hugh Latimer that survived and were published as an act of homage, half were given in a major forum, such as convocation, or the court of Edward VI in 1549–50, and half were given in Lincolnshire in the 1550s. Again, the scripture texts for the former were chosen with the particular message and audience that Latimer had in mind, but the texts for Lincolnshire consisted of seven on the Gospel prescribed for the specific Sunday or saint’s day on which they were given, seven explained the Lord’s Prayer, and one was on the parable of the marriage feast (Latimer 1562). We also know that Arthur Golding’s translation into English of Niels Hemmingsen’s Postill was commissioned by two ‘stationers’ ‘well minded towards godliness’, and was recommended by some bishops to their less well-educated clergy; it passed through five editions between 1569 and 1585. Hemmingsen had written the work to help fellow Lutheran clergy attempt an ‘exposition



ian green

of the gospels usually read in the churches of God upon the Sundays and feast days of saints’, and nearly 90 per cent of the seventy-one Gospel readings he expounded were identical or virtually the same as those in the English church (the other 10 per cent were the result of the English church’s idiosyncratic selections for Christmas and Easter weeks) (Green 2000: 113–14). If we look at another manuscript collection, that of the papers of Anthony Higgin, a Yorkshire rector from the mid-1580s, and dean of Ripon from 1608 to 1624, we find another minister who regularly followed the calendar year laid down in the Prayer Book very carefully, and like Matthew usually selected the Gospel or Epistle for the day, though in Higgin’s case this was probably for the same congregation, unlike Matthew’s many flying visits. Where Higgin did not select Gospels or Epistles, it was because he was preaching on the sacraments and preparation for receiving communion. Higgin also made preparatory notes on the Lord’s Prayer, Ten Commandments, and the Creed, which formed the bulk of the Prayer Book catechism (LUL). A slightly later example of a focus on texts prescribed in the Book of Common Prayer is the published work of John Boys, rector of Betteshanger in Kent from 1597, and dean of Canterbury from 1615 to 1625. Boys’s studies were encouraged by his family and by John Whitgift and John Overall at Cambridge, and he was capable of preaching in Latin at university. But while still there, and in his first years as rector in Kent, he started work on a project that was later published between 1609 and 1617 as eleven books of ‘postils’ on three sets of scriptures. These were ‘the principal scriptures used in our English liturgy, together with a reason why the church did choose the same’; ‘the dominical epistles and gospels’ (that is, those named for each Sunday throughout the year); and the ‘festival epistles and gospels’ (those specified for the festivals that most Protestant churches still recognized). These books were collected together and, with some of his later sermons, reprinted a few times in the early seventeenth century and occasionally thereafter, including editions in Germany and America. The postils were not intended to be substitute sermons: what they did was to cull relevant extracts from a wide variety of sources— scriptural, patristic, continental Lutheran and Calvinist, as well as English—and provide some suggestions on how to divide up the text in question and draw out its main lessons. In the postil on 2 Corinthians 13:13 (‘the Grace’ said in the Prayer Book Litany), Boys cited Luther in defence of the idea that ‘Christianity begins with simple things’. Do not bother, he said, with ‘curious speculations of God’s unsearchable counsels’; ‘run straight to the manger, embrace the little babe Christ in thine arms . . . this sight will make thee shake off all terrors and errors’. ‘Behold the lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world’, and ‘by the grace of Christ thou shalt understand . . . that Christ in our justification is all in all’ (Boys 1610: 121–2; Green 2000: 115; Richardson 2004). Hemmingsen’s and Boys’s works, together with the intermediate level of aids to bible study that the print trade was making available in rapidly increasing quantities, probably helped to fill the gap in parish preaching between the reading of the homilies or Bullinger’s Decades by the least-qualified clergy, and the independent efforts of the best-educated preachers nearer the top of the ladder (Green 2000: ch. 3). But what is also noteworthy is the assumption that many clergy would welcome help to prepare sermons on those texts approved for use on specified Sundays and saints’ days by the established church.

preaching in the parishes



Many of the ‘godly’ clergy probably regarded the prescription of texts in the Prayer Book lectionary as a straitjacket, and so ignored it in those parishes where they had powerful lay backers (Seaver 2006: 138–41). But this did not mean that they did not preach regularly on at least some of the festival and feast days in the church’s calendar. As proof of this we may take the example of John Rogers of Chacombe in Northamptonshire, who as a ‘puritan veteran’ involved in the local classis persistently neglected the official lectionary. Later in life Rogers published two works: a sermon given in Norfolk, which was a Gifford–Dent type sermon on the three sorts of Christians, only one of whom was a true Christian; and a funeral sermon, perhaps given in Worcester to judge from the epistle dedicatory, but (as he admitted) massively enlarged afterwards to become a fulllength ‘discourse of Christian watchfulness’—a classic case of the division of the text being followed by endless ‘doctrines’, ‘motives’, and ‘uses’ (Rogers 1618, 1620; Sheils 1979: 78, 83–4, 86). However, a large quarto volume, stoutly bound in vellum, also survives that contains notes of sermons, ‘preparations’ for communion, and prayers that he had delivered between 1586 and 1601. To judge from the extensive revisions and the insertions and additional references placed in the margin, Rogers went through this volume at least twice after the material was first written down; and alterations such as ‘Let this second point be placed first’ and the insertion of an ‘appendix superiori concioni’ (appendix of the above sermons) probably indicate that these materials were used more than once. There are also many cross references to at least one other such volume: ‘see more in my sermon book upon the catechism’ or ‘my catechism sermons’ or ‘my great sermon book’; and his revised numbering suggests that by 1601 he had over 14,000 pages of material on which to draw. In these manuscript sermons Rogers was predictably hostile to Catholicism, and anxious to stress the unbridgeable difference between regenerate and unregenerate. But he did not spend much time on the technicalities of the ordo salutis or on the quest for assurance through introspection. Indeed, compared to the extended funeral sermon published in 1620, in the manuscript sermons he avoided lists of doctrines and uses, adopted relatively simple structures, and employed a good deal of rural imagery. The works he cited included some expected names, such as Calvin, Becon, Foxe, Rainolds, and Perkins, and some unexpected—a clutch of classical and Renaissance authors (Cicero, Horace, Terence, Ovid, Cato, and ‘Mantuan’), the Prayer Book and the homilies, and contemporary theologians opposed to strict Calvinism such as Peter Baro and John Howson. Most common and extensive of all were his citations from Augustine and the Fathers (UWB Gwyneddon MS 25, pp. 13961, 13660, 13596, 13765, 13842, 13868, 13884—cross references to pp. 3336, 3459, 3584, 3619–20, 4812—and passim). However, what this particular volume shows is that Rogers not only was prepared to preach seasonal sermons on Palm Sunday, Easter Day, or Whitsun (‘Pentecost’) as days that God had set apart, but also placed a high premium on the sacraments, and delivered a number of ‘preparations to the Lord’s Supper’ prior to the usual dates for its celebration. On Whitsunday 1588, for example, he preached that all days were created good by God, but that Pentecost was ‘beautified with a notable mark and wonderful work above other days’. ‘It becometh not the godly to be so blockish as to make no difference of times’ when God had commanded otherwise (UWB Gwyneddon MS 25,



ian green

13687–88).3 His view of the sacraments was closely tied to his view of the covenant, which was the older one between God and Abraham or Moses that can be found in Calvin, rather than the newer, prelapsarian covenant of Ursinus between God and Adam. God covenants to give man invisible graces (remission of sins, regeneration, communion with Christ) and man covenants to believe in God, serve and obey Him. The sacraments were ‘visible’, ‘sensible signs’, suited to ‘our capacities’, but also seals of God’s promises in that covenant. Baptism was a ‘spiritual’, ‘continual baptism’ by which fallen man was purged of his sins, and received into the body of Christ and eternal covenant with God. The Lord’s Supper also conveyed grace: God enters and possesses the heart of worthy receivers, and gives them ‘spiritual food’ that nourishes true believers to everlasting life. Hence the effort Rogers felt necessary to devote at certain times of year to urging his flock to prepare for worthy reception at Holy Communion: by examining themselves for sins of omission and commission, and for true faith, appreciation of the immense gift they were about to receive, and charity towards others. They were also urged after reception to offer hearty thanks for the benefits they had received (UWB Gwyneddon MS 25, pp. 13676–85, 13702–64, 13863–971). To judge from his missing ‘sermon book upon the catechism’, the ‘godly’ Rogers approved of the use of the pulpit for this end too. Nor was he alone: Latimer’s surviving sermons on the Lord’s Prayer, the English translation of Bullinger’s Decades (many of them on catechetical material), and Higgin’s notes and Boys’s postils on the Lord’s Prayer and other catechetical formulae give good grounds for believing that the practice of expounding the staple items of Protestant catechetics was deemed necessary in the Elizabethan and early Stuart church, though in 1622 Archbishop Abbot complained that England lagged behind Reformed churches abroad in this regard. Preaching on the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Lord’s Supper could be done using the original scripture texts (Exodus 20, Matthew 6 or Luke 11, or 1 Corinthians 11), while the Apostles’ Creed was often expounded by choosing a different text for each article of that creed. When a very young Brian Walton was starting his career as an assistant to the ‘godly’ Richard Stock at All Hallows Bread Street, London, in the mid-1620s, he was obviously detailed to preach catechetical sermons on Sunday afternoons. He began in December 1626 warning his congregation ‘how dangerous it is . . . to live in ignorance’ of the grounds of religion, and between then and October 1627 he preached forty-two ‘catechetical’ sermons, selecting different texts to illuminate different themes: for example, 2 Timothy 3:16–17 on the origins and value of the word of God, and John 4:24 and Exodus 34:6–7 on God’s nature and qualities. The sermons were as scholarly as one might expect from the future editor of the Polyglot Bible, and were not only written out in full, but were clearly reused, with some new material, on more than one occasion in the 1630s and early 1640s after Walton had been given his own livings in London and Essex (Margoliouth 2004; Bodl. MS Rawlinson E.23, fo. 14r, and passim). The catechetical sermons of John Rogers and Brian Walton, together with the 3

For seventeenth-century parish clergy who composed clearly marked sets of sermons for different seasons of the calendar year, as well as the sacraments, and specific occasions such as the royal birthday or 5 November, see Green 2009b: 22–3, 34, 42, 44.

preaching in the parishes



catechisms prepared by beneficed clergy for the older as well as the younger members of their flock, suggest that, even after two or three generations of Protestant teaching and worship, some parish clergy still saw the need to get the basics across to adults as well as to children. Archbishop Laud’s efforts in the 1630s to convert Sunday afternoon sermons into catechizing sessions, preferably with both catechumens and parents or masters present, was thus building on earlier practice, and may have encouraged the giving of shorter homilies on a phrase from the catechism, of the type that became increasingly common after the Restoration (Green 1996: 26–32, 35–8, 73–5, 147–52). Other types of sermon that became more common during the Elizabethan and early Stuart period were those associated with rites of passage such as weddings and funerals, though sadly relatively few examples survive (Green 2000: 203–6). There seems little reason to doubt that courtiers, gentry, and richer citizens in the major cities increasingly welcomed these extra sermons, and indeed in the case of funeral sermons were probably active in overcoming the initial objections of militant Protestants. Over half of the detailed probate accounts for Kent between 1601 and 1650 specified payment for such a sermon; in Devon, another county with a ‘godly’ reputation, a number of the funeral sermons delivered between 1607 and 1640 found their way into print. With the fee for a sermon standing at 6s. 8d. to 10s., however, it is not surprising that those that have survived commemorated a member of the landed or urban elites, and from the 1610s women in particular. Only for the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are there a rapidly rising number of extant funeral sermons, in manuscript and print, and even then most of them commemorated members of the upper and middling ranks of society rather than the humblest of all (Gittings 1988: 237, 240; Cressy 1997: 408–9, 572 n. 39; Houlbrooke 1998: 297–300; Seaver 2006: 128–34). For the wealthy the funeral sermon soon became part of a much wider range of rituals associated with burial and commemoration, but what is especially interesting here is that for the sermon the same few scripture texts were chosen (by laity as well as clergy), and the same points were regularly made. The preacher took the opportunity to remind a chastened auditory of the inevitability of death and the need to prepare for it straight away, but knew that the family also expected to hear about the piety of the departed in terms of regular devotions and running a virtuous household, and their good deeds in public and private. Where that piety and behaviour had been less than exemplary, preachers stood on a knife edge when reaching their peroration: they could not devalue the role of faith in salvation, but did not wish to reach too pessimistic a conclusion. In such cases selective praise and careful phrasing were required (Gittings 1988: 137–8; Houlbrooke 1998: 301–20; Green 2000: 203–6).

Case Study: Thomas Jackson of Kent Let us turn finally to a preacher in east Kent in the early seventeenth century—Thomas Jackson—whose career illustrates various of the trends described in this chapter. Thomas Jackson was born in a Catholic environment in Lancashire in 1571, educated at Emmanuel



ian green

College, Cambridge, was moved by hearing Perkins preach, and as a young graduate moved into the arms of the ‘godly’ gentry and citizens of Kent, as curate at Wye and a combination lecturer at Ashford. But in 1614 he became a prebendary and ‘Six Preacher’ (a statutory cadre of preachers) at Canterbury Cathedral, and a pillar of the chapter until his death in the mid-1640s, and in 1617 he was appointed to the first of a sequence of good livings near Canterbury. Professor Collinson sees Jackson as an example of the broad-based, consensual ‘Calvinism’ of the early seventeenth-century chapter at Canterbury, but one who turned from hero to anti-hero because of his preoccupation with making money from his promotions, and the possibility that he conformed to Laud’s innovations before reverting to type in the mid-1640s in his denunciation of those innovations at Laud’s trial (Collinson 1995: 180–3; Sutton 2004; for Jackson’s earlier sermons, see Jackson 1603, 1609a, b, 1612). Certainly Jackson’s fondness for classical allusions, symbolic and mystical interpretations, and gospel rather than Pauline texts suggests that from an early date he was not an archetypal Puritan (as that term has been understood), and he may well have been another example of ‘conformist drift’ among Jacobean Calvinists. He is cited here mainly because he kept notes between 1614 and 1638 of the scripture texts on which he had preached, together with the time and place and often the occasion too. From these notes we can tell that during those 24 years he delivered at least 1,300 sermons, consisting of at least 740 sermons on Sundays and holy days (in the cathedral and several other churches in Canterbury and in at least 20 other parish churches in Kent), and perhaps as many as 600 weekday lectures in the cathedral or the adjoining parish of St George’s. He seems to have acquired a nickname in the 1620s: ‘Fluviosus’ (Motormouth?) (CCA DCc/Miscellaneous Accounts 52, reverse, pp. 256–245; Collinson 1995: 181). Jackson’s notes indicate that he delivered different types of sermon. As a Six Preacher, on weekdays he gave many ‘courses’ of lectio continua lectures for anything from a few weeks to the best part of a year on the same few verses of the Bible. But, as a prebendary and parish priest, on Sundays and holy days he preached on texts linked to the church’s calendar and its sacraments and other ceremonies, either in single or double sermons on a single text, or in short sequences on different but related texts. Sadly, we do not have examples of his lecture sequences and his Sunday preaching to compare side by side for content and style. However, as far as the lectures are concerned, there are a couple of features of Jackson’s ‘courses’ at Canterbury that were probably different from those of, say, Dering or Bolton. First of all, some of his longer sequences were timed to start or end at an appropriate part of the church’s calendar year such as Christmas and Easter (see, for example, his sequences on Matthew 2:1 in 1618, and on Luke 22:54–62 in 1615–16). And, secondly, like Lydiat he chose to lecture almost entirely on Gospel texts dealing with the history and teaching of Christ—his life and ministry, miracles, and parables. The texts he chose for the sermons he preached on Sundays and festival days in the cathedral and on his many parish visits also show the same traits: awareness of the church’s calendar, and fondness for the Gospels, or in this case the Psalms as well. He preached single or double sermons in Canterbury Cathedral on Christmas Day on no less than thirteen occasions between 1614 and 1635, on Easter Day ten times, and on

preaching in the parishes



Whitsunday twelve times. He also frequently preached on saints’ days in the cathedral and elsewhere. Long after he had left behind his curacy in Wye, he returned there every 30 November to preach on the day of the saint to whom that church was dedicated: St Andrew. And on 29 June 1622 he ended a sermon on St Peter’s Day with a section of the prayer that ‘our holy mother Church hath taught us in the Collect for this day’—namely, ‘make, we beseech thee, all bishops and pastors diligently to preach thy holy Word, and the people obediently to follow the same, that they may receive the crown of everlasting glory’ (Jackson 1623: 51). He was also obviously much in demand for funeral sermons, and for occasional sermons, as when he gave six sermons on six consecutive days (31 December 1624 to 5 January 1625) to a force of troops that was being gathered in Canterbury. For these seasonal and occasional sermons, he again chose texts overwhelmingly from the Gospels rather than from the Old Testament or from Pauline Epistles such as Romans and Hebrews favoured by many of the stricter Calvinists. It has been suggested (Coolidge 1970) that the ‘Pauline Renaissance’ led by the Puritans produced a shift from a church-centred approach to a grace-centred approach; but, if so, Jackson adopted an approach that melded together grace and church, as Lydiat and possibly many other English preachers did from the the mid-sixteenth to the midseventeenth century and beyond. The fact that nearly 80 per cent of Jackson’s sermons were based on the Gospels is the more striking given that, as the way his notebook was organized shows, he was clearly trying not to repeat his choice of texts in the same pulpit. However, given the heavy burden of preaching, often three times a week in the late 1610s, it was not surprising that soon he did start to return to the same texts, either in a different pulpit, or, increasingly later on, in the same pulpit. From various clues it also seems pretty clear that he kept fairly full notes of his preaching. Having finished a particularly long set of about forty lectures, he wrote ‘28 sheets of paper written. Laus deo [Praise be to God]’ (CCA DCc/ Miscellaneous Accounts 52, p. 251). To judge from contemporary practice, those sheets were probably folio, which could be folded a few times to make more convenient-sized pages to carry into the pulpit; and, since Jackson probably wrote on both sides of this expensive commodity, 28 sheets would represent, if folded to octavo size, 448 pages, or possibly 10–12 pages per lecture (for other examples, see Green 2009b: 21–2). What is also clear about Jackson’s preaching, as far as we can judge from the few sermons that he did publish as well as from his choice of texts, is that, although he seems to have been a convinced believer in divine judgement on a sinful nation, he was deliberately inclusive and open-ended in his approach. He did refer to ‘the elect’, ‘the godly’, and ‘God’s children’, and often said how much the genuine Christian must suffer for his belief. But he was much more inclined to deploy phrases such as ‘men and women everywhere’ and ‘all Christians, men, women, and children’, and regularly used the inclusive ‘we’ and ‘us’ and the open-ended ‘you’, rather than the exclusive ‘elect’ or the third person (Jackson 1622: 32, 54, 62; 1623: 90–1, 135, 138, 210, 344). Two of the texts on which he preached most often were ‘Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the Law’ (Galatians 3:13), and ‘thy faith hath made thee whole’ (Luke 17:19). And he does not seem to have pressed the need for self-examination for the endless lists of marks of election favoured by high Calvinists,



ian green

which some clergy found could create despair among the sensitive members of their flocks. In pressing the good news of the Gospel for all he was worth, he was apparently seeking a middle ground between what he called bold presumption of salvation and timorous despair. The faithful should remember, he said, that God had covenanted to forgive ‘(whensover) a sinner (whosoever) shall repent of his sin (whatsoever)’ (Jackson 1612: 39–40; Green 2000: 319–20). Like the moderate Calvinists Preston and Sibbes, and non-Calvinists such as Andrewes and Boys, he reassured the nervous that believers would not be pushed beyond their limits: ‘The least and weakest faith doth as perfectly justify as the greatest and strongest’ (Jackson 1623: 244). He was quick to condemn Catholic theologians for ‘soothing’ men on free will and works, but was also anxious that the elect should not see themselves as freed from the law, but rather be prepared, with the help of grace, to put on the new man and show the fruits of their faith to others. Another favourite text was Matthew 5:20 (‘except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of scribes and pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven’). Preaching on yet another of his favourite texts—Christ stilling the storm on Lake Galilee—he told his listeners (modifying the phrase in Matthew 5:16 that they would have known from the communion service): ‘let our light so shine before men that they may see our good works, and glorify our Father which is in heaven’ (Jackson 1623: 49). From what survives and his long service in Canterbury Cathedral, it would appear that Jackson, like Lydiat, neither courted controversy nor risked baffling his flocks, but preached the Gospel in a didactic and evangelical way that gelled readily with the church’s liturgical year and sacraments, and with the elements of instruction and earnest exhortation to be found in the official Edwardian and Elizabethan formularies, and especially the Prayer Book and homilies.

Parochial Preaching in the 1640s and 1650s Preaching in the parishes during the 1640s and 1650s remains almost as elusive as for the period 1560–1640, partly for the same, partly for different reasons. There is certainly more surviving first-hand evidence in the form of manuscript and printed sermons (by clergy) and sermon notes (by enthusiastic laity and aspiring clergy), but much of this material still reflects preaching in London and major towns rather than the countryside (Green 2006: 246–8; Sheils 2006; 2009b: 19–30). Secondly, the continuities of parish life were badly disrupted, as many episcopalians were ejected and presbyterians and moderate Independents appointed, and as sectaries such as the Baptists and Quakers gathered a congregation from different parishes and set up rival meeting places to the ‘steeple-houses’ (Durston and Maltby 2006). The conclusions we can draw point three ways. In the early 1640s, as in the tense years from the 1530s to the 1560s, preaching again became a dynamic instrument for criticism or defence of the status quo (Sheils 1994; Eales 2002). But then in the late 1640s and the 1650s sectaries with little formal education

preaching in the parishes



or training, women as well as men, revelled in the opportunity to call for a new order to rise from the ruins of the old. This in turn led many of the moderate Episcopalians who remained in post, and many of the conventionally educated ordinands who were then taking a living, to join either a Presbyterian classis or a looser ‘association’ of clergy who sought agreement on a list of basic tenets that all could use in catechizing and in sermons to protect their flocks from what they saw as the dangerous heresies taught by the sectaries. What a congregation heard from their pulpit in the 1640s and 1650s, therefore, probably depended on the pre-war history of the parish and the background and views of its minister, and the presence or absence of serious competition to those views (Hughes 1990; and essays by Hughes, Bell, and Eales in Durston and Maltby 2006). It is only from the 1660s to the 1730s that we are in a position to secure something like a full picture of parish preaching, because of a rapid increase in the number of printed sermons (now including many more given in rural or small-town pulpits) and, even more importantly, a striking rise in the number of manuscript sermons that survive in archives up and down England and Wales. The manuscript sermons provide much the best guide to preaching in a typical parish week in, week out, because many of the printed ones had been commissioned to be given on a specific occasion that provoked celebration (a local wedding, a royal birthday, a military victory, or the opening of a new building) or lamentation (a naval defeat or funeral of a local dignitary), and the sponsors then requested publication (Green 2006: 248–53). The manuscript sermons are usually shorter than printed ones (where copies of both survive for comparison), are often divided into parts given at different services on the same day or in succeeding weeks, and, to judge from the dates and places written on them, were in many cases given more than once. Indeed some inexperienced or nervous clergy prepared whole batches of sermons on themes such as Lent and Advent, or catechizing and preparation for communion, and the better organized of them stored these in clearly marked folders. Perhaps a sermon that had gone down well with one set of rural listeners might go down well with another, because it was not unknown for such collections to be passed on to another member of a clerical dynasty, like the Frewens in Sussex, the Rices in South Wales and West Midlands, and the Jagos in Cornwall, or for a minister to leave them for his successor in that living, as at Ditcheat in Somerset (Green 2006: 253–4; see also ESRO Fre 598–9; SBTRO DR 86/2; CRO AD1177; SARS DD/X/PB C/1676). As for style and content, late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century parish sermons shared some characteristics with those given at court or in fashionable pulpits in London and other towns. These included a renewed caution over the use of sermons to drive through dramatic changes in doctrine or ecclesiology, a stress on the duty of obeying authority in church and state, the importance of trying to lead a better life to show the fruits of one’s faith, and reactions against both the highly decorated sermons given by some preachers favoured by the educated elite, and the ‘crumbling’ of scripture texts into scores of doctrines and uses by some ‘godly’ clergy (Green 2006: 242–55; 2009b: 34–6, 44–8). But the avoidance of ‘enthusiasm’, and the plainness of style that both conformists and nonconformists cultivated in the later Stuart period, arguably had many precedents in the sermons of the less ambitious parish clergy of the century before 1640.



ian green

And the stress on faith, morality, and obedience was close to the combination of teaching the basics and exhorting the faithful to shun sin and follow Christ that was found in the homilies and the ‘country divinity’ that was targeted at parishioners in many rural and small-town parishes both before and after the civil wars. The essential nature of parish preaching perhaps changed less between 1560 and 1720 than that provided in more exalted quarters.

Bibliography manuscript sources Bodl. (Bodleian Library Oxford), MS Rawlinson E.23. Sermons of Brian Walton. Bodl. (Bodleian Library Oxford), MSS Rawlinson E75–76 and 168. Sermons of Thomas Lydiat. CCA (Canterbury Cathedral Archives), DCc/Miscellaneous Accounts 52, reverse, pp. 256–245. Thomas Jackson’s notes of his preaching in the Canterbury area. CRO (Cornwall Record Office), AD1177. Jago family sermons. ESRO (East Sussex Record Office), Fre 598–9. Frewen family archive. LUL (Leeds University Library) Ripon Cathedral MSS 16, 20, 22, 26, 30, 38. Sermon notes of Anthony Higgin. SARS (Somerset Archive and Record Service), DD/X/PB C/1676. Ditcheat parish records. SBTRO (Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Records Office, Stratford-upon-Avon), DR 86/2. Sermons of Rhys or Rice family. UWB (University of Wales, Bangor, Department of Archives and Manuscripts), Gwyneddon MS 25. Sermons of John Rogers of Chacombe. YMA (York Minster Archives), MS Add. 18. Copy of Tobie Matthew’s preaching diary. printed sources Baxter, Richard (1655). A Sermon of Judgement. Bernard, Richard (1607). The Faithfull Shepheard. Boys, John (1610). An Exposition of all the Principal Scriptures used in our English Liturgie. Bullinger, Heinrich (1577). Fiftye Godly and Learned Sermons Divided into Five Decades. Collinson, Patrick (1995). ‘The Protestant Cathedral’, in Patrick Collinson, Nigel Ramsay, and Margaret Sparks (eds), A History of Canterbury Cathedral. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 154–203. Coolidge, J. (1970). The Pauline Renaissance in England: Puritanism and the Bible. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cressy, David (1997). Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Durston, Christopher, and Maltby, Judith (2006) (eds). Religion in Revolutionary England. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Eales, Jacqueline (2002). ‘Provincial Preaching and Allegiance in the First English Civil War, 1640–6’, in Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust, and Peter Lake (eds), Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 185–207. Earle, John (1628). Micro-Cosmographie. Or, a Peece of the World Discouered.

preaching in the parishes



Fincham, Kenneth, and Lake, Peter (2006) (eds). Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Tyacke. Woodbridge: Boydell. Gittings, Clare (1988). Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England. Routledge. Green, Ian (1979). ‘The Persecution of “Scandalous” and “Malignant” Parish Clergy during the English Civil War’, English Historical Review, 94/372: 507–31. —— (1989). ‘ “Reformed Pastors” and “Bons curés”: The Changing Role of the Parish Clergy in Early Modern Europe’, in William J. Sheils and Diana Wood (eds), The Ministry: Clerical and Lay. Studies in Church History, 26. Oxford: Blackwell, 249–86. —— (1996). ‘The Christian’s ABC’: Catechism and Catechizing in England c.1530–1740. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— (2000). Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— (2003). ‘Teaching the Reformation: The Clergy as Preachers, Catechists, Authors and Teachers’, in C. Scott Dixon and Luise Schorn-Schütte (eds), The Protestant Clergy of Early Modern Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 156–74, 234–7. —— (2006). ‘Orality, Script and Print: The Case of the English Sermon c. 1530–1700’, in Heinz Schilling and István György Tóth (eds), Religion and Cultural Exchange in Europe, 1400–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 236–55. —— (2009a). Humanism and Protestantism in Early Modern English Education. Aldershot: Ashgate Press. —— (2009b). Continuity and Change in Protestant Preaching in Early Modern England. Dr Williams’s Library. Haigh, Chistopher (2007). The Plain Man’s Pathways to Heaven: Kinds of Christianity in PostReformation England 1570–1640. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harris, Robert (1611). Absaloms Funerall. Houlbrooke, Ralph (1998). Death, Religion, and the Family in England, 1480–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hughes, Ann (1990). ‘The Pulpit Guarded: Confrontations between Orthodox and Radicals in Revolutionary England’, in Anne Laurence, W. R. Owens, and Stuart Sim (eds), John Bunyan and his England, 1628–88. Hambledon Press, 31–50. Hunt, Arnold (2010). The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and their Audiences, 1590–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jackson, Thomas (1603). Davids Pastorall Poeme. —— (1609a). Londons New-Yeeres Gift for the Uncouching of the Foxe. —— (1609b). The Converts Happines. —— (1612). Peters Teares. —— (1622). Iudah must into Captivitie. —— (1623). The Raging Tempest Stilled. Latimer, Hugh (1562). 27 Sermons Preached by the Ryght Reverende . . . Maister Hugh Latimer. Marcombe, David (2004). ‘Gilpin, Bernard (1516–1584)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online edn. Margoliouth, D. S., rev. Nicholas Keene (2004).‘Walton, Brian (1600–1661)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online edn. Milton, Anthony (1995). Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Oates, Ros (2003). ‘Tobie Matthew and the Establishment of the Godly Commonwealth in England, 1560–1606’. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of York. Perkins, William (1592). Prophetica. Cambridge (translated as The Arte of Prophecying, 1607).



ian green

Richardson, William (2004). ‘Boys, John (bap. 1571 d. 1625)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online edn. Rogers, John (1618). The Glory and Happines of a True Christian. —— (1620). A Discourse of Christian Watchfulness. Sanderson, Robert (1656). Twenty Sermons Formerly Preached. Seaver, Paul (2006). ‘Puritan Preachers and their Patrons’, in Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake (eds), Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Tyacke. Woodbridge: Boydell, 128–42. Sheils,William J. (1979). The Puritans in the Diocese of Peterborough 1558–1610. Northamptonshire Record Society, 30. Northampton. —— (1994). ‘Provincial Preaching on the Eve of the Civil War: Some West Riding Fast Sermons’, in Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (eds), Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Patrick Collinson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 290–312. —— (2004). ‘Matthew, Tobie (1544?–1628)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online edn. —— (2006). ‘John Shawe and Edward Bowles: Civic Preachers at Peace and War’, in Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake (eds), Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Tyacke. Woodbridge: Boydell, 209–23. Sherlock, Peter (2004). ‘Lydiat, Thomas (1572–1646)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online edn. Stout, Harry S. (1986). The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England. New York: Oxford University Press. Sutton, C. W., rev. Margaret Sparks (2004). ‘Jackson, Thomas (1570/71–1646)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online edn. Wilkins, John (1646). Ecclesiastes, or, a Discourse concerning the Gift of Preaching. Wood, Anthony à (1813–20). Athenae Oxonienses, ed. Philip Bliss. 6 vols. Oxford: F. C. and J. Rivington.

chapter 9

women a n d ser mons jeanne shami

After the Reformation, sermons were perhaps the most significant expression of the English church’s values and authority. They record the pressures, conflicts, and uneasy compromises exerted by religion on the institution, and on the lives and consciences of its members. It could be assumed, however, that women—while often the subject of and sometimes the intended audience for sermons—were separated from their practice, and the religious, political, social, and literary influence they exerted. This chapter challenges this assumption about how sermons negotiated women’s private and public religious roles. It does so by examining four ways in which women participated in a religious, political, and literary culture enlarged by vernacular preaching: first as subjects, but then as patrons, consumers, and preachers of sermons.

Women as Subjects of Sermons This chapter begins with the way women were represented in sermons, primarily those preached at funerals. Prescriptive tracts originally based on sermons—such as William Whateley’s A Bride-Bush (1619) and William Gouge’s Of Domesticall Duties (1622)—and sermons marking other occasions—such as weddings—ought not to be ignored, but the funeral sermon’s exemplary eulogies are more properly our subject. This is because they embed a theoretical and conventional discourse on the duties of wives and on female (religious) identity in general within the actual circumstances of their subjects’ lives (Ezell 1993). Discussing sermons for evidence of the ‘boisterous [seventeenth-century] public conversation’ on these matters also raises the question of whether sermons were as prescriptive and constraining for men as for women. While we will not examine the ‘rich array of tracts aiming to persuade, entertain, and satirize rather than simply or chiefly to instruct’ (Hausknecht 2001: 85), this discussion of sermons on women’s duties and the qualities deemed exemplary in their lives will be informed by that hermeneutic context.



jeanne shami

Distrusted initially as unscriptural, tainted by association with Roman Catholic doctrines of purgatory and prayers for the dead, and polluted by ‘mercenary praisemongering’ (Tromly 1983: 295–6), funeral sermons eventually flourished in the Church of London, reaching their apogee in the 1640s and 1650s. Historians have been slow to accept them as sources, stemming from Patrick Collinson’s caution that the Puritan funeral sermon, in particular, is too formulaic to yield biographical information (Collinson 1977; see also McCullough, Chapter 12, this volume).1 For many readers, the genre erases its subjects’ particular identities. Elizabeth Hodgson concludes that the popular sermon collection Threnoikos, or The House of Mourning, a hagiographic text first printed in 1640, but reprinted with additions over the century, reinvents ‘Foxe’s public martyrs as private, domestic and domesticated saints’ by de-individualizing its subjects within ‘paradigms of domestic piety’ (2006: 2, 8). The same has been said of Edward Rainbow’s funeral sermon for Anne Clifford (Rainbow 1677). Despite Clifford’s ‘forthright views, her assertive fight for her rights to vast tracts of family land, and the determined energy with which she sought to improve and expand her properties right up to the end of her life’, in Rainbow’s sermon she becomes ‘a mirror in which other women may view a purely domestic sphere of action’ (Becker 2003: 97–8; see also App. II.9 and Fig. 18). In part, the impression that sermons eulogized women as conventional types resulted from presenting a deceased woman as ‘the reiteration and compendium of all the holy women of scripture’ (Lewalski 1993: 198). Several sermons for anonymous women adopt a roll call of biblical examples of conventional domesticity and piety: ‘For obedience, she was a Sarah: for wisdom a Rebecca: for meeknesse a Hanna: for a discreet temper, an Abigal: for good huswivery, a Martha: for piety, a Mary, a Lydia. I know not any necessary thing, that belonged to make up a good Christian, but in some measure it pleased God to bestow it on her’ (Featley 1672: 170). Another sermon by Featley praises its subject in virtually identical terms: ‘a Sarah for obedience, Rebecca for wisdome, Mary for piety, Martha for houswifery, a true Lydea, she heard, and God opened her heart, that she attended to those things she heard. A true Dorcas, full of good works’ (1672: 300). Despite the conventionality of these examples, the lives and deaths of godly women stood as particular ‘contemporary evidence of the biblical ideals in the reformed faith’ (O’Hara 2006: 78; emphasis added), not simply as evidence of their Christianity. Their obedience was compared to that of Sarah in her marriage to Abraham, their spiritual nurturing of their households to that of Eunice, their piety to that of the Virgin Mary, their domestic skills to those of Martha, and their charitable works to those of Dorcas. Women were also compared to their namesakes (O’Hara 2006: 80). The popularity of Sarah—the model of wifely submission and obedience—as a name for women in the seventeenth century is attributed to ‘the powerful influence of preachers and authors of godly advice’ (Peters 2003: 326–7). In the special case of women rulers, the examples of Esther, Judith, and particularly Deborah were deployed as models of femininity, 1 For types of conforming members of the Protestant Church of England, I follow the terminology defined by Anthony Milton (1995: 8; see also Doerksen 1997: 22).

women and sermons



spirituality, and governance (Stocker 1998: 48), although usually as ‘masculine’ exceptions to normative female behaviour. All three were often commended for taking on masculine qualities such as courage and bravery in order to perform tasks unnatural to their sex, a view adopted by Elizabeth herself, who justified her rule by insisting that ‘she was an exceptional, masculine woman, with the “heart and stomach of a king” ’ (1998: 86). Conflating Esther with Elizabeth I and Anne Boleyn before her, for example, the Protestant John Aylmer legitimized female authority as a holy exception, ordained by God to deliver England’s truly faithful from Roman tyranny and Catholic heresy. Aylmer argued that sometimes God appoints women to leadership positions, just as he did in the Old Testament when he lifted up Deborah and Judith to save the Hebrews: ‘He saved his people by the hande of a woman poore Deborah . . . He cut of the head of the proude captayne Olophernes by the hande of a weake woman [Judith]’ (1559: sig. B3v). Esther’s story exemplified either ‘wifely submission’ or ‘female governance’ in the public sphere (Summer 2005: 144), while Judith’s story could illustrate ‘Womens unnatural aggressiveness’ or ‘female triumph over the venality of men’ (Stocker 1998: 52). As these sermons indicate, however,‘female power’ was regarded as ‘the exception to the rule’, and Elizabeth I, in being equated with the figures of Esther and Judith in the advancement of Protestant causes, would come to be regarded ‘as the paradigm of that exception’ (1998: 86). Most frequently, however, Elizabeth was cast as a contemporary Deborah (Christian 1993; Walsham 2003; Osherow 2004). John Prime’s 1585 Accession Day sermon stressed Elizabeth–Deborah’s peacetime leadership: God ‘made her our Queene . . . and as a verie Debora, to execute justice, equitie and trueth in this English Nation’ (Prime 1585: sig. B3r). But, overwhelmingly, preachers stressed her providential role in establishing England as a Protestant nation, ‘not so much saluting her achievements as outlining a set of ideals to be aspired to’ (Walsham 2003: 147), and throwing in the ‘iconoclastic, proto-Protestant exploits’ of the godly kings David, Jehosaphat, Josiah, and Hezekiah for good measure (2003: 146). As Peter Lake’s subtle analysis of Jane Ratcliffe’s funeral sermon of 1662 has demonstrated, these sermons’ ‘ideological rationale’ lay in the ‘congruence between the image produced in the pulpit and the recollections of the auditory’, ensuring that the lives revealed individualized characters (1987: 160). Houlbrooke’s perusal of over 1,300 printed funeral sermons led him to ‘a strong impression of their rich variety, of the adaptation of conventional patterns to meet particular circumstances, and of the extent to which authors treasured distinctive elements of personal character’ (1998: 320). That the religious image of femininity in Protestant funeral sermons is comparatively ‘positive’ (O’Hara 2006: 85) is complicated, however, in that women were often deemed exemplary precisely to the extent that they demonstrated male qualities of ‘strength, wisdom, understanding’ (Peters 2003: 197) or behaviour defined by a ‘male, often clerical, point of view’ (Warnicke 1994: 172). Moreover, the fact that funeral sermons for women were often reprinted reinforces the view that ‘preachers of such sermons thought that not only women but men should learn’ from them, since, in their religious struggles, all Christians were weak women (Peters 2004: 152, 161).



jeanne shami

Since women’s lives were typically divided into three stages—maidenhood, marriage, and widowhood—preachers adjusted their emphases accordingly. Funeral sermons for young women stressed godliness cultivated through prayer, meditation, and church attendance over domestic skills or the preservation of chastity (O’Hara 2006: 105). Sermons for married woman focused on religious practices that ‘were overwhelmingly private and domestic: prayer and meditation, reading and note-taking, catechizing children and servants’ (Carlson 2000: 588). Finally, sermons for widows portrayed them as ‘self-sufficient, self-governing, godly women’ (O’Hara 2006: 134), praised for ‘spiritual exercises, pious virtues and charitable giving’ (2006: 136). The official Homilies (1547, 1562, and 1571) were even more obviously prescriptive. Perhaps expressing anxiety about a woman ruler, these homilies, required to be read every Sunday where there was no sermon (see Null, Chapter 17, this volume), made the most personal aspects of women’s lives a matter of public as well as private morality, a practice reinforced in funeral sermons. Obedience was the underlying theme of all the homilies, particularly that on marriage (added to the Elizabethan revision of 1562) that urged the husband to be ‘the leader and auctor of love’, yielding to the woman only in deference to her inherent weakness: ‘For the woman is a weak creature, not endued with like strength and constancy of mind, therefore they be the sooner disquieted, and they be the more prone to all weak affections and dispositions of mind.’ Women were advised to obey their husbands ‘and cease from commanding and perform subjection’, lest they turn ‘all things upside down’ (Aughterson 1995: 23–4). Some sermons challenged prescriptive roles by depicting women acting against conventional expectations of conduct; witness Katherine Brettergh upbraiding her husband for being angry on the Lord’s Day and for oppressing poor tenants by collecting rents (Harrison 1602). Donne’s commemorative sermon for Lady Danvers (Donne 1627), who had defied social and religious norms in marrying a second husband substantially younger than herself, emphasized the couple’s compatibility rather than her subjection, and praised her for overseeing the family’s religious observances, a role generally assigned to the husband. Significantly, preachers did not confine themselves to female exemplars even for less public figures. Katherine Brettergh was said to be mild of nature as Jacob before Esau and her heart was tender before God like the heart of Josiah. Katherine Stubbes was ‘ravished with the same spirit as David was’ (O’Hara 2006: 80), and Lady Frances Roberts’s grief over the death of godly divines was compared to St Ambrose’s (Carlson 2000: 581). Biblical exemplars of bravery and masculine boldness were also offered. Widows, for example, were presented with the example of Judith, who built a ‘privy chamber’ in her house where she fasted and prayed with her maids (rather than remarrying) (O’Hara 2006: 133–4). Increasingly during the period, but especially in the 1640s and 1650s, women were praised not just as exemplars of passive piety but ‘as propagators of religious advice and instruction, both within and beyond their family spheres’ (Parish 1992: 38). Lady Anne Harcourt is commended for enforcing a household regimen of Sunday services, including hearing ‘the word read’, examining her maidservants on the sermon’s content, and repeating it for their benefit (Hall 1664: 54–5). Women are also praised as ‘capable

women and sermons



religious speakers and mediators of the Word, exerting their religious influence beyond their families, over their ministers, and sometimes over the whole parish’ (Parish 1992: 38–9, referring mainly to sermons after 1640). Samuel Ainsworth (1645) noted the public nature of Dorothy Hanbury’s discourse (Parish 1992: 39), and Margaret Corbet was praised (Ainsworth 1645) for leaving many volumes in her handwriting of sermons she had heard. Some sermons even extol ‘prophecy’ as an acceptable female virtue (Parish 1992: 41). Rainbow eulogized Anne Clifford for her ability to discourse on matters ranging from ‘female domestic matters to complex theological doctrine’ with ‘great sharpness of Wit’ (Lewalski 1993: 139). While most evidence derives from printed sermons, the intriguing case study of Martha Moulsworth is manuscript based. In 1632, Moulsworth wrote one of the first autobiographical poems in the English language. The poem is a significant social and literary artefact that effectively communicates the social constraints as well as subtle emotions Martha experienced concerning her three marriages, her children, and her lack of a man’s education. Like the poem, Moulsworth’s funeral sermon, preached by Thomas Hassall in 1646, reveals her extraordinary self-consciousness as author, wife, and patron of her commemorator (whom she hand-picked to preach her sermon). Together, the ‘Memorandum’ and the funeral sermon provide a rich archive of materials for comparing Martha’s self-depiction with the portrait painted by her preacher. One comparison must suffice. On the topic of marriage, Moulsworth’s poem suggests that, while she saw her life falling into the sequential (and conventional) roles of daughter, wife, and widow, she also articulated ‘the actual complexity of such roles and how they might be subject to change or even challenge’ (Evans 1995: 39). Her depiction of her three marriages combines ‘charity and truth, idealism and realism’ (p. 23), especially when Martha distinguishes her third marriage by emphasizing her partner’s special characteristics, or as she mixes resentment at the necessity of marriage with realistic acceptance of it as an institution. Of her first marriage, she notes that ‘I did nott bind my selfe in Mariadge’ until the age of 21, concluding that ‘My first knott held five yeares, & eight months more’ (pp. 50, 52). Her second husband is dispatched in two lines. Her third husband, Bevill Moulsworth, however, was ‘a louely man, & kind’ (p. 57), and Martha devotes sixteen lines to describing their relationship: ‘was never man so Buxome to his wife / wth him I led an easie darlings life. / I had my will in house, in purse in Store / whatt would a weomen old or yong haue more?’ (pp. 65–8). Indeed, Moulsworth’s poem demonstrates that sometimes companionate marriages were achieved, while it ‘exemplifies (and in some cases subtly modifies) many of the ideals championed by Renaissance advocates of worthy wives and marriages’ (p. 55). Hassall’s sermon confirms the image of the ‘good and decent woman’ that emerges from Moulsworth’s poem but only by idealizing her: ‘The Moulsworth [of the poem] who could propose a women’s university, or boast about the intellectual capacities of women, or reflect wryly on the marriage market, or allude to sexual pleasures, or fight and beat a vicar in court, is altogether missing here’ (Evans 1995: 70). Hassall’s portrait of her is as a conventional woman, exemplifying the virtues of ‘Integrity, Justice, Pietye, / and well formed Charitye’, and making her life a ‘patterne of / Modesty, discression, /



jeanne shami

Hospitality, Frugality / to others of her Sexe’ (Evans 1995: 252). Such a portrait erases Moulsworth’s determination not to marry until the age of 21 and her evident partiality towards her third husband (Hassall insists that ‘shee / would many tymes saye / They were all so good, / that she knew not / which was the better’ (1995: 252). The cumulative effect of Hassal’s idealizations of a subject whom we know through her own eyes demonstrates the difficulties funeral sermons pose as records of women’s lives.

Women as Patrons of Sermons Patronage of preaching, whether in the most influential and powerful court circles or at local, domestic levels, exerted considerable religious and political influence. The historical narrative is fragmentary, but suggests an important role for women—whether as monarchs or housewives—in promoting and sustaining particular preaching cultures in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Even before the Reformation, preaching was part of the royal court’s religious practice, although the number of preaching occasions was probably far fewer than after the Reformation, when ‘powerful orators on both sides pitt[ed] their rhetorical skills against each other in an on-going pulpit debate over the future of the English church’ (McCullough 1998: 52). Queens and consorts could exert substantial influence over that debate. Two of Henry’s wives and his daughter Elizabeth advanced their reform agendas at least in part through patronage of preaching. Most historians present Anne Boleyn’s patronage of oppositional, reform-minded preachers and the printed vernacular books that supported their missions as one cause of her execution in 1536. Boleyn’s patronage of evangelicals such as Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Shaxton ‘gave the reformers a foothold in the court itself as early as 1530’ (McCullough 1998: 54). Eric Ives notes further that Anne organized an ‘evangelical’ preaching campaign advocating ‘the diversion of monastic endowments to better uses’ (1994: 400). George Bernard, however, challenges this conventional view of Anne as a ‘great patron of evangelicals’ (1993: 2), uncovering more complex personal and political motivations behind her allegedly reformist actions and patronage (1993: 8). Whatever Anne Boleyn’s influence on preaching, we can be more certain that Katherine Parr was instrumental in ensuring the ascendancy of Protestants and in implementing evangelical policies that went beyond those officially permitted by the Crown, including Bible reading (King 1985a: 45). Parr and her circle, which included the martyred Anne Askew, sponsored Protestant preachers and professional authors who ‘turned out a stream of Reformist sermons’ (King 1985a: 44), and she was reported to have instituted the daily practice in Lent of hearing hour-long sermons (Haugaard 1969: 352). Elizabeth’s ‘negative attitude towards preaching, which Protestants regarded as the ordinary means of salvation’, made her an ‘odd kind of protestant’ (Collinson 2004). Despite her commitment to achieving a stable, religious settlement by authorizing

women and sermons



sermons at least once a month, and homilies every Sunday where there was no sermon, and despite her awareness that sermons could effect social control, she disliked them, preferring to regulate them where she could (as in her monitoring of Paul’s Cross preachers). In fact, she preferred the official Homilies, ‘originally envisioned as a stopgap substitute for sermons’ (Collinson 2004: 7) as safer, although she did not appreciate their being applied to herself. Famously, Elizabeth refused to hear sermons on excesses in dress, and practised a code of behaviour at odds with that upheld in the homily on marriage by declaring her own unwed state unique—and legitimate (Levin 1983: 181). However, despite a ‘personal distaste for sermon-centred piety’ (McCullough 1998: 3), Elizabeth nurtured some preachers as personal favourites, preserved pre-Reformation court sermon customs, and patronized a sophisticated court preaching style (McCullough 1998: 6). Increasingly, however, the relationship between Elizabeth and her preachers became strained, evident in challenges to Elizabeth’s authority by preachers such as Edward Dering, John Jewel, Thomas Drant, Richard Curteys, attacks on courtly behaviour (William Barlow), and personal comments on the Queen’s advancing age (Anthony Rudd) (Christian 1993: 561). Just as reform-minded queens and consorts promoted preaching that supported their aims, their Catholic counterparts influenced preaching cultures as well. The overtly Catholic Queen Mary (reigned 1553–8) used sermons, both delivered and printed, to spread Catholicism among church officials and laity. By requiring preachers to obtain licences and by placing the printed books of early reformers on an index of forbidden authors, she was able to inhibit dissenting voices. Furthermore, Mary assented to the print dissemination of official homilies and sermons, thereby directing the messages delivered. Because preaching was authorized by the Council of Trent in a 1546 decree that made ‘personal episcopal preaching’ compulsory for the first time in the history of Western Christendom (Wizeman 2006: 28), Marian bishops took this command seriously, requiring clergy to read from collections such as Edmund Bonner’s Homilies (1555) and Thomas Watson’s Holsome and Catholyke Doctryne (1558), if they would not compose homilies themselves. Mary understood ‘the importance of preachers and preaching for the re-establishment of English Catholicism, and took steps to counter the Protestant evangelism of the previous reign—what she termed “those errors and false opinions disseminated and spread abroad by the late preachers”—with “good preaching” ’ (McCullough 1998: 58). The religious patronage exercised by Catholic queens and consorts of England in the seventeenth century—Anne of Denmark (d. 1619), Henrietta Maria (d. 1669), Catharine of Braganza (reigned 1660–85), and Mary of Modena (reigned 1685–8)—has been relatively unexamined. Anne of Denmark expressed her opposition to the public religious policies of her husband, James VI & I, via a separate court, entourage, and patronage, the Roman Catholic rite of confession, and pro-Spanish politics. Rejecting the restrictive role defined for her by Protestant clergy such as Thomas Playfere and Andrew Willet, Anne engaged in many gestures of resistance, including refusing communion despite patronage of preachers with solid conformist credentials as her sworn chaplains and, near her death, the ministration of priests at Hampton Court. McCullough characterizes



jeanne shami

her as ‘one of Jacobean England’s consummate “church papists” ’ (1998: 170), although she kept her Catholicism a matter of private faith and did not become the political focus of an explicitly Catholic court faction. Henrietta Maria’s household was ‘a centre for the introduction of CounterReformation Catholicism in its French version into a rabidly anti-papal England’ (Hibbard 1991: 404). Charles I’s queen consort intervened on behalf of Catholic subjects and created a court atmosphere friendly to Catholics, although this did not result in overt patronage beyond her household of pro-Catholic ecclesiastical officials (Hibbard 1991: 405). In fact, as a foreigner and as a Catholic, Henrietta Maria was the focus of much anti-royalist opposition that was ‘particularly damaging’ to her husband in events leading up to the Civil War (White 2006: 119; Mendelson and Crawford 1998: 368). Catherine of Braganza, queen consort of Charles II, was a woman of deep faith and exemplary piety, but her public profile was negligible (Wynne 2004: 8). The religious patronage of James II’s Protestant daughter Mary, who held the throne jointly with her husband William from 1688, was an energetic patron of Protestant preachers (see Claydon, Chapter 24, this volume). To ensure the permanence of the Revolution of 1688, Mary set a pious example, surrounding herself with clergymen who had campaigned against popery under Charles II and James II, and publicizing the ‘multitude of plain, useful and Practical Sermons, which She approv’d of ’ (Manningham 1695: 10). After her death the average number of sermons commissioned per year dropped from seventeen to four (Speck 2004: 21). While queens and consorts were important in promoting official religious cultures, women at lower social, even domestic, levels influenced their circles as patrons of preachers. One such group were the ‘Shunamites’ or nurses of the Reformation, epitomized in the figure of Mary Glover (the niece of reformer Hugh Latimer). Glover (and other ‘nurses’) exercised patronage by increasing numbers of sermons and sponsoring itinerant preachers. Their practical support included supplying food and lodging (most famously for Paul’s Cross preachers), nursing preachers who were ill, and arranging preaching venues for reformers and conservatives alike. Wabuda concludes that by ‘inviting clergymen to preach, or housing them, they sponsored sermons which encouraged or inhibited reform in many places’ (1990: 343). Clerical wives also contributed to serious and ‘relatively systematic’ religious instruction (Charlton 1999: 216), thanks in part to the sufferings of the first generation of bishops’ wives, who endured official and popular hatred in the 1540s and 1550s, yet within a century emerged as respected members of English society (Prior 1985). Not all clerical wives were the same, however. Apparently, women in the family of Philip and Katherine Henry in the later seventeenth century accepted unquestioningly the ideology of the family as a little church embodied in their patriarchal clerical family, consciously subordinating their unimportant domestic ‘preaching’ to their husbands’ important public roles (Crawford 1993). They can be contrasted with Dorothy Hazzard, who in the 1650s refused on grounds of conscience to attend the service of common prayer, even when read by her Puritan husband. Instead, she chose to enter during the final psalm in time to hear his sermon, and ultimately she founded a separate congregation (Briggs 1986: 339).

women and sermons



Like clerical wives, other women over this period, particularly in nonconformist, separatist, and recusant circles, practised extensive patronage crucial to the survival of religious preaching ranging from hospitality, provision of ecclesiastical benefices, and the founding of churches, to direct grants of money (including bequests). Women founded lectureships, offered their homes for religious services, harboured likeminded preachers, provided moral and financial support for persecuted ministers, intervened in parish politics to promote their candidates, created underground religious networks, and influenced the printing and publication of sermons. Wealthier women employed suspended preachers as private chaplains and provided ecclesiastical benefices for their chosen clergy (Greaves 1985: 78–81; Mendelson and Crawford 1998: 391–3). On the Protestant side, the female sustainers of the Marian martyrs decisively influenced English Protestantism (Freeman 2000). These women formed the bulk of their covert congregations, sheltering particular preachers, providing them with money in prison, smuggling books and letters, and engaging in passionate written debate on issues such as predestination. On the Catholic side, aristocratic women suffered for their faith, ‘a number of them famous for harbouring secular priests and Jesuits during the fiercest times of persecution’ (Rowlands 1985: 157–9; Eales 1998: 94; Marotti 1999: 9). The role of women in appointing domestic chaplains in wealthier households also promoted certain preaching orientations. Dorothy Lawson, an energetic Catholic proselytizer despite her Protestant husband, built and lived in St Anthony’s in 1616, a centre for Jesuits in the north-east of England (Bossy 1975: 156–7). Lady Montague’s house at Battle Abbey included a chapel complete with pulpit where ‘almost every week was a sermon made’ during Elizabeth’s reign (quoted in Hanlon 1966: 382). Reform-minded women such as Lady Anne Bacon furthered their religion by illegally sheltering delicensed preachers, including those who preached ‘improvised sermons’ instead of reading the prescribed homilies (Schleiner 1994: 39). Lady Isabel Bowes, on the radical fringes of Puritanism, gave £1,000 a year to maintain preachers where there were none. Unlike the conservative Lady Hoby, Bowes promoted an ‘aggressive’ form of religion by patronizing ‘silenced’ ministers (Newman 1999: 419). These women formed strong, long-lasting relationships with their clergy, building clerical networks of considerable complexity and variety with consequences for the stability of English religious communities and structures throughout the period (Willen 1992: 571–7). The patronage of powerful court women was also extensive. Lucy Countess of Bedford’s enormous cultural influence extended to her patronage of reform-minded preachers such as John Burges and Nicholas Byfield, whose printed sermons, dedicated to her, she had heard ‘with great attention’ (Lewalski 1993: 103). Lady Anne Clifford was also an avid patron of preachers (including John Donne), and patron of church building (Fig. 18; see Rhatigan, Chapter 6, this volume). She supported divinity students, including one Dr Fairfax (probably Henry Fairfax), to whom she gave £40 a year, her first husband’s chaplains (Henry King and Brian Duppa), and Bishop George Morley of Winchester. She is also supposed to have sent £1,000 to two or three of her chaplains when they were forced to flee the country (Williamson 1922: 306).



jeanne shami

fig. 18 St Ninian, Ninekirks, Westmoreland. Built by the great preaching patron Lady Anne Clifford. The fittings, including canopied family pews (l.), pulpit (r.), and chancel screen, are all original. In a laurel garland above the communion table are the builder’s initials (‘AP’ for Anne Countess of Pembroke), and the consecration date ‘1660’.

Women as Consumers, Transmitters, and Audience for Sermons There is little evidence upon which to construct a reliable account of women as consumers or audiences of sermons in early modern England. Hull’s study of English Books for Women 1475–1670 (1988) shows that approximately one-eighth of the 163 titles surveyed were ‘devotional works (prayer books, treatises, sermons, polemics, eulogies)’ (Bell 2002: 435–6). Studies like Hull’s, Bell notes, which aim to define a ‘female literature’, will ‘remain impressionistic’ (2002: 438) until they recognize the often-hidden history of female authorship and readership illuminated by the framework of book history. Using this approach exposes the intricate connections between ‘women in the material production of print (as printers, publisher/booksellers, binders, mercuries, hawkers)’ and ‘women as consumers of print (buying, owning, and using books)’ (2002: 432). Without reliable statistics of women’s readings, one must ‘turn to detailed case studies of the reading practices of a handful of individual women’ (2002: 444) to get closer to what women read. Similarly, ‘[e]vidence of book ownership can also be found in wills and inventories,

women and sermons



though such evidence is rarely unambiguous . . . [and] has so far yielded relatively little evidence for women book owners’ (2002: 446). Heidi Brayman Hackel’s study of the Countess of Bridgewater’s library challenges the view that few women developed personal libraries. Hackel shows that, despite methodological challenges in reconstructing and interpreting early modern book ownership, especially when the book owner is a woman, detailed records—including ownership stamps and signatures in extant books, references in journals and letters, passages in commonplace books, bequests in wills, and lists of probate and household inventories— attest to the existence of women’s private libraries. That Lady Egerton’s 241-volume library did not ‘warrant attention’ in her time leads Hackel to conclude that ‘we must expand our notions of early modern women as consumers of books’ (2005: 253). Lady Anne Clifford’s diary from 1616–19 (see App. II.9), coupled with household account books and portraits of her throughout her life (most notably the portrait where she is flanked by forty-eight identifiable books, including sermons by John Donne, Henry King, and Joseph Hall), exemplifies how books were part of the active intellectual life and the public self-conception of high-ranking women. Analyses of the collections of Elizabeth Puckering, Frances Wolfreston, and Anne Sadleir conclude similarly. David McKitterick, in particular, examines the methodological and evidentiary challenges facing the historian of women’s book ownership, concluding that ‘much of the shared existence and experience of print and manuscript that was the daily life of [his subject] Elizabeth Puckering and her husband has been all but obliterated from memory’ (2000: 380). For Anne Sadleir, the documentary evidence reveals a person engaged closely with political and religious controversy, usually constructed through the medium of manuscript rather than print. This reminds us that historical recovery focused on sermons will have to identify manuscript sermons, notes, and annotations, which Arnold Hunt cautions are not as ‘private’ or ‘personal’ as we might suppose (2004: 225). These women’s collections yield fascinating evidence of religious tastes. Frances Wolfreston’s collection emphasized what Morgan calls ‘leisure reading’, but she also possessed William Worship’s sermon The Christians Mourning Garment (1636), and annotations in her books offer ‘unequivocal evidence not only of reading but of critical enjoyment’ (Bell 2002: 447). Half of the Countess of Bridgewater’s library comprised religious books that included treatises, sermons (including several by John Donne), and doctrinal books; Anne Sadleir circulated manuscript sermons as gifts, as a scribal copy of two manuscript sermons by John Donne indicates (Shami 2007: 112); Elizabeth Puckering owned a copy of Donne’s sermons. Whether any of these women read the sermons they owned is another matter. Moreover, for women not among the educated elite, literacy rates are contentious and ‘readership for printed texts was limited by factors of geography, social status, and, possibly, religious affiliation’ (Bell 2002: 444). On the importance of examining records of book ownership and transference, Collinson, Hunt, and Walsham emphasize that books were important items of property that ‘could pass between the sexes, or cross social boundaries’ by being loaned, given, sold, or bequeathed. For example, when Margaret Barret divided her books among her grandchildren in the early 1630s, she left a New Testament, a ‘service book’, and Samuel



jeanne shami

fig. 19 Hugh Latimer preaching before Edward VI in the Preaching Place at Whitehall. One of the many iconic woodcuts from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (1563).

Smith’s David’s Blessed Man of 1635 to her male grandchildren. To her female grandchildren, she left Arthur Dent’s Plain Mans Path-Way, and a copy of Henry Smith’s sermons, ‘with the proviso that “my daughter Collyns is to have the use of the service book and the book of sermons during her life” ’ (Collinson, Hunt, and Walsham 2002: 64). As audiences for preaching, women constituted ‘by far the largest part of the parish church’s congregation’ (Charlton 1999: 154), a fact attributed by contemporaries to their natural piety (although William Gouge complained that his female auditors murmured and shifted in their seats in dissatisfaction at his sermons on women’s domestic duties) (Kusunoki 1992: 200). Emblematic images of godly and faithful women ‘proliferated’ after the Reformation (King 1985b: 41), including images depicting women as the audience for sermons. The presence of aristocratic and commoner women on the title page of the Great Bible (1539; see Fig. 4) shows commitment to ‘universal accessibility of the vernacular bible’ (King 1985b: 43), although authority is maintained as women and men hear the word through the pulpit rather than reading it themselves (King 1985b: 46). A woodcut entitled ‘A description of the pulpit wherein M. Latymer preached before Kyng Edward the vi’ (Fig. 19) depicts Latimer preaching in 1549 before Edward surrounded by a crowd of gentry, scholars, and clergy in the courtyard of the palace of Whitehall (Foxe 1563: 1353). In the woodcut, the solitary woman’s central location ‘focuses attention on her reading the Bible during the sermon. The scene embodies an implicit appeal for the literacy of women as well as men so that all people may understand

women and sermons



the scriptures for themselves’ (King 1985b: 41). Other woodcuts depict three women reading the Bible at the base of the pulpit (Foxe 1570: i. 1483) and listening to the sermon (King 1985b: 47–9). What is new is the extension of these types of special women to ‘generic types’ symbolizing the ‘literacy and pious devotion’ appropriate to all womankind (King 1985b: 50). Similarly, in Gipkyn’s painting of a Jacobean sermon at Paul’s Cross (see Fig. 21; see also McCullough, Chapter 12, this volume), women attending the sermon are depicted prominently in the foreground. Women’s attendance at churches outside their parishes and on days other than Sunday was regularly noted. Simonds D’Ewes, well-known sermon ‘gadder’ in the 1620s, could not compete with the nine or ten sermons per week attended by Elizabeth Juxon, wife of a London merchant. At home, women repeated sermons verbatim to themselves and their households, supplemented by notes taken at the sermon or made later at home. Particularly well documented is Margaret Hoby’s diary (1599–1605), which reveals her interest in sermons by prominent ministers such as Richard Greenham, William Perkins, and Hugh Latimer (Bell 2002: 447). Hoby ‘read books on religious subjects and made notes in them; she heard, almost daily, readings by her spiritual advisor . . . she heard sermons, took notes while listening and read printed sermons; she asked her husband to take notes of sermons she could not attend, which he then read aloud to her’ (Bell 2002: 449). She exercised considerable discrimination in her sermon-going, lamenting the misery of God’s visible church after hearing a particularly unsatisfactory sermon by William Palmer, though approving of Stephen Egerton’s sermons, which she attended with friends at Blackfriars. However, she found the ministrations of establishment clerics arid, commenting of a Mr Smith that she had heard nothing worth noting. Women also translated sermons, primarily during the Elizabethan period; this was a socially accepted form of female ‘authorship’ practised by Mildred Cecil (who translated a sermon by St Basil), her sister Anne (who translated fourteen sermons by Italian Calvinist Bernard Ochino), and Anne Locke (who translated Calvin’s sermons) (Collinson 1965; Lamb 1985). In fact, women’s roles as auditors, and subsequently ‘preachers’, to their families underlies the first English dictionary, A Table Alphabeticall (1604). Compiled by deprived and disgraced Puritan preacher Robert Cawdrey, the dictionary was intended for women ‘or any other unskilfull persons’ so they may understand ‘many hard English wordes, which they shall heare or read in Scriptures, Sermons, or elsewhere’ (Brown 2001: 134). The author casts women as exemplary, because malleable, auditors of the vernacular, plain style recommended by Puritan preachers, and exposes the fertile contradiction by which women are exemplary both as passive receivers and as active propagators of the word.

Women as Preachers Although it is a truism that women preachers were not part of the mainstream religious culture of the Church of England, Suzanne Trill’s discovery of a manuscript sermon (c.1606) by Anna Walker, court lady to Anne of Denmark, constitutes an exciting



jeanne shami

moment in the history of women as preachers. The entire manuscript contains a sermon and dedications, exegetical passages of biblical texts from woman to woman, emblematic coloured drawings, poems, biographical materials, and other writings in Walker’s gothic, italic, and secretary hands. The originality of Walker’s sermon achievement is stunning, beginning with her choice of a text (Colossians 4:5: ‘Walke wisely: towards them that are without, and redeeme the time’) that puns on her surname, but developed throughout the manuscript’s expert deployment of the ‘discursive strategies of her more well-known, sermon-writing male contemporaries’, including their forms of exegesis, rhetoric, and poetics (Trill 2002: 201–2). The self-referential aspects of the sermon extend beyond the choice of text into the dedication to Queen Anne of Denmark, where Walker depicts herself as a ‘walker’ in the Lord’s garden of true believers, a potential ‘foundation of identification’ between herself and the Queen based on their common interest in the ‘true’ church and on Walker’s ‘high-status Danish connections’ (bolstered by allusions to her father and to the Queen’s father and brothers) (Trill 2002: 202–4). Even Walker’s choice of handwriting for the sermon links her with signifying systems more usually associated with male authorship (Trill 2002: 212). Trill posits that the parts in gothic script encode a semi-private Danish signification, self-consciously used by Walker to support her request for financial succour based on common national identity and history. The provenance of the manuscript, dedicated to Queen Anne of Denmark but later possessed by at least one other woman, Elizabeth Wilbraham, also makes this sermon a key document in this history of women as preachers. The manuscript probably passed quickly from Queen Anne to her chancellor, Sir Roger Wilbraham (and through him to his daughter), in part because of its ill-advised anti-Catholicism (given the Queen’s conversion to Catholicism some time earlier) and perhaps in part because of its unabashed pleas for patronage and financial assistance (Trill 2002: 204–5, 210). This sermon, however, is clearly exceptional, both in its singular origins and in its provenance. It is not known to have been preached, but existed only in written form, circulating among a set of court ladies in the early part of the seventeenth century. The prohibition against women’s preaching—founded on Pauline doctrine—echoed through orthodox reform thinkers such as Calvin and Luther, and was almost universally supported. Luther did, however, cite Deborah as an exception to the rule that men, as more naturally capable, should be the only ones who preach, unless in extenuating circumstances when no qualified or suitable man was available. Perhaps for these reasons, women’s preaching developed among religious radicals, primarily in nonconforming groups (such as Lollards, Quakers, and Baptists) and in an anti-clerical context rather than within the established church. However, despite this prohibition and a strong current mistrusting women’s biblical interpretation (Peters 2003: 323), women preserved and transmitted religious belief from one generation to the next, fulfilling their domestic duties as lay preachers and teachers. Gervase Markham (1615) inveighed against ‘that violence of spirit which many of our (vainly accounted pure) women do, drawing a contempt upon the ordinary ministry . . . usurping to themselves a power of preaching and interpreting the holy word, to which only they ought to be but hearers and believers’

women and sermons



(Aughterson 1995: 247). Richard Brathwaite condemned ‘the strange opinions’ of ‘sheclerks’ and concluded that ‘Women as they are to be no Speakers in the Church, so neither are they to be disputers of controversies of the Church’ (1631: 90). When even reading the Bible was a controversial activity for women, preaching or teaching from it could provoke severe opposition. In the interrogations leading to her execution for heresy, Anne Askew (c.1545–6) denied ‘utterynge the scriptures’, claiming that she ‘knew Paules meanynge so well as he [the Bishop’s chancellor], whych is, I Corinthiorum xiiii, that a woman ought not to speak in the conregacyon by the way of teachyinge’ (quoted in Matchinske 1998: 42). Typical of her ‘rhetorical evasions’ (Matchinske 1998: 42), Askew’s clever definition of ‘congregacyon’ to mean pulpit reveals her strategy of refusing crucial distinctions and labels, and the ‘controlled irony’ with which she discomfits her questioner by using the identity she needs when it best suits her (Matchinske 1998: 85, 41–2). The fact remains, however, that Askew’s claims to religious freedom existed only as long as she stayed out of the public pulpit (Matchinske 1998: 43). The duty to become domestic preachers—at least to children, servants, and occasionally other women—proved especially important in Puritan, nonconforming, and recusant households (Bossy 1975: 40; Greaves 1985: 77; Hoby 1998: 32). Because this teaching had to ‘supplement—and sometime correct—what was learned in the parish church’ (Greaves 1985: 78), the practice became controversial if it involved instructing husbands. William Heale chastised women ‘who weare their testament at their apron-strings, and wil weekely catechize their husbands, citing places, clearing difficulties, & preaching holy sermons too, if the spirit of their devotion move them’ (1609: 35–6). Generally, however, such instruction was a mother’s duty. Oliver Heywood recalled his mother’s repeating passages of sermons remembered from before her marriage, and Lucy Hutchinson could repeat sermons exactly by the age of 4 (Charlton 1999: 158). John Collinges’s funeral sermon for Mary Simpson commended her as an ‘Eminent preacher’, explaining that during her sickness she ‘did more good, to poore soules . . . by telling them her experiences, directing, quickning, exhorting, strengthening, satisfying, them, than God hath honoured any of us who have been preachers of his word, to doe in much more time’ (1649: 66–7). Although even Elizabeth I’s Archbishop Whitgift admitted the possibility that women might preach under extraordinary circumstances, such theoretical permission was rarely exercised in conformist congregations, although we know that radical Protestant women must have been preaching in the 1590s in London, among the Baptists in the Netherlands, and among the Massachusetts Baptists by 1636 (Greaves 1985: 85). London was the main centre after 1640, but we know that women preached all over England and even in Dublin, ‘where women held all the privileges (though not the offices) of male members’ (Thomas 1958: 47). The most advanced supporters of women preachers, in theory and practice, were the Quakers. Among these ‘petticoat preachers’ and ‘apron apostles’, the term ‘preaching’ was not applied only to women who expounded Scriptures in public, but was used to describe ‘a general class of activity which consisted of any voicing of religious opinion—in print, in the church or congregation, in the company of others anywhere, and even in the home in



jeanne shami

disagreement with one’s husband’ (Ludlow 1978: 8). Women described themselves, or were described by others, as ‘prophesying, teaching, or performing some other authorized act, when preaching was prohibited them’, thus challenging the narrow definition of preaching as ‘a sermon delivered by an authorized cleric within the context of a worship service or liturgy’ (Kienzle and Walker 1998: p. xiv). Mary Cary, for example, called what she did prophecy but clearly was practising ‘charismatic exegesis’ in the public domain (Trevett 2000: 36). As a consequence, ‘A complex web of degrees and modes of “speaking” evolved, defining boundaries of women’s rights in the public spheres of the church and the street’ (Trevett 2000: 44). Women preachers such as Margaret Fell seized on ‘conversation’ as something permitted to women, creating a scriptural tradition of women preachers by redefining preaching as ‘conversation, prophecy, and advice, rather than public lecture’ (Donawerth 1998: 193). Certainly, by the 1640s women were teaching in public venues, a development that provoked vociferous opposition. Most of the opposition, however framed, involved questions of authority. This was true even within the more radical sects (especially Independents, Baptists, and Quakers), although women were making no exaggerated claims for their rights or powers. Women could show spiritual leadership provided they did not ‘exercise jurisdiction’ (Laurence 1990: 352). Preaching to women-only meetings was more acceptable to some, but even these aroused ‘suspicion and mockery’ (Laurence 1990: 353). The most strident critic, Thomas Edwards (1646), complained that: Among all the confusion and disorder in church matters, both of opinions and practices, and particularly of all sorts of mechanics taking upon them to preach and baptise, as smiths, taylors, pedlars, weavers, etc., there are also some women preachers in our times who keep constant lectures, preaching weekly to many men and women. (Aughterson 1995: 35)

One such meeting, at which Mrs Attaway and an unnamed gentlewoman preached, produced ‘such laughing, confusion, and disorder . . . that the minister professed he never saw the like: he told me the confusions, horror and disorder which he saw and heard there was unexpressible’ (Aughterson 1995: 36). Women preachers and prophets were ridiculed as ‘tub-preachers’, ‘launderesses who turned their washtubs upside down to use as pulpits’ (Mack 1992: 56), and rebuked as presumptuous, immodest, heretical, subversive, diabolical, disobedient, and sexually deviant (Trevett 2000: 26). In fact, ‘all enemies of the propertied classes and religious establishment, both male and female, were portrayed symbolically as women’ (Mack 1992: 57). Mack concludes that we know only of those women ‘whose actions or writings came to the attention of the authorities, the reading public, or the leaders of the movement’. It is likely, however, that the actual number of preachers and prophets exceeded the 243 names gathered by Mack (1992: 170, 413–24). Most of these preachers survive simply as names, while the content of their sermons is largely unknown (Ludlow 1985: 96). Nonetheless, considerable evidence survives of the practice of itinerant preaching among Quaker women within England, but more remarkably in Massachusetts, Barbados, and, in the case of Mary Fisher (d. 1698), in an effort to convert the sultan of Turkey himself.

women and sermons



Margaret Fell’s Womens Speaking Justified of 1646 tackles head-on the question of women’s public speaking—whether prophesying or preaching—by garnering the biblical support of women such as Esther and Judith as examples of the ‘holy prophetic women’ allowed to preach in contrast to ‘the false church, the great whore, and tattling women, and busie bodies’ who are the only ones ‘forbidden to preach’. Fell cites the biblical Ruth and Hulda, taunting her opponents: ‘see if any of you blind priests can speak after this manner, and see if it be not a better sermon than any of you can make, who are against women’s speaking’ (Gardiner 1993: 222). Although she concedes that foolish, carnal, gossiping women should be barred from speaking, Fell argues that the Pauline prohibitions were intended specifically for a church in confusion, in Corinth. Further, she writes: ‘God hath put no such difference between the male and the female as men would make . . . for he hath put enmity between the woman and the serpent; and if the seed of the woman speak not, the seed of the serpent speaks’ (Aughterson 1995: 38). Fell possessed a ‘stunning self-assurance about her own ability to preach, theologize, or adjudicate equally with men, a real sense of herself as an equal that is very rare even in the most active seventeenth-century women’ (Gardiner 1993: 224, 220). She did not, however, publish any of her sermons among the many items that comprise her Works. Many women preachers, however, denied their abilities, focusing on their role as God’s instruments, although all of them believed that when they spoke they expressed the word and spirit of God (Mack 1992: 136). Among the proliferating nonconforming sects, women’s preaching was not only tolerated but praised. John Taylor’s The Brownists Conventicle (1641), for example, celebrates those women who ‘are not only able to talk on any Text, but to search into the deep sense of the Scripture, and preach both in their own families and elsewhere’ (1641: 6). Nonetheless, even among nonconformists women’s preaching was not generally accepted. Early Quaker men were no great defenders of women’s preaching, including Margaret Fell’s husband, George Fox, who enjoined women to be silent in church and to obey their husbands. Not until 1674 did Quaker George Keith defend women’s preaching by example of the woman of Samaria. But even as he made this defence, Keith’s list of women who might not speak included those who usurped authority over men (1674: 12). Throughout the latter half of the seventeenth century, Quakers remained uncertain about ‘the degree of freedom and participation’ to be accorded to women (Trevett 1991: 72). By the end of the seventeenth century, even Quakerism was less open to female participation; the women’s meetings declined, the movement became more ordered, enthusiastic, and patriarchal (Trevett 1995: 43), and ‘women preachers seemed unnatural even to women’ (Crawford 1993: 207). Women suffered for preaching, their treatment depending on a variety of factors: the religious prejudices of local magistrates against sectaries; the amount of public attention the woman drew; the woman’s attitude in front of authorities; and her ability to secure male protection and influence (Ludlow 1985: 97). Punishments both ‘official and unofficial’ included verbal and physical retaliation (Kegl 1994: 58; Hinds 1996: 154–6). Women endured constant surveillance, were imprisoned, fined, ducked, put in the stocks, searched for signs of witchcraft, whipped, attacked, beaten to death, threatened with



jeanne shami

butcher knives, and led through the streets with iron bridles, the latter punishment normally reserved for scolds who undermined their husbands’ authority. In extreme cases, they were transported to Jamaica for their intransigence (Ludlow 1985: 110). Despite a period of intense experimentation among nonconformists in the 1640s and 1650s, women’s preaching remained largely in the domestic sphere in early modern England.

Conclusion This brief survey has attempted to demonstrate that sermons were integral to women’s (and men’s) religious experiences in early modern England, and that women wielded considerable influence over preaching at all social levels, and in situations variously understood as public or authoritative. While it would be unwise to overemphasize this influence without more analysis of appropriate evidence, one thing is certain: women participated in a complex and variegated sermon culture that we are only beginning to understand. The emergence of empirically based, theoretically grounded book history, however, promises to illuminate that culture further.

Bibliography Ainsworth, Samuel (1645). A Sermon Preached at the Funerall of that Religious Gentle-Woman Mis Dorothy Hanbury . . . at Navesby in Northampton-shire July 13, Anno Dom. 1642. Aughterson, Kate (1995) (ed.). Renaissance Women: A Sourcebook. Routledge. Aylmer, John (1559). An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe Subjectes, agaynst the Late Blowne Blaste, concerninge the Government of Wemen. Becker, Lucinda M. (2003). Death and the Early Modern Englishwoman. Aldershot: Ashgate. Bell, Maureen (2002). ‘Women Writing and Women Written’, in John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (eds) with the assistance of Maureen Bell, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iv. 1557–1695, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 432–51. Bernard, George (1993). ‘Anne Boleyn’s Religion’, Historical Journal, 36/1: 1–20. Bonner, Edmund (1555). Homelies Sette Forth by the Righte Reverende Father in God, Edmunde Byshop Of London. Bossy, John (1975). The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850. Darton, Longman, & Todd. Brathwaite, Richard (1631). The English Gentlewoman. Briggs, John H. Y. (1986).‘She-Preachers, Widows, and Other Women: The Feminine Dimension in Baptist Life since 1600’, Baptist Quarterly, 31/7: 337–52. Brown, Sylvia (2001). ‘Women and the Godly Art of Rhetoric: Robert Cawdrey’s Puritan Dictionary’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 41/1: 133–48. Carlson, Eric Josef (2000). ‘English Funeral Sermons as Sources: The Example of Female Piety in Pre-1640 Sermons’, Albion, 32/4: 567–97. Cawdrey, Robert (1604). A Table Alphabeticall. Charlton, Kenneth (1999). Women, Religion and Education in Early Modern England. Routledge.

women and sermons



Christian, Margaret (1993). ‘Elizabeth’s Preachers and the Government of Women: Defining and Correcting a Queen’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 24/3: 561–76. Clarke, Samuel (1662). A Collection of the Lives of Ten Eminent Divines. Collinges, John (1649). Faith & Experience, or, A Short Narration of the Holy Life and Death of Mary Simpson . . . To which is Added a Sermon Preached at her Funerall. Collinson, Patrick (1965). ‘The Role of Women in the English Reformation Illustrated by the Life and Friendships of Anne Locke’, in G. J. Cuming (ed.). Studies in Church History, 2: 258–72. —— (1977). ‘“A Magazine of Religious Patterns”: An Erasmian Topic Transposed in English Protestantism’, in Derek Baker (ed.), Renaissance and Renewal in Christian History. Oxford: Blackwell, 223–49. —— (2004). ‘Elizabeth I (1553–1603), Queen of England and Ireland’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online edn. ——, Hunt, Arnold, and Walsham, Alexandra (2002). ‘Religious Publishing in England, 1557– 1640’, in John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (eds) with the assistance of Maureen Bell, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iv. 1557–1695, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 29–66. Crawford, Patricia (1984). ‘Katherine and Philip Henry and their Children: A Case Study in Family Ideology’, Transactions of the Historical Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 134: 39–73. —— (1993). Women and Religion in England 1500–1720. Routledge. Doerksen, Daniel W. (1997). Conforming to the Word: Herbert, Donne, and the English Church before Laud. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Donawerth, Jane (1998). ‘Conversation and the Boundaries of Public Discourse in Rhetorical Theory by Renaissance Women’, Rhetorica, 16/2: 181–99. Donne, John (1627). A Sermon of Commemoration of the Lady Danvers . . . Together with Other Commemorations of her; by her Sonne G. Herbert. Eales, Jacqueline (1998). Women in Early Modern England, 1500–1700. University College London Press. Edwards, Thomas (1646). Gangraena, or, A Catalogue and Discovery of Many of the Errours, Heresies, Blasphemies and Pernicious Practices of the Sectaries of this Time. Evans, Robert C. (1995). ‘The Life and Times of Martha Moulsworth’, in Robert C. Evans and Anne C. Little (eds), ‘The Muses Female Are’: Martha Moulsworth and Other Women Writers of the English Renaissance. West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press, 17–73. Ezell, Margaret (1993). Writing Women’s Literary History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Featley, Daniel (1672). Threnoikos the House of Mourning . . . Delivered in LVI Sermons / Preached at the Funerals of Divers Faithful Servants of Christ. Foxe, John (1563). Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perillous Dayes. —— (1570). The First Volume of the Ecclesiasticall History Contaynyng the Actes and Monuments. Freeman, Thomas S. (2000). ‘“The Good Ministrye of Godly and Vertuose Women”: The Elizabethan Martyrologists and the Female Supporters of the Marian Martyrs’, Journal of British Studies, 39/1: 8–33. Gardiner, Judith Kegan (1993). ‘Re-Gendering Individualism: Margaret Fell Fox and Quaker Rhetoric’, in Jean R. Brink (ed.), Privileging Gender in Early Modern England. Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, 23: 205–24.



jeanne shami

Gouge, William (1622). Of Domesticall Duties. Greaves, Richard L. (1985). ‘Foundation Builders: The Role of Women in Early English Nonconformity’, in Richard Greaves (ed.), Triumph over Silence: Women in Protestant History. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 75–92. Hackel, Heidi Brayman (2005). Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hall, Edmund (1664). A Sermon Preached . . . at the Funerall of the Honourable the Lady Ann Harcourt, who Deceased Aug. 23, 1664 together with her Funerall Speech. Hanlon, Sister Joseph, Damien, C.S.J. (1966). ‘These be but Women’, in C. H. Carter (ed.), Renaissance to Counter-Reformation: Essays in Honour of Garrett Mattingley. Cape, 371–400. Harrison, William (1602). Deaths Advantage Little Regarded, and The Soules Solace against Sorrow Preached in Two Funerall Sermons at Childwal in Lancashire at the Buriall of Mistris Katherin Brettergh the Third of Iune. 1601. Hassall, Thomas (1995). ‘Thomas Hassall’s Funeral Sermon on Martha Moulsworth’, in Robert C. Evans and Anne C. Little (eds), ‘The Muses Female Are’: Martha Moulsworth and Other Women Writers of the English Renaissance. West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press, 243–61. Haugaard, W. P. (1969). ‘Katherine Parr: The Religious Convictions of a Renaissance Queen’, Renaissance Quarterly, 22/4: 346–59. Hausknecht, Gina (2001).‘“So Many Shipwracke for Want of Better Knowledge”: The Imaginary Husband in Stuart Marriage Advice’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 64/1–2: 81–106. Heale, William (1609). An Apology for Women. Hibbard, Caroline M. (1991). ‘The Role of a Queen Consort: The Household and Court of Henrietta Maria, 1625–1642’, in Ronald G. Asch and Adolf M. Burke (eds), Princes, Patronage, and the Nobility: The Court at the Beginning of the Modern Age c.1450–1650. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 393–414. Hinds, Hilary (1996). God’s Englishwomen: Seventeenth-Century Radical Sectarian Writing and Feminist Criticism. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hoby, Lady Margaret (1998). Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 1599–1605, ed. Joanna Moody. Stroud: Sutton Publishing. Hodgson, Elizabeth (2006). ‘The Domestic “Fruite of Eves Transgression” in Stuart Funeral Sermons’, Prose Studies, 28/1: 1–18. Houlbrooke, Ralph (1998). Death, Religion and the Family in England 1480–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hull, Suzanne (1988). Chaste, Silent & Obedient: English Books for Women 1475–1640. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library. Hunt, Arnold (2004). ‘The Books, Manuscripts, and Literary Patronage of Mrs Anne Sadleir (1585–1670)’, in Victoria E. Burke and Jonathan Gibson (eds), Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Writing: Selected Papers from the Trinity/Trent Colloquium. Aldershot: Ashgate, 205–36. Ives, Eric (1994). ‘Anne Boleyn and the Early Reformation in England: The Contemporary Evidence’, Historical Journal, 37: 389–400. Kegl, Rosemary (1994). ‘Women’s Preaching, Absolute Property, and the Cruel Sufferings (for the Truth’s Sake) of Katharine Evans and Sarah Chevers’, Women’s Studies, 24/1–2: 51–83. Keith, George (1674). The Woman-Preacher of Samaria a Better Preacher. Kienzle, Beverly Mayne and Walker, Pamela J. (1998) (eds). Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millennia of Christianity. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

women and sermons



King, John (1985a). ‘Patronage and Piety: The Influence of Catherine Parr’, in Margaret Hannay (ed.), Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women Writers as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 43–60. —— (1985b). ‘The Godly Woman in Elizabethan Iconography’, Renaissance Quarterly, 38/1: 41–84. Kunze, Bonnelyn Young (1994). Margaret Fell and the Rise of Quakerism. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kusunoki, Akiko (1992). ‘ “Their Testament at their Apron-Strings”: The Representation of Puritan Women in Early Seventeenth-Century England’, in S. P. Ceresano and Marion Wynne-Davies (eds), Gloriana’s Face: Women, Public and Private in the English Renaissance. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 185–204. Lake, Peter (1987). ‘Feminine Piety and Personal Potency: The “Emancipation” of Mrs Jane Ratcliffe’, Seventeenth Century, 2: 143–65. Lamb, Mary Ellen (1985). ‘The Cooke Sisters: Attitudes toward Learned Women in the Renaissance’, in Margaret Hannay (ed.), Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women Writers as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 107–25. Laurence, Anne (1990). ‘A Priesthood of She-Believers: Women and Congregations in MidSeventeenth Century England’, in W. J. Sheils and D. Wood (eds), Women in the Church. Oxford: Blackwell, 345–64. Levin, Carole (1983). ‘Advice on Women’s Behavior in Three Tudor Homilies’, International Journal of Women’s Studies, 6: 176–85. Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer (1993). Writing Women in Jacobean England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ludlow, Dorothy (1978). ‘“Arise and be Doing”: English Preaching Women, 1640–1660’. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana. —— (1985). ‘Shaking Patriarchy’s Foundations: Sectarian Women in England, 1641–1700’, in Richard L. Greaves (ed.), Triumph over Silence. Westport: Greenwood Press, 93–123. McCullough, Peter (1998). Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mack, Phyllis (1992). Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. McKitterick, David (2000). ‘Women and their Books in Seventeenth Century England: The Case of Elizabeth Puckering’, Library, 7th ser. 1: 359–80. Manningham, Thomas (1695). A Sermon Preach’d at the Parish-Church of St Andrews Holborn, the 30th of December, 1694, on the Most Lamented Death of our Most Gracious Sovereign Queen Mary. Markham, Gervase (1615). Countrey Contentments, in Two Bookes . . . The Second Intituled, The English Housewife. Marotti, Arthur F. (1999). ‘Alienating Catholics in Early Modern England: Recusant Women, Jesuits and Ideological Fantasies’, in Arthur F. Marotti (ed.), Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1–34. Matchinske, Megan (1998). Writing, Gender and State in Early Modern England: Identity Formation and the Female Subject. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mendelson, Sarah, and Crawford, Patricia (1998). Women in Early Modern England. Oxford: Clarendon Press.



jeanne shami

Milton, Anthony (1995). Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morgan, Paul (1989). ‘Frances Wolfreston and “Hor Bouks”: A Seventeenth-Century Woman Book-Collector’, Library, 6th ser. 11/3: 197–219. Newman, Christine (1999). ‘An Honourable and Elect Lady: The Faith of Isobel, Lady Bowes’, in Diana Wood (ed.), Life and Thought in the Northern Church. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 407–19. O’Hara, Lyndell (2006). ‘“Far Beyond her Nature and her Sex”: The Creation of a Protestant Hagiography in England, 1590–1640’. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Fordham. Osherow, Michelle (2004). ‘“Give Ear O’ Princes”: Deborah, Elizabeth, and the Right Word’, Explorations in Renaissance Culture, 30/1: 111–19. Parish, Debra L. (1992). ‘The Power of Female Pietism: Women as Spiritual Authorities and Religious Role Models in Seventeenth-Century England’, Journal of Religious History, 17/1: 33–46. Peters, Christine (2003). Patterns of Piety: Women, Gender and Religion in Late Medieval and Reformation England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (2004). Women in Early Modern Britain, 1450–1540. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Prime, John (1585). A Sermon Briefly Comparing the Estate of King Salomon and his Subjects together with the Condition of Queen Elizabeth and her People. Prior, Mary (1985). ‘Reviled and Crucified Marriages: The Position of Tudor Bishops’ Wives’, in Mary Prior (ed.), Women in English Society 1500–1800. Methuen, 118–48. Rainbow, Edward (1677). A Sermon Preached at the Funeral of the Right Honorable Anne, Countess of Pembroke, Dorset, and Montgomery. Rowlands, Marie B. (1985). ‘Recusant Women 1560–1640’, in Mary Prior (ed.), Women in English Society 1500–1800. Methuen, 149–80. Schleiner, Louise (1994). Tudor and Stuart Women Writers. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Shami, Jeanne (2007). ‘New Manuscript Texts of Sermons by John Donne’, English Manuscript Studies, 13: 77–119. Speck, W. A. (2004). ‘Mary II (1662–1694), Queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online edn. Stocker, Margarita (1998). Judith, Sexual Warrior: Women and Power in Western Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press. Summer, Saralyn Ellen (2005). ‘“Like Another Esther”: Literary Representations of Queen Esther in Early Modern England’. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, George State. Taylor, John (1641). The Brownists Conventicle. Thomas, Keith (1958). ‘Women and the Civil War Sects’, Past and Present, 13: 42–62. Trevett, Christine (1991). The Quaker Margaret Fell: Religion and Gender in a SeventeenthCentury Dissenting Group. London: British Association for the Study of Religions. —— (1995). Women and Quakerism in the Seventeenth Century. York: Sessions Book Trust; Ebor Press. —— (2000). Quaker Women Prophets in England and Wales, 1650–1700. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen. Trill, Suzanne (2002). ‘A Feminist Critic in the Archives: Reading Anna Walker’s Sweete Savor for Woman (c.1606)’, Women’s Writing, 9/2: 199–214. Tromly, Frederic B. (1983). ‘“Accordinge to sounde religion”: The Elizabethan Controversy over the Funeral Sermon’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 13: 293–312.

women and sermons



Wabuda, Susan (1990). ‘Shunamites and Nurses of the English Reformation: The Activities of Mary Glover, Niece of Hugh Latimer’, in W. J. Sheils and Diana Wood (eds), Women in the Church. Oxford: Blackwell, 335–44. —— (2002). Preaching during the English Reformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walsham, Alexander (2003). ‘“A Very Deborah?”: The Myth of Elizabeth I as a Providential Monarch’, in Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman (eds), The Myth of Elizabeth. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 143–68. Warnicke, Retha M. (1994). ‘Eulogies for Women: Public Testimony of their Godly Example and Leadership’, in Betty S. Travitsky and Adele F. Seef (eds), Attending to Women in Early Modern England. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 168–86. Watson, Thomas (1558). Holsome and Catholyke Doctryne concerninge the Seven Sacramentes of Chrystes Church. Whateley, William (1619). A Bride-Bush: Or, a Direction for Married Persons. White, Michelle A. (2006). Henrietta Maria and the English Civil Wars. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Wilkinson, Henry (1656). The Hope of Glory, or Christs Indwelling in True Believers. Willen, Diane (1992). ‘Godly Women in Early Modern England: Puritanism and Gender’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 43: 561–80. Williamson, George C. (1922). Lady Anne Clifford Countess of Dorset, Pembroke & Montgomery, 1590–1676. Her Life, Letters and Work. Kendal: Titus Wilson & Son. Wiseman, Sue (1992).‘Unsilent Instruments and the Devil’s Cushions: Authority in SeventeenthCentury Women’s Prophetic Discourse’, in Isobel Armstrong (ed.), New Feminist Discourses. Routledge, 176–96. Wizeman, William (2006). The Theology and Spirituality of Mary Tudor’s Church. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Worship, William (1636). The Christians Mourning Garment. Wynne, S. M. (2004). ‘Catherine [Catherine of Braganza, Caterina Henriqueta de Bragança] (1603–1705), Queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland, Consort of Charles I’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online edn.

chapter 10

ser mon r eception john craig

William Glibery was the Elizabethan vicar of the Essex parish of Halstead, first collated to the living in 1561 by Edmund Grindal, then bishop of London. He appears in a record of clergy drawn up in 1577 as a married man, possessor of an MA degree, resident in the parish and a preacher, albeit ‘not licensed to preach’ (CCED: Rec. ID 73939). Like hundreds of clergy both before him and since, Glibery might have left little more than his name were it not for his alleged ability to coin a phrase and leave his audience with a pungent saying or memorable proverb. When expounding the first few verses of the second chapter of the Gospel of John (the wedding at Cana), Glibery said that it was always likely that Christ would pay attention to his mother Mary’s request, for ‘she was the henne that satte next the cocke’ (TNA: PRO SPD 12/159/27, fo. 86r). Preaching on the subject of repentance in March 1583, he said that ‘he would not have them doe as the desperat dickes of this world doe, that is take them oute of the fryeing pan & caste them into the fyre, but he would have them repent in a mery meane, not to high for the pye, nor to lowe for the crowe’, and he warned on another occasion to take care of zeal, for ‘there are a great many that boast of zeal and of the spirit of God, but they have so much that it runneth oute at their nostrelles’ (fo. 85v). Concluding his sermon on St Stephen’s Day, 26 December 1582, he said: ‘I had thought to have made an end but seinge you be all here, I will rub you a litle more for sometymes you be all at home at your puddinge pyes’; and when some laughed, ‘doe ye laugh?’, he asked, ‘it is no matter, you have bene in the buttery & have drenke on the spigotte’ (fo. 85v). But not all were amused when, on an earlier occasion, he ‘fell into a laughter’ at his observation that a true miracle would be for a man to fetch down the weathercock of Halstead church, set it in the churchyard, place the steeple on top and have this support the entire building. Several in his audience walked out, ‘which when he perceyved, he sayde thus, surely, surely, this geere wyll not settle, for here is nothinge but in docke, out nettell’ (fo. 85r). Glibery was charged by some who heard him with failing to ‘use any sounde doctrine, exhortacions or applycations wherby synne myght be rooted out and the congregation profitted and edyfied, but stuffeth his sermons with the sayde prophane and wycked speaches’, using terms such as: my gutsyes, my lusty gutsyes, my jolly fellowes, that are cocke sure of their salvation, my braynesycke fellowes, my aquavite headdes: my fine sheetes such as be sycke of

sermon reception



the sturdy, my pedlers such as goe from fayre to markette, with empty hampers & nothing but a lytle Tape in them, dogge leeches, my gospoylers & goosebillers, my pratling stances, and such as doe bepisse & becacke the gospell . . . (fo. 85v)

But terms like these gave the game away. This was a dispute between kinds of Protestants, not a complaint about a church papist, and it is not surprising that the Privy Council took no further action with the vicar of Halstead. ‘A verie ridiculous preacher’ was the dismissive judgement rendered on Glibery in a Puritan survey of ministers a few years later (Peel 1915: ii. 163); this reputation was cemented by a story repeated about him in one of the Martin Marprelate tracts, Hay any Worke for any Cooper (Black 2008: 108), yet he was rightly accounted a preacher and no ‘dumb dog’ (a term of abuse for nonpreaching clergy). It seems most likely that the complaints against Glibery reflected the heightened sense of alarm on the part of groups of zealous sermon-gadding Protestants in the crisis years of 1583–4 when Archbishop Whitgift’s disciplinary drive against nonconforming ministers was beginning to bite. Perhaps Glibery was a ‘profane scoffer’, but it seems more likely that his ‘misfortune’ was to retain a racy style and a salty sense of humour, not so far removed from the terms and tales used by Hugh Latimer in his preaching, that was becoming increasingly suspect as new modes of piety and exposition evolved within Elizabethan Protestantism. But the case also challenges the arguments of those who have tended to interpret the preaching efforts of the Elizabethan church as a futile effort in the face of ‘sheer uncomprehending boredom’ (Haigh 1984: 208). Glibery’s words proved memorable, a reminder that early modern sermons were potent occasions, irritating or confirming the different members of their auditories, bits and pieces being remembered and becoming the stuff of conversations. They were a dynamic element in the shared world of social communication. How were sermons received? The subject is both vital and enormous, yet one that has received very little scholarly treatment, primarily because the evidence is so elusive. Several chapters in this volume tell us more about how these discourses were actually delivered—questions of tone, gesture, appearance, audibility, fluency (Armstrong, Chapter 7, this volume)—and about the contexts in which they were received, from St Paul’s in London to parish churches throughout the land (Green, Chapter 8, and McCullough, Chapter 12, this volume). But the range of responses to the thousands of sermons that were preached to a variety of audiences poses further challenges. The little we can know must be gleaned from a myriad of sources—epistles dedicatory in printed sermons, incidental evidence scraped from a variety of narratives, letters, parish accounts, anecdotal observations, or church court proceedings. The pioneering authority on this subject is Arnold Hunt (2010). It is noticeable that historians and literary scholars have begun to attend more closely to the art of listening, the soundscapes of parish worship, and the acoustic world of early modern England, but much remains to be uncovered (Burke 1993; Bruce R. Smith 1999; Craig 2005: 104–23; Sullivan 2006). This chapter discusses the wide variety of ways in which early modern sermons were listened to, reflected upon, noted down, repeated, transcribed into commonplace books, and circulated in both oral and written forms. If the thrust of contemporary discussion about sermon reception came from the clergy themselves and proceeded from a clerical



john craig

assumption that communication was primarily a one-way street from pulpit to hearers, a good deal of contemporary evidence discloses a more dynamic relationship in which the laity devised ways of shaping, regulating, and moulding the experience of attending to sermons. And the subject of reception has to include the changing physical space or context within which the encounter between preacher and people took place.

Preachers’ Views on Sermon Hearing Early modern English preachers had no doubt that the problem of reception lay at the heart of their attempts to communicate. If faith came by hearing, not only did this place a premium on preaching; it sharpened the requirement to hear. And the problem here lay in the perceived disconnect between the profusion of preaching and the paucity of individual and social transformation. Sermons had not always been so plentiful, but by the early 1620s Richard Crooke expressed dismay that ‘in these preaching and hearing dayes, such faithfull preaching, such frequent hearing, so many should yet bee possesst as it were with a dumb Devill, and all our Sermons to the most of men but as sounding Brase or a tinkling Cimball’ (Egerton 1623: sig. A3v). Some preachers understood that the problem might lie with themselves and with the difficulty of framing their discourses to the capacities of their congregations, but they were also caught with a number of biblical texts that prepared them for the rejection of their message. Had not Christ himself spoken of the seed that fell on stony ground and ground choked with weeds? There was a marked tendency, therefore, to place the failure to hear and understand with the hearers. Richard Crooke, in his preface to Stephen Egerton’s dialogue The Boring of the Eare, distinguished five kinds of ears: dull ears, stopped ears (these were recusants and the presumptuous), prejudicial ears, nice or itching ears, and adulterous ears, as a way of explaining the mixed attitudes present among audiences and congregations. An earlier critique had placed less weight on hearing and more on the perils of a nonpreaching ministry. Too frequently misapplied by historians, this concern over the social and religious consequences of non-preaching clergy was the vital context of Nicholas Breton’s A Merrie Dialogue (1603), which includes a satirization of parishioners who love a pot of Ale better then a Pulpit, and a corne-rick better then a Church-door: who comming to divine service, more for fashion then devotion, are contented after a litle capping and kneeling, coughing and spetting, to helpe me to sing out a Psalme, and sleepe at the second Lesson, or awake to stand up at the Gospell, and say Amen at The peace of God; and stay till the banes [banns] of matrimonie be asked, or till the Clarke have cryed a pyed stray bullocke, a blacke sheepe or a gray mare: and then, for that some dwell farre off, be glad to be gotten home to dinner. (1603: 12–13)

Breton’s capping and kneeling parishioners were the product not of a preaching ministry but of an unpreaching one, and, in spite of the gloomy note of dismay struck by Richard Crooke, the assumption that a preaching ministry wrought salvation, that it

sermon reception



could make all the difference, was never seriously challenged. For godly ministers, the problem of reception was at heart theological and not particular to the early modern period. John Angier, in his sermons on worship, reminded himself and his fellow preachers that, although it was a great grief that ‘their people should sleep when they come to worship God, especially if many sleep, and they sleep much . . .’ , ‘we cannot say that our people are worse then any people, and thereby vexe ourselves’. Christ’s own disciples had slept when asked to watch and pray, and, in spite of the apostle Paul’s undoubted abilities, one young man slept at his sermon with fatal consequences. ‘The fault therefore’, concluded Angier, ‘is not alltogether in Ministers’ (1647: 491–2). This was putting it mildly. The thrust of Angier’s sermons and Egerton’s dialogue was a wholesale critique of the hindrances that prevented making effective use of services and sermons, a comprehensive castigation of wandering thoughts, sleepiness, coming unprepared, weariness and sloth, all of which expressed a despising of the worship of God. These critiques were perfectly consonant with the ecclesiastical injunctions that governed how people were expected to behave during divine service. The law, of course, required attendance at divine service on payment of a twelve pence fine, and the episcopal injunctions and articles of the period speak repeatedly of the importance of reverence during divine service. The people were to abide soberly and orderly, they were not to talk or babble, walk or jangle or play the fool. They were ordered not to molest, disquiet, or grieve the minister with noise, brute cries, or clamours. Mothers with infants were commanded not to let their little ones disturb divine service. All present were ordered to hear attentively, reverently, devoutly, to be in quiet attendance, to hear, mark and understand (Frere and Kennedy 1910). Yet the problems of a constrained audience could not be so easily simplified, and there were many reasons why people came to sermons. The London preacher Henry Smith observed a range of ‘accidental hearers’: some come unto the service to save forfeiture, and then they stay the Sermon for shame: some come because they would not bee counted Atheists: some come because they would avoyde the name of Papists: some come to please their friends . . . some come with their masters and mistresses for attendance: some come with a fame, they have heard great speech of the man, and therefore they will spend one houre to heare him once, but to see whether it be so as they say . . .

Still others came to pass the time, or because they ‘heare the sound of a voyce, as they passe by the Church’, or just as a meeting place for ‘some occasion of busines’ (1593: 641).

Popularity of Sermon Attendance It was easy to condemn such hearers for lack of interest, yet a good deal of evidence demonstrates that sermons were popular occasions. It was observed of the townsmen of Bury St Edmunds that they were ‘such diligent hearers of the word . . . that they may easely be singled-out from other men’ (Rogers 1590: 17). Numerous parish churches constructed



john craig

galleries to accommodate the increasing demand. Popular preachers generated great excitement. When Thomas Cartwright returned to preach in Cambridge in the early 1580s, it was said that ‘grave men ran like boys to get places in the Church’ (Pearson 1925: 23–4). But popularity created its own difficulties, as the desire to hear or be present packed some churches with bodies. It was complained that, when sermons were preached in the London parish of St Botolph’s without Bishopsgate, the church was filled ‘with multitude of people, a greate parte of them beinge rude and thronginge togeither and manie of them straingers of other parishes will give no waie to the better sorte of people to passe by them either to come into their seats or to goe owte from them’ (quoted in Hunt 2010: 217). At Blackfriars, William Gouge was praised for ‘his tender compassion toward the multitudes of his hearers, that out of this Pulpit he was wont (before he began his Sermons) to observe what Pues were empty, and to command his Clark to open them, for the ease of those who thronged in the Isles’ (Jenkyn 1654: 35). But, as these examples show, reception was clearly tied to the popularity of particular preachers and perhaps as much to their appearance, tone of voice, accent, gestures, speed, and style of delivery, as to the substance of their discourses. John More, known as the ‘apostle of Norwich’, sported an enormous beard, which must have added much to the experience of listening to him, but what precisely we cannot say. Contemporaries did comment on matters of style and delivery. We know that John Rogers, lecturer of Dedham in Essex, was known for his ‘wild Note’ and powerful dramatic presentations, seizing the supports of the canopy above the pulpit and roaring in imitation of the cries of the damned (Firmin 1670: 76; Heywood 1683: 5–6). The best knew how to engage effectively with their audiences. Talented preachers, like certain stand-up comedians, knew what to say to seize and hold the attention of their audiences and how to run with different reactions. Hugh Latimer was a master of this, relating anecdotes and asides, posing provocative questions, and keeping his audience in suspense: And now I would ask a straunge question. Who is the most diligentest Byshop and prelate in all England, that passeth all the rest in doing his office? I can tell, for I know him who it is, I know him well. But now I think I see you listining and harkening, that I should name him. There is one that passeth all the other . . .

The answer was, of course, ‘the devill’ (Latimer 1572: fo. 17v). But hearing was also shaped by a set of expectations shared by preacher and audience. Gravity was expected. Words and gestures should be comely and fitting and not exaggerated. Beards were both fashionable and a sign of the Protestant embrace of clerical marriage, but the donning of vestments, especially the white surplice, might prove deeply offensive to certain congregations. Condemning sin was expected, but personal or particular preaching was disliked, even when couched in discreet terms. When Mr Threlkeld, preacher of St Botolph’s Aldgate, preached on 24 September 1587, giving the people to understand that ‘there was one in the parishe that Denyed to paye towardes the preacher whome he thowght to be a papist’, the clerk recording this expressed his disapproval: these words were ‘not meete to have beene sayde by one of his Calinge’ (GL MS 9234/1, fo. 142v).

sermon reception



What could preachers not discuss? In theory, everything the Bible spoke about was fair game, but certain subjects were sure to offend if discussed too openly or frankly. The topic of female menstruation remained sensitive. William Whately, preacher of the town of Banbury, who tackled the topic, noted that ‘women . . . are much displeased with the laying open of these points; and there want not men also, that partake with them in this’. Whately condemned such sensitivity as an ‘impious and sinfull shamefastnesse’. He asked, ‘shall we dare to thinke it unfit plainely to discover that, which God himselfe in his Scriptures doth plainely discover?’ (Whately 1619: 23). And, in response to the suggestion that certain matters were best left to be read at home and not preached about publicly, Whately argued that ‘our duty is to speake the whole truth, yours to heare it willingly; and if you cannot bring your hearts unto it, yet must wee make you heare it whether you will or no’ (1619: 23–4). Yet there were probably many preachers who chose not to say too much about the story of Judah and Tamar, nor dwell over long on how Lot’s daughters became pregnant, the sin of Onan or the naked witness of Isaiah (Gen. 38, 19; Isa. 20).

Popular Responses to Preaching What do we know of popular responses to preaching? How did people react? In all kinds of ways, from extreme anger to indifference, the varied reactions were shaped by the particular circumstances of preacher and people, words and context. When the message threatened to overturn the status quo, the response might be both immediate and violent. The evangelical message of Thomas Bilney preached in the 1520s so enraged some listening friars that they brought an end to his preaching by pulling him from the pulpit; the action is captured in a dynamic woodcut included in John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (1576: 1138). The Paul’s Cross sermon preached by Dr Bourne within a few days of the accession of Queen Mary in 1553 so angered the crowd that a dagger was thrown at Bourne and it required the intervention of the future martyr, John Bradford, to effect a rescue (Brigden 1991: 528–9). But there are also accounts of audiences moved to tears and hanging onto every word. When Laurence Chaderton, the Puritan master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, having preached for two hours, announced to his audience that he would no longer trespass on their patience, they cried out, ‘For God’s sake, sir, go on, go on’ (Dillingham 1700: 29–30). Lenten sermons in particular were expected to be direct, but preaching before a monarch was always a tricky business. In 1564, when Alexander Nowell, dean of St Paul’s, raised the matter of the cross in Elizabeth’s chapel, she broke in with the words ‘leave that, it has nothing to do with your subject and the matter is now threadbare’, leaving Nowell unable to continue. But it mattered that this Lenten sermon was delivered in the preaching place at Whitehall in full view of the people (McCullough 1998: 47). Five years later, when Edward Dering boldly if recklessly observed in his Lenten sermon that ‘I neede not seeke farre for offences wherat Gods people are greeved, even round about this Chappel I see a great manye, and God in his good time shall roote them out’, likening Elizabeth to ‘an untamed and unruly Heifer’,



john craig

Elizabeth’s deep silence made her reaction clear (Dering 1570: sigs Biiiv–Bivr; McCullough 1998: 36–7). Even the possibility of a sermon might provoke a reaction, perhaps nowhere more crucially than at moments of high drama such as public executions. When John Wade, a linen weaver from Kent bound to a stake in a gravel pit waiting to be burnt, spotted a friar about to speak to the crowd from a makeshift pulpit, he ‘cryed earnestly unto the people, to take heed of the doctrine of the whoore of Babylon, exhorting them to imbrace the doctrine of the Gospel preached in King Edward his dayes’. The verbal battle that ensued between Wade and the sheriff of Kent, who repeatedly interrupted and charged him to be quiet and ‘dye paciently’, left the unnamed friar waiting ‘looking over the Coverlet as though he would have uttered somewhat’, before finally deciding that discretion was the better part of valour and slipping away (Foxe 1576: 1600). Preachers knew to expect a reaction; their theology prepared them for this. God’s word was a two-edged sword. The Jacobean cleric Thomas Vicars believed that effective preaching would always provoke a reaction. It was no wonder ‘that in some congregations whilest the Minister was speaking in the Pulpit, there appeared compunction in the hearts, teares in the eyes, blushes in the cheekes, feare in the consciences and a kinde of horror over all the body of the auditorie’. The preacher that ‘brandisheth this glittering Sword and layeth about him manfully to strike downe sinne and impietie’ was only doing his dutie, ‘that he makes men sometime to wax red, sometime to grow pale, sometime to swet and fret and scratch where it doth not itch, and to be so exceedingly mooved, as though they were sitting upon nettles or standing upon thornes, and all this from the force and power of Gods word’ (Vicars 1627: 13–14). But not all were so moved. It is not difficult to find expressions of disgust and boredom, and it matters that the positive tales are usually found in the gratulatory and admiring biographies of divines and the complaints in the records of archdeaconry and consistory courts (Ingram 1987: 84–124; Haigh 2007). Such evidence is important, yet fundamentally anecdotal and impressionistic, reflecting the ways in which the memory of sermons tended to be encapsulated in a nutshell of an arresting image, phrase, activity, or strong reaction, whether in admiration or disgust. It is probably impossible to generalize about how sermons were received in early modern England, beyond the point already made that it would be hard to overestimate their power and importance. Nevertheless, much of this evidence channels and limits the discussion of reception from the perspective of the clergy, reinforcing the powerful clerical and contemporary focus that the experience of listening to sermons was a conduit flowing in only one direction.

Sermon Settings and Reception It is not possible to discuss reception without some understanding of the setting within which sermons were delivered. Although there were as many variations on those settings as there were sermons preached, and in spite of the more fundamental distinctions

sermon reception



that can be drawn between court sermons, sermons ad clerum, and the sermons preached at Paul’s Cross and in cathedrals and parish churches, a number of common features about the reception of sermons in parish churches can be discerned. It is worth bearing in mind that reception was dependent on the creation of an occasion, and an audience had to be gathered. We know too little about this, even in the famous public settings found in London. In more remote places, messengers were paid small sums such as the penny earned by Christopher Kettwell ‘for goynge to Crakall for to geve knowledge for to come to a sermon’ at the parish church of Bedale, Yorkshire in 1591–2 (YCRO PR/BED 2/1). The Edwardian injunctions of 1547 eliminated all ringing of bells in time of service with the exception of ‘one bell in convenient time to be rung or knolled before the sermon’, which marked the beginning of a common practice of ringing a sermon bell (Frere and Kennedy 1910: ii. 114–30). Central to reception was the arrangement of the audience. Different settings demanded differing arrangements, but there were a number of common features whether the sermon was preached in a parish church, a cathedral, or at Paul’s Cross. The separation of women from men, and the seating and standing arrangements that reflected social rank and degree, were two central features of contemporary auditories. Yet sermons preached in cathedrals must have been particularly subject to disruption. A report from Salisbury Cathedral in 1634 spoke of ‘men, both of the better and meaner sort, mechanicks, youths and prentises’ walking in the cathedral during services, and of ‘the ordinary trudging up and down of youths and clamours of children to the great disturbance of the preachers in their sermons’ (Anon. 1893: 10–23). As the majority of sermons were preached in parish churches, the analysis that follows concentrates on parochial reception of sermons. The reorganization of the interiors of parish churches over the course of the sixteenth century lay at the heart of the experience of attending sermons in the parish church. Anything that was deemed a distraction from the centrality of the word preached was removed or minimized. Rood screens separating the nave from the chancel were dismantled, pulpits were set up, and a range of different forms of seating, including benches and pews, crept into the parish church (see Rhatigan, Chapter 6, this volume, and Figs 5–17). The walls of parish churches were covered in whitewash, and sentences from scripture were painted on the whitened surface. Copies of the English Bible and the biblical paraphrases were chained to lecterns in the nave (see Ferrell, Chapter 2, this volume). Parish church interiors became lighter, as plain clear glass replaced the stained glass in windows. This emphasis on whiteness, lightness, and painted scriptural texts directed and focused attention on the pulpit and preaching.

Provisions for Preachers and Auditories Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there were three crucial developments—concerning the employment of preachers, the regulation of their sermons, and the regulation of auditories—that determined how sermons were heard and



john craig

received. Although these developments appear to have originated primarily from the middling sort in wealthier parishes, these practices became widespread and had a profound effect on the experience of hearing sermons. First, many parishes started to employ preachers and to set the terms of their employment. John More urged his audience of Norfolk justices gathered for the quarter sessions to use their positions and wealth, to ‘get you preachers into your parishes . . . bestow your labour, cost, and travell to get them, ride for them, runne for them, stretch your purses to maintain them’; only then, he said, ‘we shall begin to be rich in the Lord Jesus’ (1594: 69). In doing so he offered an obvious and practical solution to the establishment of a learned preaching ministry. Parishioners, primarily at first in towns, organized voluntary subscriptions in order to hire their own preachers. Many parishes became employers of preachers and set the terms of their employment, a key feature of reception. On 14 January 1583, the chief parishioners of the London parish of St Botolph’s, Aldgate, chose three vestrymen to ‘go abowte the warde to knowe what everye parishioner will of there good willes give yearlye toward the mayntaynenge of a preacher’. Eight days later, the vestry drew up a contract between themselves and Mr David Anderson that he sholde preatch in owr parrishe churche ij dayes everye weeke in maner and forme followinge that is to saye on everye sondaye in the forenoone to begin at x of the clocke and to ende at xj of the clocke and on sondaye in the afternoone to catechise and to begin the same at ij of the clock in the afternoone and to ende the same at iij of the clocke. And every thorsdaye thorowe owt the hole yeare to begin at iiij of the clocke in the afternoone and to ende at v of the clocke . . . (GL MS 9234/1, fo. 15v)

The arrangement took effect on 2 February 1583 and is unusual only for the detailed precision with which the vestry set the terms of Anderson’s appointment. There was no suggestion of coming to arrangements that were not within the terms of episcopal injunctions, but nor can there be any doubt that the initiative lay entirely with the parish, and similar accounts can be found throughout the length and breadth of Elizabethan England. Preachers such as Mr Anderson were hired by groups of parishioners, and just how these men squared their vocation with the reality of their economic dependence is a good question. Secondly, it is noticeable that, where the Elizabethan injunctions required a ‘comely and decent pulpit’, parishes took measures to ensure that their preachers could be heard. In the same way that they built galleries to accommodate greater numbers, pulpits were built, or rebuilt, in such a way that preachers might be both seen and heard by the greatest number (see Rhatigan, Chapter 6, this volume). An enormous pulpit was erected in the parish church of Great Yarmouth not long after the appointment of Bartimaeus Andrews (NrCRO C 39/1, payments in 1586). Pulpits became larger, higher, and more elaborate, reflecting both the honour given to preachers and preaching as well as the science of projecting the preacher’s voice. Canopies and sounding boards were erected, and parishes paid for pulpit cushions and pulpit cloths, decked with silk fringes (Cox and Harvey 1907: 144–59; see Figs 8 and 9). Some pulpits were equipped with folio bibles,

sermon reception



such as the one purchased by the Ipswich parish of St Mary at the Tower (SCRO FB 91/E1/1: 67). Such developments not only projected the preacher’s voice; the strategic placing of pulpits and the rich colour of pulpit cloths deliberately drew the eyes of the audience. Alongside the more impressive pulpits, parishioners paid for and set up hourglasses and hourglass stands. The purchase of hourglasses and their stands was a common occurrence in sets of churchwardens’ accounts from the 1560s onwards (Cox 1913: 232–3). The wardens of the London parish of St Katherine’s paid ‘for an hour glass that hangeth by the pulpit where the preacher doth make a sermon that he may know how the hour passeth away’ (Cox and Harvey 1907: 157). The hourglass (see Fig. 10) worked as a reminder both that what was expected was a discourse of substance, but also that the preacher should not exceed his hour. Stephen Egerton agreed that the minister ought to endeavour ‘to keepe himselfe within the compasse of his houre’, but, when asked whether the hearer had ‘just cause to be offended’ if the ‘Minister bee somewhat longer than the ordinarie time’, the answer was no (1623: 52). Finally, it is noticeable that the behaviour of early modern auditories was becoming more closely regulated and observed. I have argued elsewhere that the presence of dogs in churches and the reorganization of parish interiors—in particular the taking down of rood lofts and screens that had previously maintained the distinction between nave and chancel—explains the rise of the minor office of dogwhipper (Craig 2005: 113–23). Over time the duties of dogwhippers were enlarged to include a wider disciplinary role over the auditory as a whole, and young people in particular. The parish church of Loughborough employed William Ragsby both as a dogwhipper and in 1612–13 for ‘lokinge to disordered people and other thinges in the Churche’ (LCRO[HW1] DE 667/2, fos 23v, 80v). As early as 1578, the parish of St Nicholas, Warwick, paid 16d. to John Whettley ‘for looking to the children and for whyppynge of the dogges’ (WkCRO DR 87/1, payments in 1578). In the Oxford parish of St Peter le Bailey, 12d. was paid in 1638–9 ‘for keepeing boyes in order and whipping dogges out of the Church’ (OCRO PAR 214/4/ F1/81). In Newark, St Mary, the better sort employed one ‘Handley’, who was charged with ‘keeping the children quiet in the churche’ and for ‘quieting the boyes in the church’. Elsewhere his tasks were described as ‘quieting children, whipping dogges and dressing the churchyard’ (NtCRO PR 24810, fos 41v, 49v). It was a small but significant step to add sleepy hearers to this list. Noise was a central concern in the 1540s and 1550s. The churchwardens of the Wiltshire parish of Lavington Forham reported at the visitation that ‘the chyldrene make much noyse at servyce tym’, and a similar situation was presented by the churchwardens of Steeple Ashton: ‘there ys much unquietnes at service tyme by certeyne yonge persons and childrene’ (WCRO D1/43/1, fos 122v–123r). These concerns about noise and young people did not disappear. As various forms of seating became more widely available, there was a greater concern expressed about those who slept during the sermon, and in some cases dogwhippers were charged with waking those who slept. The Leicestershire parish of Stathern in 1642 paid ‘Matthew Smaly for whipping doges and waking people in the Church’ (LCRO DE 1605/34, fo. 22r). Parish sermons were becoming closely observed occasions, as congregations fixed their eyes partly on the preacher in the pulpit and partly on the hourglass. They, in turn, were being closely watched by the



john craig

preacher, minister, parish clerk, and dogwhipper, the early modern equivalents of CCTV cameras. In spite of the close attention paid to behaviour and the injunctions to listen with attentiveness and reverence, it would be a mistake to imagine early modern auditories characterized by a profound silence, like some giant ear made up of scores of rapt listeners straining for every word of the sermon. There was clearly a level of audible participation in many early modern sermons. This was the hum or buzz of whispers, groans, sighs, exclamations, murmurs, page-turning, and other engaged forms of interaction between audience and speaker. As early as 1550, Hugh Latimer commented on how the ‘hussing and bussing in the preacher’s ear’ at the preaching place at Whitehall caused the preacher ‘oftentimes to forget his matter’ (1571: fos 23r, 73v). John Donne, in an undated sermon preached at St Paul’s, discussed how listeners in the early church were far from passive, incorporating behaviour found in the theatre into services of worship: all that had been formerly used in Theaters, Acclamations and Plaudites, was brought into the Church, and not onely the vulgar people, but learned hearers were as loud, and as profuse in those declarations, those vocall acclamations, and those plaudites in the passages, and transitions, in Sermons, as ever they had been at the Stage, or other recitations of their Poets, or Orators. (1953–62: x. 132)

Donne pointed out that the same custom had been observed in other places ‘where the People doe yet answer the Preacher, if his questions be applyable to them, and may induce an answer, with these vocall acclamations,“Sir, we will, Sir, we will not” ’; this was a practice not far from Donne’s own experience with English audiences who made ‘those often periodicall murmurings, and noises . . . when the Preacher concludeth any point’ (1953–62: x. 133). Donne disliked the practice, complaining about the time lost to these ‘impertinent Interjections’, and, perhaps more pertinently, that ‘many that were not within distance of hearing the Sermon, will give a censure upon it, according to the frequencie, or paucitie of these acclamations’ (1953–62: x. 133–4). Such engagement was not only found at Paul’s Cross or in St Paul’s Cathedral. Sermons preached in the 1630s in the parish churches of Bury St Edmunds were punctuated by ‘the weomens sighes and the mens hauchins [hawkings] (quoted in Collinson 1975: 208). An admiring account of the preaching of Dr Richard Holdsworth described how his ‘Church rung not with the Preachers raving, but with the Hearers groans; the Walls, Pillars and Window, dropping with the Auditors sweat and tears extorted from them, not by a furious thundering, but by a zealous and hearty Eloquence’. At one of Holdsworth’s sermons, preached in Mercers’ Chapel, ‘upon the Acclamation made to Herod and the Consequence of it’, the congregation ‘[h]ummed him so, that they could not hear him; he cryed out to them several times, I pray you remember the Text; to teach them to have no man’s person in admiration’ (Lloyd 1668: 457–8).1

1

I owe this reference to the kindness of Mr Trevor Cooper.

sermon reception



Sermons after Delivery What happened once the sermon was preached? Richard Bancroft satirized a Puritan sermon preached in Bury St Edmunds, ‘which beinge ended the chief gentlemen in the place beginning with a groaning, but yet with a loud voice, crieth most religiously Amen. And then the whole companye of that sect followe, Amen, Amen’ (Peel 1953: 71–2). Hugh Latimer’s practice was to conclude his sermons with a public recitation of the Lord’s Prayer in English (1571: fos 97r, 103v). Although some preachers complained that their sermons went in at one ear and out at the other, if the matter proved controversial, discussion and debate ensued. William Gouge tells us that when he preached his sermons on ‘domesticall duties’ his female auditors took such exception to what he said about female subjection that ‘some have censured me a hater of women’ (1622: fo. 4r). When Thomas Carew preached a sermon castigating clothiers for, among other things, the low wages they paid to weavers, the clothiers in his congregation disputed the way Carew had interpreted and applied the warning from the book of James against rich men (1603: sigs Y2r–v). Preachers may not have welcomed these kinds of challenges from lay hearers, but, by the early seventeenth century, there was a widespread expectation that the sermon preached would become the sermon repeated. As Patrick Collinson has taught us, sermon repetition was an essential part of the practice of godly piety and sociability in which small groups of zealous neighbours met in private homes for the purpose of ‘repeating of the substance and heads of the sermons that day made in the church’ (Collinson 2006: 158). The method was encouraged by godly ministers. It was said of William Gouge that he welcomed his neighbours to his house, where ‘he repeated his Sermons after so familiar a manner’, drawing ‘such points as were delivered’ by ‘Questions and Answers’ (Sullivan 2006: 39). The practice provides crucial insight into how sermons were supposed to work and, for those who embraced the discipline, suggests a way of comprehending the formal rhetorical structures—the heads of argument and uses—deliberately employed by preachers to enable both repetition and retention.

Sermon Notes and the Case of Robert Saxby So sermons lived on, for some in the practice of repetition and for many in conversation, rumour, and reports but pre-eminently, for the historian, in written notes. Sermon notes taken by auditors were often claimed as the basis for the subsequently printed sermon. William Burton informed his readers that he was persuaded to write out and publish his series of seven sermons on assurance, first preached in Bristol, as a result of ‘the earnest desire of many, and special entreatie of some poore Christians, afflicted in conscience,



john craig

which came unto me since, with their imperfect notes of their owne gathering’ (1592: sig. A4r). Taking notes at sermons was a minority activity, closely tied to repetition, and we need to know more about the mechanics of this practice. There must have been portable writing desks that permitted schoolboys, scriveners, or clerks to write while seated and that provided the necessary platform for paper, pens, ink, and knife, although, in some London parish churches, the communion table supplied a convenient if controversial surface (Udall 1641: 12). Schoolboys and university students were expected to take notes at sermons as part of their training in the arts of hearing, writing, memorization, and rhetoric. Instruction and reiteration lay at the heart of the practice, although other reasons, such as recording what was said in order to bring charges against the preacher, might also be found (Craig and Maas 2004: 542–51). Because sermon notes constitute such an important source for historians and literary scholars seeking to determine how sermons were listened to and understood, it is understandable that they have taken pride of place in the treatment of the subject. It is assumed that sermon notes take us closer to the preached word than the printed versions that were purchased and read by an eager public. And yet it remains exceedingly difficult to determine whether, or how far, this pious practice reflected the hearing activities of the majority of listeners who took no notes. Paul Seaver’s close reading of the variety of deeply introspective notebooks kept by the godly London turner Nehemiah Wallington has shown that Wallington was so taken with his godly exercises that he failed to realize that his apprentice was embezzling funds under his nose. Yet other members of Wallington’s family managed to combine piety with hard-nosed business acumen, and so, it seems, did a Kentish clothier who moved to London in 1629: Robert Saxby. In the spring of 1630, a funeral sermon was preached at St Paul’s Cathedral. The text was Psalm 89:48: ‘What man is he that liveth and shall not see death? shall he deliver his soul from the hand of the grave?’ Unlike most sermons that have gone the way of all unrecorded speech, this was given brief record and a nod of approval: ‘This doctor did very well declare in this text of the mortality of our life and how we ought to prepare for deth in our best health.’ The note is found in a manuscript volume of almost 200 folios belonging to Robert Saxby, a clothier from Brenchley in Kent (CUL Add. MS 3117). An entry records that the paper book was purchased in 1600 for 2 shillings, by the Saxby brothers, John and Robert, as an account book, recording the payments made in connection with the brothers’ responsibilities as executors of the estate of John Scotchford. The record opens with a series of items of expenditure concerning the burial of Scotchford and includes several folios detailing the payments of legacies and debts. This duty performed, Robert Saxby proceeded to use the paper book as a personal book for spiritual exercises. Well before he moved to London in 1629 (inside front cover: ‘Came after midsomer 1629 to London’), Saxby made use of this book for the purpose of godly edification, writing out chapters of the Bible: the ‘53rd chapter of Isaiah’ (fo. 62r: ‘writen by Robert Saxby the Friday before our lady day 1627’); Hebrews chapters 11–13 (fos 90r–93r); chapters 2–16 of the book of Judith (fos 106r–119r: ‘writen out of An owld bibell printed, or writen, A longtyme Agoe . . . made an end of writing, upon the first daye of Maye in the yere of our lord God 1627’); along with printed sermons such as Samuel Smith’s Davids

sermon reception



Repentance (fos 70v–89v), or a sermon preached at Paul’s Cross by Bishop Sandys in 1570 (fos 160v–168v). Prayers, meditations, ‘A speciall remedy for a sicke soul whereby the sinner may recover himselfe from the valley of Teares to the hill of joy or a medicine for the plague’, and three chapters of John Downame’s The Christian Warfare (fos 94v–105v) all found a place in Saxby’s book. There are copies of Thomas Sutton’s Paul’s Cross sermon of 1615, Englands Second Summons, and of Henry Smith’s Prayer or Petition of Moses. This has all of the marks of a commonplace book, in which the passages copied might be reread, rehearsed, and a stimulus to prayer or meditation. But the volume also contained brief summaries of about 185 sermons heard and recorded by Saxby between 1610 and 1639, with the majority of these being heard and recorded in London between 1629 and 1635. In this respect the volume has the appearance of a spiritual diary. Saxby’s summaries range from two to three pages to a few lines. He invariably records the place where the sermon was preached, the text, and he often supplies the preacher’s name. Dates are less common, and many of the summaries that are dated come from the period 1629–34. While in London, Saxby appears to have attended most regularly the services at the parish of St Bartholomew the Great, where Dr Westfield, later bishop of Bristol, preached. But he was an assiduous, inveterate frequenter of sermons and recorded listening to sermons in a score of churches, noting down the names of as many different preachers. He appears to have written these summaries from memory, generally on the Monday following the Sunday services, and possibly in the evenings for sermons preached on weekdays. A sermon preached by Mr Tapsell at St Bartholomew the Great on Genesis 37:18 was ‘writen out according to my short Rembrance the monday befor ester term began 1632’ (fo. 56r). Saxby’s own comments often punctuate his notes, with the unrevealing adjective ‘remarkable’ used frequently. A sermon preached ‘the Wensday morning’ from Ephesians 4:22 elicited the comment that ‘the hole chapter is very Remarcable’ (fo. 18r), as did a sermon preached on the second verse of Psalm 4, ‘the hole salme is very Remarkabell’ (fo. 19r). Preachers were described as preaching ‘very lernedly’, ‘very livelly’, or ‘very lovingly and lernedly’, and as ‘this good minister’, or ‘this Reverent docter’. Rather more revealing was Saxby’s marginal comment made in his notes on a sermon preached at St Bartholomew’s by Mr Tapley, the ‘backers sonne’, from Luke 16:2, that ‘I could not her very well by Reson I sat not very nere’ (fo. 8r). Saxby’s sermon notes not only reveal much about the range of preaching available in Caroline London; they also offer some insight into the way in which sermons were heard and utilized by men and women such as Saxby. The predominant emphasis in most of his extracts is upon instruction and imitation, doctrine and moral precepts, but Saxby was sufficiently taken by particular interpretations of current events, practical applications, or arresting illustrations to note these down. The minister who preached at ‘St Polcars’ (St Sepulchre) from Isaiah 13:12–13,‘sheweth that the Lord hath shewed ous of lat yeres that he is displesed with ous by his sending unsesonabell wether the last harvest & then in the sed time: & now this spring sesone’ (fo. 5v). Dr Thomas Taylor, preaching at St Mary Aldermanbury from Revelation 12:9, warned his listeners ‘that we should not gooe to wiches and showeth what A dangerous A thing it is: by many profes: And to



john craig

Abonden & deney All the wicked workes of papestrey’ (fo. 19v). One Mr Bray, preaching at St Sepulchres, most probably at a communion service, from 1 Corinthians 11:30: admonisheth all good Christianes to Remember: That we dooe not forget the lords super to Receve it frequently, for the strengthning of our faith until his Coming Agayn . . . he sheweth how maney will gooe After the Recevng of the sacramet in the After none unto the outer part of the sitie to drinke, & walke in the fildes, & macking it A delight for ther bodyes, but Mr bray showeth it to be very unfitt: As is shewed in the Text, for this cause many Ar sicke & weake Among you . . . (fo. 14r)

Saxby remembered the illustration used by the preacher at ‘St donstones at the uper end of Flet street’ from Lamentations 3:40–1: ‘he shewed by A bocket in A well when it was drawning up in the water it was light but After it was drawn Above the water, it was A gret del hever’ (fo. 10r). Clearly this registered. An example of Saxby’s practice in recording these sermons may be found in his summary of a sermon preached at Blackfriars by William Gouge, on Hebrews 11:7. After copying out the text, Saxby proceeded to write: & so he shewed by very many places & profes of the lords mercy unto ous in sparing us so long & giving ous so larg a time of Repentance: wherin the glorious gospell have many yers ben plentifully preched Amongest us ever sense quene Elizebeth of famos memery began hir Reigne Amongest ous: to the glory of god & to the great & endles Comfort of our most gracious soverign King Jeames of famos memory And our gracious & most Religious King Charles, The which most gracious Reigne: the lord to Continew in all True obedience unto the glorious gospel of our lord & saviour Jesus Christ: That the same may Continew so long as the sonne & mone endureth, for our most gracious quen mary & for hir esue, & that they may be faithfull members in the Church & Coman welth to gods glory & our everlasting hapines: blise all the true harted nobelity with the true faith & feare of thy holy spirit: That They may live to gods glory & our continially hapines in this life; And that we, gods true Children & servants may pray to Continew All his mercies & favors for the increse of the glorious gospell Amongest all True Christianes either king or councell or Any other enferaior Magistrates to gods glory & the good of the holl kingdom. (fo. 5r)

This particular extract is atypical in its emphasis upon the royal family and nobility but common in its theme of the delay of God’s judgement and prayers for the increase of the ‘glorious gospell’ bound together by the preacher’s ‘shewing by very many places and profes’. What is striking here is not only the way in which Saxby slips effortlessly from reporting the sermon to a form of intercessory prayer, but the clear implication that members of the royal family or nobility may not be faithful members of the church and commonwealth, a matter of no small concern for ‘gods true children and servants’. London in particular was a place of plenty for those wanting to hear sermons, and Saxby’s notes are replete with the evidence of the possibilities open to Londoners and those who visited the capital. Saxby, like Nehemiah Wallington, was a zealous hearer of sermons. He attended sermons not only on Sundays but also on feast days and at

sermon reception



funerals. He listened to assize sermons and various ‘lectures’. He records hearing a sermon ‘preched besids the stockes in london’ by a stranger (fo. 29v); Wednesday lectures at the Exchange (fo. 36r); Friday lectures at Blackfriars (fo. 38r); a Paul’s Cross sermon on Whitsun Tuesday by Mr Ambler (fo. 26v); another sermon at St Antholin’s (St Tantenes) ‘the saterday after May day 1631’ (fo. 52r); and yet another at the same church on ‘shrofe monday 1633’ (fo. 174r). He was present at a sermon preached by the lecturer of St Paul’s on a Tuesday and by one of the prebends of the cathedral, Dr King, on a Sunday afternoon (fo. 17v). A more systematic examination of these notes might reveal significant patterns in Saxby’s sermon listening habits and meaningful networks in the preachers and churches he frequented. We know that he heard William Gouge preaching at Blackfriars from the book of Hebrews. He often heard Thomas Westfield, who later became bishop of Bristol, preach at St Bartholomew the Great. But he also noted a great variety of ‘strangers’, many of them perhaps visiting preachers, and his appetite for sermons brought him within earshot of many London preachers in a variety of venues: Thomas Taylor, John Downame, Mr Danford, Mr Jackson of Wood Street, Edward Philips of Southwark, Mr Tapsell, Mr Tapley, Mr Grey, Mr Brocke, Mr Gatland, and Mr Foxall. He was interested in recording their names and took pains in his notes on a sermon from 2 Corinthians 5:7 preached ‘by thexchang’ by ‘A stranger that was to goo to St Christopers Iland’ (fo. 15v), to identify the minister as ‘one Mr Jane’. But he was not always successful in attaching a name to a voice and face. An ‘anchat contry precher’ was the sole identification of the minister who preached from Hebrews 11:7 at St Bartholomew’s (fo. 36v); and, on a later occasion at the same church, the sermon was preached by ‘one of the Temple’ (fo. 41r). We can probably never know whether Saxby thought of himself primarily as a parishioner with a particular parish allegiance and identity; or did he, as his mobile sermongadding and note-taking seem to suggest, think of himself as a member of a more diffuse and widely spread movement of godly folk, both preachers and people, hearing, praying, and recording the nation towards righteousness?

Record Keeping and Regulation Finally, the subject of reception needs to include the way in which parish communities were expected to record and certify the names of visiting preachers. This was the receiving end of the Crown’s attempt to regulate preaching, seen in the occasional purchase of the instructions sent out to the provinces in the 1580s and again in 1622 and 1626. The churchwardens of the Essex parish of South Weald not only paid 4d. for the ‘Inhibicion the which came ffrome the beshopp for the forbydynge of prechers the which came to preache with owte Lyssence’, but also copied out in full the bishop’s injunction of 26 March 1589 in their parish accounts (ECRO D/P 128/5/1, fos 10r–13r). In Chelmsford, Miles Bloomfield, the parish clerk, paid for the ‘precept from the Bysshop of London concernyng preaching’, and ‘set yt upon the pulpyt’ (ECRO D/P



john craig

94/5/1, fo. 90r). Few parishes appear to have purchased the Directions to Preachers issued by the Crown in 1622 and 1626, but the Jacobean authorities successfully insisted that parishes purchase paper books to enter the names of ‘strange preachers’. Very few of these records survive, yet it is noticeable that the pressure to keep such books grew in the 1620s and 1630s. In 1626, the churchwardens of St Michael’s, Gloucester, not only purchased a ‘booke to sett downe the names of such strainge prechers as preach in our parish’, but were fined a more severe penalty of 3s. for ‘being twise cited to the court to bringe in a certificate of strainge preachers’ (GCRO P 154/14/CW 2/1). At about the same time the wardens of the Ipswich parish of St Mary at the Tower, home to the Puritan preacher Samuel Ward, were also fined 1s. 6d. ‘to the Regester of Norwich when Mr Chancler visited for not having A booke to Enter the names of strangers in that preched here’ (SCRO FB 91/E1/1: 68). By this time, many parishes possessed such books, and the paucity of surviving records should not confuse us into thinking that these injunctions were not taken seriously. The reporting in many dioceses had begun much earlier. The churchwardens of South Newington, Oxfordshire, kept occasional records of preaching in the 1580s among their parish accounts, while the parish clerk of St Botolph’s Aldgate in London kept a remarkable run of all sermons preached from 1583 onwards in a separate set of books recording parish business (Brinkworth 1964: 1; GL MS 9234/1–5). The certificates drawn up in April 1602 by the incumbents of the Cornish parishes of St Clemens and Columb Major are particularly revealing. John Williams, curate of Columb Major, provided a detailed account of ten sermons preached by four men in addition to ‘those exercises which myself have done by way of exhortacion’, which presumably meant reading homilies. Mr Hitch, parson of the neighbouring parish of Creed, preached once. Mr Danson, who showed his licence from ‘my lorde of Canterbury’, preached on three occasions. Mr Robert Johnson, curate of Manaccan, some 40 miles away, preached three times, having asked to do so, but would not show his licence, and Mr Robert Little, commended by the farmer of the benefice ‘to be an Oxforde man’ and ‘learned’, preached only once. He failed to impress Williams on his first visit (‘finding no such matter in him as was reported’), and, when he came a second time, ‘I required a sight of his licence: but he shewed mee none’. At St Clemens, William Gatliff, the vicar, reported that, ‘besydes my owne poore exercyses’, ‘the sermons that have been preached within my Church of Clemens this laste yeare god be thancked weare many’ and gave the names of seven other men who between them preached eleven sermons. These included neighbouring ministers from Camborn and Bodmin as well as the sermon from ‘Mr Geery’,‘the which I was ashamed of, but being lycensed to preach I suffered him: the which now I am sory for’ (CCRO ARD/TER 170, 177). Why Mr Geery’s sermon proved such a dud and just what the ecclesiastical authorities intended to do, or did, with this information is not known, but the record shows that not least among the auditory of sermons might be other preachers and ministers, rendering a judgement on what they heard, working with their wardens and clerks to regulate access to the pulpit and to certify what they heard. And with this image—ministers listening to ministers—the subject of reception comes full circle.

sermon reception



Bibliography manuscript sources BL (British Library) Lansdowne MS 110. CCED (The Clergy of the Church of England Database 1540–1835 (1999– )). CUL (Cambridge University Library), Add. MS 3117. CCRO (Cornwall County Record Office, Truro), ARD/TER 170, 177. ECRO (Essex County Record Office, Chelmsford), D/P 128/5/1. ECRO (Essex County Record Office, Chelmsford), D/P 94/5/1. GCRO (Gloucestershire County Record Office, Gloucester), P 154/14/CW 2/1. GL (Guildhall Library, London), MS 9234/1–5. LCRO (Leicestershire County Record Office, Leicester), DE 667/2. LCRO (Leicestershire County Record Office, Leicester), DE 1605/34. NrCRO (Norfolk County Record Office, Norwich), C 39/1. NtCRO (Nottinghamshire County Record Office, Nottingham), PR 24810. OCRO (Oxfordshire County Record Office, Oxford), PAR 214/4/F1/81. SCRO (Suffolk County Record Office, Ipswich), FB 91/E1/1. TNA: PRO (The National Archives, Public Record Office), SPD 12/159/27. WkCRO (Warwickshire County Record Office, Warwick), DR 87/1. WCRO (Wiltshire County Record Office, Chippenham), D1/43/1. YCRO (Yorkshire County Record Office, Northallerton), PR/BED 2/1. printed sources Angier, John (1647). An Helpe to Better Hearts, for Better Times: Indeavoured in Severall Sermons. Anon. (1893). ‘Archbishop Laud’s Visitation of Salisbury in 1634’, Wiltshire Notes and Queries, 1: 10–23. Baker, Geoff, and McGruer, Ann (2006) (eds). Readers, Audiences and Coteries in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press. Black, Joseph L. (2008). The Martin Marprelate Tracts: A Modernized and Annotated Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Breton, Nicholas (1603). A Merrie Dialogue betwixt the Taker and the Mistaker. Brigden, Susan (1991). London and the Reformation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brinkworth, E. R. C. (1964) (ed.). South Newington Churchwardens’ Accounts 1553–1684. Banbury Historical Society, 6. Banbury. Burke, Peter (1993). The Art of Conversation. Ithaca, NY: Polity Press. Burton, William (1592). Davids Evidence, or the Assurance of Gods Love Declared in Seven Sermons. Carew, Thomas (1603). Certaine Godly and Necessarie Sermons. Carlson, Eric (2001). ‘The Boring of the Ear, Shaping the Pastoral Vision of Preaching in England, 1540–1640’, in Larissa Taylor (ed.), Preachers and People in the Reformation and Early Modern Period. Leiden: Brill. Collinson, Patrick (1975). ‘Lectures by Combination: Structures and Characteristics of Church Life in 17th-Century England’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 48: 182–213. —— (2006). From Cranmer to Sancroft. Hambledon Continuum.



john craig

Cox, John Charles (1913). Churchwardens’ Accounts from the Fourteenth to the Close of the Seventeenth Centuries. Methuen. Cox, J. C., and Harvey, A. (1907). English Church Furniture. Methuen. Craig, John, and Maas, Korey (2004). ‘A Sermon by Robert Barnes, c.1535’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 55 (July), 542–51. —— (2005). ‘Psalms, Groans and Dogwhippers: The Soundscape of Worship in the English Parish Church, 1547–1642’, in Will Coster and Andrew Spicer (eds), Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dering, Edward (1570). A Sermon Preached before the Queenes Majestie by Maister Edward Dering the 25 day of February Anno 1569. Dillingham, William (1700). Vita Laurentii Chadertoni. Cambridge. Donne, John (1953–62). The Sermons of John Donne, ed. E. M. Simpson and G. R. Potter. 10 vols. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Egerton, Stephen (1623). The Boring of the Eare, Contayning a Plaine and Profitable Discourse by Way of Dialogue. Firmin, Giles (1670). The Real Christian, or a Treatise of Effectual Calling. Foxe, John (1576). The First Volume of the Ecclesiasticall History Contayning the Actes [and] Monumentes. Frere, W. H., and Kennedy, W. P. M. (1910) (eds). Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Period of the Reformation. 3 vols. Alcuin Club. Gouge, William (1622). Of Domesticall Duties. Haigh, Christopher (1984). ‘The Church of England, the Catholics and the People’, in Christopher Haigh (ed.), The Reign of Elizabeth I. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 195–220. Haigh, Christopher (2007). The Plain Man’s Pathways to Heaven. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heywood, Oliver (1683). A Narrative of the Holy Life, and Happy Death of . . . Mr John Angier. Hunt, Arnold (2010). The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and their Audiences, 1590–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ingram, Martin (1987). Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jenkyn, William (1654). A Shock of Corn Coming in its Season. Latimer, Hugh (1572). Frutefull Sermons. Lloyd, David (1668). Memoires. McCullough, Peter (1998). Sermons at Court Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. More, John (1594). Three Godly and Fruitful Sermons. Cambridge. Pearson, A. F. Scott (1925). Thomas Cartwright and Elizabethan Puritanism, 1553–1603. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peel, Albert (1915) (ed.). The Second Parte of a Register. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (1953) (ed.). Tracts Ascribed to Richard Bancroft. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rogers, Thomas (1590). Miles Christianus. Smith, Bruce R. (1999). The Accoustic World of Early Modern England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Henry (1593). The Sermons of Maister Henrie Smith.

sermon reception



Sullivan, Ceri (2006). ‘The Art of Listening in the Seventeenth Century’, Modern Philology, 104 (Aug.), 34–71. Udall, Ephraim (1641). Communion Comlinesse. Vicars, Thomas (1627). ΡΟΜΦΑΙΟΦΕΡΟΣ the Sword-Bearer. Or, The Byshop of Chichester’s Armes Emblazoned in a Sermon Preached at a Synod. Whateley, William (1619). A Bride-Bush: or a Direction for Married Persons.

chapter 11

ser mons i n to pr i n t james rigney

A retired whore, observes a character in The Whore’s Rhetorick (1683), is like one who, ‘After you have suffered sufficient drudgery in the Pulpit, you shall rowle into a fat Bishoprick, and there pamper your self in Prelatical pomp and luxury’. A little later in the same work, Dorothea, the apprentice whore, promises that she will attend Mother Cromwell’s instruction in the arts of prostitution, as ‘a zealous Christian to an edifying Sermon’. In the work’s furtherance of the principle that ‘all is cover for some base aim’, Dorothea is advised that, if she wishes to marry a wealthy client, she should keep popular works of devotion such as Richard Allestree’s The Whole Duty of Man and Lewis Bayly’s The Practice of Piety about her (1683: 32–3, 35, 63). How do devotional books become stage properties, ambiguous marks of identity, and untrustworthy guides to character? And how does preaching come to be represented in such a manner, notwithstanding a tradition that viewed it as the foundational and defining work of Christian ministry? How does preaching become a debased form of rhetoric serving only to achieve advancement for the preacher (and with this advancement the silencing of his preaching)? The Cambridgeshire clergyman Richard Greenham, one of the most respected divines of Elizabeth’s reign, understood preaching to be part of a great cosmic drama because it was ‘the instrument which God hath appointed to pull his people into the sheepfold of Jesus Christ’, while a congregation without preaching was like a flock of sheep scattered and threatened by wolves, ‘wandering abroad to [its] owne destruction’ (1605: 778). Another preacher, William Massie, stated that, ‘where preaching faileth there the people perisheth’, while, in the early days of the Reformation in England, Bishop Hugh Latimer had warned: ‘take away preaching, and take away salvation’ (Massie 1586: sig. A8r; Latimer 1844–55: i. 155; see also i. 418; Fig. 19). The relation of the preacher to the word was a smooth gradatio in the rhetoric of Edward Vaughan: ‘take away the preacher take away the word, take away the word take away hearing, take away hearing take away Faith, take away Faith take away calling upon God, take away calling upon God take away salvation in Christ’ (1617: 25–6). But this relation became particularly fraught during the seventeenth century, when the word was so eagerly

sermons into print



and problematically reproduced in printed form (Carlson 2001). Mark Greengrass has reflected that: Theology in the sixteenth century was, first and foremost, an activity of reading, writing, and reflection. Since the divine touched every branch of human knowledge, it was the queen of sciences. Theologians wrote in a diffused number of genres. But sola scriptura placed the emphasis on biblical truth; and what that truth was, how it was accessed and by whom, and to what effect, were the central questions of the Protestant Reformation. (2007: 105)

As contemporaries sought to characterize their times, especially during the turmoil of the Civil Wars and Interregnum, some, like John Collinges, defined it as ‘a writing age’; to others, like Samuel Hieron, it was, more disapprovingly, ‘a scribbling age’; while John Ramsey saw it simply as the age of the publisher (Hieron 1620: 163; Collinges 1652: sig. A3v; Ramsey 1656: sig. A2v). During the seventeenth century, low and high genres increasingly interact in shared formats and in often uncomfortable proximity within a shared market (Rigney 2000). The following chapter seeks to locate the sermon within the interplay of the production and consumption of printed books during the seventeenth century. It traces the progress of sermons into print, the transformation of these printed volumes into commodities, and finally the progress of these commodities not only into the hands of the ‘godly reader’, but also into the hands of the disputatious and contentious reader.

From Pulpit to Print From the start of the English Reformation, pastoral ministry was reinterpreted as primarily, if not exclusively, a ministry of the word (Carlson 2003). In The Institution of the Christian Man (‘The Bishops’ Book’), issued in 1537, for example, the exposition on the sacrament of Holy Orders states that the principal purpose for which Christ appointed ministers was that of preaching and teaching. The godly preaching ministry was, as Patrick Collinson described it, ‘a dominant and even normative model in the postReformation Church of England’ (2006: 46). Robert Shelford’s ‘A Sermon Shewing how we Ought to Behave Our Selves in Gods House’, published as part of Five Pious and Learned Discourses in 1635, lamented that ‘one beauty hath beat out another; the beauty of preaching (which is a beauty too) hath preacht away the beauty of holinesse: for if men may have a sermon; prayer and church-service, with the ornaments of God’s house, may sit abroad in the cold’ (1635: 12). To enable the sermon to fulfil this role at the heart of ministry, a substantial body of published works were added to the literature of the arts of preaching. These included texts on the responsibilities of preachers, such as John Holme’s The Burthen of Ministerie (1592), William Perkins, Of the Calling of the Ministerie (1605), Samuel Crooke, The Ministerial Husbandrie and Building (1615), and Charles Richardson, A Workeman that



james rigney

Needeth not to be Ashamed . . . A Sermon Describing the Duty of a Godly Minister (1619). Additionally, congregations were addressed with guides to the arts of hearing sermons, such as Stephen Egerton’s The Boring of the Eare (1625), John Brinsley the Younger’s The Preachers Charge; And Peoples Duty (1631), and Henry Mason’s Hearing and Doing the Ready Way to Blessednesse: with an Appendix Containing Rules of Right Hearing Gods Word (1635) (on sermon reception, see Craig, Chapter 10, this volume). The need to instruct auditors in how they were to hear a sermon indicates that even those who did not share Robert Shelford’s disquiet at the importance of preaching, but actively welcomed it, often experienced difficulty concerning the way in which the sermon was to be communicated and particularly the relation of preaching to writing and publication. While the call to preach might have been clear, the call to publish was anything but; hence the apologias that preface so many printed sermons, which cite a range of motives from the encouragement of friends to the need to issue an authorized text in place of a pirated copy. Publishing a sermon appeared to strike at the centrality of preaching to ministry and at the psychological and converting power of the spoken word. It followed that any minister who devoted time to writing was open to the charge that he was neglecting his duty. Even the publication of a sermon required time for revision, as numerous prefaces testify (Sasek 1961). To find time to compose and see through the press the sermons that resulted from diligent preaching was not always easy. John Favour mentioned that he squeezed his controversial writing into the time left from preaching on Sunday and during the week, as well as administering justice and practising medicine and surgery. Favour, the vicar of Halifax, also commented to his dedicatee, Archbishop Tobie Matthew, that as he is 60 he hopes ‘to put my flocke in mind of those things which I would wish to be beleeved after my departure; as well by my pen, which may haply pierce when I am dead, as by my tongue, which shall not ceasse (if it please God), to preach while I live’ (1619: sigs A5r, A2v). Adopting a broad definition of preaching could help to ease ministerial consciences in such situations; so, in a preface to Richard Sibbes’s Exposition of II Corinthians iv, Simeon Ashe, James Nalton, and Joseph Church declared that: ‘there are three ways by which a minister preaches: by doctrine, by life, by writing’ (Sibbes 1862–4: iv. 309). For Richard Baxter (see App. I.14), writing later in the century, books were ‘domestick, present, judicious, pertinent, yea and powerful Sermons’. Baxter goes on to offer four arguments in support of his advocacy of the printed sermon: through books one can sometimes hear better sermons than from one’s own minister; books are less expensive than ministers; books can be chosen by the individual according to their need; and finally, books are available at any time (1673: 60). Each of these advantages has the effect of empowering the reader and consumer, and of releasing them from reliance on the authority of the preacher. One common motive for publication was the desire to perpetuate the spoken word in print. This was the usual reason given in the case of posthumous publication. The 1657 title The Dead Saint Speaking to Saints and Sinners Living in Severall Treatises . . .: Never before Published / by Samuel Bolton aptly expresses this sentiment. But even here there could be a sense in which the word lost vitality in such reproduction:

sermons into print



Many things delivered viva voce, and passing by the Eares but once, may passe for tolerable, yea and may be deemed acceptable: But if once they be turned into Dead Letters, and laid forth in Sheetes, their life is gone. (Willan 1651: sig. E4v)

Here the ‘Sheetes’ of the book to which Edward Willan refers suggest winding sheets in which the corpse of God’s once living word is laid out. Protestantism was understood to be a religion of the word, not a religion of images: ‘the Apostle saith of faith, It comes by hearing’, as the Hertfordshire preacher Peter Smith reminded the House of Commons in 1644 (1644: sig. A2v). Print, however, consists of words (more or less) artfully displayed. For Protestantism, as Patrick Collinson suggested, the word was ‘primarily the word of the printed page, on which depended the spoken words of sermon and catechism’ (1988: 99). The dilemma for preachers faced with the prospect of publishing a sermon was to resolve the question of whether print represented the ‘afterlife’ of the sermon, or whether it was a new life altogether? Was the printed sermon the body renewed or the body putting on corruption? The pressure of polemic provided another incentive for publication, particularly in the mid-seventeenth century. Francis Woodcock also gives a telling insight into the competitive pressures of preaching, especially those preaching before the House of Commons whose sermons were officially ordered into print (on preaching in parliament, see Webster, Chapter 20, this volume): That [sermon] which my Collegue preacht on the same day, had so much of novelty in it, and which so wholly took up the mindes of many, that till the wonder thereof was over, I despaird, that any thing I could publish would be vouchsafed a look from them, whereby in the least it might become usefull. (1646: sig. A4r)

Sometimes timeliness was the motive for publication, when circumstances justified another intervention in an ongoing debate. So Richard Resburie’s Some Stop to the Gangrene of Arminianism Lately Promoted by M. John Goodwin in his Book Entituled, Redemption Redeemed, Or, The Doctrine of Election & Reprobation: In Six Sermons, Opened and Cleared from the Old Pelagian and Late Arminian Errors (1651), consisted of a number of sermons written but unpublished until such time as Goodwin’s book provided Resburie with an opportunity to get them published. Likewise, Woodcock concluded that the subject of one of his sermons was ‘a Text so every way apposite and concerning’, that, it ‘should not want a means whereby it might be sometimes remembered’ (Woodcock 1646: sig. A4v; see also Bolton 1647: sig. A2v; Resburie 1651: sig. A3r). While aggressive rejection of publication was rare—although not unknown (‘I would not neglect for the Printing of a thousand Books, the preaching of one Sermon’, as Vavasor Powell proclaimed)—ambivalence was more common (Powell 1650: sig. A4v). The more radical a preacher’s sentiments, the more unlikely it was that he would keep copies of his sermons or to take pains to correct any manuscripts that were in circulation or intended for publication. However, the case of the radical cleric and scientist John Webster (1610– 82) shows that it can be difficult to draw a predictable link between any theological position (even when this is stated rather than inferred) and attitudes towards printed books. It would seem reasonable to expect that Webster, the author of The Saints Guide (1653)



james rigney

and Academiorum examen (1654), each of which attacked the notion of training ministers in schools that taught ‘worldly’ wisdom through books, would possess few theological works himself. Yet, in Webster’s library of 317 volumes, theological works constituted 24.4 per cent of the collection (and was the second largest category after natural science) (Elmer 1986: 19). Although the Bible was the textual rock of Webster’s faith, he still possessed sixty-two volumes of human commentary upon it. In addition, Webster owned a number of sermons from the period 1640 to 1660 (including sermons by Nicholas Lockyer, Matthew Barker, Francis Woodcock, and William Dell), as well as various standard works on preaching and rhetoric by Keckermann. Ambivalence towards print reflected a fundamental dilemma in religious writing: the attractions of print were set against doubts as to whether spiritual experience could be adequately expressed (Toulouse 1987). Print offered the advantage of effective and efficient transmission of ideas, along with a range of additional resources for elaborating, refining, expressing, and enclosing meaning—through layout, typographical design, and textual apparata. The format of the printed page, especially the margin, increased the pedagogical resources of the sermon along with its sites of discourse. Such sites were exploited not only by the preacher and his reader, but also by the bookseller in his or her commercial interest. So the bookseller Richard Royston used the margin of William Loe’s funeral sermon for the preacher Daniel Featley, A Sermon Preached at Lambeth (1645), to advertise a work to which Loe refers (‘Entituled The Dippers Dipt, sold by Richard Royston in Ivie Lane’) (Loe 1645: 24). While these features increased the range of discourse in the sermon, they achieved this by opening the text still further and creating new spaces in which the reader could function and where the reader could contest the pre-eminence of the author in establishing the meaning of the sermon. The technology of print made the sermon into a public space for the inscription and exchange of views. Print’s provision of opportunities and locations for additional sites of discourse on the printed page enhanced the range of discursive spaces available to the preacher, but at the same time it provided a space for alternative voices and for the intrusive annotations of readers. The comparatively high number of sermons from 1600 to 1640 that have no preface is one small but telling sign of the sermon’s different character at that time. In the preface to his sermon The Old Waye (1610), Robert Abbot, master of Balliol College, Oxford, noted that it was ‘somewhat beside custom to make Dedications of printed Sermons’ (1610: sig. A2r). Humphrey Sydenham marked the distinctiveness of the sermon prior to 1640 when he wrote in the preface to one of his sermons: ‘To tell you here . . . were but to preach by Letter, and degrade a Sermon to an Epistle’ (1637: sig. M2r). Even sermons on major occasions, such as John Williams’s Sermon of Apparel, preached before the king in 1620, and, most notably, his 1625 sermon on the death of James VI & I (Great Britain’s Solomon), all appear without prefaces. To these authors, it would seem, the sermon is capable of presenting itself without further argument or recommendation by the author; the occasion accounts for the sermon without any need for further explanation, and there is no need to invoke or communicate with the reader except through the sermon itself. However, by mid-century it was clear that ‘Custome causeth Truth to crave and

sermons into print



carry Epistles Commendatory’ and the role of the preface has become so important that John Bond can complain that ‘some men (they say) reade nothing of Sermons but the Epistles’ (Greenhill 1647: sig. A5r; Bond 1648: sig. A3v). Print stimulated a competitive relation between book and person, a competition for pre-eminence as the locus of intellectual summation. Richard Vines complained of one particular difficulty of guarding against heresy: Nor is it the Pulpit which can keep off the infection, whiles the poison is carried up and downe in books, and cryed at mens doors every day, in which there are many strange doctrines going abroad open faced, and some more strange which goe vailed, and dropt into the Reader by insinuation. (1647: sigs K1v–K2r)

In his diagnosis Vines draws particular attention to rhetorical acts of insinuation, a communicative subtlety in print by which readers’ interpretative powers are appealed to and tested. The act of reading a printed sermon took the consumption of that sermon out of a directed environment such as the church, where the relation of the preacher to the congregation controlled consumption, and placed it within the realm of private, relatively deinstitutionalized textual decoding. If regeneration was accepted to be primarily a psychological process, then it needed to be immediate; whereas print, which required consideration and reflection, worked to ‘inform the judgement’, in the view of William Gouge: For as Preaching is of power especially to worke upon the affections, so Printing may be one especiall meanes to inform the judgement. For that which is Printed, lieth by a man, and may againe and againe be read, and throughly pondered, till a man come to conceive the very depths that he readeth. (1627: I, sig. a5v).

The Banbury preacher William Whately was equally certain that, ‘without question, the word preached is more usually, and more powerfully effectuall to regeneration, then the word read’, and Samuel Hieron apologized in the ‘Epistle Dedicatory’ to a collection of sermons that ‘the matter cannot be so lively from the pen, as from the tongue’ (Whately 1618: 18–19; Hieron 1616: sig. A2r). Richard Baxter offered along with his directions for the efficient hearing and recollection of sermons the warning that: ‘Some Sermons are all to work upon the affections at present, and the present advantage is to be preferred before the after perusal’ (1673: 575). To many preachers the claims of the centrality of the spoken word coexisted with a strong sense of print as divine gift for the furtherance of reform. To the Presbyterian minister Henry Newcome, for example, the plenitude of printed sermons in the years from 1640 to 1660 was a sign of God’s grace in times of trouble: sound and spiritual food, is choisly provided and serverally dished, not only publickly and weekly in Gods own house (where he is liberall and open-handed) but privately and dayly in their own Houses, in their families and closets . . . This is one of the rare if not unobserved providences of these late reling and rolling times, the lively workings of gods spirit, to bring the hidden and deep mysteries of the Word written (and copied out into the hearts of gods Ministers) into Sermons, & Sermons into printed volumes & printed volumes into the Houses of the godly, that after they



james rigney

have read the exceeding great and pretious promises of God in his own Book, they may read the reality of them in the books of them in the books of his Messengers. (1660: sigs A5v–A6v)

A contrary view—from the same year as Newcome’s positive assessment—is found in the lament of Nathaniel Hardy: I Have too often (and not without regret) beheld those monstrous births which have been forced into the world by the unskilfull and injurious Midwifery of Scriblers, Stationers, and Printers, after the death of their pretended Parents; Indeed, who would not be troubled to see the innocent Names of eminent Divines made (as it were) to do pennance in the Printers Sheets, for the incontinency of their wanton Auditors, who between the Pen and the Press, beget and bring forth a Bastard brood of Sermons, which they must father (1660: sig. A2r).

Sermons in the Marketplace In the eyes of contemporaries, the copiousness of the press was one of its defining characteristics. Alain Veylit’s figures for British publishing from 1475 to 1800, based upon individual titles listed in the English Short Title Catalogue database, indicate that the average number of titles annually printed in the forty-year period between the death of Elizabeth and the beginning of the English Civil War roughly doubled, from about 250 per year to 500 (Veylit 1994; cited in Gants 2002: 188–9). During the five-year period 1614–18, London stationers produced 356 distinct editions each year, and the size of a typical book was slightly less than 22 edition sheets. Of this output a little over half was religious material, a figure well above the next highest category, literary material, which accounted for 15 per cent of the total; two-thirds of the religious materials consisted of devotional or instructional volumes, and 20 per cent were devoted to biblical texts. Sermons represented 14 per cent of the total (Gants 2002: 187). Ever since serious attention was turned to the study of the book in England—in H. S. Bennett’s three volumes on English Books and Readers 1475–1640 (1952–70)—there has been an acknowledgement of the significant part played by religious books within the book market, and by sermons as a category within that class. Even before the publication of Bennett’s study, Alan Herr calculated that 1,200 sermons appeared, in 513 separate publications, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth; and Bennett himself estimated that 2,000 sermons were printed in the period from 1603 to 1640 (Herr 1940; Eccles 1957; Bennett 1970: 108; see also Hyperius 1577: sig. A2r; Chrisman 1982; Barnard and Bell 1991; on sermons in print 1660–1700, see Dixon, Chapter 23, this volume). By the outbreak of the English Civil War religious books dominated the field of print both in volume and in apparent appeal. Among these religious texts, sermons, both as single pamphlets and as collections, occupied a significant place. With reference to the period of the book trade’s infancy, E. P. Goldschmidt claimed that there has never been a book that went to press unless the printer, rightly or wrongly,

sermons into print



believed he would make a profit (1943: 13). Although some evidence of sympathy between a printer-publishers’ output and their politics and religion has been identified, printing was always principally a commercial venture (Lesser 2004; McCullough 2008). When in 1655 the printer Timothy Garthwaite was accused of selling a volume of sermons by Robert Sanderson (XX Sermons, 1655) that contained ‘false Divinity’, his blunt reply to the charge was ‘That ‘twas not his Trade to judge of true or false Divinity, but to print and sell Books’ (Walton 1678: sigs i2v–i3r). The decline in the number and generosity of patrons at the close of the Elizabethan period saw printers, publishers, and authors courting a new group of patrons—the readers. Reading could also become a weapon of resistance when used to assert privacy in public settings, as when Arthur Chapman, a blacksmith from Wolsingham in County Durham, read ‘of an ynglish boke, or prymer, while as the preist was saynge of his servic’. Chapman’s behaviour was, moreover, no silent protest, since ‘after the first lesson, [the priest] willyd him . . . to reid mor softly’. By the end of the seventeenth century the same practice was being employed by Quakers such as Thomas Gasley and Elizabeth Williamson at Beverley (Raine 1845: 231; Firth 1891–1901: ii. 229–31; Hill, Reay, and Lamont 1983: 48). From 1640 onwards, the ownership and reading of sermons became a sign of seriousness. The sermon was a genre, chosen among many others, by the righteous reader. The righteous reader proclaimed a special state of piety by his or her choice of such reading matter. This created, in turn, a market with a sense of itself and a sense of its ‘other’. The case of William Clewer shows that there was one type of reading that was difficult for some of the laity to accept. Among the many charges of extortion, immorality, neglect of duty, slander, and theft brought against Clewer by his congregation at Croydon was the charge that ‘he doth ordinarily preach Other Men’s Words Verbatim, that are in print, which the Parishoners have in their Houses and can read at Home’ (Anon. 1673: sig. A1v). This evidence of book ownership and the suggestion of informed critical reading practices remind us that all preachers, not only those guilty of using other people’s sermons, faced the consequences of the widespread availability of printed sermons. The topos of complaint about the fecundity of the press, such as that of Joseph Hall— ‘there is store of Sermons extant, The pulpit scarce affordeth more than the Presse’— takes on a heightened intensity as the seventeenth century progresses. In 1630 John Clarke lamented that ‘The Press is, I confess, over-pressed with some worth-less workes, should I call them? raw eructations of each petty Pamphletour; and Readers are cloyed, and surfeted on varietie in that kinde’, while by 1646 John Corbet lamented that ‘The present times do seem to groan under the multitude of Books, which are thrust out into the world by a General opinion of self-sufficiencie’. Consequently ‘the unskilfull Reader is quite oppressed, and instead of making progresse in the way of solid truth, sits down amaz’d’ (Hall 1609: sig. A3r; Clarke 1630: sig. B2r–v; Corbet 1646: 1). What happens before the act of reading even starts? Readers need to stand somewhere before they pick up a book, and the nature of that ‘somewhere’ significantly influences the ways in which they interpret (and consequently evaluate) texts. However, books also shape that ‘somewhere’. Books, as well as becoming symbols of consumerist desire, serve



james rigney

to define a culture and a community. Additionally, books mediate social relations within such communities. Accordingly, attitudes to printed books, particularly religious books, correspond to commodity fetishism in pre-capitalist societies. These responses to printed books at this time differ, in this respect, from the attitude towards manuscripts satirized in John Earle’s description of the character of the Antiquary in Microcosmographie: He loves no Library, but where there are more Spiders volums then Authors, and lookes with great admiration on the Antique worke of Cob-webs. Printed bookes he contemnes, as a novelty of this latter age; but a Manu-script hee pores on everlastingly, especially if the cover bee all Moth-eaten, and the dust make a Parenthesis betweene every Syllable. (1629: sig. C7r–v).

Printed books emphasize their newness and their novelty, and they encourage consumption rather than ‘poring-over’. It is this earlier sense of the value of religious books that lies behind Joseph Hall’s recollection in Pharisaisme and Christianitie Compared of private reading as a response to persecution: Oh how happy were our fore-fathers, (whose memorie is blessed for ever) if they could with much cost and more daunger get but one of Pauls Epistles in their bosomes; how did they hugge it in their armes, hide it in their chest, yea in their hearts! How did they eate, walke, sleepe, with that sweet companion, and in spight of all persecution never thought themselves well, but when they conversed with it in secret. (1609: 33)

Unlike other forms of socially distinguishing commodities, books do not gain additional status from patina—those signs of age that constitute a symbolic signifier in physical property. When printed books are animated, it is because, for example, they embody the social milieu in which they were produced and consumed. Insubstantial and often inconclusive data about book ownership make it difficult to trace with any accuracy the size and shape of the market for books such as printed sermons. Catalogues of personal and institutional libraries give some idea of the interest in, and the value attached to, quarto sermons; however, catalogues and booklists mention sermons far more rarely than their profile in the market might lead one to expect. The tendency of disbound quartos to fall apart may be one explanation for this. A related explanation is that such pamphlets did not seem sufficiently important to be recorded in inventories. Such as there is suggests, for example, that sermons were produced quickly (and perhaps read quickly) and that quarto pamphlets were discarded by institutions and wealthier readers in favour of a more substantial ‘body of divinity’ in folio collections. Later collections may support this conclusion: neither Thomas Creech nor John Eyre, for example, had any quarto sermons in their collections, although each had a number of folio collections from the seventeenth century (Fletcher 1731). One identifiable and important group of readers for sermons and devotional texts was the clergy, a group rich in cultural capital, with access to culture and with some economic (and occasionally) political status. In his 1607 guide to clerical responsibilities,

sermons into print



Richard Bernard gave detailed instructions as to the sort of books that a pastor ought to have in his library (on this text, see also App. I.9). One class of works that Bernard specifically excluded was the printed sermon: ‘Surely, he that understands his text well, and knowes how to draw a doctrine, needs no printed or written Sermons, to helpe for to inlarge it: the right knowledge how to use a Concordance, is everie way a sufficient helpe for proofes, reasons, and illustrations of the same’ (1607: 39). Certain features of books reveal the kinds of readers (clergy, gentry, and the ‘middling sort’) who were being targeted. The most important of these features was cost, and cost was reflected in format: a lengthy book in folio on good paper would have been too expensive for most readers, whereas a short book in a small format such as octavo or duodecimo would be widely accessible. The pamphlet became a key axis on which the economics of the book trade and the shape of the public sphere turned (Halasz 1997; see also Green 2000; Cooper and Gregory 2006; Lander 2006). Sermons tended to appear in such small formats: David Gants’s study (2002) indicates that, whereas almost half of all religious works were issued in quarto format, within this figure two-thirds of all sermons appeared as quartos. Jesse Lander’s review of Ian Green’s Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England cautioned that, for all its empirical contribution to a detailed understanding of the relationship of print and Protestantism, By ruling out large, expensive volumes as well as small, ephemeral pamphlets, [Green’s] sample skews heavily toward ‘those didactic and edifying works aimed at middle-rank, middle-brow readers by middle-of-the-road authors and publishers’. (Lander 2003: 548)

Writing in 1629, John Mayer concluded that godly Protestantism was dependent on the middle class: ‘were it not for the Gentry, Citizens, and Yeomanry of this Land, true faith were amongst us but a poore stay, and wee that are Preachers of the Word in these times, might give over for want of cordiall hearers, yea, almost of such as would yeeld but their bodily presence at our Sermons’ (1629: sig. Cc8r). Although, as Tessa Watt showed in Cheap Print and Popular Piety (1991), religious ideas penetrated right down the social scale, it remains likely that the buying of sermons was restricted for much of the seventeenth century, up until the ‘explosion’ of print in the 1640s, to what we might characterize as the ‘middling sort’.

Conclusion Arnold Hunt observed that the fifty years from 1590 to 1640 were ‘a wholly exceptional period in the history of English preaching. For a variety of reasons— partly because of the shift away from spoken discourse towards the written word; partly because of the internal dynamics of Puritanism—the sermon would never be quite so important ever again’ (Hunt 2001: 206). More recent work by scholars of the sermon after 1640 may



james rigney

adjust the chronological boundaries of that claim (see the chapters in Part IV of this volume, ‘English Sermons 1660–1720’). Yet, enmeshing the message within the written medium defined a culture of print that, for all the slow advance of literacy, continued to exclude those at a lower level of society, where reading skills remained the exception rather than the rule. During this period the forces of the written word prevailed over the vernacular and oral traditions. The dominance of print shaped even that surviving oral culture into a secondary orality—one that is influenced by, and even represents, written forms (Laqueur 1976). When writers lament the loss of orality, they are given the language of textuality in which to express that lament: ‘wee olde men are old Chronicles, and when our tongues goe, they are not clockes to tell onely the time present, but large, bookes unclasped, and our speeches, like leaves turnd over and over, discover wonders that are long since past’ (Anon. 1608: sig. A2v). In the following century, while the sermon remained a chief conduit of public instruction, it was radically reshaped by the social and intellectual pressures brought to bear on it as a medium of communication. Other channels— the newspaper, the journal, the novel, the public lecture, the coffee house, the debating club, and the learned society— rapidly appropriated its educational and moralizing functions. At the same time, audiences and readers continued to shift their attention elsewhere. Richard Baxter, for all his own prolific writing, his advocacy of the ministry of print, and the highly tactical manner in which he managed his own relations with the book trade, had his concerns by the middle of the seventeenth century about the impact of the wide dissemination of preaching—both its frequency in the pulpit and its pervasiveness in the press: Sir, if you never tried this art, nor lived the life of heavenly contemplation, I never wonder that you walk so uncomfortably, and that you are all complaining and live in sorrows, and know not what the joy of the saints means . . . And why so much preaching is lost among us, and professors run from sermon to sermon and are never weary of hearing or reading and yet have such languishing and starved souls; I know no truer or greater cause than their ignorance and unconscionable neglect of contemplation. (2004: 140–1)

As the seventeenth century progressed, the printed sermon becomes a progressively less managed and mediated form; its affiliations with other genres are increasingly fluid and often uncomfortable. In 1611, John Seller, dedicating his Sermon against Halting between Two Opinions to the congregation of St Martin in the Fields, had written that his sermon was ‘now to be acted . . . upon a Theater [‘Theatrum Mundus’] & I am intreated (as it were a prologue) to say unto you Come and see’ (1611: sig. *4r). To Seller, bringing forth a sermon in print removes it from its initial appearance on the stage of the pulpit and puts it into the larger and more complicated public stage, in which he must serve as the advertiser of his wares. Humphrey Sydenham lamented in 1637 that: ‘Tis a criticall age we live in, where Divines and Poets have alike fate and misery, most men frequenting Churches as they doe Theaters, either to clap or hisse; and it is with

sermons into print



the Auditors of the one, as with the Spectators of the other; sometimes they bestow their Laurell, sometimes their Thistle . . . Unhappy Creatures that we are to be thus fed with Aire, as if we no longer liv’d by the Spirit of God, but the breath of the people. (1637: sig. Gg2r)

These words could have been echoed by any number of preachers after 1642, although by then the theatre would not have sprung to mind as the first point of comparison with the sermon. The more likely point of reference would have been the popular pamphlet. In The Recording Angel: Music, Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa (2005), Evan Eisenberg has explored the impact of phonography on the commodification, and gradual de-ritualization, of music. While music used to be inextricably linked to ritual— and only relevant within the sacred contexts for which it was envisioned—the commodification of music and the anti-ritual environments of the Enlightenment and Protestant America, the invention of printing and the standardization of notation and, finally, the ability to copyright music gradually demythologized and demystified music as art. The study of the sermon in the seventeenth century, particularly in its relation to print and the book trade, discloses the roots of a similar process.

Bibliography Abbot, Robert (1610). The Old Waye. Anon. (1608). The Great Frost: Cold Doings in London, Except it be at the Lotterie. —— (1673). The Case of the Inhabitants of the Town and Parish of Croydon. —— (1683). The Whore’s Rhetorick. Barnard, John, and Bell, Maureen (1991). ‘The Inventory of Henry Bynneman (1583): A Preliminary Survey’, Publishing History, 29: 5–46. Baxter, Richard (1673). The Christian Directory. —— (2004). The Saints’ Everlasting Rest, ed. John T. Wilkinson. Vancouver: Regent College Publishing. Bennett, H. S. (1970). English Books and Readers, iii. 1603–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bernard, Richard (1607). The Faithfull Shepheard or The Shepheards Faithfulnesse. Bolton, Samuel (1647). Deliverance in the Birth: or, A Sermon Preached before the Right Honourable the House of Peeres in the Abbey-Church at Westminster upon the 29 of July 1646. Cambridge. Bond, John (1648). Eschol: or Grapes among Thorns. Carlson, Eric Josef (2001). ‘The Boring of the Ear: Shaping the Pastoral Vision of Preaching in England, 1540–1640’, in Larissa Taylor (ed.), Preachers and People in the Reformations and Early Modern Period. Leiden: Brill, 221–48. —— (2003). ‘Good Pastors or Careless Shepherds? Parish Ministers and the English Reformation’, History, 88: 423–36. Chrisman, Miriam Usher (1982). Lay Culture, Learned Culture: Books and Social Change in Strasbourg, 1489–1599. New Haven: Yale University Press.



james rigney

Clarke, John (1630). Holy Oyle for the Lampes of the Sanctuarie: or Scripture-Phrases Alphabetically Disposed. Collinges, John (1652). A Cordial for a Fainting Soul. Collinson, Patrick (1988). The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Basingstoke: Macmillan. —— (2006). From Cranmer to Sancroft. Hambledon Continuum. Cooper, Kate, and Gregory, Jeremy (2006) (eds). Elite and Popular Religion. Studies in Church History, 42. Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer. Corbet, John (1646). A Vindication of the Magistrates and Ministers of the City of Gloucester from the Calumnies of Mr Robert Bacon. Earle, John (1629). Micro-Cosmographie. Or, A Peece of the World Discovered; in Essayes and Characters. Eccles, Mark (1957). ‘Henry Bynneman’s Books’, Library, 5th ser., 12/2: 81–92. Eisenberg, Evan (2005). The Recording Angel: Music, Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa. 2nd edn. New Haven: Yale University Press. Elmer, Peter (1986). The Library of Dr John Webster: The Making of a Seventeenth-Century Radical. Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine. Favour, John (1619). Antiquitie Triumphing over Noveltie. Firth, C. H. (1891–1901). The Clarke Papers. 4 vols. Camden Society, New Series, 49, 54, 61, 62. Printed for the Camden Society. Fletcher, Gyles (1731) (ed.). A Catalogue of the Libraries of the Rev. Mr Thomas Creech . . . and of John Eyre Esq. Gants, David L. (2002). ‘A Quantitative Analysis of the London Book Trade, 1614–1618’, Studies in Bibliography, 55: 185–213. Goldschmidt, E. Ph. (1943). Medieval Texts and their First Appearance in Print. The Bibliographical Society. Gouge, William (1627). The Works of William Gouge. 2 vols. Green, I. M. (2000). Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Greengrass, Mark (2007). ‘The Theology and Liturgy of Reformed Christianity’, in R. Po-Chia Hsia (ed.), The Cambridge History of Christianity, vi. Reform and Expansion 1500–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 104–24. Greenham, Richard (1605). The Workes of the Reverend and Faithfull Servant of Jesus Christ M. Richard Greenham. 4th edn. Greenhill, W. (1647). ‘To the Christian Reader’, in Thomas Shepherd, The Sincere Convert. Edinburgh. Hall, Joseph (1609). Pharisaisme and Christianitie Compared and Set Forth in a Sermon at Pauls. Halasz, Alexandra (1997). The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hardy, Nathaniel (1660). A Sad Prognostick. Herr, Alan Fager (1940). The Elizabethan Sermon: A Survey and a Bibliography. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hieron, Samuel (1616). Three Sermons. —— (1620). The Works of Mr Sam. Hieron, late Pastour of Modbury in Devon. Hill, Christopher, Reay, Barry, and Lamont, William (1983). The World of the Muggletonians. Temple Smith.

sermons into print



Hunt, Arnold (2010). The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and their Audiences, 1590–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hyperius, Andreas (1577). The Practise of Preaching, Otherwise Called the Pathway to the Pulpet; Eng. by J. Ludham. Lander, Jesse M. (2003). ‘Review of I. M. Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England’, Common Knowledge, 9/3: 548. —— (2006). Inventing Polemic: Religion, Print, and Literary Culture in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laqueur, Thomas (1976). ‘The Cultural Origins of Popular Literacy in England, 1500–1850’, Oxford Review of Education, 2.3: 255–75. Latimer, Hugh (1844–5). Sermons and Remains, ed. George Elwes Corrie. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lesser, Zachary (2004). Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Loe, William (1645). A Sermon Preached at Lambeth. McCullough, Peter E. (2008). ‘Print, Publication, and Religious Politics in Caroline England’, Historical Journal, 51/2: 285–313. Massie, William (1586). A Sermon Preached at Trafford. Oxford. Mayer, John (1629). Praxis theologica, or, The Epistle of the Apostle St James Resolved, Expounded, and Preached upon. Newcome, Henry (1660). The Sinners Hope . . . Being the Substance of Severall Sermons. Powell, Vavasor (1650). Christ and Moses Excellency. Raine, James (1845) (ed.). Depositions and Other Ecclesiastical Proceedings from the Courts of Durham. Surtees Society, 21. J. B. Nichols and Son. Ramsey, John (1656). Morbus epidemicus: or, The Disease of the Latter Dayes Discovered and Laid Open in a Sermon out of the II Ep. of Timothy. Resburie, Richard (1651). Some Stop to the Gangrene of Arminianism . . . in Six Sermons. Rigney, James (2000). ‘ “To lye upon a Stationers Stall Like a Piece of Coarse Flesh in a Shambles”: The Sermon, Print and the English Civil War’, in Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter E. McCullough (eds), The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 188–207. Sasek, Lawrence A. (1961). The Literary Temper of the English Puritans. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press. Seller, John (1611). A Sermon against Halting between Two Opinions. Shelford, Robert (1635). Five Pious and Learned Discourses. Cambridge. Sibbes, Richard (1862-4). The Complete Works of Richard Sibbes, ed. A. B. Grosart. 7 vols. Edinburgh: James Nichol. Smith, Peter (1644). A Sermon Preached before the Honorable House of Commons, at their Monethly Fast, May 29, 1644. Sydenham, Humphrey (1637). Sermons upon Solemne Occasions. Toulouse, Teresa (1987). The Art of Prophesying: New England Sermons and the Shaping of Belief. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Vaughan, Edward (1617). A Plaine and Perfect Method, for the Easie Understanding of the Whole Bible. Veylit, A. (1994). ‘A Statistical Survey and Evaluation of the Eighteenth-Century Short Title Catalog’. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Riverside, California. Vines, Richard (1647). The Authours, Nature, and Danger of Haeresie.



james rigney

Walton, Izaak. (1678). The Life of Dr Sanderson, Late Bishop of Lincoln. Watt, Tessa (1991). Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whately, William (1618). The New Birth: or, A Treatise of Regeneration Delivered in Certaine Sermons. Willan, Edward (1651). Six Sermons. Woodcock, Francis (1646). Lex talionis . . . a Sermon Preached at Margarets Westminster, before the Honourable House of Commons, on their Solemn Fast, July 30th, 1645.

chapter 12

pr e achi ng a n d con text: joh n don n e’s ser mon at th e fu n er a l s of sir w il li a m cok ay n e peter mccullough

This volume asserts an interdisciplinary approach to early modern sermons as necessary for the fullest appreciation of them. As its chapters show in detail, preachers composed sermons with attention not only to the formal, literary aspects of the genre itself, but also to the Bible, to patristic, classical, and other sources, as well as to the arts of delivery. But preachers also had to compose—and deliver—their sermons with a host of contextual matters in mind; that is, with attention to the particularities of place, occasion, and auditory. Even for parochial clergy, the difference between a holy day, a Sunday, or a weekday afternoon lecture would steer a sermon in different directions. Further contingencies such as squabbles (or worse) between parishioners, or dearth, or plague could present a preacher with everything from opportunities for ministry to minefields of opinion through which he must pick his way. Then there were the special occasions often marked by sermons, each with its own demands and conventions: official fast or feast days, guild dinners, funerals, churchings, weddings. And many preachers (especially in cities) could find themselves before auditories, and in physical and political surroundings, as widely varied as a parish church, open-air pulpit cross, cathedral, guildhall, assizes, or royal court (see Rhatigan, Chapter 6, and Armstrong, Chapter 7, this volume). It is dangerous, therefore, to treat ‘sermons’ as an undifferentiated category to which the same kinds of interpretation always apply. Early modern sermons—whether ‘elite’ or otherwise—were radically occasional pieces of performed writing, contingent upon the contexts in and for which they were delivered. They suffer, in turn, from any inter-



peter mccullough

pretative engagement that does not attend carefully to the circumstances outside the remaining textual artefact that moulded and shaped it ab origine. Perhaps only the drama of the period presents as much scope for the imaginative reconstruction of a written text’s original engagement with its audience. Even more specifically, it may be the masque—with its situating of a performed text in an acutely specific architectural, social, and temporal setting—to which the sermon may best be compared. Text and context, then, should not be parsed separately, for reading a sermon while alert to both yields interpretative results—literary and historical—that would otherwise remain hidden. What follows is a case study that combines historical research with close formal analysis. John Donne’s sermon ‘Preached at the Funerals of Sir William Cokayne Knight, Alderman of London, December 12. 1626’ recommends itself because its subject and occasion can be so richly documented. And, independent of its original context, it has earned accolades as one of Donne’s finest (Donne 1953–62: vii. 22–3; cf. Bald 1970: 490). Furthermore, although study of Donne’s sermons gives us perhaps the only unbroken literary-critical tradition about an early modern preacher, the vast majority of critical enterprise in recent years has been devoted to teasing out Donne’s politics, or investigating his enigmatic biography and doctrinal views (Johnson 1999; Colclough 2003; Shami 2003). The key to my approach here is instead the moment of the sermon’s delivery—imagining Donne delivering it before the mourners gathered in the choir of St Paul’s Cathedral in December 1626. Sermons labour under the simple practical difficulty for critics of length, which (for students and teachers) has always loaded the pedagogical dice in favour of lyric poetry and drama. The necessity for critics so often to highlight only partial aspects of any sermon, and the resulting temptation to quote selectively, has resulted in very few contextualized readings of whole sermons (but see McCullough 1998, 2006; Morrissey 2003). Lost, then, is the drama of how a sermon actually unfolded in delivery with the preacher’s strategic deployment of structural parallelisms; highs and lows of emotion wrought by shifts in tone, syntax, and diction; and the often gradual evolution of argument. Here I first present contextual detail about the setting and dramatis personae in the pageant of Cokayne’s funerals that contained Donne’s sermon. The information available is unusually full, even for an elite sermon. But every piece of it illuminates the sophistication of Donne’s rhetorical, pastoral, and political engagement with this context.

The Text An approach to a sermon based on its performance immediately raises questions of text. There are no manuscript copies of the Cokayne sermon; it survives in a single witness, printed in the first (posthumous) folio of Donne’s sermons in 1640. Are these really the words Donne uttered on the day? Did he revise it before his death and its publication?

preaching and context



fig. 20 Monument to Sir William Cokayne (d. 1626) in St Paul’s Cathedral. Engraving by Wenceslaus Hollar from William Dugdale’s History of St Paul’s Cathedral (1658).

Such questions are often asked, and cautious common sense can provide the only answers. To the first, the answer is ‘probably not exactly’, for inevitably some slippage must have occurred between the prepared, delivered, and printed versions. To the second the answer can only be ‘maybe’. But, broadly speaking, when any sermon was altered substantially between delivery and print, its author or editor usually went out of his way to say so, and in this case Donne’s editor (his son, John) did not. Further, readerly expectation at least until the mid-seventeenth century was that what a buyer paid for was a fair approximation of what was spoken—sermon readers were sermon hearers first, and expected the print version to be a fair substitute. And in a case such as this, where only one text exists, the issue is in some real way rather moot: it was printed as the sermon preached at the funeral, and we have no evidence upon which to question that presentation.



peter mccullough

The Deceased ‘Sir William Cokayne Knight’ is, in itself, context enough for a lively reading of Donne’s oration, for few early modern Londoners could have presented a preacher with such a challenge for memorializing. To many in the City, Cokayne died resented, if not despised, for causing ‘one of the most severe trade crises ever to devastate England’. His 1615–16 scheme to export only dyed and dressed cloth, although initially favoured by King James, wrecked trade with the Dutch and led to a collapse in prices from which the English cloth industry took decades to recover. Moreover, the whole scheme was suspected, then and now, to be little more than a selfish attempt to redirect trade from the Merchant Adventurers Company into the hands of smaller trading companies like Cokayne’s own, the Eastland (Aldous 2004). Envy, too, must have played its part in popular resentment of Cokayne, who was fantastically wealthy by both inheritance and industry, and had managed, in spite of the cloth debacle, to aggrandize still more wealth and even to recover the king’s favour. As late as 1623, when Cokayne’s London mansion and storehouses burned, John Chamberlain remarked that he had seldome knowne a man less pitied, as well in respect of his great wealth, as for his severitie, and specially for that busines of clothing . . . which was his only plot and project, and procured him many a curse from poore people, which is not to be contemned when yt is deserved. (1939: ii. 524)

In addition to wealth and a gift for oratory (both of which were lavished on the King and Prince Charles), central to Cokayne’s recovery of his professional standing in the City was his term of office as lord mayor (1619–20). And as in death he was ‘re-presented’ to a City audience by Donne, so he was too in life by Thomas Middleton—in his lord mayor’s show and five further entertainments for Cokayne, all acted during the mayoral year, and printed in 1619 and 1622, respectively (Middleton 2007: 1399–1404, 1434–9). Middleton’s lavish lord mayor’s show, paid for as was customary by the honorand’s guild (here the Skinners’ Company), celebrated themes of amity among citizens, fraternal love in the guild, and the obligation of the new mayor to perform works of love to the City, all of which cumulatively staged ‘a path toward political consolidation and cultural perfection’ (Manley 2007: 1397–8). Middleton’s subsequent smaller entertainments for Cokayne manifested a ‘civic ambition to match the ceremony of the court and of aristocratic great houses’, seen nowhere more vividly than in the restaging of one to mark Cokayne’s eldest daughter Mary’s April 1620 marriage to Charles Howard, baron of Effingham and heir to the earldom of Nottingham (Parr 2007: 1431). By the time of Cokayne’s death, his second daughter Anne had married the Northamptonshire landholder Sir Hatton Fermor; and the third, Martha, the Scottish courtier John Ramsay, earl of Holdernesse (James’s rescuer in the alleged Gowrie Plot of 1600). With inheritances of a staggering £5,000 each, his remaining three daughters soon themselves married nobility, as did Cokayne’s widow. His only son, Charles, received an inheritance of £12,000 and was later raised to the Irish peerage

preaching and context



(Aldous 2004). But the status of these inheritances—indeed of Cokayne’s whole vast estate—would have been a troublesome cloud over the day of his funeral. For Cokayne was caught unprepared to meet his maker: he was forced to make a nuncupative will— that is, one not prepared and signed by himself, but dictated only in brief substance (presumably in the extremity of the deathbed) to his trusted London agent Jacob Price (TNA: PRO PROB 11/152; Houlbrooke 1994: 88). Such wills were, of course, more open to dispute, and letters of administration (allowing the appointed executors to ‘administer’ the will) were not granted until eight days after the funeral, with full probate granted only the following June (Aldous 2004). Surviving correspondence between Cokayne and his immediate family (NRO C) contains intimations of Cokayne’s relationships with them that would have coloured the funeral day. His elder daughters and their husbands wrote frequently to their father and mother from their country seats, passing on news of visits between the siblings, arrivals of new grandchildren, and thanks for expressions of parental generosity. Lady Fermor, for example, on 7 July 1624 rendered Sir William ‘dutifull thankes; both for your former kindnesses and alsoe your Sturgion Lately sent to mee’. She concluded with duty and love to both her parents and younger sisters, and a particular commendation to her father—‘Pray for your healthe and reste’—which suggests concern for a man consumed with business (NRO C2439). Family correspondence to Sir William streamed into London to his headquarters in Austin Friars, while his wife spent much time managing their Surrey estate of Combe and visiting their married daughters. Sir William emerges as a loving, but perhaps distant father, to whom most family events were the matter of reportage rather than experience. Responding to a letter from his son Charles on 19 July 1626, he said that he did ‘take notice thereby that my daughter Farmer is brought abedd of a sonne: and both yo[ur]selfe S[ir] Hatton and his Ladye w[ith] all their children are in Good health, for w[hich] good newes the allmightie be praysed, and make her stronge agayne & a happy mother’ (NRO C2431). The business ‘severitie’ noted by Chamberlain, however, was never far from the surface. Later the same month (31 July 1626, his last surviving letter), Sir William acknowledged to Charles the letter he had sent ‘w[ith] a Bucke w[hich] I take notice was given unto you and you kindely give it unto us’. But after those brief thanks, he devoted many more lines to criticizing Charles for having agreed what he judged too high a price for carriage and delivery—all of ten shillings (NRO C2463). Inculcating how to drive a good bargain was of more concern than indulging filial largesse. Sir William’s sons-in-law also plied him with correspondence, some of which suggests suspicions and jealousies between them. The earl of Holderness (4 February 1625) fretted about outstanding loans to the King from both himself and Sir William, and about his lack of a proper country seat, both of which he hoped that the King would rectify with a suitable ‘godbairne gift’ of lands when he had a son (NRO C2888). But previously (dated only ‘1623’) Charles Howard had urged darkly that Sir William ‘stand uppon noe termes with the kinge: nor with my lorde of Holdernes’ unless ‘ruled by your lovinge sonne’—that is, himself (NRO C2436). Meanwhile (8 January 1624), the third son-in-law, Sir Hatton Farmor, threatened—evidently about the same unspecified business (a ‘treatie of



peter mccullough

Marriage’, and probably the royal loans)—‘that if the Lorde of Holdernes and you Remaine as you were . . . bee earneste w[ith] him’ and ‘let him knowe that if it bee not done before the nexte Tearme, I am wronged in trustinge to his Lo[rdship’s] promise’ (NRO C2458). Combinations of love, affection, favouritism, jealousies, and resentments are brought to any family funeral. But they could only have been magnified by the interests, connections, and estates represented by the mourners of Sir William Cokayne seated around his coffin in the choir of St Paul’s.

The Preacher Donne was in 1626 at the height of his powers and reputation as one of England’s greatest preachers. A royal chaplain since 1615, and Divinity Reader to Lincoln’s Inn from 1616 to 1622, Donne had since the winter of 1622 been dean of London’s cathedral. In the twelve months before Cokayne’s funeral, he had already preached nine surviving sermons at court and cathedral, the most recent an evening sermon at St Paul’s on 5 November (Donne 1953–62: vii. 237–56). All of these were ex officio—as royal chaplain, canon, or dean—and, in the absence of any evidence, it seems fair to speculate that he was appointed to preach the Cokayne funeral sermon also ex officio as the officiating cleric at the place of interment. Unlike with less grand funerals, there was a long delay between Cokayne’s death on 20 October and burial on 12 December. So if for most parochial clergy funeral sermons were hurriedly composed in the usual day or two between decease and burial, Donne here had the relative luxury of some five weeks to prepare, even after his 5 November sermon. Within those weeks we know that Donne attended a meeting of the governors of the Charterhouse on 7 December; he may have attended Bishop Andrewes’s funeral at Southwark on 11 November; and mortality touched his own family with the death on 25 November of his son-in-law, the former actor and theatre entrepreneur Edward Alleyn (Bald 1970: 543; Cerasano 2004). For Donne’s personal knowledge of Cokayne we have only the internal evidence of this sermon, where Donne speaks first hand of his admiration for Cokayne’s pious bearing when attending services in the cathedral. Otherwise he speaks of Cokayne by report and reputation, though the intimacy of some of these details, particularly the account of Cokayne’s last days and death, could only have come from Donne’s conference or correspondence with a member of the alderman’s household. It should be noted, however, that one of Donne’s closest friends at precisely this latter stage of his own life was Mrs Anne Cokayne, wife of Thomas Cokayne of Ashbourne in Derbyshire, and thus chatelaine of the ancestral home of the several prolific lines of Cokaynes, including the London alderman’s. Although he was from a Warwickshire branch removed by at least three generations from Ashbourne, Sir William’s monument in St Paul’s hailed him as ‘Antiqua Cokainorum Derbiensium familia oriundus’ (sprung from the ancient family of the Cokaynes of Derbyshire). Although Mrs Cokayne lived at distant Ashbourne (where Donne evidently visited) and her personal acquaintance with the subject of Donne’s

preaching and context



sermon may have been slight, Donne could not have been ignorant of, and may have been influenced by, this connection (Dugdale 1658: 69; Bald 1970: 501–3; Aldous 2004).

The Place and Occasion Donne’s hour-long sermon was in fact only one scene in a piece of funerary theatre that would have lasted the better part of an entire day, and preacher was not the only part Donne would have played in it. As Cokayne was a knight entitled to bear heraldic arms, and as was customary for former aldermen and lord mayors, Cokayne’s executors entrusted the ordering of his funerals to the College of Heralds. Doing so guaranteed the greatest possible display of ceremony and social hierarchy, as well as expense and delayed interment, while the heralds marshalled ‘mourners and marchers, biers and hearses, escutcheons, banners, and palls’ (Cressy 1997: 450–1). The College issued ‘certificates’— a cross between an obituary and an account of services rendered—signed by the marshalling heralds and endorsed by the chief mourner (usually the heir). Cokayne’s certificate affirms that, after his death in Surrey, his body was first conveyed to his mansion house in Broad Street (newly rebuilt after the 1624 fire) in the north-east of the City, where it was presumably sealed in a lead coffin and attended by watchers in a principal room of the house over the weeks before the funeral. On the day appointed, the funeral procession led the hearse ‘from thence . . . to the Cathedrall Church of St Paul in London, and there, after his funerall rites and obsequies were performed, he was interred in the Isle on the South side of the Quier’ (Cokayne 1897: 86). Both Cokayne’s final progress and destination deserve further attention. The procession, numbering in the hundreds of men, would have proceeded south-east down Broad Street, then Threadneedle Street past the Royal Exchange, through the Poultry and into the City’s grandest thoroughfare, Cheapside, before entering the cathedral churchyard. Cokayne’s cortege thus passed through the wealthiest heart of mercantile London, in an apt reciprocal leave-taking of commercial city and prince of commerce. Moreover, Cheapside was the traditional route for royal entries on coronation days, last seen in 1604 for James I. Less than a year before Cokayne’s death, the City had been disappointed in its hopes for a repeat entry for the coronation of Charles I, cancelled because of the growing plague. Among those who lost the chance to line the route were the Cokayne ladies. Jacob Price wrote to his master on 9 January ‘touchinge a place for my Lady and her daughters upon the Coronation-day’, but with the bad news that their preferred vantage point, the huge Cheapside house of the grocer and druggist Henry Box, was not suitable, and that instead ‘my Lady may have a Chamber at Alderman Allens house in Cheapside’ (NRO C2717; Wales 2004). With the royal procession cancelled, alderman Allen would with his fellows instead pass his home escorting Cokayne’s body to its grave. Cokayne’s funeral exit also suggestively echoed his 1619 entry as lord mayor. Middleton’s The Triumphs of Love and Antiquity staged first a speech by ‘Love’ ‘to entertain his lordship upon the water’ as he returned from his oath-taking at Westminster;



peter mccullough

then ‘Orpheus’ hailed the party upon its ‘arrival in Paul’s Churchyard’ on the south side ‘near Paul’s Chain’; whereupon the ‘triumph’‘move[d] onward and [met] the full body of the show in the other Paul’s Churchyard’ (near Paul’s Cross on the north side) for a pageant, before crossing Cheapside for its finale and banquet in the Guildhall. Thereafter, the full array of liveried aldermen and their new mayor went back again, ‘accompanied with the triumph before him, towards St Paul’s, to perform the noble and reverend ceremonies which divine antiquity religiously ordained’ (Middleton 2007: Triumphs, ll. 40, 104, 197–9, 400–3). Although the prominence of St Paul’s in mayoral pageants, including the ceremonial attendance of mayor and aldermen there for seven feast day sermons a year, was traditional (Stow 1971: ii. 191), Cokayne’s burial there was not. Every other mayor and alderman of the period was buried in a parish church (George E. Cokayne 1897). Cokayne himself had seen ‘a comely Monument fixed in the wall, at the east end of the Chancell’, to his own parents in the parish church of St Peter le Poer, where he himself was still resident, and he could have been expected to extend the tradition of it as his family’s mausoleum (Stow 1633: 185). Henry Holland’s detailed 1634 survey listed only one mayoral (much less aldermanic) monument in the entire cathedral, that of Sir John Poultney, dated 1348 (1634: sig. B2v). Grandiose aggrandizement of his family may initially be suspected in the gesture of a cathedral burial. Yet, though the cathedral was architecturally grand, there had persisted from the Middle Ages but ‘slender . . . loyalties of City business men to St Paul’s . . . Nor did St Paul’s feature as a first choice for the burial of important people’ (Tudor-Craig 2004: 16). Was there an explanation other than mortuary pride for Cokayne’s interment there? In addition to mayoral and funereal pageant routes, Cokayne’s public life arrived at St Paul’s in another important way, which does explain why he was buried in its south choir aisle—where coincidentally but appropriately he was joined five years later by Donne (Cragoe 2004: 128). Cokayne (ex officio as mayor) had sat among the commissioners appointed by King James in March 1620 to raise funds for the renovation of the crumbling cathedral. It was after the first meeting of those commissioners that Cokayne—having as a captive audience members of the privy council and the other commissioners—redeployed the first of Middleton’s Honourable Entertainments to mark the marriage that very morning of his daughter Mary to Charles Lord Howard (Chamberlain 1939: ii. 301; Parr 2007: 1431). Just three weeks earlier, Cokayne and the aldermen had welcomed James to the City in pageant style, presenting the king and Prince Charles with purses of gold at Temple Bar, and then leading them up Fleet Street lined ‘by companies with their banners and stremers all along’ to the great west door of the cathedral. The ensuing sermon at Paul’s Cross—‘a patheticall speach for the repairing of Powles’—was delivered by bishop of London John King, after which, in ‘a banket in the bishops house’, James had officially launched the restoration campaign by charging Cokayne and the aldermen ‘to undertake the worke’ (Chamberlain 1939: ii. 299).1 1

Bishop King, who ordained Donne, was an intimate friend (Bald 1970: 93, 282–3, 302); given this and Donne’s loyalty to James, it would not be irresponsible to imagine that Donne, then Reader at Lincoln’s Inn, attended the royal visit and sermon.

preaching and context



To have been buried in St Paul’s was in fact an acknowledgement of Cokayne’s patronage (if by mayoral coincidence) of the cathedral, and the role it played in the rehabilitation of his reputation in the City. Although it would be lost in the Great Fire of 1666, the long inscription on the ambitious monument erected over his tomb by his son (Fig. 20) specified, immediately after listing his City offices, the fact that, ‘when with public rejoicing King James solemnly came for the beautifying of this aging house of God, halting its decay, as his Mayor he welcomed him magnificently: for that reason his memorial stands here for eternity’.2 The most vivid painted description of preaching in post-Reformation England—John Gipkyn’s 1616 diptych in the collection of the Society of Antiquaries

fig. 21 A sermon at Paul’s Cross, attended by the royal family, lord mayor, and aldermen. From John Gipkyn’s diptych (1616), now in the Society of Antiquaries.

2

‘gaudio publico Regem Jacobum ad decorem hujus Domus Dei senescentis, jam & corrugatæ restituendum, solemniter huc venientem, Consulatu suo magnificè excepit: idcirco in Templo publico, ad æternam rei memoriam hic situs est’ (Dugdale 1658: 69).



peter mccullough

(Fig. 21)—in both its subject matter and provenance is also an artefact that links the deceased Cokayne, the preacher Donne, and the cathedral of St Paul’s. The painting’s three panels illustrate the ‘vision’ of Henry Farley, an eccentric scrivener who desired (almost monomaniacally) to see the three scenes he commissioned Gipkyn to paint become reality: a mighty procession of royal family and City fathers to St Paul’s to inaugurate its restoration; a sermon preached by a bishop at Paul’s Cross before royalty, mayor, and aldermen; and a triumphantly restored St Paul’s. The personæ in the diptych had changed by the time Farley’s vision became reality in 1620: the by-then deceased Queen Anne would not join James and Charles in the royal gallery; Cokayne would be the mayor flanked by the scarlet-clad aldermen immediately below; and the preaching bishop would be bishop of London John King. Still, Cokayne is ‘in’ the 1616 vision, if only prophetically. And Donne? Recent scholarship has shown that the Farley–Gipkyn diptych was one of a flurry of petitions (in several media) urging a restoration of St Paul’s and given by Farley to King James between 1616 and 1620. Evidently not fit for the royal collection, the painting was returned to the deanery of St Paul’s, where it remained, appearing in Donne’s will as ‘that large picture of ancient churchwork which hangs in the lobby leading to my chamber’, whence it was smuggled away in 1646 by Donne’s successor and executor, Dean Thomas Winniffe (Tudor-Craig 2004: 4, 12). The bishop preaching in it from Paul’s Cross, John King, was for many years Donne’s friend, and had ordained him to the priesthood in the year it was painted (McCullough 2004). Donne himself had recalled in a 1622 cathedral sermon that James ‘visited this Church, and these wals, and meditated, and perswaded the reparation thereof ’ (Donne 1953–62: iv. 247). Whether Donne knew Cokayne personally or not, next to his very bedchamber had hung a visual reminder of that mayor’s particular connections to the cathedral in which he was to be buried.

The Mourners Cokayne’s heraldic cathedral burial, his status as thrice-master of the Skinners’ Company, alderman, and former lord mayor, and his socially advancing offspring themselves suggest that his funerals would have been attended by a heady mix of City, court, and family, something that Donne must have taken into account when writing his sermon. But the survival of a herald’s order for ‘The proceeding to the funerall of Sr William Cocaine sometime Lo: Mayor & alderman of London’ (BL Add. MS 71131D) allows an almost exact reconstruction of who Donne addressed from the pulpit after the procession had filed into the choir of the cathedral.3 The heralds’ processional cannot be analysed here in the detail it deserves from specialists, but even a summary of its contents, and comparison of processionals by the same herald for six other 3 I am indebted to Arnold Hunt, Curator of Historical Manuscripts at the British Library, for this reference, and to Dr Mary Morrissey for her draft transcription.

preaching and context



contemporary aldermen, adjusts significantly how we understand not only what Donne wrote for the people he addressed, but also how we imagine their reception of it.4 Elite funeral processions deployed the greatest number of mourners (plus the greatest social quality of mourners) that were possible within the deceased’s social and professional sphere (Woodward 1997: 17). These were marshalled according to strict rules of precedence, in ascending order from the humblest to the greatest: the poor; servants to gentlemen mourners; servants of the deceased; gentlemen; divines; knights, bishops, and noblemen; officiating minister; the heraldic regalia; the corpse; and the principal mourners (Cressy 1997: 451). For Cokayne, this template was filled with groups and individuals particular to him, his trade and estates, his civic career, and his family, though the ‘main reason’ of any heraldic funeral was less to stress individuality than continuity by displaying the passage of all such honours to rightful successors and heirs, whether institutions or individuals (Gittings 1988: 175). In the vanguard of the procession were ‘The Chilldren of the Hospital’: the liveried children of the City’s orphanage, Christ’s Hospital, of which Cokayne was a governor, and here a variation upon the usual deployment of parish poor. This distinction in itself was unusual; only two of the other six contemporary aldermanic funerals deployed the Hospital children.5 There followed something even more distinctive, ‘The Artillirye’—a martial counterpoint to the preceding orphan children that must have been rich with emotive potential, and not used in any of the other aldermen’s funeral processions. Cokayne had since 1619 been commander of the City’s trained bands, another point of pride prominently articulated on his funeral monument: ‘for seven years commander of the City’ (septemq[ue] ab hinc annis urbis præfectus) (Dugdale 1658: 69). In recognition of Cokayne’s role as ‘Lord General of all the military forces’, Middleton too had made ‘unusually heavy use’ of the corps in his mayoral pageant for Cokayne, where they were hailed as his ‘elected sons of war’ (Manley 2007: 1399; Middleton 2007: Triumphs, ll. 83, 13–14). Later that same year, Cokayne commissioned Middleton to script an oration by ‘Pallas’ to mark his and the aldermen’s revue of the company at an annual ceremonial muster; court anxiety over the City’s militancy in response to the Thirty Years War had cancelled the event (Middleton 2007: 1437–8; Parr 2007: 1432). Clearly, in both 1620 and 1626, the City’s artillery was a potent symbol of its autonomy within an increasingly vexed national polity, of which Cokayne was fiercely proud. After the artillery had passed came ‘Poore men in Gownes’ (the latter garments, like those that follow, being the mourning ‘blacks’ given as charity from the estate of the deceased), and then ‘seruants in Cloakes’—male members of the households of thirtysix more privileged mourners (but below the rank of knight) who themselves came later in the procession. The last named of this group of ‘servants’ were Donne’s own 4 The other processionals and their funeral dates are: Sir Robert Lee, 16 Jan. 1605/6 (BL Add. MS 71131A); Sir Henry Rowe, 17 Dec. 1612 (BL Add. MS 71131C); Sir Thomas Bennett, 22 Mar. 1627 (BL Add. MS 71131E); Sir John ‘Lemmon’ (Leman), 3 May 1632 (BL Add. MS 71131F); Sir Martin Lumley, 7 Aug. 1634 (BL Add. MS 71131L; Ralph Freeman, 16 Apr. 1634 (BL Add. MS 71131K). 5 Sir John Leman and Ralph Freeman (BL Add. MS 71131F, fo. 1r; BL Add MS. 71131K, fo. 1r); Leman was governor of the Hospital.



peter mccullough

retainers, ‘the Deane of Pawles his men’ (BL Add. MS 71131D, fo. 1r). Next came the first of many flags or ‘penons’, that of ‘the Cittie’, a marker for the jump in rank to the servants of thirty gentlemen, knights, and nobles, which culminated in representatives of the households of Cokayne’s two daughters ennobled by marriage: ‘the Countess of Holderness servants / The Erle of Nottinghams servantes’ (fo. 1v). Next came no fewer than fifty-six men walking in pairs as ‘servants to the defunct’ (fos 1v–2r). Disguised under that unassuming title, though, are men who were Cokayne’s ‘servants’ in the business, not domestic, sense. They are identifiable as freemen of the Skinners’ Company; Cokayne’s agents or ‘factors’ in Antwerp, Elbing, and Middleburgh; and stewards, land agents, and overseers at Cokayne’s country estates and farms. Here too appeared the first of many Cokayne relatives, with ‘the standard borne by Mr William Cockaine Junr’ (son of Sir William’s cousin of the same name, both Skinners) bringing up the rear of the servants’ party and marking the beginning of the gentlemen’s. The select number of ensuing ‘Gentlemen: In Gownes’ refined the processional map of Cokayne’s empire with seven close associates, all of whom appear repeatedly throughout the surviving Cokayne estate papers as parties to land transactions, trustees, and agents (NRO C). Richard Bankes, Skinner, would be appointed a trustee in the later settlement of Sir William’s estate (NRO C3003). Jacob Price, another Skinner and perhaps Cokayne’s closest administrative servant, had taken down Cokayne’s deathbed will (TNA: PRO PROB 11/152). And Thomas Henchman, Skinner of London and Northamptonshire, and his two sons Maurice (‘Morris’) and Edward, added to the Skinners’ Company another important thread in Cokayne’s social web—his deep connections to Northamptonshire, where he had bought the manor of Rushton in 1619, and into the gentry of which he had married his daughter Anna Fermor. Next, bracketed as ‘Divines’, are six clergymen. Only one is given a Christian name and easily identified: ‘Mr Humfrey Henchman’. Henchman, another son of Thomas, added a clerical body to the Henchman and Northamptonshire spheres circling in the Cokayne orbit. He was also at the beginning of what would be a stellar career in the church. At the time of the Cokayne funeral, he was precentor of Salisbury Cathedral, and, since 1624, had been rector of Rushton. He was thus one of Cokayne’s local clergymen, as well as having several brothers who, with their father Thomas, were Cokayne’s Skinners’ Company ‘brothers’. But Henchman’s churchmanship and future career are part of the tracings of a faint map in the funeral procession of Cokayne’s possible religious alliances, something Donne would have been alert to in the pulpit. At Salisbury, Humphrey Henchman participated in the ordination of Donne’s friend, the poet George Herbert. He would go on to be a guardian of high Anglicanism at Salisbury. He suffered acute depredations for this during the Civil Wars, and yet kept alive clandestine Prayer Book worship, and emerged after the Restoration as ‘a leading clerical figure’. He was consecrated bishop of Salisbury in 1660, and succeeded his patron and ally Gilbert Sheldon as bishop of London in 1663. After the Great Fire of 1666, it was Henchman who led the immediate efforts to rebuild the very cathedral in which he had sat exactly forty years earlier, listening to John Donne’s funeral sermon for Sir William Cokayne (Spurr 2004).

preaching and context



The higher-ranking gentlemen’s portion of the procession was rounded out by further merchants of considerable means, before briefly becoming a wholly civic pageant with the sheriffs and aldermen of the City, in order of seniority, followed by the knighted former mayors, again in order of seniority and thus capped by the Father of the City (the longest-serving alderman), Sir Thomas Bennett. Nobility (not otherwise deployed later as principal mourners) were in Cokayne’s case supplied by two bishops, whose identity suggests something further of the deceased’s churchmanship, since clergy in a funeral procession seem to have been nominated by the executors based on their affinity with the deceased. The first was the present bishop of London, George Mountain, who by 1621 ‘had clearly thrown his lot in with the Arminians . . . under the leadership of Lancelot Andrewes and Richard Neile’, and was in the year before Cokayne’s death closely associated with the ultra-royalist and High Church pamphlets of Richard Montagu (Macauley 2004). The second, ‘The Bishop of Carlile’, is even more intriguing. Francis White would most likely have been first noticed by Cokayne during White’s time as divinity lecturer in the cathedral, roughly coincident with Cokayne’s mayoralty. White too was a client of Richard Neile and a ‘principal spokesman’ for the Arminian party (not least at the predestination debate staged at York House months earlier), and, with Mountain, was co-licenser in 1625 of Montagu’s Appello Caesarem. His reward for this kind of service was to be—only nine days before Cokayne’s funeral—consecrated as bishop of Carlisle at the faction’s headquarters, Neile’s Durham House in London (Wadkins 2004). After these two Arminian bishops came a choreographical moment of emphasis in the procession—an emotional punctuation as much as a ceremonial one. Having seen hundreds of men walking two abreast, spectators saw next the first figure walking solus, the ‘sword Bearer’ clad in his City regalia, carrying the lord mayor’s ceremonial sword of office; and behind him the lord mayor himself (Cuthbert Hacket), his robe borne by ‘his traine bearer’ (BL Add. MS 71131D, fo. 2r). The Prayer Book ‘Order for the Burial of the Dead’ instructs the officiating minister to ‘[meet] the corpse at the church stile’ and usher it to the graveside. Even in a funeral as grand as Cokayne’s, the responsibility of conducting the corpse itself to the place of burial fell to the presiding minister, and next after the mayor came ‘The Deane of Pawles Preacher’. Between Donne and ‘The Corps’ were ‘The Penon of his [Cokayne’s] Armes’ carried by his cousin ‘Mr William Cokaine senr’, and the silent symbols of knighthood, carried by the hooded heralds and their marshalls: ‘Healme & Creast / Sword & Spurrs / Targett / Coate: of Armes’ (fo. 2v). Around the hearse clustered the most colourful imagery of the pageant, six great ‘penons’ of the companies through which Cokayne had amassed much of his wealth (some of which he had served as master or governor), carried by representatives who were also Cokayne’s kinsmen or partners: the Skinner’s, ‘Est India [sic]’, ‘Muscovia’, ‘Eastland’, and ‘ye merchant adventurers’.6 The last must have attracted the attention of all who knew the trials of Cokayne’s cloth trading scheme, which had as its aim (briefly successful) the wrecking of the Merchant Adventurers to 6

The sixth penon bore unspecified ‘impaled’ (or combined) arms.



peter mccullough

the advantage of the Muscovy and Eastland, under the cover of erecting the ‘New or King’s Company of Merchant Adventurers’, under Cokayne himself. By 1617 that new company had been dissolved, and the old rechartered (Aldous 2004), but, as he was its former governor, the penon in question next to Cokayne’s coffin must have been that of the short-lived, ill-fated New company. The heraldry fluttering around his corpse put a brave face on Cokayne’s chequered corporate past. Behind the hearse walked Cokayne’s son and heir, Charles, as ‘principall mourner / Assisted by’ four others, among them Sir William’s son-in-law Sir Hatton Fermor. An aristocratic finale then came with ‘A Gentleman Usher to the E: of Nottingham beare headed’, followed by the earl himself (husband of Cokayne’s eldest daughter) ‘alone’, with his ‘traine to be borne’ by Sir James Whitelock (justice of the king’s bench), Sir Robert Heath (attorney general), Sir Henry Marten (judge of the prerogative court of Canterbury and dean of the arches), and Sir John Wolstenholme and Sir Paul Pindar (leading financiers and merchants) (BL Add. MS 71131D, fo. 2v). The conclusion of the procession with these five train-bearing princes of law and finance appropriately gathered up the societal associations staged in the funerals. The first are civic, merchant, and landed interests. Heath had been registrar of London during Cokayne’s aldermanry and received substantial loans from Cokayne (NRO C2486, 2709; Powell 2004). Marten was a civil lawyer entrusted by the king with some of the most delicate of Jacobean trade negotiations (Hart 2004). Cokayne (and the Eastland Company’s penon-bearer Matthew Craddock) had conveyed Buckinghamshire estates to Whitelock (and Thomas Henchman) in 1618 (NRO C2543). Whitelock was related through his mother to, and exchanged gifts periodically with, the man he described in his diary as ‘ritche William Cokayne of London, the marchant, shirif, and alderman’ (1858: 7, 64, 67–8, 72). Wolstenholme and Pindar were some of the few merchants living who could vie with Cokayne’s own wealth, and the three had earned much of it together as farmers of customs. Pindar also brought a further Northamptonshire connection, complete with kinship with the Henchmans (Laughton 2004; Ashton 2004; St George 1880: 374). The tangle of Cokayne’s business interests with Heath, Wolstenholme, and Pindar is captured in the shorthand of the final settlement of his estate (not reached until 1630), showing all three with large debts outstanding to the Cokaynes (NRO C3086). Marten’s largest role with the Cokayne empire was probably only just getting under way (and perhaps a motivation for the executors to include him in the ceremony), as the judge handling the probate and settlement of Cokayne’s nuncupative will (TNA: PRO PROB 11/152; NRO C3229). But there was also the theme of politics and churchmanship, and the even stronger common denominator of the very building into which this funeral procession filed—St Paul’s. Of the lawyers, Whitelock and Heath were already emerging as cautious defenders of the royal prerogative with ties, if later uneasy, to Laud; Marten would remain loyal to Charles, but did fall spectacularly from Laud’s grace in 1633 over the disputed altar at St Gregory’s-by-St Paul’s (Hart 2004). But Wolstenholme and Pindar were—like Humphrey Henchman, and the bishops White and Mountain—scions of emergent Laudianism, and with particular reputations as patrons of church building and

preaching and context



beautification. Wolstenholme would in 1632 invite Laud to consecrate his new-built church at Stanmore, Middlesex (with a porch by Nicholas Stone, responsible at the same date for Donne’s effigy in St Paul’s); and Pindar at the same time would provide the ‘high Altar-place’ at St Paul’s with ‘rich Cloth of Tapestries’ and a completely new set of stalls, and erect on the chancel screen statues of kings and bishops set upon ‘Pillars & Pillasters of blacke Touch or Marble’ (Holland 1634: sig. A3v; Baker and Pugh 1976: 105–7;). These two men would also be praised jointly as exemplary patrons of churches in the dedication and text of the 1638 treatise De templis (Fincham and Tyacke 2007: 166–8). And ‘Sir William Cockain, and memorable Sr Paul Pindar’ were still linked decades later in a list of exemplary City benefactors (Waterhouse 1655: 255–6). Had he lived, might Cokayne have joined Pindar and Wolstenholme in Charles I’s and Laud’s resuscitation of the renovation programme for St Paul’s first initiated during his mayoralty by King James? Marten’s final 1630 settlement of Cokayne’s charitable bequests ‘w[hich] were not explained at the time of his decease’ did include two suggestively large bequests for church-work.7 Donne’s own time as dean was marked by little in the way of interest in cathedral renovations, and his relationship with the Arminian party was so ambiguous as still to be debated (Bald 1970: 402; Guibbory 2001; McCullough 2003: 193–8). But the prominent presence at Cokayne’s funerals of leaders of those interests would have made Donne alert to them—and them alert to what he would say. Finally, there was something missing from Cokayne’s funeral procession that it is vital to address. In accordance with a Jacobean herald’s precedent for the funeral procession of a knight, the other six contemporary aldermanic funeral processions concluded, not with the principal mourners, but with the important coda of ‘Gentlewomen’, who processed, in a mirror image of the men before them, in reverse hierarchical order, to keep those of greatest dignity (usually the widow and daughters) closest to the corpse (College of Arms MS Vincent 151, p. 175, quoted in Day 1995: 189–90). Two of the other contemporary processions even noted that young children and grandchildren of the deceased were carried in the ladies’ procession by servants or nursemaids.8 The Cokayne processional, however, did not include women, much less children. That the manuscript is not incomplete is strongly suggested by its having been disposed over a vertically folded single sheet and written in exactly the same way as those for the other aldermen, including a final summary tailpiece, which fills up an otherwise empty half-side: ‘The proceedinge to the funerall of Sr William Cocaine Kt Alderman of London’ (BL Add. MS 71131D, fo. 2v). Why did Cokayne’s widow and his five daughters not process with their husband’s and father’s body to his funerals? As we have seen, the two married daughters’ husbands and their servants were included, as were members of the household of the daughter Martha, dowager countess of Holderness. That these women who so clearly esteemed

7

These are only partially legible, because of water damage: £50 ‘Towards the newe building of [5–6 words missing] the poores Christ [several letters missing]’; and £20 ‘To the two Churches of St Giles in [2–3 words missing] towards there [2–3 words missing]’ (NRO C3229). 8 For Sir Henry Rowe, Henry and ‘Cissely’ Rowe ‘to be carried’ (BL Add. MS 71131C, fo. 2r); for Sir Thomas Bennett, ‘Little Simon & Thomas Bennett carried by there 2 maids’ (BL Add. MS 71131E, fo. 2r).



peter mccullough

fig. 22 The choir of St Paul’s Cathedral, looking east. Engraving by Wenceslaus Hollar from William Dugdale’s History of St Paul’s Cathedral (1658).

their husband and father were not present at his funerals is almost unimaginable. But perhaps precisely a desire to be present explains their absence from the procession. For, since the political and social purposes of any heraldic funeral ‘overrode all private emotions’, the members of the funeral party as formally constituted in the procession,‘despite their feelings, were required to comply with the regulations’ that the procession return to the home of the defunct after the obsequies but before the interment (Gittings 1988: 179). Perhaps these members of Cokayne’s most immediate family—a family that has been characterized in history so largely on the grounds of public resentment and envy at their father’s self-aggrandizement and ‘severetie’—were willing to sacrifice both convention and display in order to be present out of love and grief as their pater familias was lowered into his grave. Donne, as we shall see, would go startlingly out of his way in his sermon to vivify the presence of women at the graveside, and to craft a sermon that

preaching and context



created space—in spite of the deceased’s public faults, and against all the public detachment of a heraldic funeral—for personal and private love to gather there.

In the Cathedral The destination of Cokayne’s funeral procession was the choir of St Paul’s, reached either through the nave by the great west door (through which Cokayne had processed with King James in 1620), or through the north transept from Paul’s Cross churchyard. Unlike the nave, which was under the jurisdiction of the bishop of London, the choir—where daily services were said, and feast day sermons preached by the dean in the presence of the mayor and aldermen—was governed by the dean and chapter, and thus home territory for both Donne and Cokayne. No interior view from Donne’s time survives. But Wenceslaus Hollar’s fine engravings for Dugdale’s 1658 History of St Paul’s Cathedral do fairly accurately capture the architecture of the massive structure—then Britain’s largest—and may hint at the furnishings paid for by Paul Pindar in the 1630s, though they were destroyed before Hollar’s images were drawn (Fig. 22). Within such a large building, the choir—situated between the nave to the west and the chancel (with the high altar) to the east—was a discrete space, a building within a building. Its intimacy was emphasized by the elevated stalls around three of its sides, with lower ‘forms’ or benches in front of them, all creating in effect a small amphitheatre. Having processed towards the choir, the children of Christ’s Hospital and lower-ranking servants most likely remained in the nave or choir aisles to leave the limited seating free for the higher-ranking members of the entourage, with lesserranking mourners taking the benches or standing in the floorspace. Because of an internal allusion (discussed below), we know that Donne preached to the auditory in the choir. But because of ceremonies that took place before the sermon at the high altar, it may be that the coffin was placed on its hearse in the chancel, eastwards beyond and above the choir, and behind the pulpit. Based on a contemporary illustration of the hearse for Sir Philip Sidney’s 1587 funeral in St Paul’s where it clearly stands in the chancel, this reconstruction assumes a similar placement for Cokayne. The immobile, wooden-framed hearse onto which Cokayne’s casket (itself decked with a black pall and his heraldic insignia) was laid would have been draped in black, and fenced on four sides with a low barrier fashioned from corner posts with black cloth stretched between them. Because he was a former lord mayor, Cokayne’s hearse was also entitled to the baronial flourish of a canopy (College of Arms, MS Sidney’s Funeral Roll, memb. 1; illus. in Day 1995: 184; see also illus., p. 192). Around (or inside, depending on its design) the drapery barrier were placed five seats—one each for the principal mourner (the son and heir, Charles, placed at the coffin’s head) and his four assistants (two each on each side the coffin). Once in place, and perhaps while a psalm was sung, the five principal mourners ritually processed once around the hearse, and returned to their seats.



peter mccullough

There then remained before the actual burial three components in the funerals: proclamation, offertory, and sermon.9 The order in which these were performed varied, and there is no known evidence for the sequence observed for Cokayne. This reading takes the thrust of Donne’s conclusion (discussed below) to suggest that the sermon came last, immediately preceding the interment. So first, the presiding herald would have broken the gathering silence with a solemn proclamation of the ‘style’ of the deceased—that is, declaimed Cokayne’s name, listed his titles, and then formally announced his death—an act that marked his ‘official demise’ (Gittings 1988: 178). There then followed an offering by, and the ritual passing of Cokayne’s heraldic rights and titles to, his son. Charles was first escorted by the senior officer at arms to the high altar, where he presented a money offering in memory of his father to the presiding minister—Donne. Having returned to his seat, he was then escorted again in like fashion to make an offering for himself. This time, however, he remained there with Donne and the herald to receive the chivalric ‘achievements’ that had been carried in the procession. First came the coat of arms, carried by two of the chief mourner’s assistants and handed to Donne, who then handed it to Charles, thereby ‘symbolically investing him’ as heir. Charles then handed the coat of arms to the herald, who placed it on the altar. Next the other two assistants brought up the shield and sword, the latter handed point downwards to Donne, who passed it to Charles, now point up, in another act of investiture before it was passed to lie with the coat and shield on the altar. This process was repeated for the remaining accoutrements, including ‘the various banners, pennons and standards’ from the procession, which were offered in pairs, and laid against the altar. Only after Charles had thus been invested, and his father’s accoutrements all laid at the altar, did he return to his seat by the coffin, and Donne to the pulpit at the chancel steps, to wait while all other mourners ‘made their offerings of money, in pairs, according to their rank’ (Gittings 1988: 177). What was going through Donne’s mind in these moments before ascending the pulpit defies any kind of research. But how best to insert his message into the theatrical symbolism of a heraldic funeral certainly influenced the composition of his sermon, if not of his mind, at this moment. Scholars of early modern heraldic ceremonies in fact often quote Donne for rare examples of satire against them (Gittings 1988: 182; Day 1995: 179). In a sermon preached in The Hague in 1619 (and, by his own description, substantially revised in 1630), he included a passage that could almost be a parody of the Cokaynes: ‘for we are come to see even children strive for place and precedency, and mothers are ready to goe to the Heralds to know how Cradles shall be ranked, which Cradle shall have the highest place’ (Donne 1953–62: ii. 295–6). Far less comic, and much more trenchant because preached to exactly the same aldermen as were present for Cokayne’s funeral, was a direct address in the midst of his cathedral Christmas sermon in 1627. The fact that Donne stretched this satire from heraldic cradles to heraldic graves must have reminded many of the Cokayne funerals. To impress upon his listeners the selflessness shown by Christ in the incarnation, Donne reached for its antithesis in the selfishness of men. Adopting an imagined persona (a favourite strategy, though one he did not deploy in the Cokayne 9

The account that follows is based on Gittings (1988: 176–8).

preaching and context



sermon), he said, ‘why now I am a man of title, of honour, of place, of power, of possessions, a man fit for a Chronicle, a man considerable in the Heralds Office’. Then, stepping out of fictional character and into his own voice, he commanded with withering sarcasm, ‘goe to the Heralds Office, the spheare and element of Honour, and thou shalt finde those men as busie there, about the consideration of Funerals, as about the consideration of Creations; thou shalt finde that office to be as well the Grave, as the Cradle of Honour’. The point of the command turned on his insistence that the College of Heralds contained as much a ‘grave’ of ‘empoverished and forgotten, and obliterate families’ as those ‘newly erected and presently celebrated’. But, as we will see he had done at Cokayne’s funeral, he pinned the dignitaries present (mayor and aldermen) to their seats with a reminder that they not think competitively above their stations: ‘In what heighth soever, any of you that sit here, stand at home, there is some other in some higher station then yours, that weighs you downe’ (Donne 1953–62: viii. 141). Donne would certainly have been familiar with matters heraldic, and heraldic funerals. With the College sitting in the shadow of the cathedral in Paul’s Chain, it was a geographically proximate target. But, given the lack of fashion for grand burials in the cathedral, it was not the case that ‘as Dean of St Paul’s Donne would have had occasion to see a good deal of heraldic show’ (Day 1995: 179 n. 1). Cokayne’s may have been the first heraldic funeral in the cathedral for decades, and certainly the first and perhaps only one at which Donne would officiate. Scholars agree that ‘the heraldic funeral was concerned with a great deal more than simply burying a dead body’, that it de-emphasized the individual in the interest of displaying and affirming hierarchical continuities in public society (Gittings 1988: 178). Donne brought to such funerals an evident impatience with exactly the meanings of the ceremonial forms he had just participated in at the high altar. Upon taking the pulpit, he used every rhetorical muscle to reinscribe the private upon the public.

Scriptural Text Cokayne’s wealth and prominence in the City, coupled with his court connections, and his executors’ revival of St Paul’s as a heraldic stage made his funerals (like the pageants that were staged for him) a civic rival to the royal or aristocratic funerals staged at Westminster Abbey.10 Donne engaged those expectations brilliantly, and unconventionally, from the moment he first opened his mouth, to declaim his chosen scriptural text. Funeral preachers usually took as their texts verses that stated the rather obvious. Representative among texts for elite funeral sermons from the period include the resignation of Deuteronomy 34:5 (‘Moses the servant of the Lord died there in the land of Moab’) for Sir Edward Seymour; the stoicism of Job 14:14 (‘All the daies of my appointed time will I wait, till my change come’) for Lady Jane, daughter of the earl of Lauderdale; 10 The comparison was probably a very live one, as his son-in-law, the earl of Holderness, had, at his express will, been buried there only nine months earlier (MacDonald 2004).



peter mccullough

the benediction of Revelation 14:13 (‘Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord’) for Sir Philip Boteler; or the awkward compliment of Genesis 23:1–2 (‘And Sarah was an hundred and seaven and twenty yeares yeares old . . . And Sarah died . . . in the land of Canaan’) for Dorothy, countess of Northumberland (Potter 1613: sig. A4r; M[aitlane] 1633: sig. A2r; Downame 1607: sig. A2r; Chambers 1620: sig. B1r). Donne, however, mounted the pulpit, gazed at the gathered mourners, and said: ‘Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died.’ The effect of this (John 11:21) must have been electrifying. Its plaintive, passionate appeal dispensed with the usual funeral sermon platitudes and articulated rather than suppressed grief. And in its direct rebuke of the ‘Lord’, it flirted with blasphemy. Donne’s auditors would also have known immediately the narrative from which the verse was taken—the story of Lazarus’s death and resurrection, the most famous anticipation in the Gospels of Christ’s own (John 11). They would also have known exactly who in the biblical account said these shocking words—Lazarus’s sisters, Martha (John 11: 21) and Mary (John 11: 32), in their choric reproach of Christ for not arriving soon enough to save their brother. And to those conventional associations Donne’s auditory must have almost murmured at the obvious and instant application of these scriptural types to their anti-types there present: Sir William Cokayne’s two ennobled daughters, Martha, dowager countess of Holderness, and Mary, countess of Nottingham. The biblical Mary and Martha had met Christ standing at their brother’s tomb. Mary and Martha née Cokayne met a preacher beside their father’s. Donne’s choice of text instantly domesticated a hitherto public pageant by acknowledging, indeed giving voice to, the very real pain felt by family at a graveside. It also inserted, as forcefully as could be imagined, both a female presence (the sister mourners) and a female perspective (the biblical sisters) to the exclusively homosocial display of the funeral procession. And, if there was a slight genealogical adjustment to be made between the daughter-mourners in the cathedral and the sister-mourners in the Bible, no such adjustment needed to be made by any of those others present, for whom Cokayne was, of course, a Christian ‘brother’. But also, the text’s ‘our brother’ would have been directly applicable to the members of Cokayne’s various companies there represented: aldermen, merchant companies, and, most directly, the Skinners. In the corporate vocabulary of all of those, members were always ‘brothers’. Middleton’s ‘Love’ had proclaimed in Cokayne’s 1619 mayoral pageant that: Good wishes are at work now in each heart, Throughout this sphere of brotherhood play their part; Chiefly thy noble own fraternity, As near in heart as they’re in place to thee, The ensigns of whose love bounty displays, Yet esteems all their cost short of thy praise. (Middleton 2007: Triumphs, ll. 77–81)

Donne, though, turned to ‘Love’ incarnate, Christ himself, and spoke for Cokayne’s fraternities who this time carried funeral ‘ensigns’: ‘Lord if thou hadst been here, our brother had not died.’

preaching and context



Donne’s activation of the story of Lazarus by declaiming this single verse not only articulated passionate loss, but also, by the same power of biblical allusion, held out the promise of resurrection. But how, having set in play this biblical drama, would Donne match Christ’s climactic cry: ‘with a loud voice, Lazarus, come foorth’ (John 11:43)? To make Sir William Cokayne live again was nothing less than the rhetorical, doctrinal, and pastoral challenge that Donne set for himself and his hearers. But timing is all in any oration, and Donne would delay an answer to that resurrection question, exploiting the rhetorical benefit of raising an audience’s expectation—intensifying their desire for it by deferring it. The same applies to the whole cluster of analogies and associations that I have suggested adhere to the simple declamation of Donne’s text. It was nothing more than a quotation; they were not even Donne’s own words; and he let allusion remain allusion. It takes a superior orator, indeed a superior preacher, to have the strategic confidence to raise associations and possible interpretations of his text, but not to articulate them.

Exordium Having released into his auditors’ minds his powerfully allusive text, Donne then veered away from it in the dizzying non sequitur that opened his sermon proper. He began: ‘God made the first Marriage, and man made the first Divorce’ (1953–62: vii. 257, l. 1). This is an odd opening to a funeral sermon, and all the more so coming after a scriptural text that had encouraged hearers to think in personal, familial, or corporate terms. As the sweeping opening period continued to unfold, the metaphor of the marriage of body and soul ‘in the Creation’ divorced only ‘through sin’ became clearer. But Donne also went out of his way to keep alive the potential awkwardness of the marriage and divorce metaphors for the family and those who knew them. Phrases like ‘no such second Marriages upon such divorces by death’, or ‘God hath made the band of Marriage indissoluble but by death’, or ‘man is a married man still’, and ‘though they be separated . . . from Bed and Board, they are not divorced’ (ll. 12, 14, 16, 19–20), could not but be awkward in their potential application to Cokayne’s relict, Mary Cokayne, and to their daughter the dowager countess: it was a pregnant fact that they were not only recently widowed, but were now two of the richest widows potentially to enter the elite marriage market.11 These, of course, were not Donne’s dominant ‘meanings’. In a strictly denotative sense, the passage is an orthodox, if cleverly phrased, assertion that ‘man is for ever immortall in both’ body and soul (ll. 17–18). But to have cast this argument in the metaphorical language of domestic bonds used connotation and allusion as an attention-holding way to focus his hearers’ attention on his words. 11 Lady Cokayne did remarry, to Henry Carey, earl of Dover; and Martha Lady Holderness married second Montagu Bertie, Lord Willoughby de Eresby, later earl of Lindsey (Aldous 2004).



peter mccullough

And all of this was cast in some of Donne’s most emphatic, muscular prose. The syntax was relentlessly parallel in construction, both within and between clauses, as in the tricolon of opening declamations (here arranged for emphasis): God made the first Marriage, and man made the first Divorce; God married the Body and Soule in the Creation, and man divorced the Body and Soule by death through sinne, in his fall. (ll. 1–4)

The formal brilliance of these lines reminds us that poetry and prose grew on the same rhetorical tree, and that, in this case, the simple use of a return key can reveal similar patterning structures otherwise obscured to the reader’s eye, but not to the listener’s ear. Donne’s opening line had an emphatic medial caesura that placed the two subjects (‘God’ and ‘man’) and their direct objects (‘Marriage’, ‘Divorce’) on opposite sides of a formal and a thematic gulf. Then, in a brief amplificatio on those two subjects, each was given its own clause to explain the statement about it in the first. Here, the direct objects became active verbs (‘married’, ‘divorced’). ‘Body’ and ‘Soul’ were briefly ‘married’ again in the second clause’s prepositional phrase, ‘in the Creation’. And they were once more sundered in the third with the prepositional parallel ‘by death through sinne’—to which Donne added the conclusive appendage, ‘in his fall’. In the contrapuntal grammar of the whole sentence there was also a summary sequencing of the three main verbs (more visible when arranged as above, revealing a suggestive vertical descent): ‘made’, ‘married’, ‘divorced’. And throughout this introduction—generically called the exordium, which literally means ‘to begin the warp of a web’—Donne threaded a steel frame of iterative diction forged of hard plosive consonants (‘God’,‘made’,‘Divorce’,‘married’,‘giddinesse’,‘death’,‘dead’, die’ (ll. 1–15)). The argument of the opening moments of Donne’s exordium resolved in his conclusion that body and soul may be temporarily separated by death, but that, in their immortality, they cannot be permanently ‘divorced’ (ll. 19–20). Upon reaching this preliminary conclusion, with its affirmation of the afterlife, Donne relaxed the terseness of his syntax and diction as he introduced new systems of thematic imagery, in another example of masterful amplificatio. The first clause was grammatically independent in itself, a complete ‘though x, yet y’ construction: ‘For, though they be separated à Thoro & Mensa, from Bed and Board, they are not divorced.’ Simply translated, the body and soul are not permanently separated. But here Donne was still gently troubling the waters of his exordium with the potentially awkward marriage/divorce metaphor by entering what might have sounded like the acutely private sphere of the marital home (‘Board’) and the marriage ‘Bed’ itself. But for Donne’s audience—not least to listening lawyers such as Marten, Whitelock, and Heath—the Latin tag was hardly intimate, but from the specialized legal vocabulary for divorce, and it had particular reference to matters of inheritance, legitimacy, and a widow’s dower. As a near-contemporary legal digest for women put it: ‘some divorces dissolve the matrimony, scilicet à vinculo matrimonei [‘that is, from the bonds of marriage], and bastardize the issue, and barre the woman of her Dower, and some à

preaching and context



mensa & Thoro, which dissolveth not the marriage, nor barre the wife of her Dower, nor bastardize the issue’ (Edgar 1632: 225). There is no evidence or suggestion that Sir William and Lady Cokayne were estranged. On the contrary, one surviving lengthy letter from Mary to her husband, written on 5 December 1623, shortly after the disastrous fire in Broad Street, showed not only her impressive domestic acumen and a spirit of business partnership with her husband, but also a genuine tenderness for ‘her Loveing and kinde Husbande’ (NRO C3099). The dominant tenor of Donne’s divorce metaphor was of course the ultimate inseparability of body and soul. But the vehicle chosen continued, for a moment, the exordium’s reminder of the vulnerable (but also powerful) financial and marital positions of Donne’s widow and heirs, and kept alive in the listeners’ busy imaginations questions about the settlement of Cokayne’s estate now that his earthly marriage had ended in ‘divorce’ by death. But this was only the opening clause in the period under consideration. In spite of its grammatical and argumentative independence, Donne chose to expand it, not just for decoration or even refinement, but also to effect a vital transition. He did so first by taking the ‘though x’ portion of the opening clause and expanding it in both syntax and thematic imagery. First the ‘though’ was divided across the two antithetical parts of soul and body, each with a refining prepositional phrase: ‘Though the soule be at the Table of the Lambe, in Glory, and the body but at the table of the Serpent, in dust’ (Donne 1953–62: vii. 257, ll. 21–2). Donne then denied the expected ‘yet y’ conclusion by repeating the antithetical ‘though x’ pattern, but with an incremental growth in both syntactical length and imagistic richness that was suspended across the established body/soul antithesis, before finally resting on the ‘yet y’ conclusion: Though the soule be in lecto florido, in that bed which is alwayes green, in an everlasting spring, in Abraham’s bosome; And the body but in that green-bed, whose covering is but a yard and a halfe of Turfe, and a Rugge of grasse, and the sheet but a winding sheet, yet they are not divorced. (ll. 22–6)

One of the features that knitted this passage together and charted its expanding reach was the use of phrases ultimately typeset in italics, the early modern equivalent of inverted commas, or quotation marks. For these are quotations. In print they give visual accent, variety, and emphasis to the eye—a visual marker of the intensification of Donne’s rhetoric. Just as vividly in delivery they would have been heard and recognized as quotations, deepening the tone, and enriching the register of thematic imagery, but also serving as structural markers within the expanding syntactical construction. The first, the legal term ‘à Thoro & Mensa’, was, as we have seen, the foundational summary image. The second ‘though’ clause neatly received one resonant quotation for each part of its antithesis: ‘Table of the Lambe’ (based on Rev. 19: 9), ‘the Serpent, in dust’ (based on Gen. 3:14). Then for the second ‘though’ clause Donne intensified the passage further by doubling the number of evocative quotations to describe heaven: ‘in lecto florido’ (Canticles 1:16), and ‘Abraham’s bosome’ (Luke 16:22). But, having established a recognizable pattern of quotation, he used the expectation of its continuation as a rhetorical foil for setting his own dark jewel. Instead of deploying a complementary set of



peter mccullough

two biblical quotations to describe the grave, he scripted his own. In a climax of ironies, he collapsed the previously antithetical descriptions of heaven and the grave into a climactic passage that used the imagery from one to describe the other. Having loosed colour into the mind’s eye with the immediately preceding ‘lecto florido’ (literally, a ‘florid’, or ‘fresh’ bed) glossed by Donne as ‘that bed which is alwayes green’, he transplanted that same verdant imagery into his own florid miniature peroration on its earthly equivalent. A sentence and an image system that began with the arid legal pun on ‘Bed and Board’ ended in an unforgettable picture of a ‘green-bed’, the grave-bed, wrapping its occupant in a triplicate ‘covering’, ‘Rugge’, and ‘sheet’. ‘Yet’—having embroidered the ‘though x’ to a point at which a listener could almost forget what should come next—came the emphatic conclusion: ‘they are not divorced.’ And the sentence, along with the great cadence of the exordium itself, finally resolved with the affirmation that ‘they shall returne to one another againe, in an inseparable re-union in the Resurrection’ (ll. 27–8).

The Sum The exordium’s extraordinary flight brought Donne and his hearers to a place of rest, both thematically and formally. To affirm what Donne here called the ‘assurance of a Resurrection’ (l. 28) was, all Protestant commentators agreed, the raison d’être of funerals and the only unassailable justification for funeral sermons (Tromley 1983: 299; Carlson 2000: 571). Donne addressed that conventional thematic expectation while meeting a formal one, which was the so-called sum of his biblical text, a traditional component of a sermon’s opening, where a clear summary of the pertinent themes of the text justified the preacher’s choice of it for the occasion. Donne did so by putting the story of Lazarus in the context of other biblical resurrections, ending with the ‘Resuscitation of Lazarus’ as ‘that type of the . . . Resurrection of Christ’ (1953–62: vii. 258, ll. 42, 54–5). This, in itself, would have been an entirely conventional ‘sum’ of the story of Lazarus. But Donne was not conventional. Instead, he chose to frame his summary of biblical resurrections within a controlling metaphorical conceit that fit the particularities of his auditory perfectly, if perhaps uncomfortably. ‘God’, Donne said, ‘hath made two Testaments, two Wills’ (l. 31). To an auditory composed of individuals and institutions who all stood to benefit from the yet unproven and unexecuted nuncupative will of Sir William Cokayne, this pushed wordplay into awkward territory. ‘Testament’ and ‘Will’ are, of course, synonyms for a deceased’s legal testamentary document; they operated here first, though, through the wordplay on God’s two biblical Testaments, the Old and New. Each of those, explained Donne, contained an example of (extending the pun) God’s ‘Will, to give this new life after death’.12 Donne then briefly 12 Compare Donne’s ‘Holy Sonnet xvi’ (sometimes ‘xii’), the whole of which Maule brilliantly reads as ‘a serious, exploratory pun on the word “Testament”’ (2003: 28–9).

preaching and context



cited two resurrection stories from each ‘testament’, repeating two verb phrases from the legal lexis of contemporary wills to do so: ‘he bequeaths new life’, ‘he gives the same legacy’ (ll. 33–5, 36–7; emphasis added). And Donne could not have been unaware that three of these four biblical resurrections were of sons, performed at the behest of bereaved women, two of them widows: ‘the Widows sonne of Zarephtha’, ‘the Shunamites sonne’, ‘the widow of Naims sonne’, and ‘Jairus daughter’ (ll. 33–5). These exempla anticipated perfectly the climactic main text of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. But the insistent use of testamentary language forced even closer the identification of the sermon text with Sir William’s widow Mary, and his daughters Mary and Martha (not, as the heraldic offertory had done, of his son and heir, Charles). These applications were pushed even farther home when Donne added an otherwise gratuitous example of biblical resurrection in the observation that, ‘out of the surplusage of his inexhaustible estate . . . he enables his Executors to doe as he did; for Peter gives Dorcas this Resurrection too’ (ll. 37–9). The theological point—that God in biblical times gave resurrecting power to earthly deputies—had already been implied by the Old Testament examples (effected by Elijah and Elijah, respectively). But the further example of Peter raising Dorcas allowed the troping of the resurrection act as the settling of an ‘inexhaustible estate’ by ‘Executors’. The testamentary politics of the Cokayne family members gathered for the funerals resonated not only presently and prospectively, but also retrospectively. As Donne later made clear, he was well aware of some of the circumstances of the will of Sir William’s father, William Cokayne Sr, written weeks before his death in November 1599 (TNA: PRO PROB 11/94, fos 314v–20v). Donne would commend the fact that, because of his ‘industrious disposition’, Sir William had secured his own wealth and independence even before ‘his Fathers estate came to a distribution by death’ (1953–62: vii. 273–4, ll. 614, 616–17). The elder Cokayne had clearly viewed William as the leading business mind among his seven sons (itself a number with Abrahamic resonance). In spite of being the third eldest, it was William Jr whom William Sr appointed as his ‘Sole and onlie Executor’. That some future strife may have been anticipated is seen in the testator’s strict instructions to his solicitor to ‘gyve . . . Councell to my Sonnes to lyve Brotherlie quietlie and lovingely together which I doe chardge them on my Blessinge to doe’ (TNA: PRO PROB 11/94, fo. 316v). He also enumerated strict rules by which William—‘as he will answere the contrary at the tribunall seate of Allmightie God’—must regularly disclose the accounts as he settled the will, in order ‘to avoyde all controversie and Jelosye that otherwise maye arise amonge my saide Sonnes’ (fo. 317r). As a final insurance for amity and proper execution of his estate, William Sr had entered a bond with the Skinners’ Company of a staggering £10,000, for which William Jr would be liable should he ‘willfully refuse or neglecte’ part of the will (fo. 319r–v).13 Five of Sir William’s brothers predeceased him. Present at his funeral though were the other surviving brother, 13

In a codicil written just four days later, William Sr was suddenly possessed of ‘an assured and undoubted hope . . . of the Just sincere and kinde dealinge of the sayd William Cokayne my sonne . . . towardes me as [to] his Bretheren’, and cancelled the bond (fos 319v–320r).



peter mccullough

Richard (an assistant to the chief mourner), and several of the deceased brothers’ sons, all servants in the trading empire of their now deceased uncle. They may well have had cause to wonder whether Sir William’s appearance ‘at the tribunall seate of Allmightie God’ had been at all troubled by failures ‘to lyve Brotherlie quietlie and lovingely together’. Another set of ‘brothers’ who would have been alert to Donne’s testamentary imagery would have been the Skinners, who had wrangled with William Jr for five years after his father’s death to receive their precious bequest of five silver-gilt loving cups, each in the shape of the family crest, a cock standing on a tortoise (Lambert 1933: 345–8).14 And, finally, all the aldermen present, if not others, may have responded to Donne’s encouragement of testamentary thinking by recalling yet another ‘will’—contained in the fifth of Middleton’s Honourable Entertainments, staged ‘at the house of Sir William Cokayne’ on 28 October 1620, ‘being the last great feast of the magistrate’s year, and the expiration of his praetorship [i.e., mayoralty]’ (Middleton 2007: 1438, s.d.). The entertainment consisted entirely of an address by ‘One attired like a mourner’ who attended a spectacular dish ‘like a hearse stuck with sable bannerets; drums and trumpets expressing a mournful service’ (2007: 1438, ll. 1–3). That parody of a heraldic funeral was at the time a witty way to bury Cokayne’s year as mayor. But the memory of it must have soured instantly in the minds of men who now saw in front of them the translation of Middleton’s conceit into the grim reality of a real hearse, studded with penons and banners, and containing a feast of a different sort—‘The dead body of this our Brother’ (Donne 1953–62: vii. 259, l. 64). The pageant-funeral had been complete with the speaker as ‘chief mourner’, ‘orphan’s sigh’, and ‘widow’s tear’ (Middleton 2007: 1438, ll. 5–7). In fact, Middleton’s uncanny anticipation of every detail of Sir William’s eventual heraldic funeral may have been so exact as even to justify retrospective thoughts of bad taste on Middleton’s part. Even more acutely, the pageant’s mourner-speaker had delivered as the body of his speech ‘The Last Will and Testament of 1620 finishing for the city’, complete with itemized bequests in mock-testamentary form. ‘Imprimis’, the testator bequeathed Cokayne’s 1620 achievements to his ‘successor’, 1621. He named ‘Justice my executor, and Wisdom my overseer’, and bequeathed ‘legacies’ of virtue (Middleton 2007: 1438, s.d., ll. 16–30). And, not unlike a funeral sermon, 1620’s ‘Epitaph’ promised a resurrection: ‘His beamy substance shines e’en through his shroud / As the fair sun shoots splendour through his cloud’ (2007: 1439, ll. 43–4). Testaments, wills, bequests, and legacies were no merely coincidental image system for Donne to deploy over the body of Sir William Cokayne. Donne was, of course, doing several things at once. He kept alive the challenge set before him as preacher to be in some way an apostolic deputy who executes divine power to raise the dead. He deployed metaphor and allusion to keep as taut as possible the line that connected him and his sermon to those in the auditory most affected by Cokayne’s 14

The remarkable cups, which survive, were carefully scripted into, and used as properties in, the first of Middleton’s Honourable Entertainments for Cokayne (Middleton 2007: 1434–6, where also illustrated). Pace Aldous (2004), the cups were bequeathed by William Sr, not Sir William.

preaching and context



death. And he asserted the overarching doctrinal promise of resurrection in Christ—all in his amplificatio on biblical resurrections as God’s testamentary acts. But one of the triumphs of this sermon was the way in which it did not simply progress, but evolve. Attention was held by satisfying conventions and expectations only long enough to reassure the listeners and then to move quickly on to the next challenge to precisely those expectations. And so, with the web of his sermon’s introductory part sufficiently woven, he finally, and for the first time, turned to the verse that was in fact his set text. Having commended the exemplarity of ‘the most illustrious Evidence, of the Resurrection of particular men . . . this Resuscitation of Lazarus’ (Donne 1953–62: vii. 259, ll. 54–5), Donne return to Martha and her words, but in a brief, rapid subclause that concluded the ‘sum’ and propelled the sermon into completely new terrain. Martha, though, was subordinate to her brother ‘Lazarus; whose sister Martha’ appealed to Christ, Donne said, ‘with this imperfect piece of Devotion . . . Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not dyed’ (ll. 55–6, 60–2). The subordinate clause did conclude with the repetition of the main text, which completed the exordium and sum with the formal satisfaction of a sonnet’s concluding couplet. But the gloss upon it and Martha herself as ‘imperfect’ sustained at the same time a negativity, a judgement, and a theme that would govern everything that followed.

The Division Donne turned next to the work of his sermon’s divisio, the generic component that, as one homely preachers’ handbook put it, helped preacher and auditory to ‘limit our selves within bounds . . . better follow the matter . . . and helpeth memory to carry away that which is heard’ (Bernard 1609: 21). As Gregory Kneidel shows in this volume, precisely what a preacher ‘divided’ could be as various as how he did so, with a major choice being whether to structure his oration around parts of the quoted text, or to abandon those altogether for an independent consideration of themes related to them (Kneidel, Chapter 1, this volume). Although ultimately selecting the latter approach, Donne first had to decide which text to thematize, because there were in fact two. What he called his sermon’s ‘body of Instruction for the soule’ was ‘complicated’ (in the Latin sense of ‘folded up’, with its possible allusion to a winding sheet) between ‘This Text which you Heare, Martha’s single words’ and ‘this Text which you see, The dead body of this our Brother’ (Donne 1953–62: vii. 259, ll. 63–5). This gesture bluntly acknowledged the present absence that dominates any funeral, and with which any funeral preacher has to compete—the coffin, with its silent but shrill insistence on the sheer fact of death. Emotive as Donne’s remark was, it was also entirely conventional, in fact a commonplace, as indeed was the overt counterpointing of the ‘texts’ of mortality seen and heard. Donne’s innovation here, however, was to deploy this coup de théatre so early in his sermon, as doing so usually occurred at the end of the sermon as a transition to a concluding eulogy (Tromly 1983: 299–300). Only four weeks earlier, for example, John



peter mccullough

Buckeridge, preaching over the body of Bishop Lancelot Andrewes (see Fig. 30), had discoursed for a full hour on charity and the sacraments, without any reference whatsoever to the occasion, before abruptly announcing, ‘I have now done with my Text: and now I apply my selfe and my Text to the present Text, that lies before us’ (Buckeridge 1629: 16). As Kneidel astutely observes, a seriatim division based on a quoted text could be easier for a preacher than the more independent distinctio division. Donne was adept at both.15 And here, as if upping the ante, he opted for a thematic distinctio on not one, but two ‘texts’—John 11:21, and the corpse of Sir William Cokayne. The verbal text, Martha’s lament, gave Donne only the first part of his ‘Instruction for the soule’, the proposition ‘That there is nothing in this world perfect’. The corporal text, Cokayne’s body, gave the second part and proposition, ‘That such as it [the world] is, there is nothing constant, nothing permanent’ (Donne 1953–62: vii. 259, ll. 65–7). Continuing to weave these two threads of his ‘complicated’ text, Donne refined them slightly to observe, ‘That there is nothing perfect . . . in spirituall things’, and ‘That nothing is permanent in temporall things’ (ll. 68–9, 70–1). The first was exemplified by the passionate ‘imperfections’ of Martha’s outburst (l. 69). Impermanence was no less exemplified by its ‘text’, Cokayne’s corpse. Here Donne balanced, as he would throughout the sermon, on the knife edge between decorous praise of Cokayne, and conventional funeral sermon admonition about the impermanence of life and riches. The denatured status of the corpse-as-text convention seems to have offered Donne a safe refuge: he did not need to name Cokayne, and his animadversions on impermanence could occupy a liminal space between the ad hominem and ad omnium. So Donne began by listing attributes of worldly impermanence that were unmistakably Cokayne’s own—‘Riches prosperously multiplied, Children honorably bestowed, Additions of Honor and Titles, fairly acquired, Places of Command and Government, justly received, and duly executed’—but the closest he came in the divisio to saying that they were Cokayne’s was the carefully qualified assertion that all such things ‘have a Dissolution, a Determination in the death of this, and of every such Man’ (ll. 74–5). Having established that ‘these two Considerations’ (spiritual imperfection and worldly impermanence) ‘shall be our two parts’, Donne proceeded, with an arborial metaphor, to sketch ‘the branches from these two roots’ (ll. 78–9). What followed was a masterpiece of sermonic division. Pastorally, Donne’s inclusive first-person plural (‘we shall see’, ‘we shall end this part’, ‘Gods goodnesse to us’ (ll. 79, 86, 94)) gathered his auditory to him, achieving not just the rhetor’s aim of his listeners’ sympathetic trust, but also their participation in an act of mutual, cooperative interpretation. Donne was a benevolent guide, leading the gathered bereaved into the space of the oration, which filled the choir of the cathedral, the vaults of both building and oration protecting and embracing preacher, mourners, and their deceased ‘Brother’. And so, ‘the frame set up, and the roomes divided’ (l. 96), Donne concluded his division with a gracious invitation: 15

The two surviving sermons that Donne preached immediately before and after that for Cokayne, for instance, are textbook examples of seriatim divisions (Donne 1953–62: vii. 237–56, 279–99).

preaching and context



‘to the furnishing of them, with meditations fit for this Occasion, we passe now’ (ll. 97–8). As with any sermon, the delineation of those ‘roomes’ in the division was absolutely vital to the original listeners, and should be to any modern interpretation of it. Donne’s larger structural divisions attended to the present needs of his listeners, and met the challenge he set for himself with his double-text of the corpse’s unavoidable memento mori, and Martha’s articulation of impatience for a triumph over it. To have done so required a clear sense of the sermon’s ‘frame’ and ‘roomes’, given here in outline form, based strictly on Donne’s division as he announced it (line numbers are for the corresponding passages in the sermon). Although these might seem somewhat creaky and artificial, this was precisely the outline that the auditors were themselves given, and, like a reader of the printed text, should have carried with them on their progress with Donne through his sermon. Exordium Sum Division I. Spiritual imperfection 1. Man’s weakness in general a. in knowledge b. in belief i. faith ii. hope iii. charity 2. Martha’s weakness in particular a. in faith b. in hope c. in charity 3. God’s mercy towards imperfection II. Temporal impermanence 1. Temporal mutability in general 2. Man’s mortality in particular 3. God’s mercy in resurrection

(1–28) (28–62) (63–98)

(99–146) (147–239) (240–86) (287–313) (314–94) (395–446) (447–65) (466–514) (515–42) (543–69) (570–602)

Several of Donne’s strategies were here immediately apparent (and, to structure what follows, I will use these divisions as subdivisions of the remainder of the chapter). Although there were two main propositions (I and II), Donne also worked within that bipartite form with rhetorically satisfying groups of threes: both main propositions are subdivided thrice, and three further triplet structures amplified the first two parts of proposition I (1.b.i–iii, 2.a–c). But risks of any confusing over-elaboration were controlled by the tight parallelism between those sets of three. The main branches of both I and II (1, 2, and 3 respectively) moved analogously from general spiritual imperfection and temporal impermanence (I.1, II.1), to particular examples of the same seen in mankind and Martha (I.2, II.2), to God’s own merciful response to each (I.3, II.3). And the triplets



peter mccullough

that refined mankind’s and Martha’s weaknesses in belief (I.1.b.i–iii, I.2.a–c) both measured that weakness against the same cardinal virtues (faith, hope, and charity). These interlocking structures were in every way as sophisticated as the clockwork precision of a sonnet’s quatrains. But also, as in a well-composed sonnet, the interplay of these structures was not only formally satisfying, but also put to important thematic work. Here the function of careful dispositio—the arrangement or placement of parts within a rhetorical whole—was apparent. Immediately audible (or to a reader visible) in the divisio was the proportionately greater investment (in length and elaboration) in the first part. One might have expected ‘spiritual’ matters (here I’s ‘spiritual imperfection’) to take up the greater part of a sermon. But expectations based on that judgement raise questions about why—if in the usual logic of dispositio the most important matter should have been saved for last—Donne here treated spiritual matters first. Cosmic as well as moral hierarchies were here reversed, both in place and in quantity, as temporal things— earthly mutability, and human mortality itself—were given the rhetorically superior position at the end of the announced division. But, just as this order was authorially deliberate, so too was Donne’s withholding of an explanation for it until later—another example of his being consummately in command of his listeners, always controlling their experience within the ‘roomes’ of his sermon.

Man’s Weakness in Knowledge The first part of the body of Donne’s sermon began a thorough demolition of confidence in anything human, whether spiritual or temporal. But that demolition was carried out with such sympathy, wit, and self-effacement that the tone remained charitable rather than condemnatory. The imperfection of human knowledge (I.1.a) was treated with a particularly light touch, something perhaps not unwelcome at moments in a funeral sermon. And, given his mercantile audience, Donne’s diminution of academic knowledge—‘whether we consider Arts, or Sciences’ (ll. 102–3)—immediately precluded any casting of himself as intellectually superior. Philosophers, medical doctors, and astronomers were no more than children ‘rather conserved in the stature of the first age, then growne to be greater’ (ll. 111–12). Levelling as he went, Donne reached the ironic point that merely knowing ‘that every sin casts another shovell of Brimstone upon him in Hell’ alone was ‘some degree towards perfection in knowledge’ (ll. 124, 126–7). Immediately Donne made one of what would be several sudden detours into exempla or metaphors, which, by their (safely unspecified) congruence with the life of Sir William Cokayne, kept alive the audience’s interest in, or even anxiety about, what Donne would say about the defunct. Donne said of an unnamed man, ‘He that purchases a Mannor, will thinke to have an exact Survey of the Land: But who thinks of taking so exact a survey of his Conscience, how that money was got, that purchased that Mannor?’ (ll. 127–30). This cut to the Cokayne bone. Over the past decade, Sir William had bought manors in at least three counties; all of the agents and attorneys for those transactions were present

preaching and context



at the sermon, including Thomas Henchman, whose ‘exact Survey’ of one purchase in Leicestershire survives (NRO C3273). At the time of his death, Cokayne was not just involved in rebuilding his Broad Street mansion, but was also pouring money into building works at his manor house at Combe in Surrey, where he died (NRO C3099). As Chamberlain records, the general populace of London, particularly poor clothworkers, had very clear views on what to them were Cokayne’s ill-gotten gains. But, inside the cathedral, Donne was faced with the men who were partners, agents, and trustees of Cokayne’s enterprises. The preacher’s rhetorical question about the difference between surveying lands and one’s own conscience on the point of ‘how that money was got, that purchased the Mannor’, unavoidably challenged listeners not only to examine Cokayne’s life, but also, and perhaps more uncomfortably, to examine their own. As if this were not enough sting, Donne continued by observing, ‘that is truly his meanes, what way he came by it’ (1953–62: vii. 260, l. 131). But, knowing his limits, Donne drew back into potentially more complimentary mode by reflecting, ‘yet how few are there, (when a state comes to any great proportion) . . . that know . . . what they are worth?’ (ll. 132–3). One rather suspects that a businessman as acute as Cokayne knew exactly what he was ‘worth’. But, since Cokayne had died nearly intestate, most of those in the cathedral choir who stood to benefit from his ‘great proportion’ must have been very keen to know what their own would be, and whether it would be contested. And, straightaway, Donne returned to a sensitive exemplum that he had touched in his exordium, articulating what must have been many of the mourners’ worst fears: ‘We have seen great Wills, dilated into glorious uses; and into pious uses, and then too narrow an estate to reach to it’ (ll. 134–5). That was swiftly balanced by the opposite hypothesis, ‘where the Testator thinks he hath bequeathed all, and he hath not knowne halfe his own worth’ (ll. 136–7). Here Donne was exploiting yet another funeral sermon convention, the commendation of the benefactions (often with figures attached) made in the defunct’s will (Archer 2001: 103–4). Only weeks before, John Buckeridge had devoted several paragraphs of his funeral sermon for Andrewes to an itemization of the bishop’s will, including precisely one of the scenarios Donne here imagined: ‘and when he began his Will . . . he did not fully know his owne estate’ (1629: 20). But such praise was possible only when the deceased’s will was complete and proven. That Cokayne’s was not so disabled the convention. But Donne turned that to advantage by playing on the anxieties among his listeners over their own hoped-for legacies. This was savvy, attention-holding preaching, which focused the minds of Donne’s auditors, through self-interest, for the delivery of the concluding general moral point: ‘what can thou say thou knowest?’ (1953– 62: vii. 261, l. 140). Having made this foray into what rich people and their possible legatees might ‘know’, Donne had to explain his way back to what was in fact the announced proposition for this part, spiritual imperfection (‘But we must not insist upon this Consideration of knowledge . . . Spirituall things . . . falls within this Rule, which we have in hand’ (ll. 141–5)). Indeed, the asymmetry in the divisio had shown that the topic of weakness in knowledge (I.1.a) was both in subject and in structure an excrescence—further evidence that Donne went out of his way in form as well as in content to apply his anatomy of imperfection, not just to Cokayne, but also to those who mourned him.



peter mccullough

Man’s Weakness in Faith, Hope, and Charity Donne then turned to spiritual failures proper, as observed in the three cardinal virtues: faith, hope, charity. Based on 1 Corinthians 13:13 (‘now abideth faith, hope, charitie, these three, but the greatest of these is charitie’), this Pauline triumvirate was familiar to the point of conventionality. But Donne avoided citing either its source or its collective identity, a reticence that strategically gave the pleasure—and the engagement—of doing so to his auditors. Imperfect faith ‘in things that we are bound to Beleeve’ (l. 148) was treated first in a sweeping amplificatio formed of no fewer than five parallel propositions, addressed directly to the auditory about their responses to challenges in scripture. Each began ‘When you . . .’, and showed none other than the apostles themselves, as well as biblical interpreters, wholly insufficient in faith (ll. 152, 156, 159, 164, 169). The relentless propositions, which soon became rhetorical questions, demanded attention and selfexamination, and concluded with the presence not of a convicting preacher in the ‘roome’ of oration and cathedral, but of a divine judge: ‘If the Holy Ghost be come into this presence, into this Congregation, does he find faith in any? A perfect faith he does not’ (ll. 190–2). From conviction, Donne, ever the pastor, moved to instruction, completing the treatment of insufficient faith with firm advice on how to confirm and strengthen the faith first granted by the ‘inspiration of the Spirit of God’ (l. 218). He transformed the negativity of the previous propositions and rhetorical questions with the new grammatical mood of the imperative: ‘Regulate thy faith’, ‘Beleeve . . . those things necessary to Salvation’ (ll. 219–20). This emphatic assertiveness even reached to the remarkable construction, ‘That that that thou beleevest, be Universal, Catholique, beleeved by all’ (ll. 227–8). With its alliterative and highly condensed antanaclasis (repetition of a word—‘that’—in different senses), further alliteration (‘beleevest, be . . . beleeved’), and rugged predicate nominatives (‘Universal, Catholique’), the clause forced the most deliberate articulation possible in delivery. Donne applied the second cardinal virtue, hope, to its expression in prayer, the catalogued imperfections of which furthered the relentless eradication of room for any spiritual pride in any member of the auditory, ‘as that the best man may justly suspect his best Prayer’ (l. 247). For the amplification of this point Donne indulged in parallel passages of first anti-Puritan, and then anti-Catholic, satire, parodying the former’s preference for ‘extemporall prayers’, and the latter’s custom of deputizing of some to say prayers for others (ll. 249–71). This broadly comic interlude would have craftily created a moment of false security for the listeners—their habits of poor prayer were not scrutinized, but only the easily blamed extremes of others. But, into that gap of self-satisfaction, Donne dropped one of the most famous passages in his whole sermon œuvre. After a brief transitional call to ‘consider with a religious seriousnesse the manifold weaknesses’ of even the best efforts at prayer, Donne broke for the first time into an autobiographical first person, an eruption intensified by the action he suddenly

preaching and context



described in the present tense: ‘I throw my selfe downe in my Chamber, and I call in, and invite God, and his Angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God and his Angels, for the noise of a Flie, for the ratling of a Coach, for the whining of a doore’ (ll. 273–7). The period continued by amplifying myriad examples of the worldly distractions from prayer—including the unforgettable combination of specificity and generality in ‘a straw under my knee, a noise in mine eare, a light in mine eye, an any thing, a nothing’ (ll. 283–4)—in a passage justly celebrated as a set piece in excerpted collections (Donne 1932: 4; 1990: 373–4). Although satisfying as such, it was and is infinitely more compelling in context. The immediately preceding anti-Puritan and anti-Catholic satires were cast in the crabbed diction of Donne’s own early verse satires (‘To this there belongs but a holy scorne’ (1953–62: vii. 264, l. 270)). But the firstperson prayer passage unfolded in one vast, elaborately patterned period, marked structurally by the insistent repetition of ‘I’ and present-tense verbs (‘I throw . . . ’, ‘I call . . . ’, ‘I neglect . . . ’, ‘I talke . . .’ (ll. 273–7)), interspersed with amplifying catalogues of distractions (‘a Flie’, ‘a Coach’, ‘a doore’, ‘a straw’, ‘a noise’, ‘a light’). And, after having previously spoken only in the inclusive first-person plural, and having flattered the auditory into easy judgement on ‘these new Schismatiques’ and ‘the Roman Church’ (ll. 259, 263), the sudden sacrifice of the authorial self to singular first-person criticism instantly condemned all self-satisfaction, whether in auditory or in preacher. All instead had no choice but to assent to the conclusion that ‘certainely is there nothing, nothing in spirituall things, perfect in this world’ (ll. 285–6).16 In turning to the third of the cardinal virtues, ‘to Workes, to Charity’, Donne again surprised by de-emphasizing, at least in length, what could have been expected to be a main part. Paul, after all, had said that ‘the greatest of these is charitie’, and, in Donne’s division, it correctly held pride of place as the consummation of I.1.b. But the relationship of good works to faith in the economy of salvation was a point of heated dispute at the time, with battle lines firmly drawn between ‘Arminians’ and ‘Predestinarians’ (both terms of abuse) at the York House Conference in the preceding February. The prime spokesman for the ‘Arminian’ view of the efficacy of good works, Francis White, then dean of Carlisle, was sitting in front of Donne as he preached, now as bishop of Carlisle. And, at York House, it was White who had ‘pilloried’ the Calvinist arguments of Bishop Thomas Morton—the very man who first encouraged Donne to take holy orders and with whom he seems to have had a close friendship (Bald 1970: 202–12; Tyacke 1987: 177). Donne did not avoid discussing works, even if he did so briefly and without reference to their relationship to free will or predestination. He was clearly aware that he was on thin ice with this topic, beginning, ‘I would be loath to say, That every good is a sin’, but going on to insist that there is ‘no worke, that hath not so much ill mingled with it, as that wee need not cry God mercy for that worke’ (1953–62: vii. 265, ll. 289–90, 294–6). Such a view of works could easily have led to a rebuttal of arguments like White’s own, 16

The editor of one anthology (Donne 1990: 374) ends this excerpt ‘nothing in spiritual things, perfect’, eliding ‘in this world’, which is integral to the theology of both the passage and the entire sermon.



peter mccullough

but, instead, Donne discussed works with more potential application to Cokayne than to his mourner-bishop. As the principal example of the taint afflicting all works, even ‘good’ ones, Donne posited that ‘there was so much corruption in the getting, or so much vaine glory in the bestowing, as that no man builds an Hospitall, but his soule lies, though not dead, yet lame in that Hospitall’ (ll. 296–8). Without life’s breath to elaborate, Cokayne’s final testamentary dictation to Jacob Price was that ‘the Hospitall and Poore shoulde be remembred in good measure’ (TNA: PRO PROB 11/152). ‘The Hospitall’ was, as we have seen, the City orphanage of Christ’s Hospital, of which Cokayne was governor. Short of his widow and children, it was his only specified beneficiary, and thus the only benefaction about which the funeral auditory would have known. Could there have been any escaping the possible conclusion that even this good work was corrupt ‘in the getting’ and bestowed in ‘vaine glory’? Or that the careful metaphor of a lame soul that lies ‘though not dead’ could be applied to the demonstrably dead Cokayne? But Donne led his auditory quickly away from such likely speculations with a deft return to the first person, and to a doctrinal reassurance that spared both him and Cokayne from disrespect: ‘God, out of my Confession of the impuritie of my best actions, shall vouchsafe to take off his eyes from that impurity, as though there were none’ (1953–62: vii. 265, ll. 306–8). Having risked that small voyage through the troubled waters of good works, Donne brought his listeners home with the summary, ‘not Faith, not Hope, not Charitie, have any puritie . . . which is the generall Doctrine wee proposed at First’ (ll. 309–10).

Martha’s Weakness in Faith, Hope, and Charity The first branch of the sermon’s first part (I.1, man’s weakness in general) thus concluded, Donne turned to the second branch (I.2, Martha’s weakness in particular) with a bizarre apology to the biblical Martha: ‘lest’, he says, ‘we attribute this weakenesse . . . to Martha alone, we note to you first, that her sister Mary . . .when she comes to Christ, comes also in the same voice of infirmity, Lord, if thou hadst beene here, my brother had not died’ (ll. 314–20). And he proceeded in fact to adjust his announced division’s treatment of these words as Martha’s alone and instead continued the sermon (by yoking John 11:21 and 32) by considering the words of ‘both these holy Sisters’ and the mutual ‘imperfections in . . . their Faith, and their Hope, and their Charity’ (ll. 320–2), albeit with the courtly compliment that ‘they had also, and had both, good degrees towards perfection’ (ll. 323–4). There seems no discernible reason for Donne to have gone through those contortions, and to travel eleven verses further into the story of Lazarus merely for a repetition of the same text, than to make, even more prominently than he had in the divisio, an allusion to Cokayne’s noble daughters. Pointing out this tacit allusion destroys its subtlety and sophistication. Donne was not arguing for extending an application to Mary and Martha née Cokayne in a bluntly specific way. Nor might it have been the only

preaching and context



contemporary application he wished to activate. A felt need to defend Cokayne’s physicians may also have been intended, as he went on to point out that ‘we cannot say . . . to any Colledge of Physitians . . .If you had beene here, my friend had not died? though surely there be much assistance to be received from them’ (ll. 325–8). But both aspects were part of a sophisticated strategy to continue to engage his hearers as emotionally as possible with his sermon. A strategic reason for keeping the auditory alert through such potential applications to specific mourners may have been that in treating the sisters’ weakness in faith (I.2.a), Donne chose to pursue the sermon’s only points of controversial divinity. Though prefaced with the caveat that he did not ‘here institute a confutation’, Donne used Martha’s and Mary’s greatest fault—not recognizing Christ ‘to be God himselfe’—to refute at some length ‘the growth, and insinuation of that pestilent Heresie of Socinianisme’, which rejected the divinity of Christ (ll. 335–7). Even more culpable to Donne was the ‘weaknesse and error’ of ‘these Sisters’ in their insistence ‘upon the personall presence of Christ’, which limited Christ’s power to something merely bodily (ll. 375, 374, 371). This in turn allowed, in the midst of a funeral sermon, a foray into the disputed point of Christ’s presence in the sacraments. Donne here roundly discredited two extreme eucharistic positions (advanced Calvinist memorialism, and Roman Catholic transubstantiation), cautioning that it is ‘a weaknesse to attribute too much, or too little to Christs presence in his Sacraments’ (ll. 376–7). At court in the previous April Donne had taken a similar approach when he disdained attempts to ‘seeke him in a piece of bread’ as well as warning that ‘unnecessary doubts of his presence may induce fearfull assurances of his absence’. He advised instead that court communicants ‘make sure thine own Reall presence, and doubt not of his’ (1953–62: vii. 139–40). Even more evasively at Cokayne’s funerals, he recommended the middle ground only by implication. Donne’s detour into sacramental theology suggests that, in addition to preaching with Cokayne’s family in mind, he also did so with an eye to other constituencies represented among the mourners. Only weeks before, Buckeridge had also devoted a large part of Andrewes’s funeral sermon to sacramental presence, and in very similar terms (1629: 2–5). That funeral had staged the passing of the ‘Arminian’ faction’s mantle from Andrewes to his disciples Buckeridge, Laud, and Richard Neile. And several who had heard Buckeridge then probably now sat listening to Donne. Neile had processed as Andrewes’s principal mourner, and it seems highly likely that his client, Francis White, along with George Mountain, had attended (Andrewes 1841–54: ix, p. xxx). Similarly, Sir Paul Pindar was said to have ‘had noe Pictshure in his house But the Pictshure of Doctor Andrewes And hath oft sayd . . . That since St Pauls dayes the Church of God had Never his Fellow’ (Stanwood 2008: 36). He could hardly have failed, if able, to attend Andrewes’s funerals.17 With Buckeridge’s sermon for Andrewes very likely still fresh in their minds, 17 One might even suspect that Pindar’s sole picture of Andrewes owed something to Buckeridge’s funeral sermon anecdote that, in Andrewes’s own house, a picture of his admired schoolmaster Richard Mulcaster hung ‘over the doore of his Studie: whereas in all the rest of the house, you could scantly see a picture’ (1629: 18).



peter mccullough

the emergent ‘Laudians’ (White, Mountain, Pindar, Henchman) would have listened keenly as Donne circled around the same contentious points about Christ’s sacramental presence. And at the same time as Donne may have been hearkening back to Andrewes’s funeral on 11 November, he must have also been looking forward thirteen days to Christmas. For on that day he would preach his statutory decanal sermon from the same pulpit, in the presence again of the lord mayor and aldermen. He seems here to have seized the opportunity to trail his Christmas sermon to them, for it would be devoted entirely to exactly these questions of eucharistic presence (Donne 1953–62: vii. 279–99; Johnson 1999: 140–2). Continuing the application of Martha’s and Mary’s insufficiency in the three cardinal virtues in parallel to their earlier application to mankind in general, Donne turned next to the insufficient hope expressed in the sisters’ prayer (I.2.b). Donne found evidence of this in Mary and Martha having sent a messenger to Christ (rather than going themselves), and having been too vague in their message of ‘He whom thou lovest, is sick’ (1953–62: vii. 268, l. 403; John 11:3). Donne counters, ‘that was not enough, we must bring Christ and our necessities neerer together then so’ (ll. 404–5). But, just as in the structurally parallel passage on imperfect prayer in general (I.1.b.ii), Donne avoided indecorous ad hominem criticism here by again suddenly adopting a self-critical first-person singular voice. Earlier he had catalogued the afflicting impediments to his prayer. Now he administered to himself the necessary remedies and correctives, beginning: ‘I must not wrap up all my necessities in generall termes in my prayers’ (ll. 409–10). Such correctives, he said, were ‘a great assistance, and establishing, and propagation of devotion’ (l. 414). Here, the use of a parallel structural unit built into the divisio obviated the need to return, as a lesser preacher might have done, to the straw, the coach, the fly, or the ray of light that had frustrated his devotion in the earlier part. As a perfect pendant to that passage (I.1.b.ii), the remedy and correction of those previous impediments was made here (I.2.b) without preacherly explication. Instead, Donne deployed the more engaged pedagogy of constructing a space for the audience’s own recognition and application of the point. Critics and anthologists who pay attention only to the first passage, deducing from it religious scepticism or even cynicism in Donne, fail to attend properly to the signifying importance of sermons as carefully structured wholes. Donne may have honestly expressed in memorable prose the irritations that afflict attempted prayer. But he no less honestly nor memorably expressed their remedy later in an emphatic, alliterative gradatio: ‘Pray personally . . . Pray personally, and pray frequently . . . Pray frequently, and pray fervently’ (ll. 431–2, 434–5, 435–6). So to claim, based only on the earlier passage, that ‘when he prayed, he could not keep his mind on prayer’, and, that in spite of his best efforts ‘it was no good’, is not only to quote selectively. It is also to quote only half the story; it is to judge a sonnet without bothering to read the concluding couplet (Carey 1990: 154–5; Donne 1990: 373–4; see also Shami 1995). To conclude the sermon’s second part (I.2.c), Donne treated Martha’s insufficient ‘Charity’ with brevity—a single paragraph. But within that short space Donne ventured the sermon’s first direct acknowledgement of the pains of the bereaved. He entered this branch without any flourish or transition. Having concluded the previous part with the

preaching and context



emphatic ‘It is not enough to have prayed once; Christ does not onely excuse, but enjoine Importunity’, there is resignation, even filial tenderness, in what followed: ‘And then a weaknesse there was in their Charity too, even towards their dead brother’ (Donne 1953– 62: vii. 269, l. 447–8). The simple, solemn phrase ‘Their dead brother’ must have pressed on the mourners’ ears with all the finality and weight of Cokayne on his hearse, and been shot through with all the grieving affection of the biblical and contemporary Marthas and Marys, the guild brothers, aldermanic brothers, kin, and friends. And, in immediate response to those emotions, Donne acknowledged that ‘to lament a dead friend is naturall, and civill’. But he completed the sentence with a shocking exemplum that confronted every individual with his or her own relationship, physical and moral, to the defunct Cokayne: ‘and he is the deader of the two, the verier carcasse, that does not so’ (ll. 448–9). This was an observation aimed particularly at those perhaps present whose eyes were dry, and who might have shared Chamberlain’s assessment of the defunct. Donne then deployed a very conventional argument, but avoided its potential for banality by couching it in thoughtfully complex syntax: ‘if I doe beleeve him to be in heaven, deliberately, advisedly to wish him here, that is in heaven, is an uncharitable desire’ (ll. 451–3). He added further poignancy by comparing that ‘uncharitable desire’ to a ‘Princes servant’ who would be ‘loath’ to see his master succeed to the throne ‘because he should not hold the same place with him being King, as he did when he was Prince’ (ll. 455–7). Coming only one year after the death of James and accession of Charles, this would have resonated among many present—not least Donne—anxious about the continuation from Charles of favour once held (or not) with him or his father. Cokayne had shared with Donne a particularly close relationship with the late king. To James, Donne ascribed his final decision to take holy orders, and at his express command had been created D.D., against the wishes of Cambridge dons (Bald 1970: 300, 306–8). Cokayne, unlike his fellow lord mayors, had not had to wait until after his mayoralty to be knighted, having been so in his own house in Broad Street four years earlier at a private visit from the king (Aldous 2004). It is not difficult here to feel Donne reliving perhaps the last time he had preached over a hearse. That bier, standing in Denmark House in the Strand, had borne ‘The Body of our Royall, but dead Master and Soveraigne’ King James in April 1625, and over it Donne had meditated upon the royal household’s anxieties about ‘the service of the new Master’, and had consoled himself with the hope ‘to see those eyes open there, which we have seen closed here’ (1953–62: vi. 289, 291).

God’s Mercy in Accepting Imperfection With spiritual imperfections, both general and Mary’s and Martha’s, thus surveyed, Donne concluded that ‘there is nothing in this world, no not in spirituall things, not in knowledge, not in faith, not in hope, not in charity perfect’ (1953–62: vii. 269, ll. 461–3). That summary brought the sermon to a nadir, a place where, without any possible exception, every person had been shown to be fundamentally flawed. The sermon’s scales were



peter mccullough

tipped to their very lowest; crucially they held the preacher, all his listeners, and the deceased Cokayne in the same balance, with all judged uniformly wanting. In doing so, Donne not only made a valid moral point, but also prevented anyone from criticizing any other—whether that be him as a preacher, or Cokayne as a man. Nadir this was, then, and it was also the perfect mid-point of Donne’s sermon. In the announced division it (I.3) sat at the fulcrum before the second part (II) with its own tripartite subdivision. And, if Part I.1–2 had driven relentlessly downwards in its anatomy of flawed piety, the touch of a single sentence in transition to I.3 kicked the scales upwards with a universally applicable consolation: ‘But yet, for all these imperfections, Christ doth not refuse, nor chide, but cherish their piety’ (ll. 463–4). All the criticisms of imperfect piety, both that of the biblical sisters, and any that had been implied on the part of his hearers, were redeemed with a single, gospel ‘But yet’, which asserted—with a tricolon that grammatically re-enacted the transformation from negative to positive (‘not refuse, nor chide, but cherish’)—Christian mercy. That transformation loosed Donne again on a flight of soaring thematic imagery. There at the midpoint of his sermon he threw out an arch that, like those in the cathedral chancel itself, bridged the walls and supported the roof of the entire oration. ‘There is no forme of Building stronger then an Arch,’ Donne declaimed. But he continued by articulating the paradoxical nature of the form: ‘and yet an Arch hath declinations, which even a flat-roofe hath not . . . the Arch declines downwards in all parts, and yet the Arch is a firme supporter’ (ll. 466–9). So too, he said, ‘our Devotions doe not the lesse beare us upright, in the sight of God because they have some declinations towards natural affections’ (ll. 469–71). The imagery itself asserted the strength of Donne’s resolve to turn the argument. And it was deployed factually, avoiding the relative instability of simile, as the physical arches and the structure of human devotion were both articulated independently (not in a subordinating comparison), like the piers of the choir from which its own arches sprung. In this space Donne pronounced an absolution unheard of in most contemporary practical divinity, particularly of the more godly sort: ‘If a man doe depart in some actions . . . upon infirmity, or humane affections, and not a contempt, God passes it over oftentimes’ (ll. 474–6). And, under the protection of this arch of mercy, Donne did in fact loose a very pointed rebuke of Puritanism, by way of a deliberate mistranslation. He argued: ‘For, when our Saviour Christ sayes, Be pure as your Father in heaven is pure, that is a rule for our purity, but not a measure of our purity’ (ll. 476–8). Every biblically trained ear in the cathedral would have known immediately that Matthew 5:48 reads: ‘Be yee therefore perfect, even as your father, which is in heaven, is perfect’ (emphasis added). Donne’s translational legerdemain allowed a damning catalogue of the principal hypocrisies and spiritual perils by then well honed in anti-Puritan satire, which were articulated with wordplay that made patently clear his strategic reasons for preferring ‘pure’ to ‘perfect’: ‘to distrust of Gods mercy, if thou finde not this purity in thy self ’, ‘to presume upon God . . . in an overvaluing of thine own purity’, and ‘to condemne others, whom thou wilt needs thinke lesse pure’ (ll. 497–500; emphasis added). To this percussive anatomy of what could only be called ‘puritanism’, Donne said, ‘Christ armes us by his Example, He receives these sisters of Lazarus . . . though there were weaknesses in

preaching and context



their Faith, in their Hope, in their Charity’ (ll. 506–9). At one and the same time, Donne accomplished two seemingly divergent aims. First, he skewered a perceived enemy in the church. No doubt this met with the great approval of the likes of White, Mountain, and Pindar, but, as would become even clearer later, probably discomforted some of the aldermen present. But, second, he offered consolation to all those who mourned Cokayne (and did so perhaps with understandably mixed, or ‘imperfect’ feelings), and also to all those who wrestled with their own spiritual imperfections more universally. In the best sermon writing, as with the best epideictic rhetoric, criticism coexisted with consolation.

Temporal Mutability To pass to the final part of his division, Donne returned to the funeral sermon convention of counterpointing scriptural and corporal ‘texts’, which he had already deployed unconventionally earlier. Of the first part he said, ‘this we have seen out of the Text we have Heard’, before announcing, ‘and now out of the Text, which we See, we shall see the rest, That as in spirituall things, there is nothing Perfect, so in temporall, there is nothing Permanent’ (ll. 511–14). Since the corpse-as-text convention would usually appear at this point in the sermon, the auditory would have taken a deep breath, expecting Donne’s awaited eulogy on Cokayne. Instead, he deployed something dizzyingly unexpected, if in fact parallel to the opening of his first part (I.1.a, man’s weakness in knowledge): an apotropaic gesture, or dismissal, of natural science (here Copernican astronomy). He said, ‘I need not call in new Philosophy, that denies a settlednesse . . . but makes the Earth to move in that place, where we thought the Sunne had moved . . . to prove this, That nothing upon Earth is permanent’ (ll. 515–19). When the auditors had expected impermanence epitomized by a corpse, Donne asserted the impermanence of nothing less than the universe. Expectation that he would then proceed in a descending gradatio down the great chain of being may have been encouraged by his invitation to ‘consider the greatest Bodies upon Earth, the Monarchies’—probably the so-called Four Monarchies or empires of the ancient world (Dan. 2), but still an analogy again fresh with the pains of James’s death (ll. 521– 2). But, instead, Donne next seized a sheer opposite, rather than an increment, by turning to ‘the smallest bodies upon Earth, The haires of our head’ (ll. 523–4). And, in an act of ‘yoking heterogeneous ideas by violence together’ more often associated with his ‘metaphysical’ verse, he asserted that not only was God ‘no more troubled to make a Monarchy ruinous, then to make a haire gray’, but also that ‘a Monarchy will ruine, as a haire will grow gray, of it selfe’ (ll. 528–9). And then his bumpy ride down the great chain did reach the very ‘Elements themselves’, full of ‘vicissitudinary transmutation into one another’—another remarkable phrase demanding oral articulation mimetic of its very meaning (ll. 530–2). But next Donne moved up that chain again, observing that ‘it is so in the Conditions of men too’ (l. 534).



peter mccullough

There was method to this hierarchical madness. The place on the great chain that Donne wanted to reach was, in another twist on the convention, the ‘text’ of William Cokayne, deceased: ‘A Merchant condensed, kneaded’ (ll. 534–5). Was this to have been another blunt statement about the corpse in front of him? The diction ‘condensed’ and ‘kneaded’ spoke immediately of the clods from which Adam was made and to which Cokayne would return, as in Donne’s verse epistle to Sir Edward Herbert, where ‘Man is a lumpe, where all beasts kneaded bee’, and The Litanie, where the speaker laments that, ‘I / Am, but of mudde walls, and condensed dust’ (Donne 1994: 200, l. 1; 359, ll. 19–20). Ever only flirting with identification with the actual Sir William Cokayne (alive or dead), the clause began with an inescapable option to associate the unnamed ‘Merchant’ with Cokayne, ‘condensed, kneaded’ and even ‘packed up’. In his coffin? But, in a great play for maximum emotional impact, even shock, the clause in fact continued, ‘and packed up in a great estate’ (l. 535). Donne was in fact using ‘packed up’ in the sense of ‘burdened’, to nudge the identification with Cokayne towards a potential allusion to his wealth. But, to that already shocking potential description and redescription of the putative Cokayne, Donne added a final distancing qualifier, ‘becomes a Lord’ (l. 535). After a torturous route of allowable application to the deceased, Donne had turned a blind corner. Or had he? Cokayne’s daughters had married lords; his wife would marry one; his son would become one. But Cokayne never did. Did Donne ever think he would? William Cokayne Jr (the standard-bearer in the funeral procession) and John Cokayne Jr (who had carried the Eastland company penon) had thought so. In the autumn of 1624, these nephews had obsequiously written to their elder cousin from their posts as his factors at Elbing, seeking preferment for William Jr in England. John, on 23 September, wrote that ‘noe other newes is heer, only your worshipps beeng lord Tresurer’; he continued, ‘if it bee soe, I would Intreat your worshipp to bee mindfull of my brother William, with some office, and both of us shall studie to deserve it’ (NRO C2451). William himself followed his brother’s overture in October, ‘haveing understood by divers mens writings as also by word of mouth of a common report that your wo[rshi]pp is to be Lord High Treasurer of England’ (NRO C2484). That rumour was so fleeting as to go unremarked by historians, but it had the Cokayne network buzzing in 1624—and, two years later, Donne’s ostensibly hypothetical case study of the impermanence of ‘A Merchant’ who ‘becomes a Lord’ would have resonated with both Cokayne’s and his clients’ ambition, and the impermanence of both. The dark cloud spread even further as Donne ventured another vignette fraught with possible application to Cokayne, that of ‘a Merchant rarified, blown up by a perfidious Factor’. With a mercantile empire as large and far-flung as Cokayne’s, this scenario must have been a constant concern, perhaps even with respect to William Cokayne Jr., whose begging letter had also asked forgiveness for an unspecified ‘former Youthfull Foolishnes’, which seems to have banished him, his wife, and child to the Baltic outpost (NRO C2484). Donne then multiplied the possibilities for the evaporation of a great estate with the startling, ‘or by a riotous Sonne’ (1953–62: vii. 271, ll. 536–7). Cokayne left only one surviving son, Charles, and he sat in the chief

preaching and context



mourner’s chair directly in front of Donne, having just been invested by the preacher with all the ceremonial trappings of his inheritance. He must have felt the preacher’s warning to the point of embarrassment, even if tempered by the fact that that warning was just as applicable to the no fewer than eight merchant fathers (some of the aldermen) who had walked in the procession with their own sons, and now sat together under Donne’s pulpit gaze.

Man’s Mortality Evidence that the sermon was reaching a rhetorical climax gathered in these later portions of the division. Each of the three parts (II.1–3) was shorter, marked by more vivid imagery and exempla, and deployed without any elaborate transitions. Even if men could take their estates with them into the next world, ‘yet’, Donne said, ‘we cannot stay with them’. And that, Donne said simply, ‘is another Consideration in this part’ (ll. 541–2), to which he moved abruptly with another striking metaphor in the declamation,‘the world is a great Volume, and man the Index of that Booke’ (l. 543). Reaching for forceful extremes, he urged in direct address that the auditory ‘propose this body to thy consideration in the highest exaltation thereof ’—not Cokayne’s body, but rather, in another surprise, Christ’s (ll. 547–8). Impatient even with metaphor in his drive for bodily fact, he insisted: ‘Nay, not in a Metaphor . . . or any other similitudinary thing’, but even Christ’s ‘very body’, which ‘must wither, must decay, must languish, must perish’ (ll. 549–52). As so frequently in Donne, he cast up to an extreme height (here Christ’s body) in order to ensure no room for exception beneath it. As a result, the ensuing flurry of short biblical exempla of proud lives—‘armed’ Goliath, ‘painted’ Jezebel, ‘pampered’ Lazarus—was doomed to the vivid summary: ‘And they are dead’ (ll. 553–4, 557). The drive to a conclusion then quickened even further, as Donne invoked the balance-tipping weight of God’s merciful acceptance of spiritual imperfection in the previous parallel part (I.3.), to apply it now to the body to ‘conclude that, with this goodnesse of God, that for all this dissolution, and putrefaction, he affords this Body a Resurrection’ (ll. 568–9).

God’s Mercy in Resurrection Here Donne was entering conventional territory again, for, as Hooker had summarized the Reformed view, ‘the greatest thing of all other about this dutie of Christian buriall is an outward testification of the hope which wee have touchinge the resurrection of the dead’ (1977: 412). Donne introduced this greatest article of Christian faith by way of contrast. ‘The Gentils, and their Poets’, he said, ‘describe the sad state of Death so, Nox una obeunda, That it is one everlasting Night’ (1953–62: vii. 272, ll. 570–1).



peter mccullough

To the gentiles and their poets, death was ‘a Night; But to a Christian, it is Dies Mortis, and Dies Resurrectionis, The day of Death, and The day of Resurrection’ (ll. 571–3). Two things common in other Donne sermons appeared here for the first time—latinity, and quotation of an antique source. Donne’s decision to divide his text by thematic distinctio rather than into seriatim parts perhaps lessened the need to ring the changes on the text in both English and Latin, as he did habitually in seriatim sermons. But also absent was Donne’s usual marshalling of pagan, patristic, and contemporary theological authors. Evelyn Simpson found that only 5 of Donne’s 160 extant sermons are devoid of reference to St Augustine alone (Donne 1953–62: x. 347). Donne’s sermon for Cokayne’s funerals is not only one of those five, but also perhaps the only sermon that mentions not a single theologian, ancient or modern. It would be wrong to assume that Donne was suppressing his erudition for his auditory. Not only was Cokayne famous for his own learning and rhetoric, but also his wife’s and daughters’ surviving correspondence shows them to be accomplished in their literacy, and the male merchant class on display in the funeral party was well educated through grammar school (which by definition includes latinity). Moreover, Donne’s cathedral sermons never eschewed learning; his prebendal sermon only weeks before had deployed and engaged Aristotle, Jerome, Augustine, Bernard, Philo Judaeus, Gregory the Great, and (passim) Latin and biblical Hebrew (Donne 1953–62: vii. 249– 52). The distinctio approach to his text, and the lack of academic display in his treatment of it, makes the Cokayne sermon one of Donne’s most entirely original. It also marked it as one seriously and thoughtfully tailored to the pastoral imperative to personalize his oration for the funeral needs of his auditory. Donne did not seize the public spectacle of Cokayne’s funerals to pursue academic or polemical divinity for the sake of the two bishops present, or for a sermon-gadding laity with an appetite for the same. He was guided instead by the perhaps greater challenge to comfort grieving family and associates, to challenge and confirm their faith and practice, and to negotiate with honesty and integrity the legacy of a man whose estimation in the eyes of his mourners inside the cathedral chancel was sharply different from that of the wider public outside. Evelyn Simpson identified the ‘Gentil’ (that is, ‘gentile’) quotation with which Donne introduced his resurrection peroration as his ‘misquotation’ of Catullus’s Carmina 5.6 (‘Nox est perpetua una dormienda’). With it, she also consolidated a crippling tradition of appreciating Donne’s prose only in ‘poetic’ excerpts. Astutely, she judged that the preceding passage, which had sketched the pride of Goliath, Jezebel, and Dives, was ‘incomparably enriched by the associations which lie behind the proper names’, and that ‘all these immortal stories must have risen at once into the minds of Donne’s hearers, as he uttered these few sentences’. But the dismissal of the ensuing conclusion of that passage as ‘a few sentences of the flattest pulpit prose’ missed entirely, first, the structural necessity of concluding one part and introducing the next, and, second, the fact that vivid passages depend for most of their effect upon careful management of deliberate contrast with what surrounds them. So, when Donne turned ‘to the Latin poet for his associative

preaching and context



magic’, that ‘magic’ depended first on its startling contrast with the alleged preceding flatness. This was precisely the strategy that Simpson so well recognized in the shift from Catullus’ ‘sad and heavy vowels’ to the ‘deliberate repetition of the long “i” sound’ in the remarkable lines that followed: ‘We die in the light, in the sight of Gods presence, and we rise in the light, in the sight of his very Essence’ (Donne 1953–62: vii. 272, ll. 573–5; Simpson 1951: 343).18 Simpson cited Donne’s use of rhyme here (‘light’/‘sight’, ‘presence’/‘Essence’), and ‘a very marked anapaestic rhythm’ as having ‘the effect on the mind and ear . . . of poetry’ (1951: 344). There is every truth in this assessment. But we might extend Simpson’s responsiveness to sound by stressing how in delivery the brightness of the imagery broke through the darkness of the Catullan night, and how the brightness of the sound rung out from the earlier sonority—in the minds and ears of the auditory. We might also resist, though, the temptation to justify as quotable and praiseworthy only those passages that, in a limited estimation of the power of patterned prose, can be deemed ‘poetic’. And we must not sever ‘light’ and ‘sight’ from what came next. For the sound and sense of Donne’s masterful modulation was a light that cast shadows, and not just a simplistic ‘Beatific Vision’ (Simpson 1951: 343). ‘Nay’, Donne said in immediate qualification of the previous ‘sight’ of ‘light’, the day of death is still a day of judgement, a ‘Day of visitation’ (1953–62: vii. 272, l. 577). There was no escaping for Donne—or his listeners—that, ‘sayes, God, Thou shalt die the Death’ (l. 579). Donne insisted upon the fearful fact of death, because the very God who was the ‘light’ of the previous lines had decreed it a necessary part of the life he gave beyond death. Savouring the paradox, Donne asserted again in bold, reassuring first person: ‘I doe the lesse feare, or abhorre Death, because I finde it in his mouth; Even a malediction hath a sweetnesse in his mouth; for there is a blessing wrapped up in it . . . a Resurrection upon every Death’ (ll. 579–82). Because this included pain, because this acknowledged sin, because this included judgement, because it did not deny the shadows cast by the light of resurrection promise, it was not just more compelling to Donne, but would have been more rigorously consoling for his listeners. They, and Sir William Cokayne, Donne made clear, would have to pass through the shadow of judgement before seeing the resurrection light. Donne’s emphasis, in short, was upon sin—failures, not least like Sir William Cokayne’s—that would be redeemed. And so he returned to the Old Testament exempla of the previous part (II.2). In a stunning period suspended across no fewer than four parallel dependent clauses, Donne took the flawed beauty of Jezebel, the strength of Goliath, and the riches of Dives and promised that, refined and compounded through the crucible of death and resurrection, they would be ‘doubled, and redoubled upon us’ (ll. 583–91). In a grand finale perfectly structured to achieve a concluding cadence, he proclaimed that in that resurrection light there would be a trinity of goodness ‘infinitely exalted’, ‘infinitely multiplied’, and ‘infinitely extended’ (ll. 592–4). 18

Simpson’s reading was repeated in Donne (1953–62: vii. 23–4).



peter mccullough

A New ‘Text’: Sir William Cokayne With that peroration, Donne had concluded his tour through every ‘roome’ of the sermon that he had announced in his divisio. His auditory, however, would have been on the edge of their seats waiting for what they knew should be the last part of a funeral sermon, the commendatory eulogy by custom appended. The tradition well established since Elizabethan times had been for commendation to occur ‘only near the sermon’s close’, to be in comparative length ‘shorter, usually far shorter’ than the doctrinal first part, and in content to come after a studious avoidance of referring ‘to the occasion or to the dead person’—all in an effort strictly to segregate and privilege the doctrinal over the biographical (Tromly 1983: 302). That these customs were still observed at the time of the Cokayne sermon was perfectly illustrated in Buckeridge’s sermon for Andrewes (Buckeridge 1629). But Donne had already muddied these conventional waters. His text and his division of it had insisted on occasionality, and on very personal identification of the mourners with it. He had also very early in the sermon directly called attention to the present corpse, and in exempla and metaphor he had raised Cokayne’s ghost repeatedly. Given the rhetorical finality with which he had just concluded, and the fact that the announced division had been covered, the mourners might very well have suspected that all was finished. But, with a disarming frankness and tenderness, the preacher continued. Donne gathered his auditors to him again with his inclusive use of the plural first person, and they together carried the resurrection message to Cokayne: ‘And since we are in an action of preparing this dead Brother of ours to that state, (for the Funerall is the Easter-eve, The Buriall is the depositing of that man for the Resurrection) . . .’ (Donne 1953–62: vii. 270, ll. 494–6). To that conditional introductory clause, Donne then doubled back to add another, as if to reach for the sermon he had just preached and bring it with them too: ‘As we have held you, with Doctrine of Mortification, by extending the Text, from Martha to this occasion’ (ll. 597–8). And then, after those syntactical delays to gather preacher, corpse, and auditory, Donne finally supplied the remarkable conclusion to the sentence: ‘so shall we dismisse you with Consolation, by a like occasionall inverting the Text, from passion in Martha’s mouth, Lord if thou hadst been here, my Brother had not dyed, to joy in ours, Lord, because thou was here, our Brother is not dead’ (ll. 598–602). With this, Donne had effected a radically innovative transition into the traditional commendation of the departed by reinventing it as nothing less than a second sermon, complete with its own new ‘Text’. Where conventional preachers, like Buckeridge, had used as their transitional conceit for the discussion of the defunct the tired move from scriptural text to corpse-as-text, Donne moved instead from one scriptural text to another. But, with breath-taking bravado, he made the new text his own, a brazen rewriting of scripture. With the deft adjustment of the subordinating conjunction (‘if’ to ‘because’) and verb tenses in his set text, Donne at a stroke brought ‘joy’ to the mourners, and won the challenge he had set for himself at the beginning by in fact

preaching and context



resurrecting ‘Lazarus’. Listeners could also now make sense of the otherwise odd ordering of the parts of whole sermon. He had discussed spiritual imperfection first (I), then temporal impermanence (II), in a reversal of usual hierarchies. But the previously unannounced third part—thus a complete surprise—made possible by the introduction of a new scriptural ‘Text’, took even farther the thematic descent. Having moved from spiritual down through temporal imperfection, Donne now rested the entire oration upon the very individual body that lay on the hearse. The whole trajectory of the sermon, it was now revealed, had been towards Sir William Cokayne. But the unconventional, transformational new ‘text’, which was neither exactly scripture nor corpse, allowed the brilliant paradox of treating the new structural low point of the sermon (the individual deceased) in terms not of ‘Mortification’, but of ‘Consolation’ and resurrection joy. The main sermon (what we may now call, with the advent of a surprise third, the first two parts), with its insistent anatomy of imperfection and ‘Mortification’, had ruled out the possibility of anyone, including the preacher, being in either spirit or person anything but imperfect. This was good moral theology, but it was also a strategically inspired way both to acknowledge imperfection in any assessment of Sir William Cokayne, and to lessen any need to explain or excuse those imperfections. Donne was able now to divide his new text for his new sermon, and to do so he used the evocative trope of the Christian journey: ‘The Lord was with him in all these steps; with him in his life; with him in his death; He is with him in his funerals, and he shall be with him in his Resurrection; and therefore, because the Lord was with him, our Brother is not dead’ (ll. 603–6). The first of these three parts—‘in his life’—absorbed most of the usual commendation of the deceased’s life. The detail recounted by Donne, which can be corroborated by historical sources, refines our understanding of two aspects of early modern funeral preaching. First, Donne had clearly overcome earlier Protestant generations’ aversion to ‘enumerating the gifts of body, fortune, and mind or recapitulating the life from ancestry to the grave’; in doing so, he embraced rather than rejected ‘the two classical schemes for personal praise’ (Tromly 1983: 303). These were hallmarks of classical Roman eulogy, as well as contemporary Roman Catholic practice, and are further evidence of how strongly Donne was influenced by the early humanist model of preaching adapted from Ciceronian oratory (McCullough 2006; Kneidel, Chapter 1, this volume).19 Secondly, the reliability of Donne’s account of Cokayne should further qualify historians’ reluctance to accept ‘the utility of funeral sermon biographies as sources’ (Carlson 2000: 567–8; cf. Collinson 1983). Although Donne’s biographical matter about Cokayne is full and accurate, it is perhaps distanced by his controlling conceit of the Christian journey—a tactic that may frustrate historians, but that protected Donne from praising in too secular a vein, and also suggested that the character judgements were God’s, not his. So first, ‘He was with him in the

19

Tromly’s work focuses on Elizabethan funeral sermons; further research may reveal a general loosening of this convention in the Jacobean period. Buckeridge (1629), for example, includes a very full ‘cradle-to-grave’ biography of Andrewes.



peter mccullough

beginning of his life, in this manifestation, That though he were of Parents . . . of a great Estate, yet . . . [he] did not slacken his own industry’ (Donne 1953–62: vii. 274, ll. 606–9). That among the seven Cokayne brothers it was William who had attained the greatest degree of financial and trade independence was clear from his father’s appointment of him as his executor twenty-seven years before. But Donne turned this historical fact into a moral exemplum heavy with application to the next Cokayne heir, the principal mourner Charles, and to every City father and merchant in the choir stalls: the ‘Canker’ of lazy heirs who squandered the legacies of their industrious fathers ‘hath eat up many a family in this City’ (l. 610). But ‘God’ (not Cokayne himself), Donne said, had ‘imprinted’ and ‘prospered’ Sir William’s industry, and ‘enlarged’ his inherited wealth (ll. 613, 615, 618). Donne then extended his commendation of Sir William’s private industry to include its ostensible benefit to the public good. Middleton’s ‘funeral’ pageant in 1620 had similarly pressed the argument that Cokayne’s labours were selfless and public spirited. The personification of Cokayne’s mayoral year ‘bequeath[ed] to the whole body of the beloved commonalty three inestimable jewels, love, meekness and loyalty, which are always the forerunners of a blessed prosperity’ (Middleton 2007: 1438, ll. 26–9). God, Donne said, ‘gave him a large and a comprehensive understanding, and with it, A publique heart’, and the preacher contrasted this magnanimity with the times ‘in which every man determines himselfe in himselfe, and scarce looks farther’ (1953–62: vii. 274, ll. 619–22). The preacher, like the dramatist before him, could have stopped here and kept matters general and idealized. Instead, Donne grasped the nettle, which surely lay behind Cokayne’s deployment of so many adulatory Middleton entertainments—the rehabilitation of his reputation in the wake of the cloth-trade disaster. Donne’s caution, though, was palpable. Addressing the mercantile members of the auditory directly, he played the naif, venturing slowly: ‘You have, I thinke, a phrase of Driving a Trade’ (ll. 623–4). The disingenuousness of the speculation (Donne’s own father, after all, had been free of the City and a company warden) suggested the laying of a careful trap. He flattered his hearers with the bait of his ostensible lack of expertise, and asked a question that was ‘rhetorical’ in the sense that he knew the answer all too well.20 He continued, though, with the more confident and contrasting proposition: ‘And you have, I know, a practise of Driving away Trade, by other use of money’ (ll. 624–5). What could Donne possibly have meant? Was this a rebuke of Cokayne’s cloth export scheme, which had purported to ‘drive’ trade, but had succeeded only in ‘Driving away Trade’? But Donne concluded, syllogistically, with a positive assessment, still directed specifically at Cokayne’s fellow merchants: ‘And you have lost a man, that drove a great Trade, the right way in making the best use of our home-commodity’ (ll. 625–7). Unsurprisingly, Donne’s assessment of Cokayne has been judged as more ‘favourable’ than that of modern historians’ (Donne 1953–62: vii. 19 n. 43). This is hardly surprising given the funeral sermon context, but, when scrutinized, even in eulogy Donne could be said to have been, in the 20 Donne had used the image with mercantile specificity in a court sermon of 1621: ‘their is a Trade driven, a Staple established betweens Heaven and earth’ (1953–62: iv. 62).

preaching and context



terms he chose, honest. In theory (the theory that convinced James to support the cloth-trade scheme), Cokayne’s plans were predicated upon encouraging the expansion of home trade by encouraging the finishing of cloth in England, rather than abroad—or, as Donne put it,‘making the best use of our home-commodity’. To press the point, Donne repeated a well-worn criticism of the imbalance in trade when it favoured the importation of luxury goods: ‘To fetch in Wine, and Spice, and Silke, is but a drawing of Trade; The right driving of trade, is, to vent our owne outward.’ The ‘most behoofefull’ way to do the latter was for ‘Manufactures to be imployed upon our owne Commodity within the Kingdom’ (ll. 627–32). Having clung carefully to a simplified commercial theory, Donne was able to avoid the fatal practical flaws in Cokayne’s scheme, as well as any selfish motives behind it, and to commend the one thing that remained commendable in it, even in retrospect. In that, Donne said, Cokayne ‘did his part, diligently, at least, if not vehemently, if not passionately’ (ll. 632–3). The attribute ‘diligently’ leant on its etymological roots (Latin, diligere, ‘to love’), and thus extended the sermon’s treatment of fraternal love to the spirit—if not the letter—of Cokayne’s enterprises, which he could also honestly compliment as ‘vehement’ and ‘passionate’, albeit in cautious conditional negative constructions. Having passed the dangerous waters of Cokayne’s merchant ventures with evident relief, Donne suddenly launched a new system of thematic imagery. ‘This City’, he said in a grand gesture, ‘is a great Theater; and he Acted great and various parts in it’ (l. 633). While this may be further evidence of Donne’s youthful attraction to play-going, it probably resonated more at this time with the burial two weeks before of his son-in-law, the truly great stage actor Edward Alleyn, with whom Cokayne had also socialized and negotiated business and charitable affairs through one of the Henchmans also present (Warner 1881: 172, 245). From the City Donne then went westward to commend Cokayne’s contributions to discussions of business affairs ‘in Parliaments, at Councell tables and in more private accesses’ with King James (1953–62: vii. 274, ll. 635–6). Donne dwelt particularly on Cokayne’s skill as a rhetorician, which he embroidered with an extended anecdote from the late king, whom Donne characterized as ‘the greatest Master of Language and Judgement’ (l. 641). There was in this passage a striking conflation of all three protagonists—Donne, Cokayne, King James—where their complementarity as rhetors, celebrated in an oration by one in the presence of the other’s body and using the reported speech of the third, created a moment of startling meta-drama. According to Donne, James had said that ‘he never heard any man of his breeding, handle businesses more rationally, more pertinently, more elegantly, more perswasively’. If this sounded more like James’s typical enthusiastic praise for a favourite preacher rather than a favoured merchant, what Donne said next confirmed the suspicion. Continuing his Jacobean reminiscence, Donne said that, when James’s ‘purpose was, to do a grace to a Preacher, of very good abilities, and good note in his owne Chappell, I have heard him say, that his language, and accent, and manner of delivering himselfe, was like this man’ (ll. 645–8). As a most favoured veteran of James’s ‘owne Chappell’, Donne would have found it hard to escape the assumption that he might have been served with the king’s Cokayne compliment. There was here, then, a typical insertion of the Donneian persona



peter mccullough

into a hybrid moment of praise for himself, through others, as a master of what he was at the same time doing—being a ‘Master of Language and Judgement’. Donne then returned to the safety of God, rather than himself, showering Cokayne with compliments. The Lord had made the ‘Covenant with him, which he made to Abraham’ for progeny ‘both in their number, and in their quality, as . . . fit to receive a great Estate’. This made explicit the divisio’s playfully unspecified ‘Riches prosperously multiplied, Children honorably bestowed, Additions and Titles, fairly acquired’, and neatly confirmed the game of likely application to Cokayne that Donne pursued throughout the body of the traditionally theological first part of the sermon (ll. 650, 652–4, 71–2). Having met the commemorative challenge of Cokayne’s cloth-trading scheme earlier, Donne now also confronted the disastrous 1624 fire, which had prompted so little sympathy from Chamberlain and others. But Donne did so wittily, in a scriptural metaphor that redeemed what may have been to some an act of divine judgement into an edifying trial. Like Moses crossing the Red Sea (Exod. 13), God, Donne said, ‘was with him all the way, In a Pillar of Fire, in the brightnesse of prosperity, and in the Pillar of Clouds too, in many darke, sad, and heavy crosses’ (ll. 655–7). Although strictly applied, the ‘Fire’ here was ‘prosperity’, its proximity to things ‘darke’ and ‘sad’ could not but suggest that the ‘Fire’ was at Broad Street, and that the other ‘Pillar’ was the cloud of smoke in which all of Cokayne’s worldly possessions had gone up. Donne’s allusion here did not need to contradict Chamberlain’s view that at the time of the fire he had ‘seldome knowne a man less pitied, as well in respect of his great wealth, as for his severitie, and specially for that busines of clothing’ (1939: ii. 524). For Donne was not considering Cokayne publically ‘in respect of . . . wealth’, ‘severetie’, or business practice. Instead, he was considering Cokayne as a private individual, as a spiritual individual. People in the auditory, and historians now, could judge whether Cokayne manifested in public the chastening lessons of the disaster. But at the funerals Donne opened a window that revealed that ‘his crosses, as well as his blessings established his assurance in God’ (1953–62: vii. 275, ll. 660–1). The preacher’s message would have consoled those who wished to believe it, or perhaps even knew it was true. But to any doubters, then or now, Donne’s implication—how dare they or we judge—was and is the same. The second part of Donne’s division for his appended sermon miniature—that God was with Cokayne ‘at his death too’ (l. 666)—contained a mainstay of funeral encomia, an account of a pious deathbed scene (Carlson 2000: 590). But Donne’s had an oddly placed polemical twist, which further explained his earlier digression against Puritanism. Donne troped Cokayne’s death as a trial in court. He was ‘served with the Processe’ of sickness ‘here in the City’, but ‘his cause was heard in the Country’, where he died (Donne 1953–62: vii. 275, ll. 667–8). This may have been a clever way of mapping Cokayne’s last progress in life, and the hearing of a legal case was a common metaphor for death, because it hinted at the sentence from God’s judgment seat. But the principal use of the conceit by Donne seemed to be in order for him to call ‘witnesses’. Proofs of veracity were one way Protestant preachers legitimized what was for some the dubious act of commemorating the dead. Preachers with the greatest scruples even preferred to err on the side of saying little or nothing unless they could vouch for it from their own personal

preaching and context



experience (Tromley 1983: 303). Donne, as he would affirm later, had no such scruples over commending the departed, but he probably did have worries about how to praise, and perhaps how to make people believe, that Cokayne, the ruthless merchant, had a sweetly pious end. Donne first summoned the members of Cokayne’s household who had been present at Combe Manor: ‘In his sicknesse there, those that assisted him, are witnesses, of his many expressings, of a religious and a constant heart towards God’ (1953–62: vii. 275, ll. 669–71). But what he called upon these witnesses to vouch for specifically was Cokayne’s ‘pious joyning with them, even in the holy declaration of kneeling, then, when they, in favour of his weakenesse, would disswade him from kneeling’ (ll. 671–3). As several scholars have shown, kneeling was not a neutral act in late Jacobean England, but rather a litmus test for subscription to the ceremonialism soon associated with Laudianism (Lake 1991: 118; Ferrell 1998: ch. 5; Rhatigan 2004). To further the case, Donne then took the stand. ‘I must not defraud him of this testimony from my selfe’, he said, ‘that into this place where we are now met, I have observed him to enter with much reverence, and compose himselfe in this place with much declaration of devotion’ (1953– 62: vii. 275, ll. 673–6). To enter a church with ‘Reverence’ and to ‘compose’ oneself there with ‘devotion’ most likely meant, in the debates of the day, bowing to the east end and kneeling at prayer and communion (Fincham and Tyacke 2007: 122, 148–50, 252). And, with this footnote to Cokayne’s deathbed scene, Donne extended what might have been the polemically neutral posture of kneeling during private devotion to the controversial sphere of its place in public worship. However ambiguous was Donne’s position on theological Arminianism and political ‘Laudianism’, he was a stickler for ceremonial reverence in his cathedral. The deportment of Cokayne and ‘those persons who are of the same ranke that he was in the City’ was, Donne said, a reason to be glad that an earlier dean and chapter of the cathedral had invited them ‘to sit in this Quire, so, as they do upon Sundayes’ (1953–62: vii. 275, l. 683)—that is, the very same aldermen Donne then addressed as they sat in the selfsame choir stalls. This was the deft insertion of some City politics into the middle of a City funeral, for the dean and chapter and the court of aldermen were always in a delicate dance over rights and privileges in the cathedral and its precinct. Donne made simultaneously devotional and political points when he reminded the City fathers that ‘the honour is more in their reverence, then in their presence; though in that too’, and even went on to remind them that, without ‘their reverent comportment here, so just occasion of continuing that honour . . . we should be lesse willing to doe’ (ll. 684–5, 688–90). Donne with some condescension reminded them that their comfortable and dignified seats were theirs only at the gift of cathedral authorities. In 1630, he would prosecute before the court of aldermen the servant of the then sheriff for refusing to kneel during service when asked to do so by a virger. This came after a Christmas 1629 sermon with a similar digression on kneeling, which had chastised ‘persons of example to many that come with them, of whom . . . I never saw Master nor servant kneele, at his comming into this Church, or at any part of divine service’. The offenders were clearly aldermen, as the ensuing prosecution showed (Bald 1970: 404; quoting Donne 1953–62: ix. 152). But in that 1629 sermon Donne held up one parenthetical positive example—‘some few, who



peter mccullough

must therefore have their praise from us, as no doubt, they have their thanks and blessings from God’ (1953–62: ix. 152). He was probably reminding the aldermen of their deceased brother Sir William Cokayne, whose example he had commended to them three years before. So far had Donne gone in his kneeling digression that he required the corrective interjection, ‘To returne to him in his sicknesse . . .’ (1953–62: vii. 276, l. 691). What followed was a detailed and touching account of Cokayne’s last days. It is unique as a historical record, and, given its minute detail, and its delivery in the presence of those who must have supplied it, supports calls not to dismiss such accounts as merely ‘formulaic’ (Carlson 2000: 568). Hitherto known as relentless in ‘driving of trade’, Cokayne devoted but ‘one day in his sicknesse . . . to businesse’ by calling ‘his family, and friends together’ and instructing ‘those who were to have the disposing of his estate’ (Donne 1953–62: vii. 276, ll. 692–3, 695–6). Donne’s brief summary of his bequests matched exactly the surviving nuncupative will (ll. 696–8), though it may be difficult to see in this description of a measured day of ‘businesse’ why a formal will, signed by the testator, could not be drawn up. But this act, Donne said, ‘was his Valediction to the world’—that is, the worldly aim of every London citizen, to bestow an increased estate upon his heirs. Thereafter, Cokayne turned from ‘wordly business’ with ‘His last Commandement to Wife and Children’: ‘To love one another’ (ll. 700–2). Donne aptly glossed this as Christ’s last commandment to his apostles (John 13:34), but perhaps in recognition that, like them (and like William Cokayne Sr’s seven sons in the previous generation), they could be prone to dispute over a legacy, whether divine or worldly. Donne also detailed how the deceased took to his ‘last bed, two dayes before his Death’, and then directly quoted two of Cokayne’s deathbed sententiæ. To those he further remarked ‘the forme in which he implored his Saviour . . . towards his end, this, Christ Jesus, which dyed on the Crosse, forgive me my sins; He have mercy upon me’ (ll. 705, 709–11). Donne’s notice of this exemplary ‘forme’ counterpointed his satire on Puritan prayer earlier in the sermon (I.1.b.ii). Whereas Cokayne had prayed repeatedly for forgiveness, some Puritans, Donne had said, ‘left out that one Petition’ from the Lord’s Prayer, ‘Forgive us our trespasses, for they thought themselves so pure, as that they needed no forgivenesse’; others shunned any set form of prayer in preference for their own ‘extemporall prayers’ (ll. 253–5, 256–7). So Cokayne’s death was, as was traditional, held up as exemplary, but on a polemical spike. Not only had Cokayne preferred a ‘forme’, but it may have been noteworthy too that what was said in that ‘forme’ showed not a trace of predestinarian confidence in irresistible grace for the elect, but instead the combination of penitence and hope in the promise of unlimited atonement in Christ’s passion associated with anti-Calvinism (Lake 1991: 117, 120–2). Cokayne even faded into unconsciousness with the ‘hollow and remote naming of Jesus’ (Donne 1953–62: vii. 276, l. 715). And so, Donne could conclude this second part in the terms of his new text: ‘The Lord was here, here with him in his Death’, because of which ‘our Brother is not dead; not dead in the eyes and eares of God’ (ll. 717–19). Donne then chose to extend how God was with Cokayne in death by adding that ‘He is with him now too; Here in his Funeralls’ (l. 724). Doing so mirrored the main sermon’s

preaching and context



trajectory of bringing the whole focus down to the present, to the cathedral choir, to the mourners, to the very body of Cokayne itself. Using brief scriptural exempla of the tender and dignified burials of Abraham, Joseph, and Christ, Donne justified ‘Solemne Buriall’ in the same spirit as Whitgift, Hooker, and other apologists for reformed burial rites (Tromly 1983: 297–301). He brought those biblical acts into the present context by suggesting: ‘If we were to send a Son, or a friend, to take possession of any place in Court, or forraine parts’—apt both for the courtly and foreign trade destinations of Cokayne’s own children and servants—‘we would send him out in the best equipage’ (1953–62: vii. 277, ll. 739–41). The gaping grave that stood ready behind the south choir stalls was then invoked. With a metaphor far less ghoulish than those for which Donne is now disproportionately famous, he said calmly: ‘Let us not grudge to set downe our friends, in the Anti-chamber of Heaven, the grave, in good manner.’ But, registering a criticism of the heraldic panoply of pomp that was (in context) both pointed and pointless, he added, ‘as without vaine-gloriousnesse, and wastfulnesse we may’ (ll. 741–3). Donne then addressed the heralds and household servants who would actually deposit the body in its grave. In a commendation that must have addressed the pain of those who in familial and Christian charity would most want to remain, but because of protocol could not do so, Donne charged those who would stay behind that they would have the responsibility to enact this part of his new sermon text. They, ‘to whom that care belongs’, were ‘to expresse that care as they doe this day’ because ‘The Lord is with him, even in this Funerall; And because the Lord is here, our brother is not dead; Not dead in the memories and estimation of men’ (ll. 744–7). Just as Donne had kicked skywards the scales of the heavy, mortifying earlier parts of his sermon, however, he sent the mourners out of the cathedral in the hope of resurrection with the final part of his tripartite sermon-coda. He assured them that, as God ‘is with him in this holy Solemnity’, so he ‘shall bee with him againe in the Resurrection’ (ll. 750–1). Exactly as the very structure of Donne’s sermon had done, ‘God’, Donne said, ‘goes downe with a good man into the Grave’, but ‘will surely bring him up againe’ (ll. 753–4). Anticipating the question of any mourner, he even rhetorically asked, ‘When?’ (l. 754), and responded with the orthodox answer that, just as ‘the God-head’ never left Christ even when ‘in the grave’, nor did ‘his presence depart from our dead bodies in that darknesse’ (ll. 760–1). Then, in a startling appropriation of one of the Old Testament’s greatest patriarchal voices, Donne spoke ‘that which Moses said to the whole Congregation’. Not just to those who he said ‘heare me’, but also to ‘him that does not’, Donne affirmed: ‘All ye that did cleave unto the Lord your God, are alive, every one of you, this day’ (ll. 762–5, quoting Deut. 4:4). Christ had commanded Lazarus to ‘come forth’. Donne, through the magnificent calculation and control of his sermon’s structure, made possible the latter-day Christian equivalent by telling both the corpse of Cokayne and the mortals of his auditory that they could go forth in the knowledge that all were alive. In the sermon’s anatomy of mortification Donne had levelled every hierarchy displayed in the heraldic funeral. No one was perfect. No one was permanent. But each—Cokayne, Donne, and every Christian present—was that very day alive. So, in spite of grief, in spite of imperfections in Cokayne’s character, in spite of the fact that few could have reached



peter mccullough

this point in the oration thinking themselves at all morally superior to the deceased, Donne concluded by collecting all together again through a prayer cast in the masterful plural first person. ‘And so into the same hands that have received his soule, we commend his body.’ That commendation was asked of the ‘blessed Spirit’, qualified by a perfect trinity of subordinate clauses that lightly rehearsed the cardinal virtues that had organized so much of his sermon. In the sermon, those virtues had been addressed in terms of all their earthly imperfections. In its conclusion, they reappeared here brightly, cleansed by God’s merciful acceptance even of those imperfections: ‘that as our charity enclines us to hope confidently of his good estate, our faith may assure us of the same happinesse, in our owne behalf.’ Listeners may have noticed Donne’s last brilliantly honest evasion here, in his deployment of the capital virtue of ‘charity’. It was on that forgiving, self-giving virtue alone that he ventured, in spite of all his resurrection assurances, to speculate finally on the eternal state of Cokayne’s soul. As Ralph Houlbrooke astutely observes, ‘there is a distinct difference between this charitable hope and the conviction which he expressed, the following year, that Lady Danvers had been welcomed immediately after her death with the words “Well done good and faithfull servant: enter into thy masters joy”’ (1998: 318, quoting Donne 1953–62: viii. 91). But, ever balanced, Donne also pulled the Cokayne mourners immediately back from too much speculation about another’s soul, by reminding them that only ‘faith’ could provide any resurrection hope for them. After so much careful levelling of pride, the last clause of the sermon then reinscribed a hierarchy, but one that put all those listening below only Christ: ‘that for all our sakes, but especially for his own glory, he will be pleased to hasten the consummation of all, in that kingdome which that Son of God hath purchased for us, with the inestimable price of his incorruptible blood. Amen’ (Donne 1953–62: vii. 278, ll. 769–75).

Bibliography Aldous, Vivienne (2004). ‘Cokayne, Sir William (1559/60–1626)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online edn. Andrewes, Lancelot (1841–54). The Works of Lancelot Andrewes, ed. J. P. Wilson and James Bliss. 11 vols. Oxford: John Henry Parker. Archer, Ian (2001). ‘Memorialization in Early Modern London’, in J. F. Merritt (ed.), Imagining Early Modern London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ashton, Robert (2004). ‘Pindar, Sir Paul (1565/6–1650)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online edn. Baker, T. F. T., and Pugh, R. B. (1976) (eds). ‘Great Stanmore: Church’, in A History of the County of Middlesex, v. Hendon, Kingsbury, Great Stanmore, Little Stanmore, Edmonton Enfield, Monken Hadley, South Mimms, Tottenham; accessed 18 Sept. 2009. Bald, R. C. (1970). John Donne: A Life. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bernard, Richard (1609). The Faithfull Shepheard. BL Add. MS 71131D.

preaching and context



Buckeridge, John (1629). A Sermon Preached at the Funerall of the . . . Bishop of Winchester, appended to Lancelot Andrewes, XCVI Sermons (1629). Carey, John (1990). John Donne: Life, Mind and Art. Rev. edn. Faber and Faber. Carlson, Eric J. (2000). ‘English Funeral Sermons as Sources: The Example of Female Piety in pre-1640 Sermons’, Albion, 32/4: 567–97. Cerasano, S. P. (2004). ‘Alleyn, Edward (1566–1626)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online edn. Chamberlain, John (1939). The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. Norman E. McClure. 2 vols. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society. Chambers, Richard (1620). Sarahs Sepulture, or a Funerall Sermon, Preached for . . . Dorothie, Countesse of Northumberland. Cokayne, Andreas E. (1873). Cokayne Memoranda. Congleton: privately printed. Cokayne, George E. (1897). Some Account of the Lord Mayors and Sheriffs of . . . London. Phillimore. Colclough, David (2003) (ed.). John Donne’s Professional Lives. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer. Collinson, Patrick (1983). ‘ “A Magazine of Religious Patterns”: An Erasmian Topic Transposed in English Protestantism’, in Collinson, Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism. Hambledon, 499–526. Cragoe, Carol (2004). ‘Fabric, Tombs, and Precinct 1087–1540’, in Derek Keene, Arthur Burns, and Andrew Saint (eds), St Paul’s: The Cathedral Church of London 604–2004. New Haven: Yale University Press, 127–42. Cressy, David (1997). Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Day, J. F. R. (1995). ‘Death Be Very Proud: Sidney, Subversion, and Elizabethan Heraldic Funerals’, in Dale Hoak (ed.), Tudor Political Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 179–203. Donne, John (1932). Donne’s Sermons: Selected Passages with an Essay, ed. Logan Pearsall Smith. Oxford: Clarendon Press. —— (1953–62). The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson. 10 vols. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. —— (1990). John Donne: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. John Carey. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— (1994). Complete English Poems, ed. C. A. Patrides, rev. and intro. Robin Hamilton. Everyman (J. M. Dent). Downame, George (1607). A Funerall Sermon . . . at the Buriall of . . . Sir Philip Boteler. Dugdale, William (1658). The History of St Pauls Cathedral. E[dgar], T[homas]. (1632). The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights: or, The Lawes Provision for Woemen. (Sometimes attr. Sir John Doddridge.) Ferrell, Lori Anne (1998). Government by Polemic: James I, the King’s Preachers, and the Rhetorics of Conformity, 1603–1625. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Fincham, Kenneth, and Tyacke, Nicholas (2007). Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Worship, 1547–c.1700. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gittings, Clare (1988). Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England. Routledge. Guibbory, Achsah (2001). ‘Donne’s Religion: Montagu, Arminianism, and Donne’s Sermons, 1624–30’, English Literary Renaissance, 31/3: 412–39.



peter mccullough

Hart, James S., Jr (2004). ‘Marten, Sir Henry (1561–1641)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Online edn. Holland, Henry (1634). Ecclesia Sancti Pauli illustrata. Hooker, Richard (1977). Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Book V, ed. W. Speed Hill. The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, II. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Houlbrooke, Ralph A. (1998). Death, Religion and the Family in England 1480–1750. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Johnson, Jeffrey (1999). The Theology of John Donne. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer. Kopperman, Paul E. (2004). ‘Heath, Sir Robert (1575–1649)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online edn. Lake, Peter (1991). ‘Lancelot Andrewes, John Buckeridge and Avant-Garde Conformity at the Court of James I’, in Linda Levy Peck (ed.), The Mental World of the Jacobean Court. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 113–33. Lambert, John James (1933). Records of the Skinners of London, Edward I to James I. The Worshipful Company of Skinners. Laughton, J. K., rev. H. V. Bowen (2004). ‘Wolstenholme, Sir John (1562–1639)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online edn. Macauley, John S. (2004). ‘Montague, Richard (bap. 1575–d. 1641)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online edn. MacDonald, Alan R. (2004). ‘Ramsay, John, earl of Holdernesse (c.1580–1626)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online edn. McCullough, Peter E. (1998). ‘ “Out of Egypt”: Richard Fletcher’s Sermon before Elizabeth I after the Execution of Mary Queen of Scots’, in Julia M. Walker (ed.), Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 118–49. —— (2003). ‘Donne as Preacher at Court: Precarious “Inthronization”’, in Colclough (2003), 179–206. —— (2004). ‘King, John (d. 1621)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online edn. —— (2006). ‘Donne as Preacher’, in Achsah Guibbory (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to John Donne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 167–82. M[aitlane], J[ohn] (1633). A Funerall Sermon, Preached at the buriall of the Lady Jane Maitlane. Edinburgh. Manley, Lawrence (2007). ‘The Triumphs of Love and Antiquity’, intro., in Middleton (2007), 1397–99. Maule, Jeremy (2003). ‘Donne and the Words of the Law’, in Colclough (2003), 19–36. Middleton, Thomas (2007). Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, gen. eds Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Morrissey, Mary (2003). ‘John Donne as a Conventional Paul’s Cross Preacher’, in Colclough (2003), 159–78. NRO C: Northamptonshire Record Office (Northampton), Cokayne of Rushton Family Papers. Parr, Anthony (2007). ‘Honourable Entertainments and An Invention’, intro., in Middleton (2007), 1431–34. Potter, Barnaby (1613). The Baronets Buriall. Oxford. Powell, D. X. (2004). ‘Whitelock, Sir James (1570–1632)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online edn. Rhatigan, Emma (2004). ‘Knees and Elephants: John Donne Preaches on Ceremonial Conformity at Lincoln’s Inn’, John Donne Journal 23: 135–61.

preaching and context



St George, Henry (1880). The Visitation of London Anno Domini 1633, 1634, and 1635 . . .Volume I, ed. Joseph Jackson Howard and Joseph Lemuel Hester. Publications of the Harleian Society, XV. Shami, Jeanne (1995). ‘John Donne and the Absolutist Politics of Quotation’, in Raymond-Jean Frontain and Frances M. Malpezzi (eds), Donne’s Religious Imagination: Essays in Honor of John T. Shawcross. Conway, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 380–412. —— (2003). John Donne and Conformity in Crisis in the Late Jacobean Pulpit. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer. Simpson, Evelyn (1951). ‘The Biographical Value of Donne’s Sermons’, Review of English Studies, ns 2/8: 339–57. Spurr, John (2004). ‘Henchman, Humphrey (bap. 1592–d. 1675)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online edn. Stanwood, Paul G. (2008). ‘Lancelot Andrewes’s “Orphan Lectures”: The Exeter Manuscript’, English Manuscript Studies, 13: 35–46. Stow, John (1633). A Survey of London, rev. Anthony Munday et al. —— (1971). A Survey of London, ed. Charles Lethbridge Kingsford. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. TNA: PRO PROB: The National Archives: Public Record Office, Kew, Prerogative Court of Canterbury Registered Wills. Tromly, Frederic B. (1983). ‘ “Accordinge to sounde religion”: The Elizabethan Controversy over the Funeral Sermon’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 13: 293–312. Tudor-Craig, Pamela, with Christopher Wittick (2004). Old St Paul’s: The Society of Antiquaries’ Diptych, 1616. London Topographical Society and The Society of Antiquaries of London. Tyacke, Nicholas (1987). Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c.1590–1640. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wadkins, Timothy (2004). ‘White, Francis (1563/4–1638)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online edn. Wales, Tim (2004). ‘Box, Henry (1585–1662)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online edn. Warner, George F. (1881). Catalogue of the Manuscripts and Muniments of Alleyn’s College of God’s Gift at Dulwich. Longmans, Green & Co. Waterhouse, Edward (1655). A Modest Discourse, of the Piety, Charity & Policy of Elder Times and Christians. Whitelock, James (1858). Liber Famelicus of Sir James Whitelock, ed. John Bruce. Camden Society os 70. Repr. New York: AMS Press. Woodward, Jennifer (1997). The Theatre of Death: The Ritual Management of Royal Funerals in Renaissance England, 1570–1625. Woodbridge: Boydell.

This page intentionally left blank

pa rt i i

SER MONS I N SCOT L A N D, IR E L A N D, A N D WA L E S

This page intentionally left blank

chapter 13

pr e achi ng th e scot tish r efor m ation, 1560 –1707 crawford gribben

In the late 1640s, the Reverend David Sempill, a young man recently ordained into his first charge in the Borders parish of Woodilee, was visited by three members of his new presbytery. Following the custom of the times, Sempill had been ‘preached in’ by a neighbour on the first Sabbath after his installation. Throughout the novel—for these events are recorded in John Buchan’s Witch Wood (1927), an account of religious tensions within the Covenanting movement in the mid-seventeenth century—the ‘weighty voice’ of Mungo Muirhead, the neighbouring minister who had officiated at Sempill’s induction, is made to represent a significant attitudinal theme in early modern Scottish divinity. Muirhead explained the failure of the parish’s previous incumbent: He was a pious and diligent minister . . . but since ever I kenned him he was sore fallen in the vale of years. He would stick to the same ‘ordinary’ till he had thrashed it into stour. I’ve heard that he preached for a year and sax months on Exodus fifteen and twenty-seven, the twelve wells of water and three score and ten palm trees of Elim, a Sabbath to ilka well and ilka tree. (Buchan 1927: 13)

The old clergyman’s adherence to the common method of working consecutively through a selected biblical passage was demonstrably reduced to farce. He had an unfounded confidence in the method of his preaching, and, despite his systematic exposition of an ‘ordinary’, the parish had fallen prey to unspeakable evil. Muirhead traced the roots of the parish’s problems to its former minister’s homiletic inability. ‘I’ve a notion,’ Muirhead explained, ‘that he was never very strong in the intellectuals’ (1927: 13). The characters of Witch Wood were figments of Buchan’s imagination, but they vividly re-create some of the leading characteristics of and assumptions about the content, presentation, and purpose of Scottish reformed preaching in the early modern period. Preaching was central, and was believed to be central, to the reformation of the Scottish



crawford gribben

church. In 1560, the Scots Confession had described ‘trew preaching’ as first of the ‘notes, signes, & assured tokens’ of the ‘trew church of god’, which distinguished it from ‘the horrible harlot’ of Rome (Church of Scotland 1561: sig. b6v). One century later, the Westminster Assembly’s Directory for Publique Worship of God (1645; see also App. III.14), which was most enthusiastically received by the Church of Scotland and regularly included in editions of its subordinate standards, described the ‘preaching of the Word’ as being ‘the power of God unto Salvation, and one of the greatest and most excellent Works belonging to the Ministry of the Gospel’ (Westminster Assembly 1645: 13). Salvation was believed to be channelled through preaching. The Westminster Assembly’s Shorter Catechism (1647), likewise adopted by the Scottish church, insisted that ‘the Spirit of God maketh the Reading, but especially the Preaching of the Word, an effectuall means of convincing and converting sinners, and of building them up in holinesse and comfort through faith unto salvation’, and added that those listening to preaching should ‘attend thereunto with diligence, preparation, and prayer, receive it with faith and love, lay it up in our hearts, and practise it in our lives’, if they had hopes that preaching should ‘become effectuall to Salvation’ (1647: 14–15). This exaltation of the importance of the sermon was reflected in frustrations about the slow provision of the kind of preaching that would thus benefit the Scottish people. In 1645 and again in 1650, immediately before and after the Church of Scotland’s adoption of the Directory for Publique Worship, the Commission of the General Assembly included the poverty of reformed preaching in its list of reasons justifying national fasts (Blaikie 1888: 150). But, whatever its limitations, reformed preaching was still making an impact in 1707, and, in quite another political context, Daniel Defoe, on his celebrated tour of Scotland, reported that, ‘in a whole church full of people, not one shall be seen without a Bible . . . if you shut your eyes when the minister names any text of Scripture, you shall hear a little rustling noise over the whole place, made by turning the leaves’ (quoted in Benedict 2002: 496). Over 150 years after the legislative beginnings of the Scottish reformation, the appreciation of preaching remained elemental to what it meant to be Protestant. But its continuing ascendancy may not have surprised those who had framed that reforming legislation: those directing the reformation in Scotland, including Knox and Melville, had nothing if not an exalted view of preaching, and the kind of preaching they envisaged was a far cry from the ineffective homiletics of the former minister of Woodilee.

Scottish Reformation Preaching: Critical Approaches The importance of preaching in early modern Scotland seems inversely proportional to its status in recent historical and literary-critical scholarship. The last full survey of Scottish preaching was provided by William G. Blaikie’s The Preachers of Scotland: From the Sixth to the Nineteenth Century (1888). Blaikie was a minister in the Free Church of

preaching the scottish reformation



Scotland who held an appointment as professor of apologetics and pastoral theology at a denominational seminary, New College, Edinburgh, between 1868 and 1897, and his material on preaching appeared originally in his Cunningham Lectures in 1888 (Ritchie 2004). The Preachers of Scotland shared its author’s somewhat pietistic approach to ecclesiastical history and doctrinal controversy. It argued consistently for the importance of its subject, as understood through the lens of Blaikie’s conservative Presbyterian convictions. ‘It is with the Reformation that the modern pulpit of Scotland really begins,’ he argued; ‘and it is on the lines of the Presbyterian Church that its power has been chiefly shown’, for ‘the great power of the Scottish pulpit has been connected with its Presbyterian organisation’. Sporting a robust denominational allegiance, The Preachers of Scotland also insisted on a Scottish exceptionalism: ‘In no country has the pulpit of the Reformed Church taken a firmer hold of the people than in Scotland’ (Blaikie 1888: 1, 5). The Scottish Presbyterian experience, Blaikie seemed to be arguing, was defining what reformation preaching could be and do. Subsequent studies of Scottish reformation preaching have failed to interrogate many of Blaikie’s assumptions, preferring instead to overlook the partisan and polemical scholarship of this variety of late-nineteenth-century denominational dispute, as well as the subjects with which it often engaged. But this oversight has provided for a significant loss, for, as a consequence, the historiography of the Scottish reformation has been subject to considerably less revisionist impulse than has that of the reformation in, for example, England; and historians and literary scholars of early modern Scotland have failed to insist on the assumption upon which much of the confessionally orientated historical polemic was based—the motivating power of religious belief. Partly as a consequence, scholars in Scottish studies have not produced any counterpart to the classic accounts of the significance of the English reformation pulpit: McCullough’s Sermons at Court, Wabuda’s Preaching during the English Reformation, and Ferrell’s Government by Polemic (though McCullough’s work pays not insignificant attention to Scottish contexts). In part, the non-existence of a revisionist impulse is due to the slow theoretical engagement of Scottish literary and historical scholars. The most exciting early modern scholarship within Scottish studies often remains paradoxically committed to the assumptions of earlier generations of literary critics, who largely insisted on the necessary marginalization of religious and theological texts (Gribben 2006a, b). Thus the new historicism that has so dominated three decades of scholarship on early modern England has only lately had its counterpart in Scottish studies. But, as the chapters in this volume demonstrate, the best scholarship on early modern English preaching has pushed far beyond the secular orientation of its new historicist foundations. Scholars are increasingly alert to the foundational assumptions of this critical school—and therefore to its conceptual limitations. Richard Strier, for example, has admitted that religion is ‘something of a problem for New Historicism, which tends—unlike Renaissance English culture—to have a radically secular focus’ (1995: 73). Brian Cummings has turned new historicism’s often overt secularity on its head, arguing that, ‘without reference to writing, the study of early modern religion is incomprehensible’, and, without reference to religion, ‘the study of early modern writing is incomprehensible’ (2002: 6). These observations, applied in a Scottish



crawford gribben

context, would seem to provide an appropriate foundation for a reconsideration of one of the most rigorously theological of national literary canons, as well as the theological and sermonic material that, throughout much of the twentieth century, the most influential shapers of that canon have worked to exclude. Sarah Dunnigan has correctly argued that, while ‘Scottish literary history . . . still ignores, or misunderstands, the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, arguments for ‘reforging the canon’ must continue to be a canonical plea (2003: 143). But Scottish literary criticism remains largely suspicious of modish critical turns—and, just as scholars of Scottish literature generally failed to grasp the opportunities presented by new historicism, so, with a number of notable exceptions, they have generally failed to interact with the new turn to religion in early modern studies, and, by association, with the new significance of early modern preaching. Preaching’s significance has been signalled in recent scholarship on the religious history of early modern Scotland. The early contribution marked by G. D. Henderson’s study of ‘The Scottish Pulpit in the Seventeenth Century’ (1937) has recently been advanced. The significance of a religious experience that could be influenced by preaching, and a homiletic imagination upon which such preaching could be based, has been recognized in recent accounts of the Scottish reformation. While a significant scholarship of the Scottish reformation retains the political emphases of earlier generations, David Mullan’s Scottish Puritanism (2000) provides one of the most comprehensive accounts of preaching in the earlier part of the seventeenth century (2000: 55–62); Margo Todd’s The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (2002) similarly pushes preaching into the foreground, as a vital conduit and medium of religiously inspired change; and R. Scott Spurlock’s Cromwell and Scotland: Conquest and Religion, 1650–1660 (2007) situates the preaching of the Presbyterians and their new antagonists within the polemical and performative contexts of the Cromwellian invasion, as Presbyterian preaching came to terms with the loss of socio-disciplinary compulsion in the new legal context of toleration and the consequent marketplace of innovative religious ideas. But these recent trends in social and theological history have yet to filter into literary scholarship. Most recent studies of early modern Scottish literature have failed to address the significance of preaching—even as they have recognized that the activity of preaching was basic to many reformist projects of distinct and competing types. Thus Kenneth D. Farrow’s study of Knox’s ‘reformation rhetoric’ focuses exclusively on the material prepared by its subject for publication; the other most significant volume of scholarship on Knox contains only the briefest discussion of his preaching, despite one contributor’s admission that ‘preaching lay at the very heart of his ministry, dictating not only the path of his future career but also the confrontational, dramatic, and attention-grabbing rhetorical approach which informed his words, both written and spoken’ (Edington 1998: 39–40). Similarly, in seventeenth-century studies, the definitive exposition of ‘the mind of Samuel Rutherford’ discusses its subject as a ‘national prophet’ without referring to the style or content of his preaching (Coffey 1997). This trend is also evident in the most recent multi-author investigations of the means by which the Scottish reformation was

preaching the scottish reformation



enforced and the relationship between the Scottish reformation and the literature of the period, neither of which describe the importance of the preached word (Boran and Gribben 2006; Gribben and Mullan 2009). Scholarly investigation of preaching therefore remains one of the most significant and surprising lacunae in the study of the history, literature, and religious culture of early modern Scotland.

‘Preaching’ ‘the’ ‘Scottish’ ‘Reformation’ Of course, it is important to begin this account of ‘preaching the Scottish reformation’ with an acknowledgement of the ambiguities of the chapter’s title. The assumptions of a ‘reformation’ in the singular ought immediately to be contested. Historians are increasingly alert to the implications of the older use of the singular term; but, while the denominational agendas of the older scholarship have been abandoned, the historiography of early modern Scotland—like the secondary literature of Scottish studies in other disciplinary contexts—retains a conservative impulse. Early modern Scotland did witness the development of several distinct varieties of reformation—and each of these varieties of reformation was, to a greater or lesser degree, and however reluctantly, supported by rhetorical and exegetical activity in the pulpit. Preaching was associated with many kinds of reformation in early modern Scotland, from the Lollardy of the late medieval south-west to the Lutheran evangelicalism that entered through the eastern seaports in and after the 1520s and the robust Calvinism that came to dominate large sections of the national church by the end of the sixteenth century. In Scotland, as elsewhere, the history of reforming preaching is a history of oratorical and physical contest: it was, after all, preachers who most often became martyrs. But preaching also became central to the defence of the older style of faith. In 1549, John Hamilton, the recently appointed Roman Catholic archbishop of St Andrews, insisted that his bishops should preach at least four times every year—a far cry, early Protestants would have noted, from the biblical requirement that bishops should be ‘apt to teach’ and that those ‘worthy of double honour’ should be those who ‘labour in the word and doctrine’ (1 Tim. 3:2, 5:17; Cowan 1982: 79). Some of the bishops found the task beyond them—including Hamilton himself. In 1559, according to an anonymous and probably contemporary account, he stepped into the pulpit of the Abbey Church in Holyrood, to defend the established church; and: after he had vomited a little of his superstition, he declared that he had not bein weill exercised in that profession; therefore desyred the auditors to hold him excused. In the meane tyme, he shewed unto them that there wes a lerned man, meaning Fryer Blake, who wes to come immediately after him into the pulpitt, who would declare unto them the trueth; and therefore desyred them to lett him cease. (Laing 1844: 67)

But sermons were not only delivered to monitor the boundaries of these competing patterns of reform. Preaching also celebrated the transgression of these strictly defined boundaries—especially if, as in the case of the Jesuit-turned-Presbyterian Thomas



crawford gribben

Abernethy in the 1640s, that transgression of ecclesiastical boundaries marked a significant opportunity to publicize an unusual conversion and make claims for the veracity of a contested faith. Throughout the period, and across the spectrum of Scottish Christianity, there were steady attempts to fashion competing religions of the word. But the singularity of ‘reformation’ is not the only challenge facing scholars of the preaching of early modern Scotland. The foremost methodological difficulty is the problem of sources. There is, of course, a real difference between the study of ‘preaching’ (as delivered in unrepeatable events) and the study of ‘sermons’ (understood as constructed texts with an often uncertain relationship to the moment of their delivery). The act of preaching is now almost impossible to reconstruct. Some anecdotal evidence remains, but it is difficult to know how to asses this material in terms of accuracy, point of view, and balance. We know that Knox’s writings emphasized that preaching should take advantage of the preacher’s ‘tong and livelye voice’, and most scholars who have written about Knox have assumed that his pulpit manner was developed according to his vigorous literary self-fashioning (Knox 1846–64: vi. 229). But Knox’s undoubted influence upon the Protestant cultures of reformation Scotland does not appear to have popularized a uniform declamatory style. Robert Leighton’s pulpit manner, if we can trust the claims provided by his hagiographer, Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury, has been represented as combining sublime thought and expression with a ‘somewhat feeble voice and shrinking manner’ (Blaikie 1888: 144). Two centuries later, and in marked contrast, Blaikie identified Leighton’s preaching as being unparalleled among his Episcopalian peers (1888: 5, 144). Likewise, those accounts of preaching that survive in diaries and spiritual journals are more often interested in recording their authors’ responses to spiritually charged events than in their authors’ recollections of the content of the sermons they heard or the activity of the preaching they witnessed. Take, for example, the famous description of the mid-seventeenth-century visit of a London merchant to St Andrews and Irvine. The anecdote has provided subsequent historians with one of the best-known descriptions of the variety of Scottish Presbyterian preaching in the middle of the seventeenth century, despite its being recorded one century later by a Presbyterian theologian, Robert Wodrow. Wodrow recorded that, at St Andrews, the merchant had heard the preaching of ‘one Mr Blair’: and, describing his features and the stature of his body, he said that man showed me the majesty of God, which was Mr. Robert Blair’s peculiar talent; then, added he, I afterwards heard a little fair man preach (Mr Rutherfurd), and that man showed me the loveliness of Christ; then I came and heard at Irvine a well-favoured, proper old man with a long beard (which was famous Mr Dickson), and that man showed me all my heart. (Wodrow 1842–3: iii. 3–4)

This quotation—which is often cited as evidence for the variety of Presbyterian preaching in the mid-seventeenth century—actually tells us very little about its style or content. The anecdote passes over an account of what the preaching was like to concentrate instead on its impact on the merchant’s own soul. But we might make the same observation of the comments of an earlier English traveller who, in 1617, described Scottish

preaching the scottish reformation



sermons as ‘nothing but railing’ (Todd 2002: 52). Which point of view is the one to be preferred? Even the study of sermon texts—which might be assumed to come as close as possible to the moment of preaching itself—is beset by methodological difficulty. Some sermons were revised and published by their preachers. George Gillespie, for example, published the sermons he preached in London during the period in which he was attending the Westminster Assembly; with their uncharacteristic apocalyptic investment, these sermons were intended to appeal to members of the public over the more cautious heads of the Assembly divines. But these texts, prepared by their preachers, were often reconstructions or revisions of what had been said in the pulpit, reconstituted in the days after the preaching event to which they were purportedly related, and cannot provide certain evidence of what the preaching moment actually involved. Other sermons were recorded by those who heard them. Margo Todd has argued that these notes taken by sermon auditors demonstrate the extent to which Presbyterian preaching was an ‘interactive oral medium’ that combined ‘rather dry exposition of texts . . . with intensely emotional and evocative language in exhortation’ (2002: 50, 54). There exist a number of Scottish examples in a variety of formats of sermon auditors’ notebooks. These notebooks have often been misunderstood as providing reliable access to preachers’ texts, and provided the basis for a number of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editions. Among the best known of these sources are A. A. Bonar’s edition of Quaint Sermons of Samuel Rutherford (1885), and anthologies such as James Renwick’s edition of A Choice Collection of Very Valuable Prefaces, Lectures, and Sermons, Preached upon the Mountains and Muirs of Scotland, in the Hottest Time of the Late Persecution (4th edn., 1777), which was advertised on its cover page as including items ‘carefully collected, and faithfully transcribed from several manuscripts’. But, like entries in diaries and spiritual journals, these records of sermons are often more reflective of the listener’s apprehension or appreciation of the preached word than the preacher’s intention in providing it. But just as ‘reformation’ and ‘preaching’ need to be qualified, so the geographical variety of what counts as ‘Scottish’ must also be understood. The Scottish reformation was not preached exclusively by Scots, nor was it preached exclusively in Scotland. The Scottish reformation was not a discrete and geographically specific movement of liturgical and theological change, but a series of movements for religious change that drew upon and engaged with the various movements for reform that stretched across and beyond Europe (Kellar 2003). Thus English preachers—such as Lancelot Andrewes and John Owen—were involved in preaching an ideal of reformation in Scotland that was quite foreign to the Presbyterianism that dominated in much of the early modern period (Stevenson 1999; Spurlock 2007a, b). Likewise, many Scottish preachers were developing their ideals of a Scottish reformation externally to the Scottish nation. John Knox spent a number of years in pastoral ministry in England. Several decades later, ministers serving the Scottish communities in north-east Ireland developed their own church practice in conversation with their brethren at home (Gribben 2007). At the end of the seventeenth century, exiled preachers in the Netherlands were similarly developing their own notions of the Kirk’s ideal ecclesiology (Garder 2004). And their ideas did return to Scotland.



crawford gribben

Thomas Halyburton’s memoirs, recording his experiences of exile and return at the end of the seventeenth century, provide a useful example of the ways in which the ideas of radical exiles could be introduced into and contest the settled assumptions of the national kirk (Halyburton 1825). Nevertheless, with due qualification, it is possible to make some observations about the themes and manner of Scottish reformation preaching. Its most obvious characteristic is the breadth of its linguistic variety. The Scottish reformation was preached in English, Scots, and Gaelic, as well as in French at court and Latin in some of the institutions of the university and church. There is no clear evidence to suggest that those advocating competing patterns of reform lined up behind discrete linguistic platforms. Native Catholic apologists chastised pro-reformation preachers for their lack of vernacular credibility, but evidence suggests that this linguistic and dialectical slippage was deliberately pursued (Gribben 2006c). Among the early Calvinists, for example, it has been suggested that, while Knox did not preach in Scots, his colleague Robert Rollock did; but these debates make contested assumptions about the character and integrity of Scots. Further evidence suggests that the Calvinist movement was very quickly assimilated into and took advantage of Gaelic vernacular cultures (Blaikie 1888: 45). The Scottish reformation was advanced, contested, and resisted in a poly-linguistic culture. The sheer breadth of this linguistic variety poses a significant obstacle to any attempt to offer an overview of preaching in the period (Dawson 1996). Sermons in early modern Scotland therefore served a variety of purposes in a poly-linguistic and religiously divided culture. Some sermons were designed to advance the routine edification of a parish congregation. Others served specific purposes, addressing congregations on fast days or celebrating a notable conversion, and some served entirely political purposes. Some attempted to advance, and some to stem the advance of, varieties of Protestant reform. But all of them aimed to persuade their listeners of the authenticity of the preacher’s vision.

Scottish Reformation Preaching Preaching had not always been central to the piety of the Scottish church. Ninian, Mungo, and Columba were known to have engaged in preaching as they pursued the evangelization of Scotland in the fourth to the sixth centuries, but the most recent survey of Scottish preaching also found ‘little trace of true Christian preaching’ between the twelfth century and the emergence of Lollardy in the mid-fourteenth century (Cameron 1993: 665). This interpretative summary—in an authoritative reference text— confirmed Blaikie’s earlier assumption that ‘from the extinction of the Culdee Church to the Reformation, we find scarcely a trace of Christian preaching in Scotland worthy of the name’ (Blaikie 1888: 36). The preaching that did exist was often critical of the religious status quo. Early reformation preaching was critical of the established church without necessarily advocating

preaching the scottish reformation



a variety of Lutheran reform. Knox’s History of the Reformation recorded the experience of Friar Alexander Seton, who, in his preaching, affirmed that ‘within Scotland there were no true Bishops, if that Bishops should be known by such notes and vertues as S. Paul requires in Bishops’. Hauled before the bishop, ‘the man being witty, and minding that which was his most assured defence, said, My Lord, The reporters of such things are manifest liars. Whereat the Bishop rejoyced, and said, Your answer pleaseth me well; I never could think of you that ye would be so foolish as to affirm such things.’ But Alexander went on to explain the intertextual character of his sermon: My Lord, ye may hear and consider, what ears these Asses have, who cannot discern betwixt Paul, Esay, Zachary, and Malachy, and Frier Alexander Seton. In very deed, My Lord, I said, That Paul saith, It behoveth a Bishop to be a Teacher; Esay said, That they that fed not the flock are dumb dogs; and Zachary saith, They are idle Pastors: I of mine own head affirmed nothing, but declared what the Spirit of God before pronounced: At whom, my Lord, if ye be not offended, justly ye cannot be offended at me. (Knox 1644: 17–18)

Similar complaints about the lack of edifying preaching were made in the poetry of Sir David Lindsay: Gret plesour war to heir ane byschope preche, One Dane [dean], or Doctour in Divinitie, One Abbote quhilk could weill his convent teche One Persoun flowyng in phylosophie. I tyne my tyme to wysh quhilk wyll nocht be. War nocht the preyching of the beggyng frieris [friars] Tynt war the faith amang the Seculeris (Lindsay 1931–6: i. 86, ll. 1032–8)

Significantly, Lindsay also included a mock-sermon in the 1554 Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estatis (ii. 319–23, ll. 3440–510). But as Lollard nonconformity gave way before and evolved into Lutheran and Calvinist reform, Protestant preaching was pioneered by such controversialists as Patrick Hamilton (1504–28), George Wishart (1513–46), John Knox (c.1514–72), his disciple, and Andrew Melville (1545–1622). Their preaching proved essential to their wider programme of ecclesial reform. Knox’s preaching, for example, was modelled on that of the Hebrew prophets and followed Calvin’s technique of preaching consecutively through biblical books—which introduced to Scotland the method of the ‘ordinary’, though few ministers would have employed it with such disastrous effects as the former minister of Woodilee. Knox, always interested in shaping a public persona, included texts of his own sermons in his History of the Reformation, but his prophetic mode contrasts with and seems to overwhelm the warmer pastoral mode of, for example, John Erskine of Dun. But Protestant leaders struggled to staff their reformed kirk. The basic historical background is well known. Reformers provided the kirk with small numbers of preachers in the early years of the reformation, and many parishes had to settle for monthly preaching services (Cameron 1993a: 668). These shortages had largely disappeared by the early seventeenth century, when the activity of preaching was being



crawford gribben

emphasized across the ecclesiological spectrum. Of course, recent scholarship has warned us that the religious spectrum of early modern Scotland may have been less varied that the polemical publications of the period might suggest. David Mullan is perhaps the most able exponent of the theory that the divinity of early modern Scotland conformed to an essentially Reformed consensus (Mullan 2000). Preaching may, therefore, have been more generally supported than denominational historians have imagined. Thus we can confirm the existence of ‘Puritan bishops’—from the period of William Cowper (1568–1619), bishop of Galloway, who preached twice on Sundays, as well as on Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday evenings, with extra sermons on Sundays and Mondays during communion seasons and church fasts (Todd 2004: 303–12), to that of Robert Leighton (1611–84), archbishop of Glasgow, whose surviving sermons confirm Owen Chadwick’s impression that their preacher was ‘one of the five or six most remarkable Calvinists in all the inner history of Calvinism’, perhaps ‘the most attractive and persuasive of all the Calvinist devotional writers . . . of any country’ (1985: 116, 126). This ‘Puritan’ preaching was noted for its regularity, length, and thematic aggression. Sixteenth-century preachers ‘were still defending a threatened treasure, and therefore they were still preachers of the warrior type’ who, as Blaikie put it, ‘brought no little of their natural ruggedness into play’. Seventeenth-century reformed preaching was, by contrast, ‘more doctrinal’, and, especially in the early and middle parts of the century, was marked by a distinctive organizational pattern (Blaikie 1888: 6). Sermons were divided into sections of exegesis, doctrine, and application. These divisions lent a scholastic air to the ‘Puritan’ preaching of such figures as George Gillespie, and may have owed something to the Ramist assumptions that dominated the Scottish universities, but they also appealed to those who wanted to communicate at a popular level. Nevertheless, they were not universally popular. In the later 1640s, Robert Leighton, Robert Douglas, Hugh Binning, and Andrew Gray caused controversy when they began to preach without explicitly stating the ‘heads of doctrine’ they had discovered in their texts. Their new style of preaching did not exclude exegetical, doctrinal, and applicatory material, and it did provide logical divisions of this material, but it was condemned for its failure to push these arrangements into the rhetorical foreground. The new practice alarmed Robert Baillie, one of the Scottish Commissioners at the Westminster Assembly, and generated his complaint that these younger preachers had abandoned ‘the ordinarie way of exponing and dividing a text, of raising doctrines and uses’ in favour of ‘a discourse on some common head, in a high, romancing, unscriptual style, tickling the ear for the present, and moving the affections in some, but leaving . . . little or nought to the memorie and understanding’ (Baillie 1842: iii. 258–59). But the new homiletic was to prevail. While the older method of divisions continued into the eighteenth century elsewhere in the Scottish Presbyterian diaspora, Leighton and his colleagues had initiated a trend that would slowly change the Scottish pulpit (Holmes 2006: 129). Similarly, while still a covenanted Presbyterian, Leighton had drawn fire for the themes of his sermons. He famously avoided ‘preaching to the times’, neglecting the political dimension of the early modern pulpit in favour of more deliberately addressing the pastoral needs of his own parishioners. But it was also Leighton who, in the 1650s, was appointed as principal

preaching the scottish reformation



and professor of theology at the university in Edinburgh, and it was Leighton who set about reformulating Presbyterian piety in the aftermath of the Covenanters’ military defeat and the Cromwellian invasion of Scotland (Gribben 2006d). It was ironic, therefore, that his controversial innovations should go on to exercise enormous influence in the development of reformation preaching through the period. These innovations in homiletic method paralleled the development of hermeneutical theory and the continuing oversight of congregational preaching throughout the long reformation period (Clauson 2004: 57–140). Reformed seminaries grew increasingly concerned about the quality of the preachers they were producing. Their training, within the Scottish Presbyterian world, was augmented by a system of providing ordinands with an apprenticeship within a local presbytery. Some of the clearest evidence for the content of that presbytery-level training is provided in the Minutes of the Antrim Ministers (1652–4), a manuscript record book that documents the experiences of those Scottish university graduates who travelled to the north-east of Ireland to serve that region’s Presbyterian communities. These ordinands were provided with guidance in and tests of their preaching abilities. Nevertheless, the teaching of homiletics in Scottish divinity schools appears to have formally commenced only in the late seventeenth century. The most recent account of Scottish theological education provides its first example of training in homiletics in June 1700, when Adam Fergusson, a graduate of St Andrews, was requested to defend the claim that the pope was Antichrist in a sermon for his presbytery trials (Whytock 2007: 109). James Wodrow, professor of theology at Glasgow, composed a textbook (begun 1692) on homiletics for the benefit of his students, A Compend of the Treatise Methodus Homiletics, Being a Short Dictionary to Students of Theology for Making of and Criticising upon Homilies, as also for the Making of Popular Sermons, as they are Called thereto (see Wodrow 1828: 208–45). But presbyteries were equally concerned to monitor the preaching of those already in ordained ministry in an aggressively enforced version of continuing professional development. Presbytery ‘visits’ to local congregations included enquiries about the preaching ability of the parish minister (Foster 1958: 73–8). Presbyteries were vigilant against any apparent defection from the reformation ideal. The ‘Directions for the visitations of Churches’ published by the Synod of Aberdeen in 1675 required ministers to preach twice each Sabbath day (1958: 103–4). These Sunday services were often accompanied by an additional midweek sermon, though these were sometimes difficult to sustain (1958: 137). The scale of effort this involved is perhaps suggested by the fact that sermons normally lasted about an hour—though, when George Halyburton (later the bishop of Dunkeld) preached before the Parliament of 1662, his sermon ‘indured the space of 2 houres and moir’ (Henderson 1937: 195). (The regularity of this achievement is all the more remarkable when it is remembered that reformed congregations expressed a clear preference for extempore preaching.) Leighton argued in favour of shorter sermons, but others were more assertive in attempting to control their minister’s rhetorical flights (Foster 1958: 135, 139). The kirk session in Elgin warned its minister that he would be fined unless ‘the prayeris, psalme and preitching be all endit within the hour’ (Foster 1975: 179).



crawford gribben

The development of homiletic theory was linked to debates about who should preach. The debate was focused in the aftermath of the Cromwellian invasion, when the innovations in religious faith and practice that were encouraged by the English military elite seemed to challenge the hegemony of earlier varieties of Presbyterian control. Suddenly, it seemed that the activity of preaching was open to anyone—laity or clergy, women or men. Those mindful to uphold the older patterns of reform insisted that ‘God hath particularly designed some persons to the work of the ministry’, and that the ‘preaching of the Word by a minister sent and called, and the hearing of it, is a means ordained and appointed by God, and according to the ordinary manner necessary for begetting faith, and therefore needful to salvation’ (Dickson [1684] 2007: 147–8). But others were less clear about the value of the older patterns of reform, and, as Presbyterian clergy found themselves compelled publicly to defend their church order and faith, so they discovered that their formerly unique position had been entirely undermined. Ministers found that the very act of defending Presbyterian values and ideals in a public disputation offered a significant concession to their adversaries. And often they were being forced to defend the notion of preaching itself (Spurlock 2007a).

Conclusion The ideals and difficulties of preaching the Scottish reformation came to a focus at the end of the seventeenth century, when the pseudonymous ‘Jacob Curate’ published The Scotch Presbyterian Eloquence; or, The Foolishness of their Teaching Discovered (1692; regularly reprinted). The author of this pamphlet—often thought to be either Robert Calder or Gilbert Crockat (Cameron 1993a: 669)—attacked with little mercy the rhetoric of the Presbyterian preachers, and criticized their oratory for its apparently immoral content: ‘when they speak of Christ, they represent him as a Gallant, Courting, and Kissing, by their Fulsome, Amorous Discourses on the mysterious Parables of the Canticles . . . they have quite debased Divinity, and debauched the Morals of the People’ (Curate 1692: 23). The target of the criticism was the recently published letters of Samuel Rutherford, which, in their abundant eroticism, seemed so atypical of the literature of the Protestant scholastic movement from which they emerged. Two centuries later, Blaikie observed without any obvious irony that Rutherford had been ‘the first Scottish preacher in whom the poetical temperament had free and full development, and the first to discover what a relish there was in the common mind for that way of treating religious subjects’ (1888: 113–14). But in the 1690s, and amid the political and religious uncertainties that would provide a context for the collapse of Scottish independence in 1707, Rutherford’s oratory was being attacked for its immoral potential. It was to become an enduring challenge. The claims of ‘Jacob Curate’ were answered in such texts as An Answer to the Scottish Presbyterian Eloquence (1693), but the allegations were republished in the early nineteenth century, and were deemed sufficiently serious for Thomas McCrie to discuss it at length in his review of Scott’s Old Mortality (1816) (McCrie 1841: 251).

preaching the scottish reformation



Despite the claims of Scottish Presbyterian Eloquence, Blaikie is probably not far from the truth in asserting that, ‘all through this period and long after, the style of popular and effective preaching was essentially the same. Plain, lucid, and direct, it was the preaching of men whose very souls were saturated with Scripture, and who poured out the fruits of their meditations with an emotion and a force that arrested and overpowered the souls of their hearers’ (1888: 83–4). But its ‘plain’ and ‘lucid’ character took on a new dynamic in the religious contexts of the negotiations for and the aftermath of the Treaty of Union (1707). Preaching remained a vital component of Protestant spirituality throughout the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, the very popularity of preaching as a ‘means of grace’ fed into an emerging culture of celebrity preachers. The appeal of this culture undermined older communitarian bonds of congregational life, and provided, paradoxically, for the slow erosion of the importance of preaching in the definition of distinct religious communities. The practice of ‘sermon-tasting’ remained ‘a highly fashionable practice for the ardent churchgoer’ in the eighteenth century, and a practice that undermined exclusive notions of congregational membership (Brown 1997: 45). Simultaneously, the nature and influence of preaching was undergoing its own evolution, as the Anglicization of pulpit speech took its part in the movement to rid the new ‘North Briton’ of its remaining ‘Scotticisms’ (Tulloch 2006: xii. 335–62). The ‘Presbyterian eloquence’ of the mideighteenth century was quite different from that of the mid-seventeenth century, however it should be understood. But the pastoral content of this preaching continued; political preaching would never be as popular as it once had been. Preachers continued to exhort their listeners to adopt the values and perspectives of scripture, as they had come to be understood. It was a development that Buchan’s Witch Wood would have encouraged. As Sempill’s colleagues left for home, one of his new colleagues took his hand and ‘held it with a kind of wistful affection. “I pray”, he said, “that your windows may be ever open towards Jerusalem”’ (Buchan 1927: 18).

Bibliography Baillie, Robert (1842). The Letters and Journals of Robert Baillie, ed. David Laing. 3 vols. Edinburgh: Robert Ogle. Benedict, Philip (2002). Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism. New Haven: Yale University Press. Blaikie, William G. (1888). The Preachers of Scotland: From the Sixth to the Nineteenth Century. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Boran, Elizabethanne, and Gribben, Crawford (2006) (eds). Enforcing Reformation in Ireland and Scotland, 1550–1700. St Andrews Studies in Reformation History. Aldershot: Ashgate. Brown, Callum G. (1997). Religion and Society in Scotland since 1707. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Buchan, John (1927). Witch Wood. Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company.



crawford gribben

Cameron, Nigel M. de S. (1993a). ‘Preachers’, in Nigel M. de S. Cameron (ed.), Dictionary of Scottish Church History and Theology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. —— (1993b). ‘Preaching: Themes and Styles’, in Nigel M. de S. Cameron (ed.), Dictionary of Scottish Church History and Theology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Chadwick, Owen (1985). ‘Robert Leighton after Three Hundred Years’, Journal of the Society of Friends of Dunblane Cathedral, 14/4: 116–26. Church of Scotland (1561). The Confession of the Faythe and Doctrine Beleved and Professed, by the Protestantes of the Realme of Scotlande. Clauson, Marc A. (2004). A Study of Scottish Hermeneutical Method from John Knox to the Early Twentieth Century: From Christian to Secular. Toronto Studies in Theology. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen. Coffey, John (1997). Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions: The Mind of Samuel Rutherford. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (2006). ‘The Problem of “Scottish Puritanism”, 1590–1638’, in Elizabethanne Boran and Crawford Gribben (eds), Enforcing Reformation in Ireland and Scotland, 1550–1700. St Andrews Studies in Reformation History. Aldershot: Ashgate, 66–90. Cowan, Ian B. (1982). The Scottish Reformation: Church and Society in Sixteenth-Century Scotland. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Cummings, Brian (2002). The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Curate, Jacob (1692). The Scotch Presbyterian Eloquence; or, The Foolishness of their Teaching Discovered from their Books, Sermons and Prayers. Dawson, Jane (1996). ‘Calvinism in the Gaidhealtachd of Scotland’, in Andrew Pettegree, Alistair Duke, and Gillian Lewis (eds), Calvinism in Europe, 1560–1620. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 231–53. Dickson, David ([1684] 2007). Truth’s Victory over Error: A Commentary on the Westminster Confession of Faith, ed. John R. De Witt. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth. Dunnigan, Sarah (2003). Review of Theo van Heijnsbergen and Nicola Royan (eds). Literature, Letters and the Canonical in Early Modern Scotland. East Linton: Tuckwell, 2002, in Scottish Studies Review 4/2: 143. Edington, Carol (1998). ‘Knox and the Castilians’, in Roger A. Mason (ed.), John Knox and the British Reformations. St Andrews Studies in Reformation History. Aldershot: Ashgate, 39–40. Farrow, Kenneth D. (2004). John Knox: Reformation Rhetoric and the Traditions of Scots Prose, 1490–1570. Oxford: Peter Lang. Foster, Walter Roland (1958). Bishop and Presbytery: The Church of Scotland, 1661–1688. SPCK. —— (1975). The Church before the Covenants: The Church of Scotland, 1596–1638. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press. Garder, Ginny (2004). The Scottish Exile Community in the Netherlands, 1660–1690. East Linton: Tuckwell. Gribben, Crawford (2004). ‘James Hogg, Scottish Calvinism and Literary Theory’, Scottish Studies Review, 5/2: 9–26. —— (2006a). ‘The Literary Culture of the Scottish Reformation’, Review of English Studies, 57.228: 64–82. —— (2006b). ‘Theological Literature, 1560–1707’, in Ian Brown et al. (eds), Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature. 3 vols. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, i. 231–7.

preaching the scottish reformation



—— (2006c). ‘John Knox, Reformation History and National Self-Fashioning’, Reformation & Renaissance Review, 8/1: 45–60. —— (2006d). ‘Robert Leighton, Edinburgh Theology and the Collapse of the Presbyterian Consensus’, in Elizabethanne Boran and Crawford Gribben (eds), Enforcing Reformation in Ireland and Scotland, 1550–1700. St Andrews Studies in Reformation History. Aldershot: Ashgate, 159–83. —— (2007). God’s Irishmen: Theological Debates in Cromwellian Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——, and Mullan, David George (2009) (eds). Literature and the Scottish Reformation. St Andrews Studies in Reformation History. Aldershot: Ashgate. Halyburton, Thomas (1825). Memoirs of the Rev. Thomas Halyburton, ed. David Young. 2nd edn. Glasgow: Chalmers and Collins. Healey, Robert M. (1989). ‘The Preaching Ministry in Scotland’s First Book of Discipline’, Church History, 58/3: 339–53. Henderson, G. D. (1937). ‘The Scottish Pulpit in the Seventeenth Century’, in Religious Life in Seventeenth-Century Scotland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 190–219. Holmes, Andrew R. (2006). The Shaping of Ulster Presbyterian Belief and Practice, 1770–1840. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kellar, Clare (2003). Scotland, England and the Reformation, 1534–1561. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kirk, James (1998). ‘Knox and the Historians’, in Roger A. Mason (ed.), John Knox and the British Reformations. St Andrews Studies in Reformation History. Aldershot: Ashgate, 20–1. Knox, John (1644). The Historie of the Reformation of the Church of Scotland containing Five Books: Together with Some Treatises conducing to the History. —— (1846–64). The Works of John Knox, ed. David Laing. 6 vols. Edinburgh: Woodrow Society. Laing, David (1844) (ed.). ‘A Historie of the Estate of Scotland, from the Year 1559 to the Year 1566’, in The Miscellany of the Wodrow Society, Containing Tracts and Original Letters, Chiefly Relating to the Ecclesiastical Affairs of Scotland during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Edinburgh: Wodrow Society, vol. i. Lindsay, David (1931–6). The Works of Sir David Lindsay of the Mount, ed. Douglas Hamer. 4 vols. Edinburgh: Scottish Texts Society. McCrie, Thomas (1841). Review of ‘Tales of My Landlord’ (1817), in Thomas McCrie, Miscallaneous Writings: Chiefly Historical, ed. Thomas McCrie Jr. Edinburgh: John Johnstone. Macleod, John (1974). Scottish Theology: In Relation to Church History since the Reformation. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth. ‘Minutes of the Antrim Ministers, 1654–58’, Gamble Library, Union Theological College, Belfast. Mullan, David George (2000). Scottish Puritanism, 1590–1638. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Old, Hughes Oliphant (1998–2007). The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church. 6 vols. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Ritchie, Lionel Alexander (2004). ‘Blaikie, William Garden (1820–1899)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online edn. Spear, Wayne R. (2003). ‘Word and Spirit in the Westminster Confession’, in J. Ligon Duncan (ed.), The Westminster Confession into the 21st Century. 2 vols. Fearn, Ross-shire: Mentor, i. 39–56.



crawford gribben

Spurlock, R. Scott (2007a). Cromwell and Scotland: Conquest and Religion, 1650–1660. Edinburgh: John Donald. —— (2007b). ‘ “Anie Gospell Way”: Religious Diversity in Interregnum Scotland’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society, 37: 89–120. Stevenson, Kenneth (1999). ‘Lancelot Andrewes at Holyrood: The 1617 Whitsun Sermon in Perspective’, Scottish Journal of Theology, 52/4: 455–75. Strier, Richard (1995). Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Taylor, Larissa (2001) (ed.). Preachers and People in the Reformations and Early Modern Period. The New History of the Sermon. Leiden: Brill. Todd, Margo (2002). The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland. Yale: Yale University Press. —— (2004). ‘Bishops in the Kirk: William Cowper of Galloway and the Puritan Episcopacy of Scotland’, Scottish Journal of Theology, 57/3: 300–12. Tulloch, Graham (2006). ‘The English and Scots languages in Scottish religious life’, in Colin MacLean and Kenneth Veitch (eds.), Scottish Life and Society: A Compendium of Scottish Ethnology, 14 vols. Edinburgh: John Donald, 12.335–62. Westminster Assembly (1645). A Directory for the Publique Worship of God, throughout the Three Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland. —— (1647). The Humble Advice of the Assembly of Divines, now by Authority of Parliament Sitting at Westminster, Concerning a Shorter Catechisme. Whytock, Jack C. (2007). ‘An Educated Clergy’: Scottish Theological Education and Training in the Kirk and Secession, 1560–1850. Studies in Christian History and Thought. Milton Keynes: Paternoster. Wodrow, Robert (1828). Life of James Wodrow. Edinburgh: William Blackwood. —— (1842–3) (ed.). Analecta: or Materials for a History of Remarkable Providences, Mostly Relating to Scotch Ministers and Christians. 4 vols. Edinburgh: Maitland Club.

chapter 14

pr e achi ng th e r efor m ation i n e a r ly moder n ir el a n d raymond gillespie

In Ireland, as in most of the rest of the British Isles, speech was the dominant form of communication in the early modern period. Over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries print certainly grew in significance, but it never rivalled the importance of the spoken word. While print has the ability to communicate standardized messages over wide areas, in local worlds printed items were subject to interpretation and valorization through conversation, gossip, and rumour. This was a point well appreciated by contemporaries. Government might declare its will through printed proclamations, but it did not neglect to command that the printed broadsheets be read out in county and market towns as well as other public places. Churchmen above all recognized the importance of the spoken word in conveying information, providing instruction and creating bonds between speaker and listener that were stronger than those forged between reader and text. This realization came from their experience of one of the central features of their calling: preaching. As the early seventeenth-century godly preacher Richard Olmstead prefaced a collection of his sermons, ‘as a picture expresseth not the life, so neither can writing demonstrate the lively energy of the voice which consists of an utterance and action, the two ornaments of speech’ (1630: sig. A6v). Later in the century the Dublin Presbyterian minister Robert Chambers expressed similar sentiments when he noted at the beginning of his unpublished catechism ‘there is as much difference between reading and hearing, between a lively word and breathless lines as much as is between cold meat and hot’ (n.d.: sig. A2r). In this realization of the centrality of speech lies the dilemma of the historian of preaching in Ireland, as in other places. Preaching was essentially an ephemeral activity; once spoken, the preacher’s words vanished into the air and hence are not available for the historian’s inspection. In some cases Protestant godly listeners recorded some of the



raymond gillespie

words of the preacher, or at least the gist of the sermon, in the notes that they took to aid their memories in their weekly reflections on the Sunday message.1 In other cases preachers felt compelled, for a range of reasons, to commit a form of their spoken words to print to advance their careers. As the Cromwellian Independent preacher John Murcot claimed, he put a sermon preached in Dublin in 1656 into print for ‘those whose frail memories may have lost the greater part of the sense of it’ (1656: sig. A3v). Yet this evidence is problematic. The written word fails to capture the performance element of the sermon, the actions and gestures of the preacher and his intonation as he delivered his oration to a congregation who had very different expectations of, and responses to, what they heard. Some were in search of genuine spiritual edification and listened intently, others listened out of curiosity, while yet more slept or whispered the latest gossip to their neighbours (Gillespie 1997: 22–4). However, both the words of and the reactions to sermons in early modern Ireland have been poorly preserved. Probably the most distinguished preacher of early seventeenth-century Ireland, James Ussher, archbishop of Armagh, left almost no trace of his Irish preaching activities, although a number of the sermons that he preached in England were printed at the time. Those clergy who did not preach extempore were not good about preserving their sermon notes; most of those that survive are so laconic that they tell us little.2 A few sets of sermon notes from listeners have survived, but more typical appears to be the verdict of Robert Chambers that most threw their notes away ‘as so much waste paper’ having taken them only for the sake of conformity to ministerial expectations (n.d.: sig. A4v).3 Even more problematical for the study of Irish preaching is the fact that only a small number of Irish preachers committed their words to print. In the years before 1640 the English presses poured forth thousands of sermons by preachers of different political and theological persuasions, but the Dublin press produced very little of this type of literature. Between 1500 and 1640 the Dublin press printed only thirteen sermons or sermon collections, all after 1603. The reasons for this difference between the Irish and English experiences are not hard to find. On the one hand, the Irish print business was under-capitalized and had a poorly developed marketing structure and hence could produce only items for which there was strong demand. On the other hand, many potential consumers had little interest in the products of the press. Whereas the bulk of the Irish population spoke Irish as the everyday means of communication, the press produced works in English, unable to invest in the infrastructure necessary to print in Irish (Gillespie 2005). For preachers, either in person or in print, the problem of language was a difficulty that was never satisfactorily resolved, and this limited the spread of the preacher’s message. Over time the number of published sermons would grow, so 1 For late-seventeenth-century examples, see National Library of Ireland, MS 4201 (Independent); Trinity College, Dublin, MS 151 (Baptist); Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, D/1759/2B/2 (Presbyterian). 2 For example, Trinity College, Dublin, MS 1688 (Dopping); Marsh’s Library, Dublin, MS Z4.5.19 (unknown). 3 For surviving sets of sermon notes by godly listeners, see National Library of Ireland, MS 4201, and Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, D/1759/2B/2.

preaching in ireland



that by the last decade of the seventeenth century the Dublin press had produced forty sermons, but this restricted number was controlled by factors other than language. By then it had become abundantly clear that the process of religious reform that had begun in the early sixteenth century had failed to find roots in Ireland. The Reformed churches and their preachers had given up any drive that had existed earlier to make converts, and preachers contented themselves with encouraging and reproving their own communities. Inevitably this made the themes of many Irish Reformed sermons, so far as we can recover them, rather introverted and at times lacking in enthusiasm. Such are the problems in attempting to reconstruct a history of the Reformed sermon in early modern Ireland. We need to admit that the evidence will never permit us to recreate the detail of the experience of the ordinary parish church or dissenting service. We are better informed about events in the larger cathedral churches and perhaps best informed about the set-piece sermons preached on government-initiated fast and festival days, such as the sermons preached on 23 October in thanksgiving for Protestant preservation during the rising of 1641 and those that commemorated the execution of Charles I on 30 January (Barnard 1991; Connolly 2003). However, the task is not impossible. While the evidence is fragmentary and sometimes inconclusive, it does exist, and, perhaps most importantly, it can be contextualized within its social setting, which is often rather clearer, to produce an outline account of both the religious and the social function of the sermon and its performance within Protestant Ireland. That is the aim of this chapter.

Medieval Inheritance and Early Reformation Despite the problems of language, early Reformed preachers in Ireland had a homiletic inheritance that had similarities with their contemporaries elsewhere. Both the religious orders and the secular clergy had access to preaching manuals such as John Mirk’s Festial and the range of sermon collections found in the library of the Franciscans at Youghal (Fletcher 2001; Ó Clabaigh 2001). At least some clergy knew how to construct a sermon and to make their message effective. One Franciscan friar in Donegal in 1539 made a Galway merchant in his congregation ‘greatly afraid’ with demands that the listeners make war on the king (State Papers, Henry VIII 1834: iii. 141). However, what is unclear is how many of the Irish clergy had mastered this skill. In the case of the secular clergy, the evidence is thin, but it appears unlikely that many were adept at preaching. Ireland lacked a university at which clergy could be trained in this skill, and the church’s concern was mainly with the saying of Mass and the Office rather than preaching (Jefferies 1997: 52–3). By contrast, the Franciscans and Dominicans had both the enthusiasm and the training to make preaching a central part of their activities. The Observant reform of the fifteenth century had created a cadre of men sufficiently



raymond gillespie

educated to make preaching a fundamental part of their mission and to be able to preach across linguistic divides. However, their training and inclinations made these men among the least likely to be recruited to the cause of reform (Flynn 1993: 5–8; Ó Clabaigh 2001). The scant evidence does not allow for any reconstruction of how the secular clergy who might have had the ability to preach the new ideas responded to the reform movement, but one late example is suggestive. During the sixteenth century Ulster had remained relatively insulated from the processes of reform, but after 1603 the new church structures quickly spread into the province. Some Catholic clergy did convert and occupied benefices in the Church of Ireland, but almost exclusively as ‘reading ministers’ rather than as preachers (Mac Cuarta 2007: 40–53). The pattern was probably not unusual, since in the diocese of Cork in the 1590s the clergy were all either native Irish or connected with Anglo-Irish merchant families, but none was a graduate or a preacher (Ford 1985: 24–5). The reasons for the failure of the Reformed Church to recruit a cadre of preachers able to preach in Irish are partly to do with the educational standard of the existing ministry, but as time progressed the cultural basis of the Reformed Church became increasingly Anglicized and churchmen grew ever more suspicious of the motives of converts who were, in effect, marginalized within the new ecclesiastical structures. Again, as the Catholic Church rebuilt itself at the end of the sixteenth and into the early seventeenth century, the pressures not to conform grew, depriving the Reformed Church of recruits. The outcome of this process was that the Reformed Church looked for its preachers, not from among a native ministry, but from clergy from England who had come to Ireland in search of preferment. This process was intensified by the lack of educational possibilities among would-be preachers in Ireland, since no university was established there until the foundation of Trinity College in 1592. Perhaps the most dramatic example of this new colonial preacher is provided by the Reformation polemicist John Bale, appointed bishop of Ossory in 1552. In his own highly polemical account of his experiences, he emphasized the importance of preaching to his diocesan mission. He preached every Sunday and holy day in Lent after his arrival and, although ill, ‘never feeling any manner of grief of my sickness for the time which I was in the pulpit. Whereat many men and myself also greatly marvelled.’ Through his preaching he ‘earnestly exhorted the people to repentance for sin and required them to give credit to the Gospel of salvation’ rather than ‘chanting, piping and singing’. In addition he urged his hearers to show loyalty to the state and the magistrates of Kilkenny, where his cathedral was located (Happé and King 1990: 53, 54). Yet, for all this, few paid any attention to his efforts, demanding the traditional rites of Catholicism, and he was forced to flee his diocese after one attempt on his life and a confrontation with the cathedral clergy. What Bale failed to appreciate was that the complex symbolic system of traditional Catholicism was so well integrated into everyday life that it could not be undermined by such limited preaching activities unsupported by a coherent Protestant community with its own cultural ways of listening, speaking, hearing, and reading. The variety of ritual solutions that traditional Catholicism offered to the problems of daily existence could not easily be collapsed into listening to the word preached alone.

preaching in ireland



It was a problem that others would face later. Protestantism lacked ritual solutions to difficulties such as witchcraft or demon possession, and new, psychologically unsatisfactory, means of dealing with such problems had to be devised. In the 1670s some Dublin Presbyterians dealt with an allegedly haunted house by prayer and a sermon on Hebrews 2:18, which proved singularly ineffective (Baxter 1691: 218–19). Such instances indicate that preaching in the early Irish Reformation was a slow and uncertain method of building a church. The association of the preaching ministry with the processes of colonization inevitably had an impact on the way in which preaching was perceived among the indigenous population in Ireland. While the law required attendance at the parish church on Sunday, it could not ensure that those who attended paid attention to what was going on. In some parts of the country, notably the north and west, the power of the state in the sixteenth century was so limited that, although it claimed the medieval parish churches for the Church of Ireland, it was impossible to enforce this claim. In these parts of the country the formal structures of traditional religion remained little disturbed into the early seventeenth century. In the east and south of the country Protestant preachers were more in evidence, although with limited effect. In 1585 it was alleged that Catholics forced to attend the established church in Waterford did not spend their time listening to the preacher, but ‘they walk about like mill horses, chopping and changing, making merchandise. So that they in the quire cannot hear a word, and those not small fools but the chief of the city’ (Brady 1868: 99). To provide preachers was not necessarily to make converts.

Elizabethan and Jacobean Resurgence Just at the point when it appeared that the reform process in Ireland might run out of steam, it seems to have found a new energy. In the late 1580s and 1590s there is some evidence for a resurgence in the enthusiasm for preaching the ideas of reformation in the core of English influence, Dublin itself. The main evidence for this comes from the cathedrals of the city, which should have acted as a powerhouse for reform but which had been rather lacklustre in their performance. By 1603 the lord deputy could claim that there was as much preaching in Dublin as in any English city, including a lecture every week at Christ Church Cathedral. By contrast, it was claimed in 1585 that the cathedral had not been able to maintain a preacher. Initially some of the funding for this development had been provided by government, but the main impetus for change was the growth of a pool of preachers and lecturers following the establishment of Trinity College in the city in 1592. Students and Fellows of the college preached and lectured in rotation at Christ Church. Apart from a brief gap in 1603, this pattern continued into the 1630s (Gillespie 2000b: 185–6). While preaching appears to have undergone something of a resurgence in the capital, it is more difficult to chart the spread of the practice outside this core of the Protestant



raymond gillespie

state. Over the course of the early seventeenth century the size of the preaching ministry of the established church in Ireland grew. The partial 1615 visitation recorded some 655 clergy holding benefices in the Church of Ireland. Of these, 525 were said to be resident and 161 of the residents were preachers; the remaining 364 were reading ministers. Gaps in the record of this visitation make it difficult to draw national comparisons with the subsequent visitations of 1622 and 1634, but some are possible. In 1622, the ecclesiastical province of Armagh could muster 112 preachers out of 158 resident clergy, but by 1634 only 109 preachers appeared. In Cashel, 67 preachers in 1615 had grown to 108 in 1634 (Ford 1985: 81–7). While this certainly represents progress over the early seventeenth century, it can hardly be described as dramatic change. Preachers were still comparatively rare in Ireland. Perhaps more importantly, these preachers were overwhelmingly graduates of English universities. While Trinity College Dublin was founded in 1592 with the express intent of providing preachers for the Church of Ireland, it made little contribution to the supply of clergy outside Dublin and its environs during the early seventeenth century. This meant that English preachers were often poorly equipped for Irish conditions and, in particular, were unable to use the Irish translations of both the New Testament and the Book of Common Prayer that had been prepared to further the preaching mission among the native Irish. What preachers actually said in the early seventeenth century is almost impossible to reconstruct for want of evidence. Few preachers committed their words to print or even to writing, and, when they did, the sermons recorded were usually set-piece discourses delivered on important occasions. Anti-Catholicism was, predictably, one powerful theme that runs through the surviving material, but a lesser theme was the unity of Protestantism. Preachers at visitation, for instance, tended to play down the differences between the various strands of Protestantism in early seventeenth-century Ireland. In particular, the things that divided Scottish settlers with a Presbyterian background in Ulster from the established church were minimized at these formal events in an attempt to build a broad Protestant consensus against the Catholic majority (Kilroy 1975: 110–21). That broad consensus went further than simply anti-Catholicism. Almost all, as far as can be determined, held fast to one of the strands of predestinarian Calvinism, which emphasized preaching as the key to man’s relation to God. Even the onslaught on such ideas in the 1630s under Bishop Bramhall of Derry and Lord Deputy Wentworth made few inroads into this position and its emphasis on the preached word as opposed to the sacraments. In consequence, Ireland experienced almost none of the tensions that followed from the introduction of liturgical change into contemporary England. Irish preachers held to a position that they had a dual role, to preach first the law of the Old Testament and then the gospel. The law made one aware of one’s sinful state and the gospel rectified that position, as God’s grace alone began the work of conversion (Ford 1985: 202–16). One distinctive strand of preaching stemmed from the concern by some godly Reformed preachers to make their vision of a godly society a reality in Ireland. Traces of this can be found in a number of sermons. Providentialist preachers warned of the danger of divine judgement that immoral conduct would bring on the inhabitants of Ireland.

preaching in ireland



In 1628, the newly appointed provost of Trinity College Dublin, William Bedell, commented during a series of fast-day sermons at a time of poor harvests that ‘our preachers lay the higher cause on the tolerating and countenancing idolatry, church robbery, swearing and blasphemy, blood, drunkenness, pride and other open and insolent sins and they speak marvellous plainly and too truly I fear’ (McNeill 1943: 85). The sort of language that preachers resorted to is clear from Henry Leslie’s 1625 fast-day sermon when plague in London threatened Ireland. The sins of Ireland, he claimed, would cause God’s wrath to be visited on the country, providing a foretaste of a final destruction. There was a need to forsake sin, refusing to tolerate Catholic practices as well as refraining from the more mundane offences of the ungodly, such as swearing, adultery, robbery, deceit, fraud, and bribery. The underlying message in these sermons was a simple but unsettling one about danger and security, describing a world in which no one was safe from providential judgement (Leslie 1625). Clearly the answer to this problem was an amendment of life, and preaching was held to play a significant role in this process of conversion. The emotional power of the sermon was vital in providing a way to move from the profane world into the new godly one and in forming a focus for the new communities of the saved. This was clearly evident in a revival movement led by a number of preachers of a Presbyterian background in the Six Mile Water area of County Antrim in the mid-1620s. The origins of this lay in the preaching of an English Presbyterian, James Glendinning, whose sermons to his congregation at Oldstone ‘roused up the people and awakened them with terrors’, although with uncertain doctrine according to some involved (Adair 1866: 316–21). Others joined in the revival preaching with three or four sermons daily. The effect of this preaching, according to one contemporary, was dramatic. Andrew Stewart, who wrote a history of Presbyterianism in the 1660s, described how revival preaching affected entire communities: ‘I have seen them myself stricken, and swoon with the Word—yea a dozen on one day carried out of doors as dead so marvellous was the power of God smiting their hearts for sin, condemning and killing . . . we knew, and yet know the multitudes of such men who had no power to resist the Word of God.’ Preaching, argued Stewart, had awakened a sense of sin, but this was followed by a reconstruction of lives ‘so that the slain were breathed upon, and life came into them; and they stood up as men now freed from the spirit of bondage’. Those with ‘wounded consciences’ began ‘to draw into holy communion and met together privately for edification . . . but now new life forced it upon the people who desired to know what God was doing with the souls of their neighbours who were wrought with the spirit’ and from this developed a new godly society in the area (Adair 1866: 316–21). In this case, as with some Catholic Counter-Reformation preaching in Ireland, the sermon was a powerful emotional experience that served to dissolve one set of social bonds and create new ones. In some contexts this might well be described as conversion, and there is little doubt that, in both Catholic and godly preaching, spiritual renewal lay at the core of what preachers were trying to achieve. However, the effect of this preaching was also to create a new type of community held together by the deeply emotional experience that the sermon had created.



raymond gillespie

Catholic Rebellion and Cromwellian Diversity In the 1640s, the scope and content of Reformed preaching underwent a dramatic change. The outbreak of war in Ireland in the autumn of 1641 saw significant advances over the next two years by the armies of the Catholic Confederation of Kilkenny. By the time a cessation was signed in September 1643, almost all Ireland outside Ulster and two areas around Cork and Dublin lay under the control of the Confederation. Parish churches and their pulpits in these areas thus passed into the hands of Catholic clergy, and hence the sorts of sermons delivered were rather different from what had been heard in the years before 1641. As might also be expected, the war affected the texts that those Protestant preachers who retained their pulpits chose, and it also shaped the way they handled those texts. In particular, what many of the clergy on the godly wing of the established church saw as a Catholic rebellion inspired a fierce backlash of antiCatholicism from the Dublin pulpits. Edward Dusterville, preaching at the funeral of one military commander at Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin in March 1642, described the Irish as ravening wolves, and a few months later Faithful Teate, the acting provost of Trinity College Dublin, claimed that the war in Ireland was ‘against our anti-Christian and bloody adversaries’, against whom revenge had to be sought. The cathedral also saw another theme in its preaching. The sub-dean, John Harding, arranged for Stephen Jerome, a minister of a godly background, to preach in the cathedral. Jerome saw the rebellion as a consequence of Charles I’s marriage to the Catholic Henrietta Maria and condemned kings who endangered their kingdom by marrying a daughter of Jezebel. For men such as Jerome and Harding, English cavaliers and Irish rebels were birds of a feather (Gillespie 2000c: 204). This sort of preaching may have been highly popular at the height of the war, but, as negotiations for a truce, and then a peace, began in 1643, it was clearly politically unacceptable. Harding was stripped of his preferments and degraded from the ministry, and Teate was removed from Trinity College and forced to flee to England. What replaced this dramatic preaching is unclear, since none of it has survived, but, with the immediate threat of war removed, it seems likely that preaching returned to many of its pre-war preoccupations. As the old ecclesiastical order gradually imploded in Ireland after 1647, with the proscription of the Book of Common Prayer and the effective abolition of episcopacy, preachers were faced with new challenges. The most important of these was the maintenance of theological orthodoxy and godly order. The collapse of episcopacy removed the licensing system for preachers, and the appearance of sectaries in Ireland with the Cromwellian army introduced a new, wide range of theological and spiritual options that were declaimed not only from pulpits, but also on the streets (Kilroy 1994; Gribben 2007). In areas such as Dublin, a wide variety of preaching styles and sermon content could be found, and this inevitably encouraged the intensification of a consumer culture in sermon listening. This desire for novelty in preaching was not new. In the 1630s, the

preaching in ireland



godly preacher Richard Olmstead had complained about people who desired novelty rather than edification and ‘go from sermon to sermon to know something to be able to discourse and find table talk’ (1630: 102, 105–6). In the 1650s, the possibilities for such sermon tasting expanded enormously, especially in the areas around Dublin where there were significant numbers of preachers. Lay reactions to what they heard are few, but the case of Elizabeth Chambers in Dublin may illustrate the point. In 1649–50, Elizabeth worked her way around the Dublin churches tasting sermons and judging the preachers. She first went to St Catherine’s ‘but I could not well hear the minister’ and she did not approved of what she did hear. Another preacher ‘moved’ her, but she found no ‘satisfaction’ in his sermons. It was only when she encountered John Rogers at Christ Church that she ‘was much raised up and went home with joy’ and eventually became a member of his church (Rogers 1653: 407–8). The emergence of this wide range of theological views expressed in preaching created a problem both for the Cromwellian administration and for those churches that felt a godly order was crucial to their view of salvation, most especially the Presbyterian church and, to a lesser extent, Independents. The Cromwellian administration, in particular, was caught between the dilemma of providing enough godly preachers to promote religious reform in Ireland, while, on the other hand, curbing the more radical sentiments expressed by Baptists and Quakers, many of whom had come to Ireland as part of the Cromwellian army and hence were in a position of considerable power in the military administration of Ireland before 1657. The Cromwellian regime attempted to solve this problem by controlling access to pulpits. In return for state payments for godly preachers, tests for orthodoxy were imposed in the form of the production of testimonials of their positions, often from English or Scottish churches (Barnard 1975: 144–53). In the larger preaching places, such as the old cathedral churches, the state assumed control for preaching, appointing preachers and maintaining order in the church while they preached (Gillespie 2000c: 212–14). By the late 1650s, political shifts were serving to marginalize some of the more radical sectaries in Ireland. The declining role of the army in civil administration had reduced the power of the Baptists in particular. In this context, some of the religious communities now moving into favour with the Dublin administration sought to establish greater order in preaching and to marginalize their opposition. At Cork in 1657 a number of ministers joined together to form an association under the leadership of the former Church of Ireland dean of Cork, Edward Worth, one function of which was to uphold the importance of ordination and to silence lay preaching (Anon. 1657: 2–3, 5). Their example was followed in Dublin and Leinster in 1659, when a number of ministers again formed an association based on the Solemn League and Covenant with the aim of stabilizing the ministry and promoting godly preaching by those ministers (Anon. 1659). In the main these associations emerged too late to have any real impact on ecclesiastical organization in Cromwellian Ireland, but their existence demonstrates the fragmented, dangerous, and uncontrolled state that preaching had attained by the late 1650s, and the fact that contemporaries were concerned about unregulated access to the pulpit.



raymond gillespie

Restoration and Dissent The Restoration of the king and church in 1660 provided a new structure that regulated the way in which the pulpit was to be used in the late seventeenth century. The Restoration settlement in the Church of Ireland imposed much tighter regulation on the ministry. The threat of radical preaching, associated with the Cromwellian regime, on the one hand, and the need to maintain social order in a highly volatile world, on the other, led the church to define its position in relation to dissent much more clearly. Theologically, too, the Church of Ireland took on a much more Arminian stance in the 1660s than it had done previously. Almost all the bishops in the reconstructed hierarchy had Laudian credentials that emphasized sacramental worship over preaching (Gillespie 2006: 225–9). All of this had an impact on the preaching practices of the established church. The bishops emphasized moderate, sober preaching with plain and practical sermons that did not touch on mysteries that were difficult to understand. In many cases clergy resorted to the theme of duty, which pervaded much of the theological writing of the late-seventeenth-century established church. Hardly surprisingly, there was little to commend the preaching of parish clergy to the hearers, whether those who attended every Sunday or those in search of edification or entertainment. Much of the emphasis of the worship in the late seventeenth-century Church of Ireland was on the liturgy set out in the Prayer Book, the use of which defined them against other Protestants and against Catholics (Gillespie 2001: 127–9). The sermon came to have a rather different role among the dissenting communities of late-seventeenth-century Ireland. Most of these had only been recently formed in the 1650s, and in the years after the Restoration were still in the process of shaping their own identities, defining what made them dissenting Protestants rather than members of the established church. In this process the minister was the focus for most congregations, and the central role of the minister was preaching. Preaching in this context did a great deal more than convey propositions about salvation or behaviour. It established a set of social relationships between the preacher and his audience that was wider than simply that between hearer and listener. Preachers taught their congregations not only the language and symbols of religious discourse, but also what bound them together as a social and ecclesial group and what separated them from other forms of Protestantism and from Catholics. Preaching in this tradition was a genuinely popular activity and formed the focal point of most dissenting worship. As the session of Larne Presbyterian church noted in 1701, ‘it is considered that unless there be a sermon they will hardly meet’, and in Summerhill, County Meath, the Church of Ireland rector increased his congregation by attracting local Presbyterians to worship by preaching a sermon (Gillespie 2001: 136–7). The attraction of the sermon in this context was twofold. The message was an immediate one, informed by the dissenting conviction that the sermon conveyed the immediate word of God. As the Ulster Presbyterian minister Robert Craghead put it starkly

preaching in ireland



in the 1690s, ‘God saveth by preaching’ (1694: 65, 67, 88). Secondly, the immediacy of the message was complemented by an immediacy of delivery. The ministerial presence conveyed the authority of the preacher in gesture and tone as much as in content. Dissenting clergy, for instance, did not preach from prepared texts, as many Church of Ireland clergy seem to have done, but used notes or preached entirely extempore. However, there were rules for the delivery of the sermon. The Synod of Ulster in 1697 declared that preachers ‘must use a sound form of words in preaching, abstaining from all romantic expressions and hard words which the vulgar do not understand and also from all sordid words and phrases’ (Anon. 1890–8: i. 25). Within these general rules there developed particular vocabulary, intonation, and gestures associated with dissenting pulpit oratory, with the Bible as important as a pulpit prop as it was a source of inspiration. These attributes of dissenting preaching were condemned by Church of Ireland clergymen, who castigated the drama of dissenting preachers and their play on the emotions of the congregation. However, this was an approach that congregations demanded. Some audiences complained that their minister did not have sufficient vocal power or dramatic gestures, and in the long term this could have severe repercussions, as listeners drifted off to other more dramatic performances elsewhere (Gillespie 2001: 139–40). Those who listened to dissenting sermons were not simply the passive consumers of entertainment. Listening to the ministerial performance was an active task. Dissenting preaching style was to expand on a biblical text by comparing it with other texts from other parts of the Bible and by placing several parts of scripture together to allow them to illuminate each other. Sermon listeners were encouraged to participate in this exercise by bringing their own Bibles to church and following the minister’s scriptural citations as they were mentioned. They were also encouraged to follow the argument of the sermon by keeping notes that could be read over later, either in private or as part of family worship (2001: 140–2). In such ways was the dissenting preaching style appropriated by the hearers of the sermon. Since the sermon was genuinely popular, it taught the laity a language and performance style that defined them against the established church. It created bonds between clergy and people that proved impossible to fracture and helped to build a culture of dissent that resisted the sporadic pressure by central government for conformity to the church as established by law. In that sense the survival of voluntary religion in the late seventeenth century and the emergence of effective sermon performance were inseparable. Perhaps nowhere was this more obvious than in the dramatic mass communion services that characterized Ulster Presbyterianism in the late seventeenth century. Up to 500 or 600 communicants might be expected at such an event. The entire experience could last for up to two weeks between preparation and the communion itself. What lay at the heart of this experience was preaching, which passed through a well-defined cycle. In the week before the communion the preacher’s theme was the unworthiness of the hearers and also the need for penitence. On the Saturday before the communion, sermons began to include the theme not only of unworthiness, but also the need for obedience. Such sermons were powerful pieces of ritual drama intended to set the scene for the moment of the sacrament itself on Sunday. As communicants received the bread and



raymond gillespie

wine, a sermon was preached focusing this time on the themes of triumphing and overcoming sin and temptation, and hence this became the pivot of the entire ritual. The following Monday was kept as a day of thanksgiving, with sermons intended to encourage and ensure God’s protection for those who had undergone the cathartic experience of the previous week. This experience of saturation preaching had both religious and social effects. While it may well have increased the spiritual fervour of the faithful, it also reinforced the social and confessional solidarity of all those present: all had heard the same sermons and through them understood both intellectually and emotionally the visible and invisible worlds and their place in them. The experience of the sermons and the other elements of the ritual had dissolved the social hierarchy and created a new one (Gillespie 1997: 99–101).

Williamite Stability and the Growth of Print The Williamite victory at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 produced a stability in the social order that ushered in the golden age of Irish Reformed preaching. Sermons entered public life in a way that they had never done before. In the decade of the 1690s alone, the Dublin press produced almost as many sermons as it had in the previous thirty years. Part of this was simply the result of the growth in the market for print in late-seventeenth-century Ireland. In the last five years of the seventeenth century, the output of the Dublin presses was roughly a third higher than the output in the first forty years of the century and three times the size of that in the 1670s (Gillespie 2005: 75–100, 187). To this must be added a growing volume of imports. It was inevitable that the sermon would be caught up in this avalanche of print. Yet what dominated these sermons was not the normal parochial or meeting discourse, but rather set-piece sermons preached on formal occasions. The increased frequency of the meeting of parliament, especially in the early eighteenth century, led to the publication of sermons preached before Houses of Parliament at prominent points in the Protestant political year. The anniversary of the outbreak of the 1641 rising on 23 October, thanksgiving for the failure of the Gunpowder Plot on 5 November or the king’s birthday, as well as celebrations of a more ad hoc sort, all required appropriate theological reflection from the pulpit, of which the parliament showed its approval by ordering the printing of the text. Events such as the death of Queen Mary saw dissenting ministers take to the pulpit and place their reflections in print later, given the high regard that the godly had for the queen. Equally, the formation of the Societies for the Reformation of Manners in Dublin during the 1690s saw sermons preached before the Society, warning in traditional language that Ireland lay in a state of probation before God and that, unless manners and morals were reformed, judgement would come. In the wake of the near Jacobite triumph in the late 1680s, Protestant Ireland had good reason to listen carefully to these warnings, and

preaching in ireland



six of the sermons published in the late 1690s originated in these sermons (Barnard 1992: 805–38). This rise of the printed sermon at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries transformed the sermon into a multimedia experience. What began as speech, perhaps written down in manuscript by a member of a congregation, now found itself in print. This had two significant consequences. First, it extended the preacher’s words to a congregation larger than might be contained in the church or meeting house on a Sunday morning. The printed sermon became a literary form as much as a means of religious instruction. The Irish lord lieutenant, the duke of Ormond, had among his library a significant collection of sermons drawn from both English and Irish presses. He had clearly read these and was sufficiently impressed by the style of some preachers. In 1681, on the basis of having read the sermons of John Tillotson, then dean of Canterbury, and of hearing him preach, he tried to entice him first to the bishopric of Derry and then to that of Meath, despite the fact that this would attract the wrath of his own chaplains, who regarded bishoprics as their reward (Gillespie 2000a: 102–3). Clearly the printed sermon had as much power to influence as did the preacher. Secondly, the appearance of the sermon in print changed the relationship between the preacher of the sermon and its consumers. Writing and print allowed for the sort of detailed analysis of theological ideas that the immediacy of the sermon did not. As a result, the role of the minister in this world of print moved from being a powerful and immediate presence around which a congregation would rally, to being the supplier of a text around which a different sort of ‘textual community’ might form. As the Dublin Presbyterian minister Joseph Boyse explained in his published sermons of 1708, ‘the sermons contained in this volume were formerly preached to you . . . they may when leisurely read make a more deep and durable impression than they did when transiently heard’ (1708: ii, sig. A2). The difference between hearing and reading is highlighted in the typography of the text. Sermons printed by Boyse as single items retained something of the congregational reaction to the text in the numerous scriptural references given in the margin, which could be followed up. In the collected sermons these marginal notes were removed, suggesting a less active and more meditative role for the reader and hence an impact different from that of the spoken word. Preachers certainly appreciated the need to adapt texts as they moved through the different media and had different functions. According to Henry Jones, bishop of Meath, one of his sermons, which was printed in 1676, ‘at first was intended but for that honourable auditory [Christ Church, Dublin]’ but ‘an imperfect copy taken while it was in speaking which I understood to have been dispersed I know not how far’ forced him to concede ‘to the revising and publishing thereof for avoiding those inconveniences declaring this and none other to be what I own’ and in the process ‘something also is added for further enlargement which might better pass (I conceive) in writing than speaking’ (1676: sig. B3v). Indeed, the printed sermon needed greater explication, since the preacher as central interpreter was replaced by a more ambiguous set of words given meaning in the less structured world of closet devotions or in debate with others.



raymond gillespie

Conclusion Preaching in early modern Ireland was a central feature of the experience of the varied forms of Protestantism on the island. On Sundays, and to a lesser extent weekdays, sermons could be heard in many parish churches over the kingdom and, in many cases, heard enthusiastically. Those sermons fulfilled many needs. Most importantly they were a point of contact between preacher and congregation. That point of contact could be used in many ways. On some occasions the message that the preacher wished to convey was political. Assize sermons and sermons on days of feast and fast carried political messages about loyalty to the state and the need for hearers to be good and loyal members of that state. Yet on most occasions sermons had a less dramatic function. Perhaps typical of what most preachers thought they were doing is the comment of the godly minister of Tralee in the 1630s, Devereaux Spratt. As Spratt stated: by the persuasion of friends I entered into the function of the ministry and chose for my first text Pro[verbs] xi, the latter part of the 30 ver[se] out of which I shewed I. The manner of our sermons, etc the word of God. II the manner of preaching, etc. III The end, God’s glory in the winning of souls. This way of preaching I followed and continued a few years in the town, joining myself to the people of God. (Seymour 1909: 16)

Here Spratt caught the essence of preaching for clergy: the salvation of souls. Perhaps equally important was the other function of preaching, that of joining preacher and people together into one community. In the first aim of the sermon, Irish Protestant clergy had limited success. Evangelical or controversial preaching to convert Catholics to what contemporaries regarded as the truth of Protestantism was singularly lacking, a fact reflected in the failure of Irish Protestants to engage with the Irish language, which was a necessary precondition for this sort of preaching and proselytizing activity. Yet, in their use of sermons to create Protestant communities in Ireland, clergy were remarkably successful. The development of distinctive preaching styles by the various confessional groups on the island made a vital contribution to the emergence of the Protestant religious cultures in early modern Ireland. By associating preaching styles and religious vocabularies with confessional groups, it served, together with particular ways of reading, singing, and praying, to bind together those groups in such a powerful way that it proved impossible to create the wider Protestant interest in Ireland that some early seventeenth-century preachers had envisioned. The sermon in Ireland was, indeed, a powerful tool for conversion in many and varied ways.

Bibliography Adair, Patrick (1866). A True Narrative of the Rise and Progress of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, ed. W. D. Killen. Belfast.

preaching in ireland



Anon. (1657). The Agreement and Resolution of Several Associated Ministers in the County of Cork for the Ordaining of Ministers. Cork. ——(1659). The Agreement and Resolution of the Ministers of Christ Associated with the City of Dublin and the Province of Leinster. Dublin. —— (1890–8). Records of the General Synod of Ulster. 3 vols. Belfast. Barnard, T. C. (1975). Cromwellian Ireland: English Government and Reform in Ireland, 1649–60. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— (1991). ‘The Uses of the 23rd October 1641 and Irish Protestant Celebrations’, English Historical Review, 106: 889–92. —— (1992). ‘Reforming Irish Manners: The Religious Societies in Dublin during the 1690s’, Historical Journal, 35: 805–38. Baxter, Richard (1691). The Certainty of the World of Spirits. Boyse, Joseph (1708). Sermons Preach’d on Various Subjects. 2 vols. Dublin. Brady, William M. (1868) (ed.). State Papers concerning the Irish Church in the Time of Queen Elizabeth. Chambers, Robert (n.d.). ‘Explanation of the Shorter Catechism’. MS, Union Theological College, Belfast. Connolly, Sean J. (2003).‘The Church of Ireland and the Royal Martyr: Regicide and Revolution in Anglican Political Thought, 1660–1745’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 54: 484–506. Craghead, Robert (1694). An Answer to a Late Book, Intituled, a Discourse concerning the Inventions of Men in the Worship of God. Edinburgh. Fletcher, Alan J. (2001). ‘Preaching in Late-Medieval Ireland: The English and Latin Traditions’, in Alan J. Fletcher and Raymond Gillespie (eds), Irish Preaching, 700–1700. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 56–80. Flynn, Thomas S. (1993). The Irish Dominicans, 1536–1641. Blackrock: Four Courts Press. Ford, Alan (1985). The Protestant Reformation in Ireland, 1590–1641. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Gillespie, Raymond (1997). Devoted People: Belief and Religion in Early Modern Ireland. Manchester: Manchester University Press. —— (2000a). ‘The Religion of the First Duke of Ormond’, in T. C. Barnard and Jane Fenlon (eds), The Dukes of Ormonde. Woodbridge: Boydell, 101–14. —— (2000b). ‘The Shaping of Reform, 1558–1625’, in Kenneth Milne (ed.), Christ Church Cathedral: A History. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 174–94. —— (2000c). ‘The Crisis of Reform, 1625–60’, in Kenneth Milne (ed.), Christ Church Cathedral: A History. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 195–217. —— (2001). ‘The Reformed Preacher: Irish Protestant Preaching, 1660–1700’, in Alan J. Fletcher and Raymond Gillespie (eds), Irish Preaching, 700–1700. Dublin: Four Courts Press. —— (2005). Reading Ireland: Print, Reading and Social Change in Early Modern Ireland. Manchester: Manchester University Press. —— (2006). Seventeenth-Century Ireland: Making Ireland Modern. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. Gribben, Crawford (2007). God’s Irishmen: Theological Debate in Cromwellian Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Happé, Peter, and King, John N. (1990) (eds). The Vocacyon of Johan Bale. Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance English Text Society. Jefferies, Henry A. (1997). Priests and Prelates of Armagh in the Age of Reformations, 1518–1558. Dublin: Four Courts Press. Jones, Henry (1676). A Sermon on Antichrist Preached at Christ-Church Dublin. Dublin.



raymond gillespie

Kilroy, Philomena (1975). ‘Sermon and Pamphlet Literature in the Irish Reformed Church, 1613–34’, Archivium Hibernicum, 33: 110–21. —— (1994). Protestant Dissent and Controversy in Ireland, 1660–1714. Cork: Cork University Press. Leslie, Henry (1625). A Warning for Israel. Dublin. Mac Cuarta, Brian (2007). Catholic Revival in the North of Ireland, 1603–41. Dublin: Four Courts Press. McNeill, Charles (1943) (ed.). The Tanner Letters. Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission. Murcot, John (1656). Saving Faith and the Pride of Life Inconsistent. Ó Clabaigh, Colmán N. (2001). ‘Preaching in Late Medieval Ireland: The Franciscan Contribution’, in Alan J. Fletcher and Raymond Gillespie (eds), Irish Preaching, 700–1700. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 81–93. Olmstead, Richard (1630). Sions Teares Leading to Joy. Dublin. Rogers, John (1653). Ohel or Beth Shemesh. Seymour, St John D. (1909) (ed.). Adventures and Experiences of a Seventeenth-Century Clergyman. Dublin. State Papers, Henry VIII (1834). Record Commissioners.

chapter 15

t h e ser mon i n e a r ly moder n wa l e s: con text a n d con ten t stephen k. roberts

Until 1660, the sermon in Wales was in public debate and polemic an indicator of Protestant intensity. On the eve of the Reformation, church buildings in Wales were frequented, beautified, and cared for. During its course, the translation of the Bible and the liturgical texts of the Church of England into Welsh helped create before 1640 something like a distinctively Welsh church, whose comforts and familiarity won the loyalty of the people (Fig. 23). Reformers wanted more, however, and champions of the sermon were usually reformers. That there was a scarcity of preaching among the ignorant Welsh people was a construction shared among reform-minded clergy and laity from the 1530s to the 1640s and later (BL Add. MS 34324, fo. 304; Birch 1742: iv. 565; Stearns 1936: 321). These advocates were passionate in their longing for more and better preaching, and the apogee of their achievement before 1700 came between 1640 and 1660. For all that, the number of surviving Welsh sermons—Welsh in language, or delivered in English but Welsh in origin—is small, and any discussion of them has to negotiate the differences between the oral and printed format, and between the intentions of their creators as preachers and as authors. The dominant strain of the Welsh sermon to emerge in these years was a vigorous, populist style that bore the hallmarks less of formal learning and more of homespun idiom, pointing the way to the explosion of sermons both as oratory and literary artefacts in the Calvinistic Methodist revival of the following century.

Preaching the Reformation in Wales, 1530–1640 William Barlow, prior of Haverfordwest before the Dissolution, wrote in 1535 to Thomas Cromwell of the ‘desolate scarcete of true prechers’, one among whom he counted himself (Wright 1843: 77, 189). He denounced the secular and regular clergy as hostile



stephen k. roberts

fig. 23 St Michael, Llanfihangel Din Silwy, Anglesey. A fine pulpit of local Welsh craftsmanship, added to this medieval church in 1628.

to the ministry of the word in south-west Wales, where ‘not one . . . sincerely prechithe Goddes word’ (Wright 1843: 79). Barlow’s commentary is so interwoven with his own efforts to ingratiate himself with the reforming Cromwell that at least some of its veracity is undermined. His reward was the see of St David’s. Nevertheless, the detail in his description of the 300–400 auditors at an ‘ungodly disguysed sermone’ (Wright 1843: 183–4) at St David’s on Innocents’ Day (28 December) 1538 seems unlikely to have been invented, and illustrates that not all pulpit utterances commended themselves to Protestants. Barlow’s proposed solution to the persistence of the traditions of the medieval church was a removal of his seat to Carmarthen and a regime of daily lectures on scripture. The sermons he gave and wherever possible promoted were expositions of the word of God. They were inseparable from the printed words that lay before the preacher in the pulpit as he held forth upon them. The idea of the sermon as an adjunct to the word is encapsulated in Barlow’s letter of 1535 to Cromwell, in which the need for more preaching is coupled with his indignant narrative of seizures of books by the

the sermon in wales



hostile bishop’s officers, behaving as if to have a New Testament in English were ‘horrible heresie’ (Wright 1843: 78). Three diocesan surveys of 1560, one from Llandaff in the south, the others from Bangor and St Asaph in the north, show that at the start of Elizabeth’s reign preaching remained at a premium. In Llandaff diocese, only five men were recorded as ‘able and lycensed to preach’, implying that in the whole of Monmouthshire only three clergymen enjoyed the confidence of their bishop in this aspect of their duties (Willis 1719: 194–211). Comparable statistics are found in St Asaph and Bangor. Five clergy were accounted concionatores evangelicos (‘conscientious preachers’) in the former, and only two in the latter (Willis 1720: 264; Glanmor Williams 1967: 148). In Bangor by the mid-1570s, an expectation of quarterly sermons by the higher diocesan clergy had been established, with the dates settled and set up in a table for the benefit of the auditors (Kennedy 1924: ii. 21–3). By the time that Bishop Marmaduke Middleton administered his articles in St David’s diocese in 1583, there was at least a hope of quarterly sermons in each parish church. Even so, a much greater emphasis remained on reading the services from the Book of Common Prayer, administering the sacraments, and reading from the Book of Homilies. Particular attention was paid to the availability of books in each church—six in all—for use by the incumbent (Kennedy 1924: iii. 139–40). There seems little doubt that preaching was becoming established as a basic function of the clergy. In St David’s in 1570, ten including the bishop were noted as preachers; in 1583, fourteen (Glanmor Williams 1967: 173–4). Even so, the reforming polemicist John Penry, a Welshman who wrote outside Wales, denounced at length the dearth of preaching in his native country, provoking defensive outrage in the Pembrokeshire antiquary George Owen (Penry 1960: 12, 13, 20, 36–8, 40, 62, 66, 73; J. Gwynfor Jones 1994: 163). From the earliest inroads by the Reformation into Wales, there was an official awareness that meaningful evangelization could be expected only when it was delivered in the language of the majority. In 1538, it was ordered that the gospel be preached in Cardigan ‘in the mother tongue’, and that the people should be weaned from devotion to the cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary by explanations in Welsh of the evils of idolatry (Wright 1843: 183–7). The order suggests a pointed sensitivity to language, as Welsh-speaking Cardigan was not far from the Englishry of south Pembrokeshire. None of the books essential for a reading, as opposed to a preaching, Protestant ministry was available in Welsh translation at the start of the Reformation, but from 1546 printed devotional literature in Welsh began to appear. A primer of that year by Sir John Price of Brecon was followed by a translation of Gospels and Epistles in 1551. The demands of an Act of Parliament of 1563 requiring a Welsh Bible and prayer book were partially satisfied in 1567 with the publication of a New Testament, but only in 1588 was the entire Bible published in Bishop William Morgan’s celebrated and enduring vernacular translation. Other milestone Welsh versions of English church texts followed, including Edward James’s Book of Homilies (1606) and Edmund Prys’s metrical psalms (1621) (Glanmor Williams 1987a: 476–7; 1987b: 192–3). The geography of Wales inhibited the development of any focal point or hierarchy of esteem in preaching places. There were the four impoverished dioceses of Llandaff,



stephen k. roberts

St David’s, Bangor, and St Asaph, but no privileged pulpit in city or palace. Nor were devotees of the printed sermon any better served. The absence of a commercial printing press in Wales before 1718 meant that all publishing was brought to fruition outside Wales, mostly in London (Rheinalt Llwyd 1998: 93; Rees 1998: 123; Philip Henry Jones 2002: 730). It was the word-based liturgy of the church that the Welsh-published translations helped consolidate before 1640. The comforting familiarity and rhythms of the liturgical year were accepted readily by a people whose devotions to cults and other forms of popular piety attracted the notice of commentators even in the mid-seventeenth century. The achievements in Welsh printing before 1640 therefore did little to encourage or develop the transfer of the preacher’s art into a printed format. Very few printed sermons have survived from that period. The first sermon from Wales to be recorded in the register of the Stationers’ Company in London was one preached in Carmarthen in English on 26 November 1576. This was A Funerall Sermon . . . at the Buriall of the Right Honourable Walter Earle of Essex. The preacher was Richard Davies, bishop of St David’s. The printed sermon was prefaced by extensive genealogical and heraldic pictorial material and laudatory poetry in five languages. In the sermon itself, Davies gave out his text, from Revelation, and promised a tripartite discourse on the authority of his text, an exposition of its doctrine, and its application to the circumstances. Like official sermons more generally, much of this one was taken up with a survey of deficiencies in public life, but it reinforced the message of the dignity and authority of the peerage conveyed in the preface (Richard Davies 1577). The Stationers’ Register recorded only two more printed sermons of Welsh provenance before 1640: one a gentry funeral sermon now lost, the other a 1629 translation of Arthur Dent’s Sermon of Repentance (W. Ll. Davies 1921: 169–71). To quantify the volume of sermonic literature in print alone, however, is unrealistically restrictive. A significant amount of material in manuscript format circulated in early modern Wales as a result of the efforts of a generation of copyists, whose activities kept a pre-Reformation tradition of sermonizing in the consciousness of the Welsh people. These were manuscripts (in Welsh or sometimes in a macaronic mix of Welsh and English) of free-metre poems called in south Wales cwndidau, aptly described by their early twentieth-century editors as ‘Welsh sermons in song’ (Fig. 24). Elsewhere in Wales, similar verses were known as carolau, ‘carols’. The phrase ‘free metre’ in this context means the use of popular verse forms, accessible to the unlearned, as against the strict metre poetry composed according to restrictive rules of composition, which had severely limited its usefulness as a creative tool. The authors of this free-metre verse might be laymen, but also included clergy such as ‘Sir’ Huw Dafydd, the parish priest of Gelligaer in Glamorgan, whose Christmas carol has been dated to 1520 (Hopkin-James and Evans 1910: 128). One of the most celebrated of the cwndidau is ‘The Dream of Tomos Llewelyn Dio ap Hywel’, which takes the form of an extended lively dialogue between church and alehouse, in which the former is derided as unfrequented: ‘Tydi hen eglwys fraithlwyd | di ymgeledd i’th adwyd | Ni ddaw nymmor o ddynion | i’th gilfacheu gweigion’ (You old grey mottled church, built with care, hardly anyone comes to your empty nooks)

the sermon in wales



fig. 24 Sermonic literature transmitted by copyists. The opening lines of a cywydd, a poem in traditional strict metre, ‘against pride’. The author, Ieuan Tew, flourished in the fifteenth century, but it is here in the hand of Llywelyn Sion (fl. 1600). Cardiff City Library MS 5.44 f. 29v, reproduced by permission of Cardiff Libraries.

(Hopkin-James and Evans 1910: 81). Little is known of the (probably Elizabethan) author, thought to have been from Llandyfodwg, Glamorgan, beyond a wealth of dubious tradition. It is nevertheless of at least passing interest that one of these unsubstantiated traditions should be that he was licensed to preach by Archbishop Grindal (Hopkin-James and Evans 1910: 287; Glanmor Williams 1984: 164–79). It has been argued that the moralizing cwndidau, socially conservative and respectful of hierarchy and good order, were aimed at influencing the leaders of local society (Glanmor Williams 1984: 162). They were kept in circulation by the efforts of copyists who were active in scribal publication, such as Tomos ap Ieuan of Tre’r Bryn, Coychurch (fl. 1670) (Glanmor Williams 1984: 168–73), and the better-known John Jones of Gellilyfdy, Flintshire (d. in or before 1658) (Nesta Lloyd 2004). The motives behind these labours have much in common with those found among English copyists, whose work was rooted in gentry country-house life, and for whom copying was ‘a way of capturing the past for future service’ (Love 1993: 201). However, in the upsurge of interest in copying in seventeenth-century Wales there seems little or no sign of the impulse towards exclusive access and ownership that marked the English gentry copyists (1993: 177). Copying of earlier sermonic verse material may have been compensatory, as



stephen k. roberts

comparatively little pious literature, either sermons or other religious didactic material, found its way into print in the context of an undeveloped market. Indeed, the cwndidau may have been intended for recital at social gatherings, to have an impact comparable to that of a book where there was limited literacy and a restricted market. Manuscript circulation of cwndidau complemented the popularity of the printed service book, Llyfr Plygain, of which four editions appeared between 1607 and 1633 (Glanmor Williams 1987a: 476–7). It is clear that no compartmentalized distinction can be sustained between advanced Protestant zeal for preaching and publishing sermons, on the one hand, and Welsh popular culture, as represented by the cwndidau, on the other. William Wroth, the founder of the first gathered congregation in Wales, at Llanfaches, Monmouthshire, in 1639, composed cwndidau (J. Gwynfor Jones 2009: 296). Verses in free-metre form in English are attributed to the pugnacious Puritan minister Vavasor Powell (NLW Add. MS 366A; see App. I.15). Morgan Llwyd, among the most allusive and millenarian of the Welsh radical ministers, was a prolific composer of manuscript poetry in the free-metre form (Morgan Llwyd 1899). As for the delivery of sermons in the pulpit in the Welsh language, the evidence is patchy and anecdotal. It was worthy of contemporary record that, in March 1631, ‘the first sermon in Welsh’ was delivered in the parish church of St Asaph, rather than in the cathedral, by order of the reforming bishop there, John Owen (Peter Roberts 1883: 134). The standard of formal education attained by the Welsh clergy had unquestionably risen by this time, but the gulf between them and their Puritan critics was widening over doctrinal questions, not on language policy or pulpit style (W. P. Griffith 1996: 117–18; Glanmor Williams 2007: 11–12, 16).

The Apogee of Welsh Preaching, 1640–1660 A petition placed before the House of Commons in December 1640 stood in a long tradition of complaint about the quantity and quality of preaching in Wales. In 1,000 parishes, it was claimed, there were only thirteen ‘constant preachers’, who preached both morning and evening on the sabbath and who expounded the catechism in Welsh. If every ‘silly reader ordained by a bishop’ were removed, ‘people would seeke out for a preaching ministry, the meanes of their salvation’ (BL MS Harleian 4931, fo. 90). The origins of the petition lay in the group of radical ministers active in Monmouthshire and the Severnside region: William Erbury, Walter Cradock, and others, associates of William Wroth, who had founded the first Welsh separatist church at Llanfaches, Monmouthshire, in 1639. Claiming support from the ‘whole principality of Wales’, in February 1641 seven of these ministers put their names to a follow-up petition, with Erbury’s name foremost (BL Add. MS 70109, misc. 69). Backed by Sir Robert Harley, a patron of Puritan ministers in the Welsh marches, the petitioners won from the Commons an order that Erbury, Cradock, Richard Symonds, Ambrose Mostyn, and Henry Walter would be at liberty to preach in Wales wherever preaching was needed,

the sermon in wales



which, in the turbulent politico-ecclesiastical conditions of 1640–1, was the best outcome they could realistically have expected (Bowen 2009: 175–7; Stephen K. Roberts 2009: 42). Their strictures have been subject to less critical comment by historians than they might have been. Visitation articles by the bishops of Llandaff and St David’s in 1603 and 1622 indicate a concern to ground preaching in the routines of parish life, and Bishop Francis Godwin’s call to scribes of last wills to encourage testators to bequeath donations to the cathedral was evidently building on existing charitable impulses (Fincham 1994: 1–3, 110–11, 200–1; Judith Jones 1997). Contemporary with the radicals’ petitions of 1640–2, another from north Wales, albeit of much less certain authorship, viewed with alarm any threat to episcopacy and the Book of Common Prayer (Maltby 1998: 98, 101, 114, 131, 243–4). During the Civil War, the committee for scandalous ministers was intended as the nemesis of the ‘reading ministers’ who blocked the progress of the preaching ministry, but parliament devised another vehicle for promoting the kind of ministry it favoured: the committee for plundered ministers. By 1650 seventeen of forty-nine beneficed ministers in Pembrokeshire could attribute their appointments to the committee (Stephen K. Roberts 2004: 62). It wrestled with the legal niceties of clerical tenure and the singularities of impropriations, under the shadow of the Solemn League and Covenant with the Scots (1643) and bolstered by the pronouncements and publications of the Westminster Assembly of Divines. The Covenant, the Directory of Worship (1645), and associated disciplines of meditative and sermon-enhanced fast days were imposed by military and civilian representatives of parliament where they were able to establish their authority. In Pembrokeshire the Covenant was imposed in 1644; in Cardiff the Directory was introduced in October 1645 (Phillips 1874: i. 215; Stephen K. Roberts 2003: 659–60). The new order was usually imposed on a hostile populace, ‘meerly deluded by the name of King and Service-book, for their religion’ (Stearns 1936: 126). The episcopal Anglican tradition persisted as long as the king’s authority held sway, evident in the funeral sermons preached. They were delivered at the obsequies of the north Wales gentry at least until January 1645, although noted increasingly as remarkable occasions (Peter Roberts 1883: 206, 209, 214, 215). The Covenant, the Directory, the fast days, and the orders of the committee for plundered ministers—the four tools used by parliament in its effort to entrench support for itself in Wales—brought with them implications for the style and context of preaching. The parliamentary orders of 1640 in favour of itinerant preaching were left exposed as mere expediency, despite the creditable interest in itinerancy that has been traced back to the mid-sixteenth century (Hill 1974: 5). After 1640, the efforts of the Commons had been directed more towards shoring up and enhancing the settled parochial ministry rather than a ministry of mobile preachers in the vanguard of parliamentarian advance. By September 1648 at least 175 parishes had in theory benefited from deals done with convicted royalists, by which settlements were bestowed on parish clergy in lieu of swingeing fines, but only a tiny handful were in Wales (Houses of Parliament 1648). By October 1650 the effects since 1642 of ejections of ‘scandalous’ or inadequate clergy, manipulation of impropriations, and the introduction of preaching ministers were



stephen k. roberts

measured in the surveys of livings authorized by the Rump Parliament. In Pembrokeshire, there were 156 parishes and 47 serving ministers; of these, 32 were noted with approval as ‘preaching ministers’; another 47 had been ejected. The survey confounded a newspaper report that in all the county there was ‘never a faithfull preacher’ (Stearns 1936: 308), but the true picture was still a challenge for reformers. The most shocking statistic is that, of 108 parishes in the county, most of them, in fact, had no minister at all (LPL MS Comm. XXIIa/14/87–182). At the other end of the country, a contemporary survey of twenty-nine livings in Anglesey noted that, of the sixteen ministers ejected, fourteen had been graduates. The surviving cadre of eleven ‘constant’, ‘painful’, or ‘diligent’ preachers included seven with university degrees (LPL MS Comm. XXIIa/1/38–56). In other parts of Wales the same pattern was visible: a disturbance in the proprietorship of livings, many ejections of personnel, but no significant advance in numbers of preaching clergy. Little is known in detail of the sermons preached by the settled clergy in Wales during the 1640s and 1650s. Guidance for ministers in the Directory placed a premium on their academic learning, and approved preaching that was performed ‘painfully’, ‘plainly’, ‘faithfully’, ‘wisely’, ‘gravely’, ‘with loving affection’, and ‘as taught of God’ (Westminster Assembly 1645: 13–18). It stipulated that normally a sermon should be based on a text of scripture, and a record of sermons preached in Flintshire during the mid-1650s confirms that that was indeed the usual practice. The implication of the Anglesey surveyors’ description of Robert Morgan BD as ‘learned, able, preaching’ and of that of the nongraduate Evan Jones as ‘good, able, preaching’ suggests that learning was noted and evident in Morgan’s ministrations, and was in local official quarters duly prized and nurtured. The best-documented career of a preaching, university-educated, beneficed clergyman in Wales during the Interregnum is that of Philip Henry, who preached occasionally and as required in Flintshire, combining his tentative pulpit appearances with work as a tutor to his patron’s sons. The format of his ordination in 1657 in a Presbyterian classis included his oral testimony of proofs of God’s grace working in him and tests in the biblical languages, logic, philosophy, theology, and even on the contemporary controversies between Presbyterians and Independents. On the latter issue, someone answered for Henry, ‘if I had not approved of the Presbyt. way, I would not have come thither’ (Henry 1882: 14, 15, 34–7). After the trial and execution of Charles I, the commonwealth government inherited twin strategies for augmenting the preaching ministry: improving the quality of the parochial clergy and supporting itinerancy. The act for maintenance of preaching ministers (June 1649) confirmed the commitment of the Rump Parliament to the former strand, while the act for promoting and propagating the gospel in New England (July 1649) was the first statute to embody the principle of an itinerant mission and to incorporate the word ‘propagation’ in its text (Firth and Rait 1911: ii. 142, 197). Towards the end of 1649, a flurry of petitions reached parliament advocating mission schemes of various kinds, among them one from north Wales that proposed the arrangements that within two months became incorporated in the Act ‘for the better Propagation and Preaching of the Gospel in Wales, and redress of some Grievances’ (February 1650) (Firth and Rait

the sermon in wales



1911: ii. 342; Stephen K. Roberts 2004: 71). This was parliament’s response to Hugh Peter’s plea from west Wales the previous month: ‘We want preachers of the Gospel, I wish you could spare out of your abundance some to that great work’ (Stearns 1936: 231). The Act breathed fresh authority into the urge to rid the church of inadequate ministers. Within a few months, Cardiganshire had been purged of half its cadre of forty-four ministers disparaged as ‘priests’, with a promise that they would soon be followed by another twenty ‘rotten’ men like them (Stearns 1936: 318). During the three-year life of the commission established by the Act, 278 ministers lost their livings, 82 from north Wales and 196 from the south (Johnson 1978: 237). They were succeeded by itinerant preachers, sixty-three of whom—many shadowy figures—were long ago identified by Dr Richards (Thomas Richards 1920: 148–50). The itinerants were fired by millenarian zeal, and the practice of their preaching blended with their apocalyptic theology so that their sermons necessarily deviated from the style of structured, prepared expositions of scripture, supported by scholarship, advocated in the Presbyterian Directory, which, remarkably seems not to have been translated into Welsh. Church buildings were not completely shunned by the itinerants. Jenkin Lloyd took monthly communion services in the church of Merthyr Tydfil; William Erbury conducted his disputation with Henry Niccols in the church at Newcastle, Bridgend. Niccols had the living of one parish and conducted services for a gathered congregation nearby (Thomas Richards 1920: 167–8; Niccols 1653: 5). There is, however, plenty of evidence that the ministers travelled significant distances. Morgan Llwyd left his home at Wrexham in north-east Wales to preach in the open air in the Llŷn peninsula. He would preach on market days, and as he walked through Pwllheli people would get out of his way ‘pe buasai gerbyd yn carlamu trwy’r heolydd’ (as if he were a carriage galloping through the streets) (Robert Jones 1958: 3). Llwyd himself tells us he lost his voice in Llŷn (Morgan Llwyd 1899: 68). In the same region of north-west Wales, John Williams preached outdoors to good effect with a trumpetlike voice that was said to carry a quarter of a mile (Robert Jones 1958: 2). Henry Walter and Richard Powell preached over two counties each, Powell ranging over Herefordshire, strictly beyond his brief, as well as Breconshire (Alexander Griffith 1654: 8). Vavasor Powell, said to have preached ‘every day in the week’ and grudgingly acknowledged by a hostile observer as ‘metropolitan of the itinerants’, was active in Brecon, Radnor, and Montgomeryshire, with regular visits to London, where he preached both official sermons and to radical congregations such as that which met at Blackfriars (Gough 1981: 160; Alexander Griffith 1654: title page). The timings of other preachers were occasionally synchronized: the south Wales Baptists agreed a preaching schedule for the Carmarthen district that involved three speakers (Owens 1996: 13). Not all the potential auditors of the itinerants responded as the Pwllheli people did towards Llwyd. Where gentry patrons were able to lay on appropriate accommodation and refreshments, the outcome could be more fruitful. The chronicler Richard Gough furnishes a memorable account of a visit by Vavasor Powell to the house of Thomas Baker in Myddle, Shropshire:



stephen k. roberts

I have heard him pray and preach four hours together in the dining room at Sweeney, where many persons came to hear him; and when the people departed they had every one a quarter of a twopenny bun or cake, and everyone a glass of beer, of about half a pint. (Gough 1981: 160)

It was beer—not wine, the usual social lubricant of polite urban society—that was offered to Powell’s auditors, indicating the social target of itinerant preaching. In the effort to reach out to an unconverted people, plain, urgent speaking stood far ahead of scholarship and ornament in the preacher’s armoury of skills. By the later 1640s there were enough lively preachers in Wales to encourage the ‘gadding to sermons’ that characterized Puritan lay enthusiasts in England. Richard Davies, son of a small farmer in Welshpool, began to take an interest in sermon-going when he was on the point of adolescence. He attached himself to Vavasor Powell and the Independents, following the celebrity preacher to his engagements in east Wales. Davies’s literacy was better developed than that of many of his fellow enthusiasts, and he soon found himself copying out Powell’s pulpit exhortations for the benefit of others, thereby enhancing his own selfesteem. When it came to settling on a trade, Davies was even able through godly networks to choose his own master, a felt-maker, and accompanied his employer to services, writing out sermons and making forays into religious expression acceptable for young godly men: extempore prayer (Richard Davies 1752: 1–4). Here was a case study in the impact of preaching, but the effects of most sermons are harder to assess. In 1653, Powell published in London an account of conversion narratives, Spirituall Experiences of Sundry Beleevers, which included short spiritual autobiographies, many of them from servants and former apprentices, confirming the direction of his own ministry. The location for many conversions was the private meeting, rather than the parish church. The formulaic element of at least a proportion of the narratives limits their usefulness as evidence, but the insistence on the comforts of ‘holy duties’ (devotions and spiritual exercises) in private settings suggests an important theme in Interregnum spiritual life. Curiously, none of Powell’s narratives can be traced explicitly to Welsh experiences, but this may have been a deliberate strategy to widen the readership of a book designed to promote the case for gathered churches. The itinerant proponents of the ‘congregational way’ and its variants were not the only preachers whose sermons fell on fertile ground. Between 1655 and 1656 Joseph Crichley (1637–74) of Wrexham, a young grocer similar in age and punctilious godly zeal to Richard Davies, if not like him in his theological tastes, kept notes of the local sermons he attended (NLW St Asaph, will, 1674; Palmer 1888: 4; Morgan Llwyd 1908: p. li). These sermons were delivered in parish churches, and in each case Crichley prefaced the biblical text expounded with the formula ‘as it is taken out of . . . ’. Crichley heard twenty-three ministers preach forty sermons, at least one of them an assize sermon before the judges at Wrexham. The ministers were nearly all settled, learned divines, whose core theology might in the context of the Interregnum church best be described as ‘orthodox’, meaning broadly Calvinist despite adherence to either Presbyterian or Independent views on matters of church membership or governance. Crichley made his notes up in full sentences, perhaps creating a fair record from notes scribbled during or immediately after

the sermon in wales



the sermons. His grasp of the complexities of sermon structure and his capacity to note supplementary scriptural references provided by the preachers as they expounded their texts suggest a sophisticated methodology and extensive biblical knowledge that can perhaps be taken as read in an auditor whose skills in interpretation kept pace with the preacher’s in explication. The subject matter of the sermons was strikingly New Testament in character, texts from the Gospels and Epistles outnumbering those from the Old Testament by over three to one. The pulpit methods deployed by the ministers included the breaking-down of texts into smaller parts for minute treatment, the expositions of polar opposites such as election and reprobation, and the adoption of a catechismic style of question and answer on theological detail. The secular imagery deployed from the pulpit was often homely. Philip Henry asserted in a treatment of the doctrine of justification that ‘an ould deare steeler will make the best keeper of a parke’, and a colleague preaching at Bangor-on-Dee characterized false teachers as ‘highwaymen lying in waite for their praii’ (Bodl. MS Rawlinson C261, fos 4v, 10). Occasionally there are learned allusions, such as a sermon on Psalm 119 enhanced by a Latin couplet about Achilles, translated into two rhyming English couplets (Bodl. MS Rawlinson C261, fo. 46). The detail in the notes suggests that after a service Crichley may have taken himself to the vestry door to complete his record with the collaboration of the preacher himself. His methods are comparable with those of English gentry notables motivated by ‘a positive concern with godly reformation and their own spiritual fulfilment’ (Ann Hughes 2004: 328). With the exception of the sermon before judges, the preaching that Crichley recorded was set in the context of conventional parish services. The sermonic form was, however, adapted in Wales as in England during the 1640s and 1650s for controversialist purposes. Disputations between clergy took place in various locations across Wales. Some of these grew out of sermons. The Independent and orthodox Henry Niccols, ‘bishop’ of the Vale of Glamorgan, went to hear William Erbury preach at Newcastle, Bridgend, and after the sermon stood up to dispute Erbury’s interpretation of a passage in Zechariah. An invitation to private discussion was rejected, ‘seeing he did deliver such things in publique, as I conceived not to be truths, it stood him upon to maintain them in publique’, so a disputation took place in Cowbridge (Niccols 1653: 7; Jones and Owens 1962: 65–6). A disputation in July 1652 between Vavasor Powell and George Griffth at Newchapel, Montgomeryshire, was a three-hour event to which a sermon by Griffith was promised, though not delivered, as a curtain-raiser (Anon. 1653a: 1; Anon. 1653b: 1, 21). Some of these were highly structured, gladiatorial conventions, with the clerical antagonists backed by professional colleagues and the wrangling presided over by a moderator (Anon. 1653b: 6, 7, 13). The practical outcomes of this and other disputations were significant. True to form, Erbury denounced Presbyterians, Independents, and Baptists, pleasing no one but the royalist disenfranchised Anglicans present, and his pronouncements from the pulpit were criticized as far away as Cambridge (Niccols 1653: 8, 41). As a result of another disputation involving Erbury, at Llantrisant, the Calvinistic Baptist minister there was obliged at the insistence of a south Wales denominational general meeting ‘to betake



stephen k. roberts

himself to the ministry to the world’ (White 1976: 57). Erbury himself explains how auditors were unused to interruptions or challenges to ministers, and how an unexpected disputation could generate ‘the trouble and tumult of the company; who being strange to such open affronts, and publique contests in the Church, began to forget what they heard before, and to rise up on their seats, as if they were to see a shew’ (Erbury 1653a: 5–6). In the Newchapel disputation, at least one auditor called out to offer his own opinion on the adulterers and sodomites of Montgomeryshire (Anon. 1653b: 18). Disputations were ‘vivid evidence of the fluid marketplace’ that religion in Wales as well as England had become (Ann Hughes 1990: 49). Of the contexts in which sermons were preached by orthodox clergy, the disputation was the least predictable in outcome, where the heat of pulpit argument could transmit itself into unseemly behaviour among the auditors. By contrast, sermons preached before urban corporations, at assizes, meetings of great sessions, and similar local state occasions were highly decorous. Civic sermons were preached at English-speaking Haverfordwest before the Civil War (B. G. Charles 1967: 12). Wales was no different from England in the attention given to religious utterance in the more formalized assemblies of courts of justice. An example of a sermon at Carmarthen great sessions has survived because it was published in 1657, albeit with a technically incorrect description as an ‘assize’ sermon. Highly conventional in form, the assize or great sessions sermon dwelt, even under the Cromwellian protectorate, on the indissoluble link between church and state, and apotheosized the magistrate as God’s vicegerent (on assize sermons, see also Adlington, Chapter 21, this volume). The preacher and author of the Carmarthen sermon took the opportunity to denounce Welsh litigiousness, ‘the Brittish feuds and quarrells of persons and familyes’ (Thomas 1657: 19–20). Thomas spared no one in what must have seemed like an ad hominem attack, excoriating false witnesses, jurors (‘commonly . . . kneaded out of the dregs of the people’), and corrupt, avaricious lawyers (1657: 18, 24, 34–5). The element of anomie in Thomas’s sermon was doubtless as expected as pulpit denunciations of sinners were, and his lawyer hearers probably received his harangue with at least feigned appreciation and a show of equanimity. A preacher whose sermonic skill was equal to his enthusiasm for the prevailing parliamentary climate might expect an invitation to preach before either House of Parliament, or to the fathers of the City of London (on preaching in parliament, see Webster, Chapter 20, this volume). Welsh preachers made an impact in this way in the capital. Vavasor Powell preached to both Commons and City. In December 1649, he treated the lord mayor and aldermen to an exhortation that the work of reform should continue. His style was the urgent and plain one he was perfecting in Wales (Powell 1649). His appearance before the Rump Parliament two months later to preach a fastday sermon came at a high point in the radicalism of the commonwealth. With the Welsh act for propagating the gospel freshly printed, the Members may have been openly receptive to Powell’s enthusiastic calls for further reformation: passages in his sermon were larded with millenarian celebration that one of the ten horns of the Beast had been cut off. Even in the Rump Parliament in 1650, however, not all his auditors would have been comfortable with this unsubtle allusion to the regicide. It was left to others to urge

the sermon in wales



remedial action from the pulpit after the regime had run out of steam. In 1653 and 1656, John Owen, born in England but with unquestionable Welsh loyalties, preached before parliament in a very different register, arguing strenuously in October 1652 that the propagation act should not be allowed to expire, and in 1656 pleading the cause of the gospel in Wales, ‘almost cast to the ground’ ‘between misguided zeal and formality’ (John Owen 1850–5: viii. 380–1, 452). State sponsorship of a very different stamp came during the Civil War at the king’s alternative English capital, Oxford. St Giles Church there was the intended venue for a scheme to lay on preaching in Welsh for those natives of the principality serving as soldiers in Charles’s army (Charles I 1645: 4). Whether such sermons were indeed delivered is not known. The sponsorship in London from the mid1650s of sermons by voluntary associations of exiles from English counties had no Welsh equivalent until 1715 (Key 1994: 251). The demotic styles and content of itinerant preaching, whether in churches, towns, or on moorland and mountain, tended to discourage theological subtlety, classical allusion, and literary ornament. This may in turn have dissuaded many of the most powerful preachers in Interregnum Wales from printing their sermons. Reluctance is evident in Vavasor Powell, who ‘would not neglect for the Printing of a thousand Books, the preaching of one Sermon’ (1650: sig. A4v). William Erbury’s first venture into print, in 1639, The Great Mystery of Godlinesse, was a conservative and orthodox Calvinist tract that owed much to the sermon format. By the early 1650s he was concluding that ‘God is going out, and departing from all the preachings of men’ (Erbury 1653b: 38). His subsequent ventures into print were controversialist or theological speculations, highly charged ad hominem polemic, and pugnacious, assertive reports of disputations rather than worked-up sermons. Of all the eleven books published by Morgan Llwyd, not one was in sermon style, except perhaps for internal, perorative passages in his most celebrated work, Llyfr y Tri Aderyn (Book of the Three Birds). The considerable corpus of unpublished work Llwyd left behind contains verse, hymns, and correspondence, but only scraps that can be called sermon plans, and one finished piece, ‘Where is Christ?’, that looks as if it began life as a sermon (Morgan Llwyd 1899: 296–309; 1994: 91). The exception to this pattern is Walter Cradock, a state-supported lecturer at Allhallows-the-Great, London, 1643–6, and, in the judgement of his most acute modern commentator, ‘above all, a preacher’ (Nuttall 1957: 24). First publishing a sermon given before the Commons in July 1646, he went on to publish thirty-two between 1648 and 1651, with further ‘exercises before sermons’ published in 1650. Most, if not all, of this material must have originated in his years in London. Cradock’s unusually limpid and thoughtful prose is scarcely likely to have been delivered on the stump after his return to Wales. The assumption must be that Cradock fashioned his sermon notes into prose marked by an immediacy that made for lively copy in print. An example is the most celebrated quotation from his printed sermons, describing the diffusion of godly Protestantism in south Wales and the irrelevance of higher education among ministers: the Gospel is run over the Mountaines between Brecknockshire, and Monmouthshire, as the fire in the thatch; and who should doe this? . . . They have no Ministers, it is



stephen k. roberts

true, if they had, they would honour them, and blesse God for them; and shall we raile at such, and say they are Tub-Preachers, and they were never at the University? (Cradock 1648: 50)

In later collections, Cradock ensured that his printed text was topical enough to include brief digs at critics of the itinerants (1650: 205). The continuing lack of a printing industry in Wales must have kept the market for Welsh printed sermons depressed. The book trade was an instrument of the politically influential, those geographically and intellectually close to the seat of political power. It has been shown beyond question that, especially on the parliamentarian side during the Civil War, the production and uses of propaganda were sophisticated and practised (Peacey 2004: 31–63). The value of print as a means of influencing public debate is essential background for appreciating the persistence and repetitiveness of polemical pamphlets on the Welsh church, in particular for and against the Committee for the Propagation of the Gospel, printed in London during the 1650s. The ground covered in this protracted controversy concentrated on the number of ministers ejected, the poor standard of education of the itinerant preachers, the alleged disappearance of the financial resources of the church, and the deterioration in Welsh religious provision. Typical of this literature was Strena Vavasoriensis (1654), which thundered ‘that notwithstanding all this great Revenue by them received, there are above seven hundred Parishes in the thirteen Counties unsupplied with any Ministers . . . and you may ride ten or twenty miles on the Lords day, where there is twenty Churches, and not one door opened’ (Alexander Griffith 1654: 5). The corpus of sermons in Welsh that found their way into print in London between 1640 and 1660 is small. A number of them were translations of distinguished English contributions to the genre. Thomas Shepard’s sermon The Sincere Convert was published in Welsh translation in 1657, and the following year saw a Welsh version of Sermon against Schism by Jasper Mayne (Shepard 1657; Mayne 1658). Vavasor Powell published a translation of one of his own sermons, Saving Faith, which he gave a different title in Welsh, Canwyll Crist (The Candle of Christ) (Powell 1653a). These translations of sermons were a subset of a wider impulse to provide Welsh versions of religious works that had made an impact in England: Richard Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted, in Welsh from 1659, is a classic example (W. Ll. Davies 1921: 173). It stood in a tradition established in earlier decades, when influential English religious texts were translated into Welsh as part of the evangelizing urge of pious Protestants. Among these are two works of 1630, the translation of Arthur Dent’s A Godly Sermon (Dent 1630) and Rowland Vaughan’s influential version of The Practice of Piety, by Lewis Bayly, bishop of Bangor. In the second half of the 1650s, a few sermons appeared in the London bookshops that were translations neither from English originals, nor from the celebrated ministers whose controversialist or theological works have commanded scholarly attention. Cerbyd Iechydwriaeth (The Chariot of Salvation), by Thomas Powell, was the work of a minister from Cantref, Breconshire, ejected from his living in 1650, who announced to his readers that he turned to writing ‘pan ddaith attal a rhwystr arnom i bregethu’r

the sermon in wales



Efengyl yn eich plith’ (when a stop and obstacle came on me to preach the gospel among you) (Powell 1657: sig. A2r). In 1657, his text of religious instruction, some of it in catechismic form, was graced with some commendatory englynion (miniature strict-metre poems) from a zealous royalist and litterateur, Rowland Vaughan of Caer Gai, Merioneth. William Jones published two sermons in Welsh in a single volume in November 1655, the first taking as its text the third commandment, the second, the fourth of them. The two sermons were punctuated by a table of Arabic and roman numerals, with the Welsh words for the numbers underneath, as an aid to those Welsh people ‘ac ydynt yn ddiwid i wrando pregethau, ac yn ddyfal ei chwilio yr scruthuran’ (who come to listen to sermons and diligently search the Scriptures) (William Jones 1655: 25–6). Jones, like Powell, was not a minister with a history of unambiguous support for the Interregnum political regimes (Walker 1714: pt. ii, p. 286; Jones and Freeman 1856: 360, 362, 363; Thomas Richards 1920: 145). The dedicatee of his 1655 sermons was Lady Katherine Owen, wife of Sir Hugh Owen, a Pembrokeshire gentry leader in disgrace since his support for royalist rebels in the second Civil War of 1648. In his frank dedicatory epistle in English, Jones explained how he needed a patron for his sermons because ‘the Vulgar people would hardly be moved to look into them, except they did beare some good name before them’ and how Katherine Owen’s name ‘will attract the vulgar eye’ because her family estates lay in both south and north Wales (William Jones 1655: sig. A2r–v). The appearance of these sermons came during a period of despair in the later 1650s at the state of the Welsh church (Bowen 2007). The itinerants’ mission had dried up, leaving a bitter legacy. The radical ministers had quarrelled spectacularly over the legitimacy of the Cromwellian protectorate; one group, led by Vavasor Powell, moved into a phase of disaffection, while others, represented by Walter Cradock, came to terms with state power under the auspices of the lord protector. The small ‘Seeker’ element in the religious spectrum of Wales, personified in the vociferous presence of William Erbury, had after his death in 1654 developed into Quakerism. A number of direct and well-publicized challenges from Quakers, such as John ap John and Francis Gawler in Glamorgan, to beneficed ministers as they preached quickly followed (Gawler 1663; see also 1659: 5, 5–16). The printed sermons of Thomas Powell and William Jones seem a deliberate attempt to reach out to a spiritually needy populace in a format recognizable from the Wales of before 1640. Others followed the same atavistic route. Carol o Gyngor (A Carol of Counsel) (1658), by Matthew Owen, was published at Oxford by the author, an Anglican and royalist whose verses were a revival of the tradition of the cwndidau (D. M. Lloyd 1959: 716). The most important and durable work to emerge from this attempt to recover the effectiveness for the church was Rhan o Waith Mr Rees Prichard (Part of the Work of Mr Rhys Prichard), ‘Vicar Prichard’, published in 1659 by Prichard’s editor, Stephen Hughes. Prichard’s work is a long series of free-metre quatrains in an aabb rhyme scheme. The verses are heavily moralistic, eschewing theological subtlety in favour of simple didacticism in homiletic style. Like Carol o Gyngor, the verses hark back to the cwndidau. Their author was vicar of Llandovery, Carmarthenshire, and chancellor of St David’s Cathedral, and died in 1644. Prichard justifies his verses by reference to the dearth of preaching:



stephen k. roberts

‘Abergofi pur bregethiad | Dyfal gofio ofer ganiad’ (The complete forgetting of pure preaching | The diligent remembering of frivolous verse) (Nesta Lloyd 1997: 114). It has long been accepted that early bibliographers’ assertions of a 1646 edition of this work is an error, but recently the possibility of an edition of 1656 has been given credence (Parry 2001: 129). The first surviving edition is that of 1659, with an apologia by Hughes. Prichard is located first in the Wales of 1640–2, the time of ‘pregethwyr pwerus yn ein gwlad . . . yn enwedig pregethiad Mr Wroth o shir Fonwy’ (powerful preachers in our country . . . especially the preaching of Mr Wroth of Monmouthshire) (Stephen Hughes 1659: sig. A3r). Wroth, a founder of the church at Llanfaches, Monmouthshire, in 1639, but also a composer of cwndidau (J. Gwynfor Jones 2009: 296), died in 1641, and Hughes passes over the more recent painful quarrels among the elect of the gathered churches, the Saints as they called themselves. He attributes preaching talents of a high order to Prichard, but urges his readers’ indulgence when they encounter expressions ‘tramgwyddus . . . Sathredig . . . megis ble gelwir y llann yn Eglwys, y gwenidogion yn offeiriaid, addoliad Duw y borau yn wasanaeth pryd, ag addoliad Duw y Pryd nhawn yn osber’ (offensive . . . vulgar . . . such as where parish house of worship is called church, ministers priests, morning worship of God morning prayer, afternoon worship vespers) (Stephen Hughes 1659: sig. A5v). Hughes urges Prichard’s readers to focus in their reading of the book on the essentials necessary to salvation it contains, which Quakers and Ranters have obscured and undermined. Of all the Welsh religious literature of the Interregnum owing something to the pulpit, it was this volume that proved of lasting value and a cornerstone of Welsh popular religion, appearing in ‘about 50’ editions between 1659 and 1820 under the title Hughes gave it in 1681, Canwyll y Cymry (The Candle of the Welsh People) (Parry-Williams 1932: pp. xli–xlii; Nesta Lloyd 1997: 114). Even more extraordinary is Stephen Hughes’s background: not a royalist but an approved minister and son of a former committeeman (TNA: PRO SP 23/36, fo. 262). The publishing context of these late 1650s Welsh books is worthy of consideration. Hughes’s edition of Prichard was printed by Anna Brewster, a second-generation London publisher, whose brother, Edward, published at least twelve titles in Welsh between 1653 and 1667 (TNA: PRO PROB 11/203, fo. 382v; ESTC), although no Welsh influences can be traced in their family background. The publisher of Cerbyd Iechydwriaeth, Philip Chetwind, owned the rights to The Practice of Piety and its Welsh translation by Rowland Vaughan. In both languages, at least ten editions appeared between 1656 and 1680 (ESTC). A little flowering of at least nine Welsh or Welsh-related titles published between 1656 and 1658 can be attributed to the business relationship built up between the Merioneth gentleman Vaughan and the London publisher Chetwind (ESTC), at a time when the number of new titles in general in London was stable (Barnard and Bell 2002: 783, 785). These were texts in the royalist, Episcopalian Anglican tradition, among them the sermon by Jasper Mayne in Welsh translation, Pregeth yn erbyn Schism. Vaughan’s translations were informed by ill-concealed rage at the condition of the Welsh church under Cromwell (Garfield H. Hughes 1951: 142–3). The Welsh language seems to have provided a cover by which texts from a tradition officially proscribed could circulate without attracting government attention.

the sermon in wales



Conclusion: Preaching in Wales 1660 to 1720 In the decades after the Restoration, debate over the frequency and quality of sermons in Welsh at first glance hardly seemed to have moved on from the Elizabethan period or the 1640s. Some commentators dilated on the credulous trust the people invested in their inadequate clergy (William Richards 1682: 103). Closer examination suggests, however, that sermons were delivered more regularly and conscientiously than they had been in previous decades. A survey of sixty-nine parishes in the diocese of St David’s from 1684 recorded that twenty-nine parishes were satisfied with the conduct of their clergy, another four reported a regular Sunday sermon, and a further fourteen provided details of preaching arrangements that ranged between ‘often’ and ‘somewhat’ (Jenkins 1978: 11–12). The ejections of the Presbyterian ministers in 1662 created a body of ‘Old Dissent’ whose ministers kept alive a tradition of vigorous, unpretentious evangelical preaching that fed into the Calvinistic Methodism of the eighteenth century. Among the dissenting ministers were Stephen Hughes and Vavasor Powell. An analysis of the dissenters’ preaching style before 1700 concludes that they remained ‘obsessed with the need to save souls’ (Jenkins 1978: 30). Their sermons embraced appeals to emotion as well as to reason; leading exponents of the art were unafraid to shed tears during their own preaching. The Old Dissent tradition remained rooted in the Calvinist schema of confession, election, regeneration, and assurance, and, if any colour in the spectrum of 1650s Protestantism was abandoned, it was the more abstruse, speculative, and mystical strand personified by Morgan Llwyd. The preaching of the Anglican clergy of 1660–1700 developed a style as robust as that of Old Dissent. Examples of sermons surviving in manuscript suggest an emphasis on clarity of style, homely metaphors and language, and strictly restrained displays of classical learning. The public sins of cursing, gaming, and excessive drinking were a regular target of the preaching clergy, whose theology was by 1700 identifiable as ‘latitudinarian’. A standard of expectation was established probably for the first time since the Reformation: ‘By the early decades of the eighteenth century, most parishes could at least expect a discourse on alternate Sundays and, at best, a regular Sunday sermon’ (Jenkins 1978: 13). The upsurge of printing in Welsh from the later 1650s continued unabated after the Restoration of the monarchy. Between 1660 and 1730, 545 titles were published, ‘over five times as many . . . as had been published during the previous 115 years’ (1978: 34). Devotional literature played a dominant part in this, but the sermon format was no more successful in attracting the attention of writers and publishers in postRestoration Wales than it had been earlier. Indeed, a 1670s project for a new edition of the Welsh Bible was declined by London publishers, who pleaded cost and a surfeit of bibles in English (Green 2000: 55). In the task of winning souls to God, publishing remained a parallel activity to preaching, with little attempt to narrow the distinction by publishing sermons (Fig. 25). The activities of the Welsh Trust (1674–81) in establishing



stephen k. roberts

fig. 25 The title page of Tryssor i’r Cymru (1677), which included a reprint of a translation into Welsh of Arthur Dent’s A Sermon of Repentance, which in English appeared in many editions from 1582. The printer is described as ‘printer in Welsh to the king’s excellent majesty’.

schools and publishing Welsh books illustrate the effectiveness of a latitudinarian spirit in which Stephen Hughes was the most energetic moving spirit. In 1678 alone the Trust distributed 5,185 Welsh books (Jenkins 1987: 198–200). Free-metre verse continued to be written by poets like Huw Morys (1622–1709), but its assessment of Wales during the Interregnum was wholly and uncompromisingly negative. Only infrequently did the dissenting preachers find champions willing to refute the repetitious assertion that the Welsh were ‘rude savage Heathens in the late times’ of 1640–60 (Anon. 1685: 27).

the sermon in wales



Despite these retrospective fulminations, the Civil War and Interregnum can be seen as providing a fulcrum for a discussion of the Welsh sermon. During that period, a critique of the Welsh church as inadequately provided with preaching moved through parliamentary discussion to the centre stage of British public life. A new form of preaching, by itinerant ministers, was given statutory authority and bolstered the confidence of the most talented of them into writing and publication. No war on Welsh popular culture was waged by these preachers, who tried instead to work with the grain of the Welsh literary legacy. Printing of Welsh-language and Welsh-related material may not have exploded in quantity, as London printing generally did, but the uses of print expanded to include controversialist literature in which critiques of sermons and preaching formed a prominent part. While so many warring tribes competed in the religious field for the loyalties of the Welsh people, it was inherently unlikely that uniformity or common purpose would emerge in the parochial, beneficed ministry. The stimulus to publishing visible in the later years of the Interregnum was inherited by the stars of the pulpit after 1660, whose sermons were delivered under a regime of which uniformity was a hallmark. Printing may have helped narrow the diversity of competing models of the Welsh sermon, so that by 1700 its dominant qualities were simplicity and vigour.1

Bibliography Anon. (1653a). A Relation of a Disputation. —— (1653b). A Welsh Narrative Corrected. —— (1685). A Winding-Sheet for Mr Baxter’s Dead. Barnard, John, and Bell, Maureen (2002). ‘Statistical Tables’, in John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (eds), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iv. 1557–1695. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 779–93. Birch, Thomas (1742) (ed.). A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe, Esq. 7 vols. BL (British Library), Add. MS 34324. BL (British Library), Add. MS 70109. BL (British Library), MS Harleian 4931. Bodl. (Bodleian Library, Oxford), MS Rawlinson C261. Bowen, Lloyd (2007). ‘ “This Murmuring and Unthankful Peevish Land”: Wales and the Protectorate’, in Patrick Little (ed.), The Cromwellian Protectorate. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 144–64. —— (2009). ‘Oliver Cromwell (alias Williams) and Wales’, in Patrick Little (ed.), Oliver Cromwell: New Perspectives. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 168–94. Charles I (1645). Injunctions concerning the Garrison of Oxford. Charles, B. G. (1967) (ed.). Calendar of the Records of the Borough of Haverfordwest, 1539–1660. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Cradock, Walter (1648). Glad Tydings from Heaven. 1

I should like to acknowledge the help given me by Newton Key, the late Peter Lindenbaum, the late Geoffrey F. Nuttall, Ian Roy, John Spurr, and the staffs of the Library, University of Birmingham, and the Library and Information Centre, University of Swansea.



stephen k. roberts

Cradock, Walter (1650). Divine Drops Distilled from the Fountain of Holy Scriptures. Davies, Richard (1577). A Funerall Sermon. —— (1752). An Account of the Convincement, Exercises, Services and Travels of . . . Richard Davies. Philadelphia. Davies, W. Ll. (1921). ‘Welsh Books Entered in the Stationers’ Registers, 1554–1708. Part 1, 1554–1660’, Journal of the Welsh Bibliographical Society, 2: 167–74. Dent, Arthur (1630). Pregeth Dduwiol (A Godly Sermon). Edwards, Thomas (1646). The Third Part of Gangraena. Erbury, William (1647). Nor Truth, nor Errour, nor Day, nor Night. —— (1652). Apocrypha. —— (1653a). A Call to the Churches. —— (1653b). The Sword Doubled. ESTC (English Short Title Catalogue), http://estc.bl.uk Fincham, Kenneth (1994) (ed.). Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Early Stuart Church, i. Church of England Record Society, 1. Woodbridge: Boydell. Firth, C. H., and Rait, R. S. (1911) (eds). Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660. 3 vols. HMSO. Gawler, Francis (1659). A Record of Some Persecutions. —— (1663). The Children of Abrahams Faith. Gough, Richard (1981). The History of Myddle, ed. David Hey. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Green, I. M. (2000). Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Griffith, Alexander (1654). Strena Vavasoriensis. Griffith, W. P. (1996). Learning, Law and Religion: Higher Education and Welsh Society, c.1540– 1640. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Henry, Philip (1882). Diaries and Letters of Philip Henry, ed. Matthew Henry Lee. Kegan, Paul, Trench. Hill, Christopher (1974). ‘Puritans and the Dark Corners of the Land’, in Christopher Hill (ed.), Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 3–47. Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion (1959). Dictionary of Welsh Biography down to 1940. Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion. Hopkin-James, Lemuel J., and Evans, T. C. (1910) (eds). Hen Gwndidau, Carolau a Chywyddau (Old Sermons in Song, Carols and Strict Metre Poems). Bangor: Jarvis and Foster. Houses of Parliament (1648). Impropriations Purchased. Hughes, Ann (1990). ‘The Pulpit Guarded: Confrontations between Orthodox and Radicals in Revolutionary England’, in Anne Laurence, W. R. Owens, and Stuart Sim (eds), John Bunyan and his England 1628–88. Hambledon Press, 31–50. —— (2004). Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hughes, Garfield H. (1951) (ed.). Rhagymadroddion 1547–1659 (Prefaces 1547–1659). Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Hughes, Stephen (1659). Rhan o Waith Mr Rees Prichard (Part of the Work of Mr Rees Prichard). Jenkins, Geraint H. (1978). Literature, Religion and Society in Wales, 1660–1730. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

the sermon in wales



—— (1987). The Foundations of Modern Wales, 1642–1780. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Johnson, A. M. (1978). ‘Wales during the Commonwealth and Protectorate’, in D. H. Pennington and Keith Thomas (eds), Puritans and Revolutionaries: Essays in Seventeenth-Century History Presented to Christopher Hill. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 233–56. Jones, J. Gwynfor (1994). Early Modern Wales, c.1525–1640. Macmillan. —— (2009). ‘Language, Literature and Education’, in Madeleine Gray and Prys Morgan (eds), The Gwent County History, iii. The Making of Monmouthshire, 1526–1780. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 285–311. Jones, Judith (1997) (ed.). Monmouthshire Wills Proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, 1560–1601. Cardiff: South Wales Record Society. Jones, Philip Henry (2002). ‘Wales’, in John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (eds) with the assistance of Maureen Bell, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iv. 1557–1695. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 719–32. Jones, Robert (1958). Drych yr Amseroedd (Mirror of the Times), ed. G. M. Ashton. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Jones, Robert Tudur, and Owens, B. G. (1962). ‘Anghydffurfwyr Cymru 1660–1662’ (Welsh Nonconformists 1660–1662), Y Cofiadur, 31: 3–91. Jones, William (1655). Y Trydydd ar Pedwaredd Gorchymynion (The Third and Fourth Commandments). Jones, William Basil, and Freeman, Edward Augustus (1856). The History and Antiquities of St David’s. Parker, Smith, and Petheram. Kennedy, W. P. M. (1924). Elizabethan Episcopal Administration: An Essay in Sociology and Politics. 3 vols. A. R. Mowbray. Key, Newton (1994). ‘The Political Culture and Political Rhetoric of County Feasts and Feast Sermons, 1654–1714’, Journal of British Studies, 33: 223–56. Lloyd, David Myrddin (1959). ‘Owen, Matthew’, in Dictionary of Welsh Biography Down to 1940, ed. Robert Thomas Jenkins and John Edward Lloyd. Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 716. Lloyd, Nesta (1997). ‘Late Free-Metre Poetry’, in R. Geraint Gruffydd (ed.), A Guide to Welsh Literature, c.1550–1700. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 100–27. —— (2004). ‘John Jones (b. before 1585, d. in or before 1658), in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online edn. Llwyd, Morgan (1899). Gweithiau Morgan Llwyd (The Works of Morgan Llwyd), i, ed. Thomas E. Ellis. Bangor: Jarvis and Foster. —— (1908). Gweithiau Morgan Llwyd, ii, ed. John H. Davies. Bangor: Jarvis and Foster. —— (1994). Gweithiau Morgan Llwyd, iii, ed. J. Graham Jones, Goronwy Wyn Owen, and R. Tudur Jones. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Llwyd, Rheinalt (1998). ‘Printing and Publishing in the Seventeenth Century’, in Philip Henry Jones and Eiluned Rees (eds), A Nation and its Books: A History of the Book in Wales. Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales, 93–107. Love, Harold (1993). Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford: Clarendon Press. LPL (Lambeth Palace Library), MS Comm. XXIIa. Maltby, Judith D. (1998). Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mayne, Jasper (1658). Pregeth yn erbyn Schism (A Sermon against Schism).



stephen k. roberts

Niccols, Henry (1653). The Shield Single against the Sword Doubled. NLW (National Library of Wales), Add. MS 366A. —— St Asaph diocese, will of Joseph Crichley, 1674. Nuttall, Geoffrey F. (1957). The Welsh Saints, 1640–1660. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Owen, John (1850–5). Works, ed. W. H. Goold. 24 vols. Owen, Matthew (1658). Carol o Gyngor (A Carol of Counsel). Oxford. Owens, B. G. (1996) (ed.). The Ilston Book: Earliest Register of Welsh Baptists. Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales. Palmer, Alfred Neobard (1888). A History of the Older Nonconformity of Wrexham and its Neighbourhood. Wrexham: Woodall, Minshall, and Thomas. Parry, C. (2001). Libri Walliae: A Catalogue of Welsh Books and Books Printed in Wales, 1546–1820. Supplement. Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales. Parry-Williams, T. H. (1932). Canu Rhydd Cynnar (Early Free-Metre Poetry). Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Peacey, Jason (2004). Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum. Aldershot: Ashgate. Penry, John (1960) (ed.). Three Treatises concerning Wales. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Phillips, John Roland (1874). Memoirs of the Civil War in Wales and the Marches, 1642–49. 2 vols. Longmans, Green. Powell, Vavasor (1649). God the Father Glorified. —— (1650). Christ and Moses Excellency. —— (1653a). Canwyll Crist (The Candle of Christ). —— (1653b). Spirituall Experiences of Sundry Beleevers. Powell, Thomas (1657). Cerbyd Iechydwriaeth (The Chariot of Salvation). Rees, Eiluned (1998). ‘The Welsh Book Trade from 1718 to 1820’, in P. H. Jones and E. Rees (eds), A Nation and its Books. Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales, 123–33. Richards, Thomas (1920). A History of the Puritan Movement in Wales. National Eisteddfod Association. Richards, William (1682). Wallography, or, The Britton Describ’d. Roberts, Peter (1883). Y Cwtta Cyfarwydd (The Commonplace Book), ed. D. R. Thomas. Whiting and Co. Roberts, Stephen K. (1986). ‘Godliness and Government in Glamorgan, 1647–1660’, in Colin Jones, Malyn Newitt, and Stephen K. Roberts (eds), Politics and People in Revolutionary England. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 225–52. —— (2003). ‘How the West Was Won: Parliamentary Politics, Religion and the Military in South Wales, 1642–9’, Welsh History Review, 21/4: 646–74. —— (2004). ‘Propagating the Gospel in Wales: The Making of the 1650 Act’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, ns 10: 57–75. —— (2009). ‘ “One that Would Sit Well at the Mark”: The Early Parliamentary Career of Oliver Cromwell’, in P. Little (ed.), Oliver Cromwell: New Perspectives. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 38–63. Shepard, Thomas (1657). Y Cywir Ddychwelwr (The Sincere Convert). Stearns, R. P. (1936) (ed.). ‘Letters and Documents by or Relating to Hugh Peter’, Essex Institute Historical Collections, 72: 43–72, 117–34, 208–32, 303–49. Thomas, William (1657). The Regulating of Law-Suits, Evidences and Pleadings. TNA: PRO (The National Archives: Public Record Office), PROB 11/203, fo. 382v.

the sermon in wales



—— SP 23/36, fo. 262. Walker, John (1714). Sufferings of the Clergy. Westminster Assembly (1645). A Directory for the Publique Worship of God. White, B. R. (1976). ‘John Miles and the Structures of the Calvinistic Baptist Mission to South Wales, 1649–1660’, in M. John (ed.), Welsh Baptist Studies. Cardiff: South Wales Baptist College, 35–76. Williams, Glanmor (1967). Welsh Reformation Essays. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. —— (1984). Grym Tafodau Tân (The Power of Tongues of Fire). Llandysul: Gwasg Gomer. —— (1987a). Recovery, Reorientation and Reformation. Wales c.1415–1642. Oxford: Clarendon Press. —— (1987b). ‘Welsh Authors and their Books c.1500–c.1642’, in M. B. Line (ed.), The World of Books and Information. British Library, 187–95. Williams, G. (2007). ‘The Early Stuart Church’, in Glanmor Williams, William Jacob, Nigel Yates, and Frances Knight (eds), The Welsh Church from Reformation to Disestablishment, 1603–1920. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 3–32. Williams, G. J. (1948). Traddodiad Llenyddol Morgannwg (The Literary Tradition of Glamorgan). Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Willis, Browne (1719). A Survey of the Cathedral-Church of Landaff. —— (1720). A Survey of the Cathedral-Church of St. Asaph. Wright, Thomas (1843) (ed.). Three Chapters of Letters Relating to the Suppression of Monasteries. Camden Society.

This page intentionally left blank

pa rt i i i

E NGL ISH SER MONS , 15001660

This page intentionally left blank

chapter 16

from tu dor hum a n ism to r efor m ation pr e achi ng lucy wooding

In a sermon in 1512, John Colet issued an arresting call for church renewal. Addressing Convocation, he called for ‘the reformation of the churches matter’, insisting that ‘hit was never more nede. And the state of the churche dyd never desyre more your endevours’. In particular, he attacked the corruption of the priesthood, ‘bycause that nothinge hath so disfigured the face of the churche/ as hath the facion of seculer and worldly lyvynge in clerkes and pristes’ (Colet c.1531: sigs Aiir, Aiiiv). Fifty years later, John Foxe would hail Colet’s ‘ripeness of judgment’, which ‘seemed something to incline from the vulgar trade of that age’ (Foxe 1837–41: iv. 246). Even before Foxe, some early Protestants claimed Colet as one of their own, inventing the myth that he had been accused of heresy, even that he had been at risk of being burnt (Wabuda 2002: 90–2). Many later historians have followed this lead, casting Colet’s sermon as ‘the overture in the great drama of the English Reformation’ (Lupton 1961: 178). Colet’s words of 1512 have been misunderstood. In its first incarnation in Latin, this sermon had a wholly different character from the one it would acquire upon its publication in English nearly twenty years later. It was a spiritual revolution that the author had in mind, not an ecclesiastical or doctrinal one. Colet, dean of St Paul’s, was a leading cleric, appealing in the language of clergymen and scholars to a gathering composed entirely of the higher clergy, at a time when schism was unimaginable. The shock value was calculated, but with no intention of any radical challenge to church doctrine or tradition; rather it was intended to shake a collection of clergymen out of their complacency and into a very personal examination of their own inadequacies. When Colet’s sermon reappeared in English translation, it had acquired a far more urgent signification. In the atmosphere of 1531, a sermon that criticized the clergy, appealed on biblical grounds for reformation, and talked about the need for a General Council had special resonance. Henry VIII, impatient for the annulment of his first marriage, and increasingly



lucy wooding

critical of papal authority, was showing new interest in anticlerical rhetoric. In these circumstances, Colet’s sermon took on the anticlerical and crypto-Protestant associations which it has carried ever since. The afterlife of Colet’s Convocation sermon encapsulates the problem of interpreting English sermons from the earliest years of the sixteenth century. Colet was far from being a diehard traditionalist; in 1512 he was indeed at the cutting edge of reformist thinking. Nor was he writing in an atmosphere of unchanging ecclesiastical serenity, but had originally been commissioned to deliver a sermon against heresy to his Convocation audience. Yet his reformism sprang from the evangelicalism of humanists like his friend Erasmus, clearly distinct from the Lutheran evangelicalism that would later come to dominate religious debate. His concerns were with biblical renewal, spiritual regeneration, and ecclesiastical reform from within. The generation that succeeded his would, by contrast, be concerned with biblical supremacy, doctrinal change, and a fundamental attack upon ecclesiastical institutions, including the clergy itself. There were some continuities between these two outlooks, but between them lies the gulf carved out by the conflict between Henry VIII and the Papacy, which would finally precipitate the transition from humanism to Reformation.

Late Medieval Sermons and the Impact of Humanism It is a well-established and only partly confounded myth that the English sermon was a product of the Protestant Reformation in England. In fact, sermons were an integral part of traditional religious life in fifteenth-century England, and sixteenthcentury sermons built upon these foundations. As Susan Wabuda has comprehensively demonstrated, sermons in both Latin and English appeared routinely in three different manifestations: the sermon or homily that could form part of the Mass each Sunday, the quarterly sermons required by canon law, and the outdoor sermon (2002: 26–48). This level of sermon provision was the result of considerable exertions by the late medieval church. In the decree of 1281 for the archdiocese of Canterbury, called Ignoraentia sacerdotum, four sermons per year on the essentials of the faith were prescribed; by 1357 constitutions for the archdiocese of York were requiring a weekly sermon in the vernacular. It seems clear that some parish priests preached regular sermons, although it is impossible to discover what proportion took this duty seriously. The Cura clericalis, a guide to priestly responsibilities, was printed in English in 1532, and in a final edition as late as 1542; it explained that the fourfold duties of a priest were those of celebrant at Mass, minister of the other sacraments, confessor, and preacher (Duff y 1992: 56–7). Priests who were university graduates were expected and equipped to preach, and the number of graduate priests was rising at this time, as was demand for their services. The proliferation of fifteenth-century

from humanism to reformation



pulpits also bears witness to the importance of sermons (Fig. 26). Some images also remain: sermons relied upon a congregation’s understanding of symbols and imagery, at a time when art was regarded as muta predicatio, silent preaching (Gill 2002: 155). Wall paintings of the seven Corporal Works of Mercy, or the seven Deadly Sins, were often located close to the pulpit (2002: 175). It seems probable that sermons evoked such symbols, as the bishop of Rochester did when he preached about the Wheel of Fortune, which can still be seen on the wall of the choir in Rochester Cathedral (2002: 160).

fig. 26 St George, Dittisham, Devon. A stone ‘wineglass’ pulpit flamboyantly carved with saints in niches, dating from the fifteenth century. Reproduced from J. Charles Cox, Pulpits, Lecterns, and Organs in English Churches (Oxford 1915).



lucy wooding

Attendance at sermons was of great importance; on this too there was agreement between late medieval and early Reformation thinking. In 1530, Richard Whitford, Brigittine monk and humanist, published A Werke for Housholders, a devotional guide for the laity. He instructed the householder to keep members of his household nearby on Sundays, in case a sermon was preached. For yf there be a sermon any tyme of the day/ let them be there present all that ben not occupyed in nedeful & lawful busynes/ all other layde on parte/ let them ever kepe the prechynges/ rather than the masse/ yf (by case) they may not here bothe. (1530: sig. Diiijr–v)

This would seem like a reforming emphasis, and indeed Whitford was friend to Erasmus and More. Yet it was no more than an endorsement of late medieval attitudes. The fifteenth-century manual Dives and Pauper had also insisted that it was more beneficial for a man’s soul if he heard a sermon rather than attending Mass (Marshall 1994: 88). John Alcock, bishop of Ely, published a sermon in 1497 on the text ‘Jhesus clamabat: Qui habet aures audiendi audiat’ (‘Jesus cried, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear” ’ (Luke 8:8)), and drove home the point that Christ had taught by preaching. He related how St Jerome sheweth that alle the sermons & prechynges that Cryste Jhesu made. he sayd them (cum magno clamore) by the whiche he certifyed the people that he prechyd unto the grete zele & affeccyon that he had to the wele of ther soules/ and that they sholde be desyrous to here the worde of god. by the whyche they sholde be delyvered from all mortalyte and be made by it (filios dei per adopcionem1). (1497: sig. Aijr)

He thought the church of his time well provided with sermons, noting that ‘many a noble sermon is sayd in this place in the yere/ & in lyke wyse in maner thrugh the realme & the lawes of god shewed you’, castigating his audience that ‘there was never more pride. covetise. usury ne other capitall synnes usid than be now a dayes. for al the noble prechyng that is there made’ (sig. Bivv). By 1500, sermon collections previously circulated in manuscript were being printed. Many went on being widely used well into the Reformation period (Wabuda 1994: 554– 5). John Bale noted their place in London in the 1540s, commenting (derisively) that priests could choose between ‘ther olde festyvall, mammotractatus, Gesta romanorum, Sermones discipuli, Sermones dormi secure, Rationale divinorum, Manipulus curatorum, postilla guilhermi, and dyverse other more’ (1543: fo. 57r). Bale here unwittingly provided evidence of the importance of sermons in the preReformation church. ‘Ther olde festyuall’ was John Mirk’s Festial, which provided sermons in English for all major feast days. There are at least forty-three known manuscripts of Mirk’s Festial, many of which have been expanded in a way that strongly suggests how valuable they were as a resource for preachers. These manuscripts travelled to East 1

‘sons of God by adoption’ (cf. Gal. 4:5).

from humanism to reformation



Anglia, to Wales, and to Dublin, and were translated into Welsh and Anglo-Irish dialect; there were over twenty editions of the earliest printed versions (Powell 2006: 160–1). Surviving copies with references to the pope, abbots, and monks crossed out show these texts were still in use after the break with Rome and the dissolution of the monasteries.2 ‘Mammotractatus’ refers to the Mammotrectus super Bibliam of Johannes Marchesinus, a Franciscan text containing biblical exposition printed on the Continent in the 1470s. Gesta romanorum was a fourteenth-century compilation of moral tales all ending with a Christian interpretation, printed in English around 1510. A later edition of 1557 suggests it was still in use during Mary I’s reign. Sermones discipuli, by Johannes Herolt, was a fifteenth-century collection, this time in Latin, published in 1510 and still being refuted by Protestants during Elizabeth’s reign. Rationale divinorum, a thirteenth-century text by Guillaume Durand, explained the liturgy and its symbolism. Over three centuries later, a modern edition by J. M. Neale would give weight to the Anglo-Catholic tradition in Britain (Neale and Webb 1843). Manipulus curatorum was a fourteenth-century Spanish guide for priests by Guido de Monte Rocheni, which explained the practical skills required of the priest, and the necessity of him knowing the Scriptures (Duffy 1992: 56). There were several printed editions before 1509. That these texts were widely used, and well known, is evident from the way later Protestant commentators wrote about them. Thomas Becon used Rationale divinorum as evidence of Romish abuses that had crept, or been ‘violentlye intruded’, into the church, but, when attacking singing, he noted: ‘Durandus saieth, that the use of syngynge was ordeyned for carnall and fleshlye menne, and not for spiritual and godly mynded men’ (1560: sig. Eviir–v). The medieval work still had a strong hold on Becon’s imagination. Discussing the traditional manner in which the priests rendered the words of consecration inaudibly, Becon recalled a tale, reported by Durand, that in the early church the words had been said loudly, until people started singing them ‘in streates and hye wayes’, evidence that in the primitive church the words of consecration had been audible to the congregation. His use of the work indicates how well known it was even in 1560. In due course Becon was to write his own sermon collection, published in 1566 as A New Postil Conteinyng Most Godly and Learned Sermons upon all the Sonday Gospelles. This was a work of passionate biblicism and clear Protestant doctrine. Yet in one sense this was less a rejection of the pre-Reformation preaching tradition than a continuation and refinement of it. He was in a sense merely updating the sermon collections of his youth, which he knew so well. The Edwardian and Elizabethan books of homilies would build on the same tradition. Erasmus famously mocked theologians who relied on works such as Mammotrectus to conceal their ignorance (1976: 121–2). Yet the humanists could also value such works, keeping them in their libraries, giving them as gifts (Willoughby 2008: 160–1). English 2 For example, the Emmanuel College Cambridge copy of STC 17971 (Early English Books Online) has lines through the Injunctions to pray for ‘oure holy fader the pope with all his true colege of cardynales’ and ‘for abbottes pryours / monkes / chanones / freres / and for all men and women of relygyon’ (fo. cciiir).



lucy wooding

humanism was less controversial and confrontational than that of Erasmus and his continental supporters. Its chief objectives were a desire to communicate direct knowledge of the Bible (in part through the study of Hebrew and Greek), to reform the moral standards of both clergy and laity, to deepen their classical education and learn from it, and to strengthen all these intellectual advances by securing practical backing from influential patrons and institutions. These aims were mediated through established foundations such as monasteries and university colleges; the new emphasis upon the Bible, education, moral reform, and inner spirituality sat fairly easily beside prayers to the saints, pilgrimages, and the devotional patterns of the past. The arrival of humanism, therefore, involved no sharp break with late medieval preaching. Humanist influences insinuated themselves into a sermon tradition that was already strong, which took the duty of popular religious instruction seriously, and which

fig. 27 A bishop preaching. Woodcut from John Fisher’s ‘Sermon made again the pernicious doctryn of Martin Luuther’ (1521). Reproduced from The English Works of John Fisher, ed. John E. B. Mayor (1876).

from humanism to reformation



already made good use of the vernacular. John Fisher, whose sermons ‘encompassed the learning of both the middle ages and the renaissance’, was a leading example (Dowling 1991: 306; Fig. 27). His biblicism was profound and demonstrated the increasing trend towards using several pieces of scripture to illustrate each point. In a sermon of 1509, for example, Fisher made the point that ‘oftentymes in scrypture the vertuous and holy faders maketh lamentable exclamacyons agaynste almyghty god/ for that he semeth to be more indulgent and favourable unto the wycked persone then unto the good lyver’. This assertion was then supported by careful scriptural quotation from the Old Testament, first in Latin, then in English, from David, Jeremiah, Habbakuk, and Job (Fisher 1509b: sig. Aviv). All of Fisher’s sermons contain large amounts of biblical exegesis, yet also retain the formal structures of the medieval period (Rex 1991: 33–4). His two funeral sermons, for Henry VII and Lady Margaret Beaufort, took inspiration from classical funeral oratory; his intellectual influences ranged from Cicero to Pico della Mirandola; Erasmus classed him as a humanist (Rex 1991: 50). Yet Fisher continued to use medieval exempla and take the saints as inspiration. His funeral sermon for Lady Margaret Beaufort explained how she had decided to marry her first husband, Henry VII’s father, in response to a vision of St Nicholas (Fisher 1509b: sig. Aiiiv). In the same sermon he drew on popular legend from the Legenda aurea about Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, including the story that, after his raising from the dead, Lazarus never laughed again, ‘but was in contynuall hevynes and pensyfnesse’ (Fisher 1509b: sig. Bivv). Fisher’s sermon on the crucifix developed the theme of the crucifix as a book accessible to all, literate or illiterate, but with a clear allusion to Erasmus’s wish that the labourer would know scripture so well he would sing psalms as he followed the plough. A man may easily say and thinke with him selfe (beholding in his hart the Image of the Crucifixe, who arte thou, and who am I). Thus everie person both ryche and poore, may thinke, not onely in the church here, but in every other place . . . Thus the poore laborer maye thinke, when he is at plough earyng hys grounde, and when hee goeth to hys pastures to see hys Cattayle, or when hee is sittyng at home by hys fire side, or els when he lyeth in hys bed waking and can not sleepe. (Fisher 2002: 302)

As Richard Rex has argued (1991: 46–7), Fisher here shares Erasmus’s evangelical imperative, but sees images as communicating divine truth just as capably as the biblical text itself. Erasmus revered Fisher, and wrote his Ecclesiastes de ratio concionandi, a guide for preachers, at Fisher’s request, but Fisher never criticized established church practice as Erasmus did. The difference perhaps lay in the contrasting imperatives of bishop and scholar. English Protestantism would later acquire many distinctive characteristics by being the work of archbishops and bishops; most of the leading figures among English humanists were also leading figures in the church. Humanism was encouraged by king and court, by both universities, and by leading bishops such as Warham at Canterbury, Alcock at Ely, Fisher at Rochester, Fox at Winchester, and Longland at Lincoln. Medieval practice thus merged easily with humanist objectives. In the ancient guild of Kalendars in Bristol reforms were introduced by John Carpenter, bishop of Worcester in 1464; it was ordained that the prior should have studied theology, know the Bible well,



lucy wooding

and be well equipped to preach. The guild was also endowed with a public library, which was to be open for two hours each morning and afternoon for public use, with the prior on hand to explain obscure points of scripture. The prior was to deliver a weekly public lecture too, and preach regularly in the city. This guild continued to employ educated preachers until the 1520s. The prior from 1480, a Fellow of Balliol called John Burton, went to study theology in Bologna in 1483 (Orme 1978: 40–3). Roger Edgeworth, prior before 1528, was Fellow of Oriel and an established university preacher. He published a large collection of sermons in Mary’s reign, which displayed his humanist biblicism, and simultaneously upheld both doctrinal conservatism and evangelical zeal (Wooding 2000: 120, 122). Late medieval concern for good preaching had provided a natural channel for humanist ideas. Preaching was central to the priestly vocation, and many ideas were in circulation at the start of the sixteenth century concerning the exalted nature of that vocation, and the need for educational provision in order to raise standards. Here again humanists grafted their new emphases onto existing concerns. Robert Joseph, the Benedictine monk from Evesham abbey who studied at Oxford, wrote a series of letters to his Oxford friends between 1530 and 1533. His loyalty to his order was combined with a passionate enthusiasm for humanist learning, and his letters cited Virgil, Ovid, and Boethius alongside Augustine and Jerome, contemporary continental humanists such as Lefèvre d’Étaples and Erasmus, and English humanists such as Thomas More, Richard Pace, and William Lily (Joseph 1964: p. xxviii). He reiterated on several occasions his views on the sanctity of priesthood. In a letter to his friend John Feckenham, whose ordination was approaching, he wrote: Magna dignitas sacerdocium, verum nunquam ita ut nostris temporibus pedibus conculcatum proque vili habitum . . . Nunc tibi gestus vultusque capiendus est novus, nunc alieno more vivendum . . . nunc evacuanda que sunt parvuli, nunc sumendus gladius spiritus quod est verbum Dei. (1964: 108) (Great is the dignity of the priesthood, truly never so trampled under foot and vilified as in our times . . . Now you will have to adopt a new way of behaving, a new way of life . . . now you must put away the things of children, and take up the sword of the spirit which is the word of God).

Joseph’s ideas concerning priesthood echoed Colet’s observations of 1512, or William Melton’s Sermo exhortatorius of 1510: priests must truly be ‘the light of the world’. This insistence on the sacred role of the priest shows the difference between humanists and later reformers, whose tendency was to revile and diminish the priestly office. For humanists, the priesthood carried many of their hopes for the future, as the instrument for spreading the word of God. This attempt to raise clerical standards at this time was given concrete expression in bricks and mortar. Here, again, humanist initiatives built on late medieval precedent. John Alcock, bishop of Ely, was also the founder (in 1496) of Jesus College, Cambridge, and his chantry and school at Holy Trinity, Hull, would become Hull Grammar School. Lady Margaret Beaufort’s Cambridge foundations sought to promote biblical study with

from humanism to reformation



practical results; at St John’s the statutes ordained that at least one quarter of the Fellows were to preach publicly, as well as in the college chapel, and her refoundation of Godshouse as Christ’s College upheld the educational aspirations of its founder, William Bingham, who had been concerned at the ‘so grete scarstee of maistres of Gramer’ in England (A. H. Lloyd 1934: 1). Lady Beaufort’s readership in divinity carried the obligation to preach at least six sermons a year outside Cambridge (Dowling 1991: 289). Pious layfolk were also concerned with educational provision. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries grammar schools were being established by merchants and maintained by merchant guilds. John Carpenter, a friend of William Bingham, endowed the public library attached to the Guildhall in London, in the manner of that maintained by the Kalendars guild in Bristol. He also left money for a scholar to preach at St Paul’s (Barron 1996: 236–7, 238–9). Whittington College in London, established in 1424 by the executors of Richard Whittington, in 1490 founded the fraternity of St Sophia under the auspices of Archbishop Morton, to promote good preaching. In 1537, the last master of the college was Richard Smith, first Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, preserving to the last the tradition of humanist and reforming Catholicism. Smith was to return as master during the Marian restoration of the college (VCH 1909: 578–80; Harper-Bill 1987: 18). It had become increasingly common during the second half of the fifteenth century to include provision for education in chantry foundations. Richard Whittington had also laid the foundation stone in 1421 for the library of the London Greyfriars, and paid £400 towards the cost of the books, which totalled £556 10s. 9d. (Trollope 1834: 10–11). The rest of the books were paid for by the Franciscan Thomas Winchelsea, whose collection of sermons was in the library at the dissolution (Kingsford 1915: 231–5). Humanist ideas found a natural haven in England’s monasteries. The traditional preaching expertise of the friars was complemented by the development of education and preaching among the older orders (Catto 2002: 103–4; Clark 2002: 7, 20–1). Newer foundations also emphasized the importance of preaching; in the library of the Brigittine house at Syon, where humanist texts reposed besides more traditional tomes, the single largest literary genre represented was sermons (Gillespie 2002: 76–82, 93). Sermons were also a central part of court life. In 1515, Lord Mountjoy wrote to Wolsey from Tournai, to find out if the queen were indeed with child, as was rumoured, so he would know whether to order the appropriate prayers and sermon (L&P 2.i.890). In the same year, the archbishop of Canterbury preached at the opening of parliament, expounding upon the respect the ancients bore the commonweal, and urging the king to dispense impartial justice (L&P 2.i.119). The skills required of a court preacher were outlined in 1518 in a letter from Richard Pace, the king’s secretary, to Wolsey, in which he commended his subdean (the bearer of the letter) for having pleased the king with a sermon, ‘wherein he did show both substantial and profound learning, and in his pronunciation very good eloquence, with gesture apt and convenient’ (L&P 2.ii.4045). There was clearly some room for independent thought on the part of the preacher: in 1519, Erasmus commented on an Oxford sermon that had inveighed against the study of Greek, despite the king’s enthusiastic backing for Greek studies and his support for them in the universities (L&P 3.i.566).



lucy wooding

Court preaching was clearly at its most intense during Lent. In 1513, with the court at Greenwich, the king gave 20s. to Dr Longland, Dr Rowland the vicar of Croydon, Dr Bryket who preached on Palm Sunday, and John Colet, who preached on Good Friday. At the same time he gave an offering of 10s. when he was houseled (that is, took Communion), and 6s. 8d. on Easter Day, which gives some indication of the importance accorded to the preacher (L&P 2.ii.1460). In a ducal household there was the same emphasis on preaching during Lent and at Easter. The duke of Buckingham in 1521 gave 6s. 8d. to the preacher each Sunday during Lent, including the prior of the Austin Friars in Bristol, and the vicar of All Saints’ Bristol, the church where the Kalendars guild was based (L&P 3.i.1285). The household book of Katharine, countess of Devon, contained similar entries: ‘To the prior of the Black Friars of Exeter, for preaching before my Lady . . . 6s 8d . . . To the warden of the Grey Friars, Exeter, for a sermon on Good Friday, 6s 8d’ (L&P 4.i.771). That preaching was such an integral part of religious life at court, in noble households, and on state occasions, was to have important consequences later when reformation became a matter of political urgency, and religious conflict took centre stage at the highest levels. Humanist influences were strong at court, and among the educated. Erasmus in particular brought a new understanding of scripture, and idealized the role of the preacher as a man transfigured by Christ, channelling the word of God (Wabuda 2002: 68–72). As one of his many English translators wrote: He is the man that whan in his first dayes trouthe was far hyd in the depe vaynes of the grounde/ and more over it was prohibited as a thyng beyng worthy deth that no man shulde for her enquere/ he dyd nat suffre the worlde to be confounded with suche a marvaylous darkenes / and eyther he hath digged up many lymmes of trouth/ or at the lest he hath restored us free liberte to serche her. (Erasmus c.1526: sig. Aiiv; see also Wooding 2000: 21–2, 40–1, 70)

This was written by the Countess of Salisbury’s chaplain; his employer was a noted conservative, later executed for her Roman Catholic connections. Erasmus influenced preachers of every shade of opinion. He also set the fashion for translating sermons, building upon humanist language skills. Many translators commented on the difficulties of this, illustrating the newness of the trend. Thomas Elyot explained that he had had to translate a sermon by St Cyprian ‘not supersticiouselye folowynge the letter, whiche is verely elegante, and therfore the harder to translate into our langage, but kepynge the sentence and intent of the Autour’ (Cyprian 1534: sig. Aiiir–v). Translations of sermons by early church fathers and by Erasmus and other humanists were to provide a small but steady component of published sermons throughout the sixteenth century. The use of translations may have been new, but the use of the vernacular was not. Another important misconception concerning pre-Reformation sermons is that they were in Latin. In fact they were more likely to be in the vernacular; Latin sermons were generally reserved for learned congregations. Religious instruction in English was thus an accepted part of devotional life. Colet, according to Protestant mythology, was accused of heresy for having translated the paternoster into English. In fact, this was

from humanism to reformation



entirely legal, and indeed encouraged at the time (Wabuda 2002: 92). Mirk’s sermon De oracione Dominica began by explaining how every curate was bound by church law to expound the paternoster once or twice a year, and argued that it was ‘moch more spedfull and meritabull’ for it to be said in English rather than Latin. ‘ For when ye spekyth yn Englysche, then ye knowen and undyrstondyn wele what ye sayn; and soo, by your undyrstondyng, ye haue lykyng and devocyon forto say hit’ (Mirk 1905: 282). Much of what the Protestant reformers were to claim as their own inspiration was already a wellestablished part of the pre-Reformation church. Sermons from this time used image and metaphor to reach their audience; here again late medieval usage merged with humanist ideas about educating the unlearned and preaching to the common man. Fisher in 1509 preached the necessity of letting the dead depart in peace, using the powerful analogy of an over-protective mother. ‘The moder that hathe so grete affeccyon unto her sone that she wyll not suffre hym to departe from her to his promocyon and furtheraunce but alway kepe hym at home/ more regardynge her owne pleasure than hys wele/ were not she an unkinde and ungentyl moder/ yes verayly’ (Fisher 1509b: sig. Bvr). In his funeral sermon for Henry VII earlier that same year, he compared the pains of hell to fierce dogs, much less frightening to those who know them well: ‘unto suche as often vysyte them they be more gentyll and easy/ but to the straungers whiche have none acqueyntaunce of them they ragyously and furyously gape and ryse ayenst them as they wolde devoure them’ (Fisher 1509a: sig. Aviir). John Alcock’s Sermon on Luke VIII from 1497 compared those who cried out against the church to a dog barking against the moon he cannot touch or destroy, until he is killed and his body cast in a ditch (1497: sig. Dir). In a passage on the sanctity of the priesthood, it also noted that ‘there was never man more Jelous of his wyf . . . than Cryste is of his prests/ men and wymmen of relygyon/ that have vowed chastyte’ (1497: sig. Diir). Alcock’s sermon showed a paternalistic concern for the ordinary parishioners of London, and encouraged his audience to cherish them. And though it be so as I am sure almyghty god is gretly pleysed with the perfyte lyvynge of men of relygyon for theyr contemplaccon/ prayers, theyr good ensample & prechynge also: But in myn opinyon the parysh chyrches ben they, that holde & kepe the people in gode rule to love & serve god to ther preservacion of the fayth/ Wherfor frendes I exhort you to love them, honour & mayntene them. (1497: sigs Bvv–vir)

The sermons of John Longland, bishop of Lincoln, continued to use numbered points in the 1530s, a characteristic late medieval device. In his 1536 Good Friday sermon, Longland discoursed, for example, on the five things that augmented the pains of Christ’s passion (1536: sigs Fivr–Hjv). The last of these, he argued, in turn taught four things that the follower of Christ must do (1536: sigs Hjv–iiiv). He also ended both Good Friday sermons with an exhortation to the traditional prayer of five paternosters, five aves, and one creed, in honour of the five wounds of Christ. In Fisher’s Two Fruytfull Sermons there was a comparison of the Field of Cloth of Gold with the courts of heaven, and Fisher provided five reasons why heaven was better (Dowling 1991: 299–301). The lives of saints quite



lucy wooding

swiftly receded in importance as biblical exegesis increased in quantity and detail, but they were not abandoned. In Longland’s sermons the saints had largely been displaced by detailed exposition of scripture; if added testimony were needed, it was supplied from the fathers. Yet, in his invective against temptation, Longland provided the comforting examples of St Catherine and St Margaret, both of whom had managed to resist the devil despite being only 14 and 15 years old at the time: ‘stronglye they dyd overcome the devyll and all his bende, as maye appeare to those that wyll reede there lyves which are red in the church’ (1538: sig. Kr). Nor had late medieval reverence for the saints been without restraint. Mirk’s Festial approved the efficacy of images as books for the unlettered: ‘Also ye shall understonde that as clerkys saye in theyr bokes how they sholde lyve and do/ so sholde lewde men lerne by ymages’ (1508: fo. clxiiv). Yet Mirk also warned against giving images undue honour; they were to be reverenced, but not worshipped, and the beholder should remember that they were reminders, no more, of who they depicted: to do goddis worshyp to ymagis every man is forboden. Therfore whan thou comest to the chyrche fyrste beholde goddis body/ under fourme of brede on the aulter/ And thanke hym that wouchesauf every daye to come fro the holy heven above for helth of thy soule/ loke thou on the crosse and therby have mynde in the passyon. that he suffred for the thenne thymages of the holy sayntis not bylevyng on theym. but that by the syghte of theym/ thou maye have mynde of them that ben in heven. and so to folowe theyr lyfe as moche as thou mayste. (1508: fos clxiiv–clxiiir)

Late medieval sermons could also have political resonance (Wabuda 2002: 89–99). Alcock’s Sermon on Luke VIII attacked with vigour those who menaced the liberties of the church. He appealed to Magna Carta, recalling its original declaration at Paul’s Cross: And that it shold be inviolatly kept & observyd. the kynge and all the lordes temporall & the comynaltee by theyr attourneys. And all the bysshoppis of the reame [sic, ‘realm’] beynge in this same place Pouliscrosse . . . cursid al them that brake ony artycle comprisid in the same. (1497: sig. Civv)

In language that would be echoed in a different context thirty years later, he argued that the key provision of Magna Carta was ‘that noo temporall Juge shall have ony Jurisdiccion in a spirituall persone’, and denounced those who contravened the will of God in this (1497: sig. Civv). Here he hinted heavily at royal culpability. He then compared those responsible to Saul, Judas, and Herod, two of whom were kings, and recalled the sacrifice of St Thomas à Becket, who died ‘for none other cause/ but for the libertees of the chyrche’, ostentatiously observing that if St Thomas were alive in his own time, those who opposed the liberties of the church would no doubt put him to death again (1497: sig. Cviv). When Henry VII died, Fisher’s funeral sermon passed judgement on his reign, showing that Henry’s greatest strength lay in his deathbed repentance, when he promised a true reformacyon of all them that were offycers and ministres of hys lawes to the entent that Justyce from hensforwarde truly and indyfferently myght be executed in all causes . . . And many a tyme unto his secrete servauntes he sayd that yf it pleased

from humanism to reformation



god to sende hym lyfe they sholde se hym a newe chaunged man. (Fisher 1509a: sig. Aiiiv)

These were not voices raised in opposition. Both spoke from within the establishment, and Fisher printed Henry’s funeral sermon ‘at the specyall request of the ryght excellent pryncesse Margarete moder unto the sayd noble prynce and Countesse of Rychemonde and Derby’ (1509a: sig. Air). Yet, long before the preaching of the Royal Supremacy became necessary, the political potential of sermons had been demonstrated, and the contentious area of clerical privilege and independence brought under scrutiny. Here was one last feature of the pre-Reformation sermon that would endure, only to be given a new and menacing edge in the turmoils of Henry VIII’s religious policies.

Henry VIII and the Royal Supremacy The single most important transforming influence on the early sixteenth-century sermon was the invention and implementation of Henry VIII’s Supremacy over the church in England. The humanist rediscovery of scripture was not enough to prompt a Protestant Reformation in the English church. It was to take the particular, peculiar, and ingenious application of scripture by a headstrong monarch to turn English sermons first into an arm of the state, and only secondarily—and in large part inadvertently— towards a Protestant future. The true revolution in sixteenth-century preaching, therefore, was to be as much political as religious. Henry’s policies were enforced in a major propaganda campaign which made widespread use of sermons; equally, the fierce opposition he faced in many quarters was given expression through preaching. On both sides there was a great deal of variation. Preachers licensed to speak in support of the Royal Supremacy often advanced other ideas at the same time. In 1535 Simon Matthew, prebendary of St Paul’s, preached a sermon in the king’s cause which was later published. At one point he besought his audience to pray for the dead. And all though the laste sonday the preacher coude not fynde in his conscience to pray for the soules departed, saying, that he thought his prayer shuld nothynge avayle them: yet I wyll desyre you to praye for them, trustynge that you have in remembrance, howe in times paste I have proved by auctorities of Hierome, Augustin, Ambrose and Chrysostome, and also by scriptures . . . that we shulde do so. (1535: sigs Avv–vir)

Throughout the 1530s London pulpit oratory in particular saw sermons being repeatedly used in this way as conservatives and evangelicals competed over doctrine, veiling their encounters in the unimpeachable propriety of remarks in favour of the Supremacy and in criticism of the pope. There was no single ideological platform for supporters or detractors of the king, no straightforward contest between ‘Protestant’ and ‘Catholic’, nor even between ‘evangelical’



lucy wooding

and ‘conservative’. Religious identity was in a state of flux, and Henry’s piecemeal approach to reformation meant a range of responses was possible, from martyrdom to enthusiastic conformity, with every variation in between. The initial impact of Lutheranism had been limited in its effects, and the campaign against Luther in the 1520s an academic affair, largely conducted in Latin (Rex 1989). The spread of popular reform, which would one day grow into early Protestantism in England, was haphazard. The chief consequence in England of Luther’s stance was that Henry VIII entered the public arena as a religious champion of Roman Catholic orthodoxy, using humanist scholarship as the basis for his attack on Lutheran heresy. Ten years later, he again used the humanist tools of biblical and patristic authority to justify the divorce and the Supremacy (Murphy 1995). In the first instance, Henry’s Reformation did more to spread the ideas of Erasmus than those of Luther. Controversial subjects had been discussed before through an exchange of sermons. The questions of the validity of Henry’s first marriage and papal authority over the church raised tensions to new heights, however. One of the first acts of public defiance was a sermon delivered at Greenwich before the king and the court on Easter Day 1532. William Peto, head of the Observant Franciscan order in England, denounced Henry VIII’s actions, comparing him to King Ahab, who listened only to false prophets, and warning that, if he went ahead with the divorce, then, like Ahab, dogs would lick his blood (Bernard 2005: 20, 152–3). It is some measure of a preacher’s independence at this time that Henry made no immediate moves against him, except to order another sermon in favour of his case. The medieval friars had done much to promote the sermon as a form of religious instruction, and in the early years of Reformation remained prime movers on both sides of the debate, until their suppression in 1538–9 (Rex 2002; Wabuda 2002: 107–46). Henry devised a special oath for the Observant Franciscans, committing them to preach in support of the king’s authority and new marriage at every opportunity; he appreciated the power of their preaching only too well (Bernard 2005: 156–7). As Royal Supremacy was transformed from intellectual proposition into statute law, many preachers protested (Elton 1972: 13–27). Two friars from Newark toured the West Country in June 1534, preaching in defence of the pope, and telling their hearers that the water used to baptize Princess Elizabeth had not been hot enough (Bernard 2005: 154–5). Meanwhile evangelicals also were working to make their voices heard. The influence of figures such as Anne Boleyn or Thomas Cranmer was significant in the promotion of reformed preachers at court and at Paul’s Cross. Yet the picture was always complicated. Cranmer was able to move swiftly in those areas where he had direct patronage. Yet Latimer’s sermons in Bristol, which were facilitated by Cranmer’s patronage, were as vigorously rebutted by men such as William Hubberdyne and Roger Edgeworth (Elton 1972: 112–20). Meanwhile there was a battle for control of Paul’s Cross, with John Hilsey, bishop of Rochester, and the more conservative John Stokesley, bishop of London, in contention (Wabuda 1993: 78–80). Every Henrician formulation hammered home the Royal Supremacy. Precise instructions were given in the Injunctions of 1536 that all clergy should,‘to the uttermost of their wit, knowledge and learning’, preach ‘without any colour or dissimulation’ against the

from humanism to reformation



bishop of Rome’s ‘usurped power’, initially every Sunday for one quarter of the year, and thereafter at least twice every quarter (Frere and Kennedy 1910: 3–4). These Injunctions also reiterated the medieval provision that the basics of the faith be taught from the pulpit, but in fact religious instruction was being sidelined by the greater imperative of preaching the Supremacy. With the Supremacy as the only fixed point, doctrinal variation and conflict flourished in the sermons of the 1530s. In 1535, Thomas King, a priest of St Albans, preached against the king and the Supremacy, but also against Luther and Melanchthon, Frith, and Tyndale (Clark 2000: 301). Not everyone made this automatic association, however, and many of the sermons that supported the king also sought to defend traditional doctrine. There were also those who seem to have struggled to comprehend the new order. The vicar of Loose in Kent referred in 1536 to ‘holy Urban, sometime pope’, and then quickly corrected himself, ‘I should have said Bishop Urban’, but still got in trouble for preaching indulgences. It is unclear whether his offence should be classed as opposition to the king or merely confusion, like the canon of Wells who mistakenly prayed for Queen Katherine, though he got Princess Elizabeth’s name right (Elton 1972: 15; Shagan 2003: 53–4). The prioritizing of the Supremacy could also lead to terrifying reversals of fortune, as in the case of Robert Barnes, who went from exiled Lutheran, to royal chaplain, to heretic burned at the stake, all within a few years. Strict conformity to the Royal Supremacy was breeding both heterodoxy and confusion. In a Palm Sunday sermon of 1539 Cuthbert Tunstall included a political section between two more pious portions. From a text concerning obedience, Tunstall launched an attack on the disobedience of the pope. He also attacked Reginald Pole and his associates for sowing dissension in the realm, and the powers abroad who threatened invasion. Nevertheless, Tunstall’s sermon contained much besides this finely elaborated piece of royal propaganda. The actual religious content of the sermon was a moving exposition of the terrible death suffered by Christ for the sake of humankind, and an attack upon disobedience to God’s commandments. We doo professe the fayth of Chryste, and doo speake of the gospell with oure mouthe, and have the booke ofte in our handes, but we lerne it not . . . we moche do talke of it, which is very well done, and yet we nothyng regard to amende our lyves therby . . . we doo use the gospell, as if it were a boke of problemes to dyspute upon. (Tunstall 1539: sig. Eviiv)

Here was the influence of Erasmus, and an endorsement of the new English Bible, which yet warned against its negative effects. Tunstall also made an emphatic denial of the doctrine of ‘justification by faith alone’ and underlined the traditional expectations of Holy Week—that people give themselves to the threefold obligation of fasting, almsgiving and prayer, and do penance before they receive Communion at Easter. Tunstall’s sermon characterizes the Henrician Reformation: emphatically biblical, doctrinally conservative, above all centred upon the Supremacy. The court sermons of John Longland in the 1530s took a slightly different approach. Longland, as the king’s confessor, presumably knew what was expected of him. He was a



lucy wooding

complex individual, reputed for his humanist learning and condemnation of monastic corruption, a friend of Erasmus and Vives, who had supported the divorce but been dismayed by the erosion of clerical independence. His attack on the ‘Bishop of Rome’ held out the possibility, at least, of some improvement. ‘Lette the bushop of Rome therfore knowledge his greate faulte . . . wolde god he wolde refourme him selfe’ (Longland 1538: sig. Biiv). Longland was a passionate defender of the clerical estate; one of his main grievances against the pope was that, by his presumption, ‘the honour of all preesthood is taked away’ (1538: sig. Biiir). His sermon included a moving exposition on the duties of a bishop, taking Christ as the exemplar.3 This was far closer to Colet’s humanism than to the Protestant invectives against clerical error. Longland sought to bring about reformation by simultaneously lambasting vice and emphasizing the dignity of the priestly vocation. So for Longland the Royal Supremacy was the triumph of episcopacy. By contrast, Hugh Latimer’s sermon to convocation in 1534 contained a very different approach to the priesthood. He saw the clergy as brought up by ‘grandfather dyvell, father worlde, & mother hypocrisie’. He also included a clear deviation from the king’s own agenda by asking ‘What thynke ye of these masse priestes, and of the masses them selfe?’ To call the Mass into question was to come dangerously close to what would remain for Henry VIII the touchstone of orthodoxy; a gloss was added in the margin, noting that ‘the abuses reprehended, the reverence of the Masse is not diminished, but rather set forth’ (Latimer 1537: sigs Ciir, Eiv). Despite such a caveat, Latimer’s reforming agenda was clearly perceptible behind the more overt political purpose of the sermon. The last decade of Henry VIII’s reign was marked by a profound anxiety about the content of sermons, as Henry VIII became concerned with the increasing diversity in doctrine (Wooding 2009: 250–7). As the king’s preface to the Ten Articles made clear, ‘unity and concord in opinions’ were his responsibility now, and it was important that ‘all occasion of dissent and discord touching the same be repressed and utterly extinguished’ (C. Lloyd 1856: 3). This ‘dissent and discord’ was because, at the heart of the Henrician Reformation, there existed a paradox. The king claimed jurisdiction over the church on the grounds of scripture, supported by examples of early history. In his eagerness to exalt biblical authority over the pretended and usurped authority of the pope, however, Henry was in danger of limiting the Supremacy on which he so relied. If Henry could seek justification for his actions directly from scripture, then others might do the same. This potential for independent inspiration, and independent action, had provided the basis for the Henrician Reformation; it was also to prove one of its major weaknesses, as shown by the preacher who denounced the Supremacy using the biblical verses generally applied to the pope (Elton 1972: 17). Released from papal bondage, reformers began to preach and teach as the spirit moved them, and it frequently moved them in different directions from those Henry intended them to take.

3

Longland based his exposition on Heb. 4:14, giving the Latin version as ‘Habemus pontificem magnum quo pentravit coelos, Iesum Filium Dei’. In the Protestant tradition, ‘pontificem magnum’ was rendered ‘great high priest’, but Longland translates it as ‘great bishop’ (1538: sig. Biir).

from humanism to reformation



Conclusion Preaching was at the same time a central part of religious practice, firmly embedded in the church’s ritual year since long before the Reformation, and a form of communication that could evade constriction and control, whether in parish or at court. Sermons were thus a peculiarly sensitive medium in which subtle changes in religious ideas could be reflected. The sixteenth century began with great enthusiasm for church reform, which was both expressed in sermons, and took the expansion of biblical preaching as one of its goals. This was in part a continuation of medieval trends, with humanism grafted onto pre-Reformation concerns with education, clerical reform, and the provision of sermons. The break with the past came, not with Luther, but with Henry VIII’s construction of the Royal Supremacy, which inadvertently opened up an array of religious differences. The dramas and confrontations of the 1530s were played out in sermons, as both royal propaganda and opposition issued from the pulpit. The Supremacy reconfigured preaching as a form of political interaction in a guise it was to retain throughout the early modern period, where necessary deploying preaching bans, press censorship, and the safer alternative of books of homilies, which would be used to such effect by both the Edwardian and Elizabethan regimes. Yet Henry also gave an inadvertent opportunity to those who nurtured Lutheran sympathies in defiance of official church doctrine. The optimism of the humanists had not been entirely misplaced; the centrality of both the English Bible and the ideas of Erasmus within the Henrician Reformation were to have a profound effect upon English sermons. The advent of the Scriptures in English came at a high price, however—namely, the submission of English preachers to a new and aggressive form of political dominance, and the unfolding of a great many different, often conflicting, opinions about religious belief and practice. At the same time, the dissolution of the monasteries, the suppression of the mendicant orders, and the confiscation of church wealth removed much of the practical provision for preaching. The culture of preaching therefore lost as much as it gained from the reforms of Henry VIII. Henceforth, sermons were to be as attentive to the needs of the monarch as they were to the spiritual demands of their congregations.

Bibliography Alcock, J. (1497). Sermon on Luke VIII. Bale, J. (1543). Yet a Course at the Romyshe foxe. Zurich (i.e. Antwerp): Oliver Jacobson (i.e. Goinus). Barron, C. (1996). ‘The Expansion of Education in Fifteenth-Century London’, in J. Blair and B. Golding (eds), The Cloister and the World: Essays in Medieval History in Honour of Barbara Harvey. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Becon, T. (1560). The Relikes of Rome.



lucy wooding

Bernard, G. W. (2005). The King’s Reformation: Henry VIII and the Remaking of the English Church. New Haven: Yale University Press. Catto, J. (2002). ‘Franciscan Learning in England, 1450–1540’, in J. G. Clark (ed.), The Religious Orders in Pre-Reformation England. Studies in the History of Medieval Religion, 18. Woodbridge: Boydell. Clark, J. G. (2000). ‘Reformation and Reaction at St Albans Abbey, 1530–58’, English Historical Review, 115: 297–328. —— (2002). ‘The Religious Orders in Pre-Reformation England’, in J. G. Clark (ed.), The Religious Orders in Pre-Reformation England. Studies in the History of Medieval Religion, 18. Woodbridge: Boydell. Colet, J. (c.1531). The Sermon of Doctor Colete/ Made to the Convocacion at Paulis. Cyprian, St (1534). A Swete and Devoute sermon . . . of mortalitie of man. Dowling, M. (1991). ‘John Fisher and the Preaching Ministry’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 82: 287–309. Duffy, E. (1992). The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400–c.1580. New Haven: Yale University Press. Elton, G. R. (1972). Policy and Police: The Enforcement of the Reformation in the Age of Thomas Cromwell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Erasmus, D. (c.1526). De immensa dei misericordia, trans. G. Hervet. —— (1976). The Collected Works of Erasmus, iii. Letters 298 to 445, 1514–1516, tr. R. A. B. Mynors and D. F. S. Thomson; annotated by James K. McConica. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Fisher, J. (1509a). This Sermon Folowynge was Compyled and Sayd in the Cathedrall Chyrche of Saynt Poule within the Cyte of London . . . the Body Beynge Present of the Moost Famouse Prynce Kynge Henry the vii. —— (1509b). A Mornynge Remembraunce had at the Moneth Mynde of the Noble Prynces Margarete. —— (2002). The English Works of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester: Sermons and Other Writings 1520 to 1535, ed. Cecilia A. Hatt. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foxe, J. (1837–41). Acts and Monuments. ed. S. R. Cattley and G. Townsend. 8 vols. Frere, W. H., and Kennedy, W. M. (1910). Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Period of the Reformation. 3 vols. Alcuin Club Collections. Longmans, Green & Co., 14–16. Gill, M. (2002). ‘Preaching and Image: Sermons and Wall Paintings in Later Medieval England’, in C. Muessig (ed.), Preacher, Sermon and Audience in the Middle Ages. Leiden: Brill, 155–80. Gillespie, V. (2002). ‘Syon and the New Learning’, in J. G. Clark (ed.), The Religious Orders in Pre-Reformation England. Studies in the History of Medieval Religion, 18. Woodbridge: Boydell. Harper-Bill, C. (1987) (ed.). The Register of John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury. Canterbury and York Society, 75. Leeds: Duffield Printers, privately for the Canterbury and York Society. Joseph, R. (1964). The Letter Book of Robert Joseph, ed. H. Aveling and W. A. Pantin. Oxford Historical Society, ns 19.Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kingsford, C. L. (1915) (ed.). The Grey Friars of London. British Society of Franciscan Studies, 6. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. Latimer, H. (1537). The Sermon that the Reverende Father in Christ, Hugh Latimer, Byshoppe of Worcester, made to the Clergie, in Convocation.

from humanism to reformation



L&P (Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII), ed. J. S. Brewer, J. Gairdner and R. S. Brodie. 21 vols. 1862–1932. Lloyd, A. H. (1934). The Early History of Christ’s College, Cambridge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lloyd, C. (1856). Formularies of Faith put forward by Authority during the Reign of Henry VIII. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Longland, J. (1536). A Sermond Spoken before the Kynge. —— (1538). A Sermonde Made before the Kynge. Lupton, J. H. (1961). A Life of John Colet: With an Appendix of Some of his English Writings. 2nd edn. Hamden. Marshall, P. (1994). The Catholic Priesthood and the English Reformation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Matthew, S. (1535). A Sermon made in the Cathedrall Churche of Saynt Paule at London. Mirk, J. (1508). The Festyvall. —— (1905). Mirk’s Festial, ed. T. Erbe. Early English Text Society, extra series 96. Murphy, V. (1995).‘The Literature and Propaganda of Henry VIII’s First Divorce’, in D. MacCulloch (ed.), The Reign of Henry VIII: Politics, Policy and Piety. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 135–58. Neale, J. M., and Webb, B. (1843). The Symbolism of Churches and Church Ornaments. Leeds: T. W. Green. Orme, N. (1978). ‘The Guild of Kalendars, Bristol’, Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, 96: 33–52. Powell, S. (2006). ‘The Festial: The Priest and his Parish’, in C. Burgess and E. Duffy (eds), The Parish in Late Medieval England. Donington: Shaun Tyas, 160–76. Rex, R. (1989). ‘The English Campaign against Luther in the 1520s’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 39: 85–106. —— (1991). The Theology of John Fisher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (2002). ‘The Friars in the English Reformation’, in P. Marshall and A. Ryrie (eds), The Beginnings of English Protestantism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 38–59. Shagan, E. (2003). Popular Politics and the English Reformation. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Trollope, W. (1834) (ed.). A History of the Royal Foundation of Christ’s Hospital. Pickering. Tunstall, C. (1539). A Sermon of Cuthbert Bysshop of Duresme made vpon Palme Sondaye Laste. VCH (1909). Victoria County History, A History of the County of London, i. Wabuda, S. (1993). ‘Setting Forth the Word of God: Archbishop Cranmer’s Early Patronage of Preachers’, in Paul Ayris and Selwyn (eds), Thomas Cranmer: Churchman and Scholar. Woodbridge: Boydell, 75–88. —— (1994). ‘Bishops and the Provision of Homilies, 1520 to 1547’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 25/2: 551–66. —— (2002). Preaching During the English Reformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whitford, R. (1530). A Werke for Housholders. Willoughby, J. (2008). ‘The Provision of Books in the English Secular College’, in C. Burgess and M. Heale (eds), The Late Medieval English College. Woodbridge: York Medieval Press. Wooding, L. (2000). Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— (2009). Henry VIII. Routledge.

chapter 17

offici a l t u dor homilies ashley null

As the first Protestant archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer sought the conversion of the hearts of the English people to what he believed to be the true gospel. As a top-down movement, the Edwardian theological agenda succeeded, not because of overwhelming popular support, but because the national leadership worked in concert with committed Protestant cadres ‘to undermine unreliable elements in positions of authority, and radically reconstruct the outlook of the people as a whole’ (Marshall 2003: 58). The touchstone for all Cranmer’s efforts at this religious reorientation was his first clearly Protestant formulary, Certayne Sermons or Homelies, popularly known as the Book of Homilies, published barely six months into the new reign on 31 July 1547. Like Mao’s ‘Little Red Book’, the Book of Homilies was designed to be a manifesto of the regime’s theological agenda and the means of its revolutionary implementation. Its sermons established an official epitome of scriptural teaching on the way of salvation by which all received and future doctrinal formulations were to be judged. As required reading in parish churches every Sunday, the Homilies were also intended to harness the persuasive power of the local pulpit to foster the populace’s embrace of its new religious beliefs and rhythms. Yet, this dual purpose had but one end: the nurturing of a better, more godly society through a successful reordering of the national spiritual consciousness. Although the Marian regime would repudiate Cranmer’s book for its message, it responded to its effectiveness by emulating his method for national change. Hence, when Elizabeth’s accession brought another alteration in religion, the Edwardian homilies were reintroduced in 1559 and augmented by a second book in 1563 (on preaching the Elizabethan Settlement, see Hunt, Chapter 18, this volume). These two volumes embodied both the continuity and the divergence between the innovative, revolutionary aspirations of the Edwardian regime and Elizabeth’s determination to make an unchanging, final settlement of religion.

official tudor homilies



State Use of the Pulpit Of course, the direct state use of the pulpit assumed by the Book of Homilies had been a standard practice in the Church of England since the break with Rome. As early as June 1534, Cranmer ordered all preachers to speak at least once ‘against the usurped power of the Bishop of Rome’. He also commanded them to preach in defence of the Boleyn marriage ‘till the people be fully satisfied’, while appending five lengthy talking points to guide their preparation (Cox 1846: 460–1). In June 1535, Thomas Cromwell ordered a nationwide preaching campaign in support of the Royal Supremacy, prompting bishops to provide model sermons and other homiletic cribs for the priests in their dioceses (Elton 1972: 231–40; Wabuda 1994: 559–61; Ayris 1998: 690–1). Such assistance for local clergy was particularly useful, since the following year Cromwell institutionalized antipapal rhetoric as part of the rhythm of English life. His Royal Injunctions of 1536 specified that every priest with a cure of souls should preach several times a year in defence of the king’s new title (Elton 1972: 249; App. III.1). Yet enlisting popular support for the break with Rome was only one half of the government’s religious challenge. The other was to delimit just how much doctrinal innovation was acceptable to the new head. According to Thomas Starkey, speaking to the bishops in March 1537 at Cromwell’s command in the king’s name, scripture was clear and open with regards to Christ’s doctrine of salvation. As for some biblical passages that were not clear, preachers should strictly adhere to the interpretation of the ‘ancient doctors’ of the church. If that be not sufficient to resolve any controversy, then preachers should follow the practice of the Church of England as ultimately determined by the king (Block 1977: 40–1). Already in July 1536 Henry VIII had been actively involved with convocation in drawing up the Ten Articles as the official doctrinal statement for the English church. Consequently, when Cromwell issued his injunctions the next month, he turned to the parochial pulpit as the means for the articles’ dissemination. Injunction No. 2 specified that priests with cure of soul had to read them to their people so that they might know what they needed to believe for salvation (Williams 1967: v. 805–8). When the Bishops’ Book of 1537 superseded the Ten Articles, its descriptions of Christian basics were also intended to serve as parish homilies. Following Henry’s command, Cranmer ordered that portions of the Bishops’ Book should be read as sermons, week by week, to the peculiars in his diocese (Cox 1846: 348–9, 469–70; MacCulloch 1996: 206). In 1538, Cromwell’s second set of injunctions specified how often such basic doctrinal sermons should be heard in every parish—four times a year, the same standard as that set by Archbishop Peckham in 1281 (Williams 1967: v. 812; Wabuda 2002: 37–40; App. III.2). In contrast to such doctrinally focused homilies, the first semi-official attempt at replacing the liturgically based medieval sermons of Mirk’s Festial were the Epistles and Gospelles with a Brief Postyl upon the Same, published by Richard Taverner during the course of 1540. In 1538 Cromwell appears to have issued a general order that the Epistle



ashley null

and the Gospel for Mass each Sunday be read in English ‘and they that have such grace . . . make some declaration, either of the one, or of both’ (Duffy 1992: 425–7; MacCulloch 1996: 225). At the request ‘of certayn godly persons’, Taverner, a client of Cromwell, assembled homiletic material from a variety of sources, including Latimer and Tunstall, to help clergy fulfil this requirement (Cardwell 1841: p. xix; Yost 1970a, b; Christian 1998;). The Postils provided short homilies for both scripture readings on Sundays and major feast days in the traditional calendar based on the Sarum lectionary as reprinted in the Great Bible (1539) (see Fig. 4). Although Cranmer’s involvement as an editor of Taverner’s project has also been suggested (Wabuda 1994: 563), the first concrete substantiation usually cited for Cranmer’s own efforts at sermon-writing for a collection of homilies is a letter from four Englishmen to Heinrich Bullinger and their other former theological teachers in Zurich dated 8 March 1539 (Wabuda 2002: 143–4). As part of the general evangelical advance, Cranmer was reported to be now wholly employed in instructing the people, and in composing some discourses in English, which our clergy are to use instead of those Latin ones which they have hitherto prated in their churches like so many parrots. (Epistolae tigurinae 406; Robinson 1847: ii. 626)

Diarmaid MacCulloch, however, has sensibly pointed out that a much better translation for orationes is ‘prayers’ not ‘discourses’, since ‘pre-Reformation sermons in churches were naturally in English, not Latin’ (1996: 224). Indeed, according to Cranmer’s own account in 1547, he wanted his homily project to replace such popular medieval collections of ‘foolish lying tales’ as Mirk’s Festial, composed in English, and the Legenda aurea, widely available in English as The Golden Legend since Caxton’s translation in 1483 (Muller 1933: 311–15).

Origin of the Homilies Although leaning in an evangelical direction, the Bishops’ Book was only a temporary compromise. In the words of Bishop Stephen Gardiner, the formulary was merely ‘a common storehouse, where every man layd uppe in store suche ware as he lyked, and could tell wheare to fynde to serve his purpose’ (Muller 1933: 351). This uneasy truce could not last, especially after the enactment in 1539 of the traditionalist Act of Six Articles. When the three-year mandate for the Bishops’ Book expired in 1540, both sides battled over what should replace it. In the process, Cromwell lost his life in 1540 and Cranmer very nearly did as well in 1543. As part of these doctrinal manœuvrings, Cranmer had the 1542 convocation of Canterbury approve the gathering of an official collection of parochial homilies (Muller 1933: 296; MacCulloch 1996: 293–4). On 16 February 1543 he presided over the formal presentation of several homilies in convocation, which were then entrusted to Anthony

official tudor homilies



Hussey, Cranmer’s registrar, for filing (Wilkins 1737: iii. 860–3; Bray 2006: 271). Although Gardiner had promised Cranmer to make a contribution, his work was not among them. Fearing that the diverse group of authors involved would only lead to more theological ‘dissonantia’, Gardiner preferred to concentrate his energies on pushing for a wholesale conservative revision of the Bishops’ Book, rendering Cranmer’s homily project superfluous in the process (Muller 1933: 303–4, 353–4). Two months later Gardiner’s plan came to fruition. During 20–30 April 1543 convocation debated the draft text of the new doctrinal formula, and it was uniformly Erasmian Catholic on salvation. On 27 April, Cranmer strenuously objected to its explicit rejection of justification by faith alone. As a fallback, he proposed using ‘faith only’, since he did not deny that other virtues such as love and repentance were present in the justified. Rather, he merely denied that these other virtues contributed something to justification. In Cranmer’s view, ‘faith only’ justified because only this virtue pointed to a basis for right-standing with God outside of sinful human beings themselves—namely, to the righteousness in Jesus Christ himself. Both convocation and Henry VIII found his arguments unpersuasive. In the end, the revised book, A Necessary Doctrine and Erudition of a Christian, popularly known as the King’s Book, specifically rejected justification both by ‘faith alone’ and by ‘faith only’. The King’s Book now became the official standard for preaching for the remainder of Henry’s reign.

The Edwardian Homilies With the advent of Edward’s accession, political power shifted to the evangelicals, and Cranmer judged the time to be right for resurrecting the old project. In the spring of 1547, he wrote letters describing his intention to act on the homilies agreed to in convocation years before. Stephen Gardiner, not surprisingly, objected. His chief argument was that no alteration in Henry’s final religious settlement should be made during the boy king’s minority. Gardiner also vehemently opposed Cranmer’s assertion in the letter that Henry had been ‘seduced’ into approving doctrine in that text that now needed to be corrected as well. Gardiner indignantly reminded Cranmer that the king had specifically rejected the archbishop’s view on justification and had had the text rewritten to make that perfectly clear. Finally, Gardiner disputed the whole idea that homilies made a difference in the people anyway. He argued that they would best be encouraged by imitation rather than by hearing. This last argument deserves closer analysis. It was a commonplace of early Tudor reform that the laity followed the example of the clergy and, therefore, the best way to improve the moral behaviour of the people was for their spiritual leaders to set a better example. What is novel, and probably disingenuous, is Gardiner’s analysis of the effects of preaching (on sermon reception, see also Craig, Chapter 10, this volume). He divided the audience of a parochial sermon into three groups. When the ‘most rude’ hear a sermon, they report that it was ‘good and very good and wondrous good’ but cannot remember what was actually said. Another group



ashley null

consists of those aspiring to knowledge above their capacity, and these merely mixed up their facts. The third group, according to Gardiner, would not trouble themselves to listen to sermons ‘tyll lerned men agree better’ (Muller 1933: 311). As perceptive as ever, Gardiner saw clearly that the biggest threat posed by the evangelical use of sermons was to undermine the teaching office of the church. Gardiner simply expected the laity to accept and obey the admonitions of the preacher because of the church’s divine institutional authority. Yet, when people heard officially sanctioned divergent opinions within the same formulary like the Bishops’ Book, or listened to one teaching from the King’s Book and a probably contradictory doctrine from Cranmer’s new homiletic initiative under Edward, they would be forced to decide which position was correct, and such decisions were, in Gardiner’s view, clearly beyond their capacity. Protestant doctrine, however, emphasized personal faith and individual assurance as necessary for salvation. Hence, its adherents needed the laity to accept and obey the preacher, because his scriptural message moved them to inward awareness and consent. Here we see Gardiner’s fundamental objection to the evangelical use of sermons—to persuade people to decide for themselves what was true. Here is the fundamentally radical nature of the Edwardian homilies. Cranmer ignored Gardiner’s objections, and on 31 July the Book of Homilies was issued with a preface by Edward VI. Its title made the source of its authority and the intended means of its implementation clear: Certayne Sermons, or Homelies, Appoynted by the Kynges Majestie to Be Declared and Redde by All Persones, Vicars, or Curates every Sondaye in their Churches where they have Cure. This royal command was reiterated in the king’s preface and in his injunctions issued the same day, and both were delivered to the dioceses by the king’s commissioners during their visitations (App. III.3). According to the injunctions, clergy ‘should not at any time or place preach, or set forth unto the people, any doctrine contrary or repugnant to the effect and intent contained or set forth in the King’s highness’ homilies’. This measure was not deemed sufficiently effective in spreading the regime’s message, however. Consequently, in 1548 the king commanded that all preachers, including those licensed by the regime’s top leaders, content themselves with merely reading ‘the devout and godly homilies’ in order that they ‘might the better in the meanwhile sink into his subjects’ hearts’ (Bond 1976: 31; App. III.4).To make their length more manageable, a rubric in the service of Holy Communion of the 1549 Book of Common Prayer gave notice that the sermons would soon be divided into parts, thus also giving them indirect authorization from convocation and parliament. Finally, in 1553 the Homilies received direct confirmation through their incorporation into Article 34 of the Forty-Two Articles.

Structure of the Homilies Despite their significant doctrinal differences, both the Bishops’ Book and the King’s Book still adhered to the catechetical pattern of Peckam’s quarterly sermons. Their focus was on instruction, not exhortation, and Christian doctrine was explained primarily via

official tudor homilies



the traditional essential standards of the faith: the Apostles’ Creed, the seven sacraments, the Ten Commandments, the Paternoster, and the Ave Maria. The Bishops’ Book did append, however, descriptions of two specific controversial issues, justification and purgatory. The King’s Book included all these and added clarifications on three more disputed topics: faith, free will, and good works. Taverner’s Postils took a different approach. They were overtly homiletical, combining scriptural exegesis with moral exhortation. Yet their organization, like Luther’s, was equally traditional, following the medieval liturgical calendar and its readings. With the Book of Homilies, Cranmer made a clean break with both catechetical and liturgical precedents. He turned instead to the latest humanist teachings of Erasmus and Philip Melanchthon. In 1535, Erasmus published Ecclesiastes, his long-awaited manual on homiletics (Kleinhans 1968; Shuger 1988: 63–4). Here he urged preachers to handle their texts with learning, organizing their scriptural material by ‘loci communes’ so that more difficult passages could be understood in the light of those that were more clear (Schottenloher 1970; Walter 1991: 189–200). Erasmus also argued that good preachers needed to be skilled in moving the affections of their audience as well, for knowledge without love would not inspire people to lead a virtuous life. Since ‘love births love’, according to Erasmus, the best way to move an audience to love God was by reminding people of God’s prior love for them, that, while they were still his enemies, he gave his son for their redemption (Erasmus 1703–6: v. 977B–981E). Melanchthon employed key aspects of Erasmus’s rhetorical theology in his own Loci communes theologici (1521). As his title suggests, Melanchthon followed Erasmus’s commonplace method, using scripture to interpret scripture on such key doctrines of Christian theology as sin, law, gospel, grace, and justification by faith. As a teacher of rhetoric himself, he agreed with Erasmus’s insistence on the importance of the affections in enabling changed lives, both stressing that only ‘love births love’ and acknowledging the need for divine inspiration to birth it. However, Melanchthon thoroughly adapted each of these points so as to combine them into a powerful vehicle for promoting Lutheran soteriology. According to Melanchthon’s analysis, the affections were not merely aids to moral application as Erasmus thought. True to Luther’s understanding of the bondage of the will, Melanchthon argued that the affections were located in the heart and that they determined both the choices of the will and the reasoning of the mind. For what the heart loved, the will would inevitably choose, and the mind would then defend. Hence, after the Fall, both human reason and the will were held captive by the affection of selflove, or concupiscence. Moral transformation could come about then only through the intervention of an outside force, the Holy Spirit. When the good news of justification by faith was proclaimed, the Spirit assured believers of their salvation by working supernaturally through the power of God’s word. This new confidence in God’s gracious goodwill towards them reoriented their affections, calming their turbulent hearts, and inflaming in them a grateful love in return (Null 2000: 98–101). Therefore, in his De modo et arte concionandi (1537–9), Melanchthon taught that there were two kinds of sermons, those that taught doctrine and those that encouraged people to do good works.



ashley null

Of course, proclaiming justification by faith was the cornerstone of all doctrinal preaching, since the two chief biblical loci were ‘law’ and ‘gospel’. However, all sermons needed to aim at moving the affections, for ‘conversion and the spiritual life’ was attained by ‘introducing better affections into souls’ (Drews and Cohrs 1910–29: v.2: 33, 35-7, 51–2; Schnell 1968: 88–99; Shuger 1988: 65–8). When Cranmer organized his new set of homilies, he adopted the loci method of scriptural exposition. The twelve sermons of the 1547 book were evenly divided between loci describing essential doctrines and those addressing important ethical issues. The first six described the fundamentals of the way of salvation: ‘Reading of Scripture’; the ‘Misery of Mankind’ caused by sin; justification described in three separate homilies entitled ‘Salvation’, ‘Faith’, and ‘Good Works’; and a final sermon on ‘Love’. The second six addressed important aspects of Christian living: ‘Against Swearing and Perjury’, ‘Declining from God’, ‘Fear of Death’, ‘Exhortation to Obedience’, ‘Against Whoredom’, and ‘Against Strife’. Many of these topics were on both Erasmus’s and Melanchthon’s lists of essential loci theologici. Of the four known homilists, two were conservatives: John Harpesfield, archdeacon of London, who wrote the homily on sin; and Edmund Bonner, bishop of London, who wrote on love. The other two known homilists were Protestants: Thomas Cranmer, who without question wrote the three homilies on justification; and his chaplain Thomas Becon, who included ‘Against Adultery’ in his collected works. Since the ‘Homily on Scripture’ has themes and quotations in common with Cranmer’s known works, it is usually attributed to him as well (Griffiths 1859: pp. xxvii–xxix). Given that the homilists had differing theological commitments, was Gardiner’s fear of theological inconsistency ultimately proved correct? Presenting the Book of Homilies as a coherent manifesto of their reforming programme, the Edwardian regime certainly did not think so. According to the preface, the aim of the homilies was to rid the kingdom of erroneous doctrine and vicious living, and, directly addressing Gardiner’s concern,‘clerely to put away all contencion whiche hath heretofore rysen through diversitie of preachyng’. How? By the ‘true settyng further and pure declarynge of Gods Woorde, whiche is the principall guyde and leader unto all godlinesse and vertue’ (Bond 1987: 55). The question remains, then, whose rhetorical theology proved more influential in shaping the ‘pure’ construal of scripture found in the Book of Homilies: that of Erasmus or Melanchthon? John Wall has argued at length for an Erasmian interpretation of the Homilies. Since the second half of the 1547 book so clearly seeks to promote godly living as a way to improve society, Wall sees the project as the ultimate fulfilment of a reform programme developed by Thomas Starkey and his fellow English humanists during the reign of Henry VIII (Wall 1981: 88, 91–3). Wall is certainly correct that the reformation of society was the heart of the whole Tudor humanist enterprise. Yet he has failed to appreciate that English humanists became divided over which theological approach best promoted that reform. According to Wall’s analysis, Cranmer followed Erasmus and continued to insist on works of charity for final justification (Wall 1981: 107, 118, 124). Yet, Cranmer studies since the mid-1990s have rendered such an assessment untenable. In reality, Cranmer followed Melanchthon (MacCulloch 1996; Null 2000).

official tudor homilies



Cranmer’s Contribution Cranmer brought theological consistency to the Homilies by carefully structuring the first six dogmatic topics. The opening sermon on scripture established biblical knowledge as the foundation of every Christian’s relationship with God. The Almighty gave human beings the Bible as ‘a sure, a constant and a perpetuall instrument of salvacion’. On the one hand, scripture was God’s chosen medium to tell human beings the truth about the world around them and the struggles within them: ‘In these bokes we may learne to know our selfes, how vile and miserable we be, and also to know God, how good he is of hymself and how he communicateth his goodnes unto us and to al creatures.’ On the other hand, the Bible was also the means through which God worked supernaturally to turn people’s hearts to himself and the doing of his will: ‘[The words of Holy Scripture] have power to converte [our souls] through Gods promise, and thei be effectual through Gods assistence.’ Hence, Cranmer urged the people of England to ‘diligently searche for the welle of life in the bokes of the New and Old Testament, and not ronne to the stinkyng podelles of mennes tradicions, devised by mannes imaginacion for our justification and salvacion’ (Bond 1987: 61–2). ‘The Misery of All Mankind, and of his Condemnation to Death Everlasting by his own Sin’ followed next. In spite of the homily’s relative brevity, Harpesfield gathered together a treasury of scripture, quoting forty-seven different verses about the pervasiveness of sin. With true Erasmian copia, Harpesfield wrote that David humbled himself in confession because he weighed ‘rightly his sinnes from the original roote and spring hed, perceiving inclinations, provocations, stirrynges, stingynges, buddes, braunches, dregges, infeccions, tastes, felinges, and sentes of them to continue in hym still’ (Bond 1987: 72). Consequently, human beings could not trust in their works, because of their inherent imperfections. Instead, acknowledging that they ‘have no goodnes, helpe, nor salvacion, but contrariwise, synne, dampnacion, and death everlastynge’ (1987: 74), Christians were to flee to God’s mercy as the only hope for a quiet conscience. These three points—the effects of sin, the necessity of confession to God, and the inability of humanity to gain salvation apart from the mercy of God—were all stressed by Erasmus as useful for arousing the affections (Erasmus 1703–6: v. 980D–981A). Yet, herein lies the genius of Cranmer’s ordering of the sermons, which were required to be read seriatim. According to Melanchthon, to preach the law meant to point out ‘sin and its penalty’, which included corruption and death (Drews and Cohrs 1910–29: v.2: 35–6). Thus, Harpesfield’s erudite Erasmian, but still thoroughly traditional Catholic, homily became through Cranmer’s placement of it in the book a Protestant proclamation of the law immediately preceding his own three sermons expounding the gospel. According to Melanchthon, preaching the gospel meant presenting the benefits of Christ and clarifying that they were received by faith (Drews and Cohrs 1910–29: v.2. 36–7). Such was the message of Cranmer’s next three homilies on ‘Salvation’, ‘Faith’, and ‘Good Works’. In his earlier ‘Great Commonplaces’ and ‘Notes on Justification’, Cranmer



ashley null

had already delineated his commitment to the Protestant interpretation of Augustinian soteriology—including the key doctrine of forensic justification (Null 2000: 213–34). Accordingly, the ‘Homily on Salvation’ stressed that justifying righteousness was an alien righteousness: ‘Because all men be synners and offendors against God . . . every man of necessitie is constrayned to seke for another righteousnesse, or justificacion, to be received at Gods awne handes’ (Bond 1987: 79). Moreover, the righteousness given to the believer through faith was not true inherent righteousness, but merely reckoned as such by God (p. 79). Therefore, the only possible means of salvation was the imputation of an alien righteousness by faith: ‘Christe is nowe the righteousnesse of all them that truely doo beleve in hym . . . forasmuche as that which their infirmitie lacketh Christes justice hath supplied’ (p. 81). Yet Cranmer was equally careful to define the nature of the faith that brought about this imputed righteousness. First, saving faith came ‘by Gods workyng in us’ through the hearing of the word (p. 80). Secondly, this ‘acte to beleve in Christe’ was not the basis for justification, but only what sent the sinner to Christ for pardon. Indeed, faith was ‘farre to weake and insufficient, and unperfecte’ to merit remission of sins in its own right, ‘for that were to compte our selfes to be justified by some acte or vertue that is within oure selfes’ (pp. 84–5). Finally, justifying faith was more than just intellectual assent to dogmatic statements. Since demons also believed the principal truths of Christianity, ‘right and true Christian faith’ was not only agreement with scripture, but also ‘a sure trust and confidence in Gods mercifull promises to be saved from everlastynge dampnacion’. This assurance, in turn, led to the outward fruitfulness of a lively, or living faith, that is, a faith which showed itself by good works (p. 86). For Cranmer, the Lutheran assurance of salvation was the long-sought missing key to unlock societal transformation. In his mature view, only the promise of free salvation made possible by God’s love could inspire grateful human love, as he had privately written as early as 1538 to Henry VIII (Cox 1846: 86). In 1547 Cranmer publicly proclaimed this Melanchthonian doctrine of the affections in the ‘Homily on Salvation’: ‘[from this assurance of salvation] doeth folowe a lovyng harte to obey his commaundementes’ (Bond 1987: 86). When the benefits of God’s merciful grace were considered, unless they were ‘desperate persones’ with ‘hartes harder than stones’, people would be moved to give themselves wholly unto God and the service of their neighbours (p. 87). In short, grace produced gratitude. Gratitude birthed love. Love prompted repentance. Repentance issued forth in good works. Good works made for a better society. The homilies on ‘Faith’ and ‘Good Works’ were simply a further exposition of this way of salvation, albeit as an artful concessio, each describing what the other’s title suggested. ‘Faith’ emphasized the necessity of good works in the life of the justified. When believers found evidence of their fruitfulness in godly living, they would certify their consciences that they did indeed have saving faith (p. 99). ‘Good Works’ insisted on the necessity of faith for justification, for no work was good unless it flowed from the love generated by saving faith. Of course, Cranmer intended this Christian love to be extended to foes as well as friends, for ‘they be his creacion and image, and redemed by Christ, as ye are’ (p. 113). Thus, the following final doctrinal homily was Bonner’s work on the importance

official tudor homilies



of loving like Christ did, including loving one’s enemies. For Christ loved us ‘when we wer his enemies’ (p. 123). Naturally, this was an important Erasmian Catholic theme (Erasmus 1703–6: v. 981E). However, since the ‘Homily on Love’ was placed so as to come immediately after Cranmer’s inculcation of Protestant soteriology, the handiwork of the staunchly traditionalist Bonner now functioned as the fullest expression of the life to be lived by those assured of their salvation by grace through faith alone. Having outlined the Church of England’s new Protestant way of salvation, the remaining six homilies addressed issues that seriously threatened both an individual’s eternal salvation and the well ordering of current society. Not surprising in the light of England’s experience in the Wars of the Roses, the first ethical homily stressed the importance of oaths—the fundamental basis of English society. ‘Against Swearing and Perjury’ addressed both those Anabaptist factions who refused to swear any oath as contrary to Jesus’s teaching and those who had sworn oaths but failed to keep them. The next two,‘Declining from God’ and ‘Against the Fear of Death’, were a further clever example of preaching the law and the gospel in succession.‘Declining from God’ outlined how sin led people astray from God by convincing them to rely on ceremonies and sacrifice to cover up ‘the stubbernes of their awne hartes’, rather than reading and following God’s word (Bond 1987: 138). As a result, people experienced divine punishment in the form of such calamities as sword, sickness, and famine. Of course, the ultimate divine sanction from failing to live out their Christian faith in society was the withdrawal of his presence by removing his word from that society (pp. 139–40). Yet, if preaching God’s wrath was the proper pastoral response to antinomianism, the exact opposite approach was necessary when dealing with the fear of death. That homily sought to assuage anxiety about one’s future fate by reaffirming the promises of the gospel. Moved by ‘so excedinge greate benefites’ which God ‘hathe layed up in store’ for Christians, those facing death should simply repent, trust that Christ had paid the penalty for their sins, and believe that ‘death can neyther take hym from us, nor us from hym’ (pp. 149–50). The remaining three homilies addressed standard Tudor ethical concerns. The ‘Homily on Obedience’ was a worthy successor to Cromwell’s Supremacy sermons. The ‘Homily on Whoredom’ attacked sexual licentiousness as an affront to God’s commandments and a threat to social stability that bred illegitimacy and marital dysfunction. Finally, the ‘Homily against Strife’ sought to prevent doctrinal fights over the interpretation of scripture that could lead to community friction. The book concluded with a note that further homilies on at least eleven different topics divided between church practices and more issues of personal morality would eventually follow.

Marian Reaction Perhaps the greatest tribute to the effectiveness of Cranmer’s Book of Homilies was the opinion of Reginald Pole’s Legatine Synod (1555–6) that the ‘majority’ of the English were now ‘infected’ with ‘corruptions and abuses, both in doctrine and in practice’ (Bray 1998:



ashley null

104–5). Although ‘heretical infection does not necessarily imply widespread Protestant belief ’ (Wizeman 2006a: 28), twenty years of aggressive attacks against the papacy and six years of the Edwardian regime’s proselytizing Protestantism had taken its toll. The corrosive effect of the flood of sermons, treatises, ballads, and plays on cherished traditional teachings and ritualist practices had not gone unnoticed by the Marian authorities (Bonner 1555a: sig. A2r). Nevertheless, they recognized that the greatest threat to the restoration of a vibrant Roman Catholicism in England under Queen Mary was a general scepticism about the authority of the institutional church to tell people what to believe on any issue. Even if a majority of the country had not been persuaded to embrace Protestant doctrine by an experience of internal assurance, a Protestant culture of the individual deciding for himself had at least taken hold, just as Gardiner had feared. Therefore, the Marian theologians embraced an ‘exalted ecclesiology’ that ascribed to the church an ‘almost oracular grasp of the truth’. In their view, the church’s authority was ‘chiefly that of instruction’—namely, the ‘power to define and conserve divine truths’, and ‘they wrote about it incessantly’ (Wizeman 2006a: 118, 124–5). This concern for reasserting the teaching office of the church is clearly evident in the pastoral materials that Bonner issued for his London diocese in 1555. Typical of the Catholic humanism that undergirded the theological efforts of the Marian restoration, Bonner chose to issue both a catechetical book (based on Peckam) and a topical book of homilies after the Edwardian fashion, the two usually bound together, ‘to thintent they shall have no cause to murmure or grudge, for lacke of certayne bokes in the englishe tongue for their instruction, or yet for lacke of preachynge unto them’ (Bonner 1555a: sigs A3v–A4r). Bonner’s A Profitable and Necessarye Doctryne was a revised version of the King’s Book, sharpened in focus, expanded with more scriptural and patristic references, and covering not only the nature of faith, the Creed, the seven sacraments, the Ten Commandments, and the Lord’s Prayer, but also adding the Hail Mary, the Seven Deadly Sins, and the Eight Beatitudes. His Homilies consisted of thirteen sermons: two each on sin, redemption, charity, the church’s authority, and the pope’s authority; and three on the Mass and transubstantiation. Harpesfield’s Edwardian ‘Homily on the Misery of All Mankind’ as well as Bonner’s ‘Homily on Charity’ were included in Bonner’s Marian sermons with only slight revisions (Duffy 1992: 525, 534–7). The consistent message of these sermons was that the ‘doctryne that the church teacheth, we muste love, & with great diligence embrace the tradition of the truth’ (Bonner 1555b: fo. 20r). Indeed, even the ancient Fathers would ‘never presume upon theyr owne judgementes, but ever referred themselves, to the understandyng, and interpretacion of the catholike churche before them’ (fo. 38r). For ‘yf in [controversies] ye will fly from the catholike church, & aske counsell of your selves, or of any that dooth swarve from the sayd churche, than for so muche as the holy ghost is not your guyde, you shall fall from ignoraunce to errour, and from doutyng, and dysputyng, to playne heresy’ (fo. 39v). Therefore, ‘all christen people are requyred, to make a solempne vow at theyr baptisme, to beleve the catholyke churche. And he that so doeth, is in an assured trade of salvation, if in his conversation, he folowe the same, but contrarywyse, he that beleveth it not, is in a mooste certayne estate of everlastynge dampnation’ (fo. 21r).

official tudor homilies



Although distrustful of the religious debate generated by the Reformation, Pole also recognized the importance of preaching (Duffy 2006). The fourth decree of his Legatine Synod insisted that clergy must ‘feed the people committed to them with the wholesome food of preaching, at least on Sundays and other feast days’ (Bray 1998: 104–5; App. III.6). For those not qualified to do so, the synod drew up plans to issue four sets of homilies: (i) on disputed doctrine; (ii) on the Lord’s Prayer, the Hail Mary, the Ten Commandments, and the seven sacraments; (iii) on the Epistle and Gospel readings for Sundays and feast days; and (iv) on church rites, virtues, and vices (Wizeman 2006a: 28–9). There is even some evidence that Pole may have required every parish to purchase Bonner’s material, for the first legatine book, Thomas Watson’s Holsome and Catholyke doctrine concerninge the Seven Sacramentes of Chrystes Church, did not appear until 1558 (Mayer 2000: 250; Wizeman 2006b). Yet Pole was also convinced that the word would hinder the people’s restoration to the true Catholic faith, rather than help, if its proclamation were not joined to the promotion of rites and rituals that encouraged willing obedience to the Marian church authorities (Duffy 2006: 177–86, 197–8). Consequently, the synod’s second decree restored the traditional canons on ecclesiastical discipline, including the Fourth Lateran Council’s requirement for annual auricular confession (Bray 1998: 77–8). Finally, taking and reversing a page from Cromwell’s book, the synod’s first decree instituted a new ritual. On St Andrew’s Day (30 November)—the anniversary of England’s return to Roman obedience—everyone in every English village, town, and city was required to attend a public procession preceded by a Mass with a sermon or reading explaining the reason why this was such a joyous occasion.

The Elizabethan Homilies Elizabeth acceded to the throne in November 1558, and by the following April a new Act of Uniformity restoring a slightly revised 1552 Book of Common Prayer had passed through parliament. Since the communion rubric still ordered the Edwardian homilies to be read, an edition of the latter appeared that year with a new preface and minor changes in diction ‘for the better understandyng of the simple people’ (Bond 1978; App. III.7). The Elizabethan version also concluded with the original advertisement that more homilies were to follow on matters of worship and personal morality. On 29 January 1563 convocation approved the Thirty-Nine Articles, whose thirty-fifth article named the titles of the Second Book’s twenty sermons (those in italics were listed in the advertisement): ‘Of the Right Use of the Church’, ‘Against Peril of Idolatry’, ‘For Repairing and Keeping Clean the Church’, ‘Of Good Works: And First of Fasting’, ‘Against Gluttony and Drunkenness’, ‘Against Excess of Apparel’, ‘Homily of Prayer’, ‘Of the Place and Time of Prayer’, ‘Of Common Prayer and Sacraments’, ‘Information for them which take Offence at certain Places of Holy Scripture’, ‘Of Almsdeeds’, ‘Of the Nativity’, ‘Of the Passion, for Good Friday’, ‘The Second Homily of the Passion’, ‘Of the Resurrection, for Easter Day’,



ashley null

‘Of the Worthy Receiving of the Sacrament’, ‘Homily for Whitsunday’, ‘Homily for Rogation Week’, ‘Of Matrimony’, ‘Against Idleness’, and ‘Of Repentance’. On 5 February 1563 convocation gave assent to their texts. The authorship of the sermons in this volume is even more uncertain than of those in its predecessor. However, based on style and known theological interests, John Griffiths, their Victorian editor, ventured assignments to leading Elizabethan bishops John Jewel (general editorship and ‘Idolatry’), Edmund Grindal (‘Fasting’), James Pilkington (‘Apparel’, ‘Gluttony’), and Matthew Parker (‘Rogation’). ‘Of the Passion’ and ‘Of the Resurrection’ were taken directly from Taverner’s Postils, and, according to Strype, Richard Cox wrote the preface (Griffiths 1859: pp. xxiv–xxxviii; 302 n. 4, 303 n. 5, 310 n. 5; Tomlinson 1897: 246). Several of the homilies incorporated parts of other patristic and reformed works, including Erasmus’s Paraclesis (in ‘Information for them that take Offence at certain Places of Holy Scripture’), Cypian’s De opere et eleemosynis (in ‘Of Almsdeeds’), Peter Martyr Vermigli’s lectures on Judges (in ‘Against Gluttony and Drunkenness’), and Rudolf Gwalther (in ‘Of Repentance’). Half of ‘Matrimony’ was translated from an address by Veit Dietrich of Nuremberg, the other half from Chrysostom. Finally, ‘Against Idolatry’ was itself an abridgement of Henrich Bullinger’s De origine erroris in divorum et simulacrorum cultu (Griffiths 1859: 369–70, 389–99, 302–6, 526–32, 500 n. 1, 506 n. 8). Once the texts had the approval of convocation, the queen kept them in her custody for several months. When the volume finally appeared at the end of July 1563 as the Seconde Tome of Homelyes, three significant editorial changes had been made. ‘Against Idolatry’ no longer banned images from the church because they were inherently evil, but merely ‘for fear and occasion of worshipping them, though they be of themselves things indifferent’—a change no doubt reflecting the queen’s own persistent determination to retain a crucifix in her private chapel. The text of the ‘Of Common Prayer and Sacraments’ was cleverly rewritten to maintain convocation’s insistence that only Baptism and Holy Communion were fully dominical sacraments of the New Testament, yet this affirmation was phrased in such a way as to imply that the other traditional rites, such as absolution and ordination, still remained sacraments, although not to the same high degree as the first two. Lastly, a quotation from Augustine that suggested that unworthy communicants ‘neither eat his flesh nor drink his blood’ was deleted from ‘Of the Worthy Receiving of the Sacrament’ (Griffiths 1859: pp. xix–xxi). Similarly, convocation’s Article 29 ‘Of the wicked who eat not the body of Christ’ (which refers to Augustine as well) was also omitted from the 1563 printed version of the Elizabethan Articles of Religion before finally being included in the 1571 edition. All these changes were in keeping with the queen’s political overtures to the German Lutherans in the 1560s as well as the older Melanchthonian Protestantism she had imbibed from her stepmother, Katherine Parr (Doran 2000; Collinson 2003: 109–14). The final addition to the Second Book was ‘Against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion’, written in the aftermath of both the Northern Rebellion in November–December 1569 and Pope Pius V’s bull of 25 February 1570, Regnans in excelsis, which released Elizabeth’s

official tudor homilies



Roman Catholic subjects from any allegiance to her. After five editions as a separate homily, the text was incorporated into the Elizabethan Book of Homilies when the convocation of 1571 added its title to the end of the list in Article 35 of the final version of the Articles of Religion. Hence, spurred on by a visitation, Sir Christopher Trychay’s conservative parish of Morebath purchased a copy of the new, complete edition in 1571 (Bond 1987: 40–4; Griffiths 1859: p. xxiii; Duffy 2001: 179). If Cranmer had intended the Edwardian homilies to lay the theological foundation for his programme of ever more progressively Protestant changes, Elizabeth expected her collection to be its conclusion and consolidation. In her view, society was best served, not by using religion to encourage innovation, but rather as a means for fostering its unchanging stability. Hence, the purpose of the Second Book of Homilies was to inculcate a final, thoroughly Protestant religious culture supportive of the formularies already established by the queen. In the eyes of the compilers, such a process of popular persuasion required both the constant refutation of papist beliefs as well as the elucidation of Protestant truths. At the heart of this dual task stood scripture. Here Christ was to be found, not in those ‘dead and dumb’ statues garnished with ‘gold, and precious stone’ (Griffiths 1859: 159, 489, 215, 370). The Bible was his living expression, where he would speak to his followers (p. 370). Yet the bishops of Rome had conspired to prevent this vital communication between Christ and his people so that everyone would ‘take all their commandments for God’s’ (p. 591). The resulting biblical ignorance was ‘the cause of all error’ and ‘evil’ in church and society (pp. 597–8), whereas the knowledge derived from God’s Word was ‘the only mean to bridle carnal liberty, and to kill all our fleshly affections’ (p. 368). In short, relying on scripture was the dividing line between those who would be saved and those who would perish (pp. 379–80). Consequently, the Elizabethan homilies stressed the primacy of biblical teaching, with confirmation of it drawn from the Fathers and grace-directed reason (see, for example, the three divisions of ‘Against Peril of Idolatry’). Since the Scholatics had erred because ‘they sought not the will of God, but rather the will of reason’ (p. 488), ‘Information on Scripture’ was particularly clear about the inferior status of human understanding to scripture: ‘reason must give place to God’s Holy Spirit; you must submit your worldly wisdom and judgment unto his divine wisdom and judgment. Consider that the Scripture, in what strange form soever it be pronounced, is the word of the living God’ (p. 377). Seen in the perspective of this biblical plumb line, the purpose of going to church was not to pray to saints (p. 325), nor to intercede for dead loved ones (p. 335–7), and certainly not for ‘gay gazing’ at the elavated host during ‘mummish massing’, let alone ‘the blasphemous buying and selling the most precious Body and Blood of Christ’ (pp. 348–9, 442, 277). The Bible had clearly forbidden such practices. Rather, Christians were to gather together to call on God’s holy name, listen to his holy word, and receive by faith his holy sacrament (pp. 160, 444–5). As a result, the Elizabethan church had had to be cleansed from all the superstitious and idolatrous practices reintroduced under Mary. The importance that the church authorities ascribed to this task was made clear by ‘Against Peril of



ashley null

Idolatry’. Although only one of twenty sermons, its length alone took up a quarter of the 1563 collection. The sermons on fasting, prayer and the sacraments, worthy reception, rogation processions, and repentance also sought to discredit traditional Catholic practices as unscriptural, while at the same time retraining the congregation in how to think, act, and worship like good Protestants. That the nation under Elizabeth still needed such a radical reconstruction of its religious sensibilities appeared self-evident to the compilers of the Second Book. Its very opening sentence suggests a substantial reluctance even in 1563 to embrace Elizabeth’s Protestant settlement: ‘there appeareth at these days great slackness and negligence of a great sort of people in resorting to the church’ (p. 153). ‘Of Common Prayer and Sacraments’ admitted one factor contributing to the poor attendance— namely, the continuing bewilderment of many about how to worship after all the alterations: ‘Alas, gossip, what shall we now do at church, since all the saints are taken away, since all the goodly sights we were wont to have are gone, since we cannot hear the like piping, singing, chanting, and playing upon the organs, that we could before?’ (p. 349). Indeed, these changes reached down to even the most basic level of how one prayed during the service. According to ‘The Right Use of the Church’, with a vernacular liturgy, traditional private acts of piety during worship were contrary to scripture: ‘St Paul teacheth . . . Glorifying God with one spirit and mouth, which cannot be when every man and woman, in severate pretence of devotion, prayeth privately, one asking, another giving thanks, another reading doctrine, and forceth not to hear the common prayer of the minister’ (pp. 162–3). Consequently, ‘On Common Prayer and Sacraments’ found it necessary to teach the people how to worship as good Protestants: whiles our minister is in rehearsing the prayer that is made in the name of us all, we must give diligent ear to the words spoken by him, and in heart beg at God’s hand those things that he beggeth in words. And, to signify that we so do, we say, Amen, at the end of the prayer that he maketh in the name of us all. (p. 358)

In all these matters, the Elizabethan homilies were merely confirming and consolidating the teachings of the Edwardian church. Yet, the struggle to defeat papist teachings pushed the Second Book of Homilies to include two significant revisions of Cranmer’s theology. Firstly, the archbishop had routinely preached to the people such benefits of election as assurance of salvation, but he always refrained from describing its grounding in God’s decision rather than the individual’s. ‘On Almsdeeds’, however, appealed to an explicit explanation of God’s role in predestination in order to exclude any possibility of personal merit contributing to either salvation or sanctification: God, of his mercy and especial favour towards them whom he hath appointed to everlasting salvation, hath so offered his grace effectually, and they have so received it fruitfully that . . . the Spirit of God mightily working in them unto obedience to God’s will and commandments, they declare by their outward deeds and life . . . that they are the undoubted children of God. (p. 390)

official tudor homilies



Secondly, while Cranmer had acknowledged the fear of punishment’s preparatory role in driving sinners to God, he continually stressed that the true motivation for repentance and amendment of life was loving gratitude for the free gift of salvation. The Elizabethan homilies had several passages that trumpeted Cranmer’s ‘grace and gratitude’ theology (pp. 391, 408–10, 424–6, 470). Yet the trauma of the Marian reaction had evidently stolen much of its wind. Many more passages throughout the collection emphasized repentance in order to avoid another experience of God’s wrath against the nation. In fact, the Second Book literally begins and ends with ‘the common peril and plague hanging over us’ (pp. 153, 597–600). Nothing makes the shift in tone any clearer than ‘On Repentance’, which offers five reasons to repent: duty to God, hope of forgiveness, shame for sin, suddenness of death, and fear of divine punishments (pp. 545–9). However, no mention is made of grace-inspired gratitude or love. Thus, the Second Book of Homilies began to preach predestination explicitly to safeguard salvation sola gratia, while at the same time emphasizing the benefits of moralism as the basis for repentance. It has been suggested that such mixed signals in early Elizabethan preaching contributed to the development of reformed Protestantism’s new ‘covenantal’ or ‘federal’ theology. To avoid confusion, the typical Tudor concern for the nation’s morals was incorporated into the covenant of works, whereas the utter gratuitousness of salvation was ensured by the covenant of grace (McGiffert 1982). Despite the queen’s reluctance to embrace new developments in Protestant theology, the seeds for later Puritan preaching were already present in the collection of sermons she personally reviewed.

Conclusion Regardless of what later Anglican historians became accustomed to claiming, the Elizabethan church was no via media between Rome and Geneva. With the advent of the Second Book of Homilies, the people of England, even thoroughly traditionalist parishes such as Morebath, were forced to hear week after week an uncompromising condemnation of essential Roman Catholic beliefs and faced constant encouragement to adopt, or at least adapt to, the distinctly Protestant religious culture now mandated by their government (Duffy 2001). The queen left no doubt about her own unstinting support for this anti-papist inculcation. In her famous confrontation in 1576 with Archbishop Grindal over the movement for local preaching clinics known as prophesyings, Elizabeth made quite clear that she thought the official homilies were more than sufficient for the normal instruction of the people (see App. III.8). Indeed, in 1585 she told a group of bishops that there was more learning in one of the homilies than twenty of some of theirs (Collinson 2003: 115). By the 1580s, most scholars would agree that significant progress towards Cranmer’s original intention for the Edwardian sermon collection had finally been achieved with the assistance of Elizabeth’s, that the ‘birthpangs of Protestant England’ had ‘actually



ashley null

produced the baby’ (Marshall 2003: 150). Yet the result was not what they had expected. Although the state had persuaded the people of England no longer to see themselves as Roman Catholics, successive governments would find far less success in determining exactly what kind of Protestants they would be. For, having become a Protestant nation, that decision now remained firmly with the individual conscience.

Bibliography Ayris, Paul (1998). ‘Preaching the Last Crusade: Thomas Cranmer and the “Devotion” Money of 1543’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 49: 683–701. Block, Joseph (1977). ‘Thomas Cromwell’s Patronage of Preaching’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 8/1: 37–50. Bond, R. B. (1976). ‘Cranmer and the Controversy Surrounding Publication of Certayne Sermons or Homilies (1547)’, Renaissance and Reformation, 12: 28–35. —— (1978).‘The 1559 Revisions in Certayne Sermons or Homilies: “For the Better Understanding of the Simple People”’, English Literary Renaissance, 8: 239–55. —— (1987) (ed.). Certain Sermons or Homilies (1547) and A Homily against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion (1570). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Bonner, Edmund (1555a). A Profitable and Necessarye Doctryne. —— (1555b). Homelies Set Forth by the Righte Reverende Father in God, Edmunde Byshop of London. Bray, Gerald (1998). The Anglican Canons 1529–1947. Woodbridge: Boydell. —— (2006). Records of Convocation VII: Canterbury 1509–1603. Woodbridge: Boydell. Cardwell, Edward (1841) (ed.). Postils on the Epistles and Gospels Compiled and Published by Richard Taverner in the Year 1540. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Christian, Margaret (1998). ‘ “I knowe not to howe to preache”: The Role of the Preacher in Taverner’s Postils’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 29/2: 377–97. Collinson, Patrick (2003). Elizabethans. Hambledon. Cox, John Edmund (1846) (ed.). Miscellaneous Writings and Letters of Thomas Cranmer. Cambridge: Parker Society. Doran, Susan (2000).‘Elizabeth I’s Religion: The Evidence of her Letters’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 51/4: 699–720. Drews, D., and Cohrs, D. (1910–29) (eds). Supplementa Melanchtoniana. 5 vols. Leipzig: Verein für Reformationsgeschichte. Duffy, Eamon (1992). Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400– c.1580. New Haven: Yale University Press. —— (2001). The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village. New Haven: Yale University Press. —— (2006). ‘Cardinal Pole Preaching: St Andrew’s Day 1557’, in Eamon Duffy and David Loades (eds), The Church of Mary Tudor. Aldershot: Ashgate, 176–200. Elton, G. R. (1972). Policy and Police: The Enforcement of the Reformation in the Age of Thomas Cromwell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Epistolae tigurinae de rebus potissimum ad ecclesiae Anglicanae reformationem . . . 1531–1558 (1848). Cambridge: Parker Society. Erasmus, Desiderius (1703–6). Opera omnia, ed. Jean Leclerc. 10 vols. Leyden: Vander.

official tudor homilies



Griffiths, John (1859). The Two Books of Homilies Appointed to be Read in Churches. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kleinhans, Robert Cr. (1968). ‘Erasmus’ Doctrine of Preaching: A Study of Ecclesiastes, sive de ratione concionandi’. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton Theological Seminary. MacCulloch, Diarmaid (1996). Thomas Cranmer: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press. McGiffert, Michael (1982). ‘Grace and Works: The Rise and Division of Covenant Divinity in Elizabethan Puritanism’, Harvard Theological Review,75: 463–502. Marshall, Peter (2003). Reformation England 1480–1642. Arnold. Mayer, Thomas F. (2000). Reginald Pole: Prince and Prophet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Muller, James Arthur (1933) (ed.). Letters of Stephen Gardiner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Null, Ashley (2000). Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine of Repentance: Renewing the Power to Love. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Robinson, Hastings (1847) (ed.). Original Letters Relative to the English Reformation . . . Chiefly from the Archives of Zurich, ii. Cambridge: Parker Society. Schnell, Uwe (1968). Die homiletische theorie Philipp Melanchthons. Berlin: Lutherisches Verlagshaus. Schottenloher, Otto (1970). ‘Zur Funktion der loci bei Erasmus’, in Hommages à Marie Delcourti. Brussels: Collection Latomus 114, 317–31. Shuger, Derbora K. (1988). Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tomlinson, J. T. (1897). The Prayer Book, Articles and Homilies: Some Forgotten Facts in their History which May Decide their Interpretation. Elliot Stock. Wabuda, Susan (1994). ‘Bishops and the Provision of Homilies, 1520 to 1547’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 25/3: 551–66. —— (2002). Preaching during the English Reformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wall, John (1981). ‘Godly and Fruitful Lessons: The English Bible, Erasmus’s Paraphrases, and the Book of Homilies’, in John E. Booty (ed.), The Godly Kingdom of Tudor England: Great Books of the English Reformation. Wilton, CN: Morehouse-Barlow, 47–135. Walter, Peter (1991). Theologie aus dem Geist der Rhetorik: zur Schriftauslegung des Erasmus von Rotterdam. Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag. Wilkins, David (1737). Concilia Magna Britanniae et Hiberniae. Williams, C. H. (1967) (ed.). English Historical Documents, 1485–1558. Eyre and Spottiswoode. Wizeman, William (2006a). The Theology and Spirituality of Mary Tudor’s Church. Aldershot: Ashgate. —— (2006b). ‘The Theology and Spirituality of a Marian Bishop: The Pastoral and Polemical Sermons of Thomas Watson’, in E. Duffy and D. Loades (eds), The Church of Mary Tudor. Aldershot: Ashgate, 258–80. Yost, J. K. (1970a). ‘German Protestant Humanism and the Early English Reformation: Richard Taverner and Official Translation’, Bibliothèque d’humanisme et renaissance: travaux et documents, 32: 613–25. —— (1970b) ‘Taverner’s Use of Erasmus and the Protestantization of English Humanism’, Renaissance Quarterly, 23: 266–76.

chapter 18

pr e achi ng th e eliz a beth a n set tl em en t arnold hunt

Studies of the Elizabethan settlement have tended to focus on the legal, liturgical, and doctrinal documents—the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity, the Prayer Book of 1559, the Royal Injunctions of the same year, the Thirty-Nine Articles of 1563, and the Canons of 1571—by which, over a period of years, the new religious order was gradually put into place. This is entirely understandable. These documents gave the settlement the political and statutory embodiment that was necessary to make it work; they have also been central to subsequent debates over the confessional identity of the Church of England, which have frequently revolved around the precise interpretation of particular rubrics in the Prayer Book or passages in the Articles. But this focus on written documents has resulted in something of an imbalance in the scholarship on the Elizabethan settlement, with more attention paid to the way that the settlement was constructed on paper than on the way it was mediated through the pulpits. Preaching has not been ignored, but very often the governing assumption has been that the historic formularies played a primary role in creating and defining the settlement, whereas the sermons of the early Elizabethan period played a secondary role in defending and supporting it. Historians of the Elizabethan church have not always found it easy to come to terms with the idea that the settlement might have been brought into being as much by speech acts as by written texts. This chapter looks at some of the sermons preached in the first decade of Elizabeth’s reign. Its purpose is not merely to provide a survey of the arguments used in defence of the Elizabethan settlement, but also to investigate what these sermons have to say about the activity of preaching itself. One of the most striking aspects of these early Elizabethan sermons is their self-reflexive nature, particularly with regard to the relationship between the preacher and his audience. Bishop John Jewel, who, as the leading apologist of the Elizabethan settlement in its first decade, had more occasion than most to reflect on

preaching the elizabethan settlement



such matters, commented that the audience response to preaching seemed to fluctuate from one extreme to another: ‘So it happeneth oftentimes that either the people judge too much of the Preachers of Gods word, or else they judge too little: Sometime they attribute unto them too much honour, sometime againe they give them too little honour: Sometime they credit them too much, sometime they beleeve them nothing at all. So are the people alwaies inconstant, so are they mooved on either side’ (Jewel 1607: sig. B2r). This was not just the lament of a Protestant preacher about the difficulty of weaning people away from the old religion. It was a concern about the complex and unpredictable nature of popular allegiance, which, as we shall see, was also expressed in very similar terms by some of Jewel’s Catholic adversaries. The need to direct and moderate the audience’s response also forced preachers to confront questions of pulpit rhetoric and decorum, which again are a common self-reflexive theme in the sermons of this first decade. Bringing the new settlement into being, against a background of widespread popular attachment to the old religion, required them to adopt an aggressive, confrontational strategy that in other circumstances they might have preferred to avoid. It required them to handle explosive issues of theological controversy in front of a popular audience, running the risk that the whole debate would spiral dangerously out of control. It required them to attack their opponents, not just with reasoned arguments but with mockery, sarcasm and invective, and even to bring some of the techniques of the theatre into the pulpit. As Thomas Wilson remarked in a well-known passage in The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), ‘menne commonly tary the ende of a merie plaie, and cannot abide the halfe hearyng of a sower checkyng Sermon’, so that ‘even these auncient preachers, must now and then plaie the fooles in the pulpite, to serve the tickle eares of their fleetyng audience’ (Wilson 1553: sig. A2v; see also Anselment 1979: 35). This was a period when the conventions of pulpit decorum were still very fluid. In retrospect, the sermons of the 1560s mark a transitional phase in Elizabethan preaching, characterized by a self-consciousness about the role of the preacher, by experiments with different rhetorical strategies, and by a pervasive uncertainty about the nature of the audience (see Armstrong, Chapter 7, this volume).

Constructing the Settlement, 1558–65 With the accession of Elizabeth I in November 1558, English pulpits were reopened to Protestant preachers. On the Sunday after her accession, as Edwin Sandys reported in a letter to Heinrich Bullinger,‘the Queen caused the gospel to be preached at that renowned place, Paul’s Cross, which duly occurred to the great delight of the people’ (Zurich Letters 1842–5: i. 4). But this moment of Protestant triumphalism did not last long. Hardly had the pulpits been reopened than they were abruptly closed again, only a few weeks later, by a royal proclamation of 27 December 1558, which ordered that all preaching was to cease for the time being, pending a resolution of ‘matters and ceremonies of religion’ by the queen and parliament. In the meantime, the clergy were required to limit themselves



arnold hunt

to the reading of the Gospel, Epistle, and the Ten Commandments, without ‘any maner of doctrine or preachyng’ or any ‘exposition or addition of any maner, sense or meaning to be applyed or added’ (Strype 1824: i.2. 391–2). The new Elizabethan regime thus came into existence, not to a chorus of welcome from Protestant preachers, but to a resounding silence from the pulpits. This was not what the returning Protestant exiles had been hoping for. James Pilkington, future bishop of Durham, argued in his exposition of the prophet Haggai that God’s house could only be rebuilt on a solid foundation of preaching: Thus we may learne here the necessitie of preaching, and what inconvenience folowes where it is not used. Where preaching fayles saieth Salomon the people perishe . . . What is the cause that the Papistes lye so sounde on sleepe in theyr abominations, but that they care not for preachinge, nor thinke it so necessarye, and because they woulde not be tolde of their faultes, that they mighte amende them? (Pilkington 1562: sigs Bviv–Bviir)

Pilkington warned that without a vigorous preaching campaign, the Elizabethan regime could never hope to succeed in its task of re-converting England to Protestantism: ‘Wel worth the Papistes therfore in their kind, for they be earnest, zelous and painful in their doinges, they will build their kingdom more in one yeare with fire and fagot, than the colde gospellers will do in seven’ (1562: sig. A4v). For hotter gospellers like Pilkington, it was distinctly embarrassing that one of the first acts of the new regime should have been to impose a ban on preaching. The ban lasted until the following spring, by which time frustrated Protestants like Thomas Lever,‘considering that the silence imposed for a long and uncertain period was not agreeable to the command and earnest injunction of Paul to preach the word in season and out of season’, had started to force the pace of religious change by preaching openly in London in defiance of the royal proclamation (Zurich Letters 1842–5: ii. 29–30). Why, then, was the new regime so reluctant to let Protestant preachers off the leash? One reason was that, contrary to Pilkington’s claims about Catholic disdain for preaching, the Marian government had been extremely effective in using sermons to win popular support. To be sure, the leading Marian churchmen did not regard preaching as the sole means to the reconversion of England. Reginald Pole, in a well-known letter to Cardinal Carranza in June 1558, maintained that preaching could be ‘more of a hindrance than a help, unless it is preceded or accompanied by the establishment of church discipline’ in order to compel people to attend church and receive the sacraments. Pole’s vicar-general Henry Cole would later make a similar point in his controversy with John Jewel, remarking sardonically that people tended to be selective in the sermons they chose to hear: ‘As men chouse theyr wives, so chouse they their teachers . . . Sermons tende more to teache, than to convince’ (Jewel 1560: sig. D7r). But this did not mean that the Marian regime was careless or neglectful of the role of preaching. Indeed, Pole’s letter to Carranza went on to argue that preaching and church discipline ought to go hand in hand, and that discipline could not be properly established without the preaching of the word. He also stressed that there was no shortage of preaching in London, pointing out

preaching the elizabethan settlement



that sermons were preached every week at Paul’s Cross, ‘to which the people resort in large numbers’, and that he himself had been careful to appoint religious and learned men to the London parishes under his control (Duffy 2006; Quirini 1744–57: v. 69–76). It also became clear in the early weeks of the new reign that many Catholic clergy were not prepared to go quietly. John Christopherson, bishop of Chichester, preaching at Paul’s Cross on 27 November 1558, launched a ferocious attack on the Protestant sermon delivered from the same pulpit the previous Sunday, declaring: ‘Believe not this new doctrine; it is not the gospel, but a new invention of new men and heretics’ (Zurich Letters 1842–5: i. 4). John White, bishop of Winchester, preaching at the funeral of Queen Mary on 13 December, warned his audience that ‘the wolves be coming out of Geneva, and other places of Germany, and hath sent their books before, ful of pestilent doctrines, blasphemy, and heresy, to infect the people’ (Strype 1822: iii.2. 536–50). Similar sermons may have been preached from other London pulpits, as the royal proclamation of 27 December refers to certain preachers ‘assembling specially in the City of London in sondry places, great nomber of people, whereuppon riseth amonges the common sort not only unfrutefull dispute in matters of religion, but also contention, and occasion to break common quiet’ (Elizabeth I 1558). Elizabeth’s advisers would undoubtedly have been aware of the disturbances at Paul’s Cross at the beginning of Mary’s reign, when a dagger had been thrown at the preacher, and the authorities had been forced to station 200 soldiers around the pulpit to keep order during the sermon (MacLure 1958: 196). In 1558, as in 1553, it was entirely possible that the sermons at Paul’s Cross, and elsewhere in London, might have served as the flashpoint for popular opposition to religious change. Not surprisingly, the Elizabethan regime preferred not to take that risk. There were further reasons why it was expedient to shut down the pulpits. John Jewel, in a remarkably frank appraisal sent to Peter Martyr in January 1559, suggested that one reason was the shortage of Protestant preachers available to fill the pulpits, there being ‘at that time only one minister of the word in London, namely, Bentham’ (that is, Thomas Bentham, later bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, who had served as chief pastor to the secret Protestant congregation in London). But another reason, Jewel went on, was that news of the disputes among the English exiles at Frankfurt had already begun to filter through to England, and, ‘having heard only one public discourse of Bentham’s, the people began to dispute among themselves about ceremonies, some declaring for Geneva, and some for Frankfurt’ (Jewel 1850: 1198). This was a reference to the dispute between the English congregation at Geneva, which, under the leadership of John Knox, had adopted the Book of Order as its liturgical standard, and the English congregation at Frankfurt, where a faction led by Richard Cox, future bishop of Ely, had prevailed over Knox’s wishes by retaining an adapted version of the 1552 Book of Common Prayer. These were highly divisive issues that the Elizabethan government had no wish to see openly debated in London pulpits, particularly when the future form of public worship had not yet been officially determined. During the spring of 1559, the government gradually began to open up the pulpits again, beginning with a series of Lenten sermons preached at court by a succession of former Marian exiles, including Cox, Parker, and Grindal, who would soon be promoted to epis-



arnold hunt

copal office. As Peter McCullough has remarked, these court preachers were ‘a remarkably well-tuned choir’, their sermons running in parallel with the proceedings of the 1559 parliament and providing the first public indication of the shape of the new religious settlement (1998: 60). The sermons at Paul’s Cross resumed in May, beginning with a sermon by Grindal in the presence of the privy council in which, according to one observer, ‘he dyd proclayme the restoring of the booke of kyng Edward, whereat as well the lords as the people made or at least pretended a wonderful rejoysing’ (Machyn 1848: 197). The following week Robert Horne, future bishop of Winchester, preached a sermon from the same pulpit, in which he denounced the pope as the vicar of Antichrist, setting a tone of fierce antipapal polemic that would become the staple fare at Paul’s Cross for many years to come (Churton 1809: 392–4). It was not long after this that the custom was introduced of concluding the Paul’s Cross sermon with the singing of a metrical psalm, as a way of orchestrating popular support for what had now become a more aggressively Protestant occasion. Jewel, writing to Peter Martyr on 5 March 1560, claimed that congregational singing had played a major role in building up popular allegiance to the new religious settlement: ‘You may now sometimes see at Paul’s Cross, after the service, six thousand persons, old and young, of both sexes, all singing together and praising God.’ This, he added, greatly annoyed the Catholics, ‘for they see that by this means the sermons sink more deeply into men’s minds’ (Zurich Letters 1842–5: i. 71; see also Machyn 1848: 228). Only a fortnight after writing this letter, Jewel himself stood in the pulpit at Paul’s Cross to deliver his famous ‘Challenge’ sermon, first preached at the Cross the previous November and then repeated at court on 17 March and at the Cross on 21 March. The sermon was a set-piece defence of the Elizabethan settlement against its Catholic opponents. Jewel focused on the Eucharist as the clearest marker of religious difference, and recognized that one of the crucial objections to Protestant sacramental practice was that it was perceived as something newly invented, in contrast to the old-established rite of the Catholic Mass. This was the issue he set out to address. Preaching on 1 Corinthians 11:23 (‘for I have received of the Lord that which I also have delivered unto you’), he depicted St Paul as a proto-reformer, arguing that he had been attempting to call back the Corinthians to ‘the institution of Christe from whence they were fallen’. From this, he went on, we learn that, ‘when soever any order geven by God is broken or abused, the best redresse therof is, to restore it again into the state that it first was in at the beginning’ (Jewel 1560: fo. 121r–v). But the Catholic Mass, he argued, had no basis in the Scriptures or in the writings of the early Fathers, and therefore bore no resemblance to the original state of the Lord’s Supper. After firing off a battery of patristic references to support his case, he threw down his challenge to his opponents, declaring that,‘if any learned man of all our adversaries’ could prove the contrary ‘out of any olde catholike doctour, or father: Or out of any olde generall counsell: or out of the holy scriptures of God: or any one example of the primitive Churche’, then ‘I am content to yelde unto him and to subscribe’ (Jewel 1560: fos 162v, 165v; see also Ettenhuber, Chapter 3, this volume). This was a skilful polemical manœuvre, as it threw his opponents onto the defensive, forcing them to justify their own sacramental practice rather than leaving them free to attack the novelty of the Elizabethan Prayer Book.

preaching the elizabethan settlement



Jewel’s reliance on patristic writings in the Challenge sermon has often been seen, particularly by Anglican scholars, as heralding a more positive attitude to the Fathers that would eventually reach fruition in the classical Anglican doctrine of a threefold authority, the famous ‘three-legged stool’ of scripture, reason, and tradition. Recent scholarship, however, has made it clear that Jewel’s strategy was more pragmatic. His main aim was to show that his Catholic opponents did not hold an uncontested monopoly of patristic authority; or, as he put it in a later sermon: We are not so farre to seeke in learninge, as they woulde have us appeare to be . . . They are seene in the tongues, Latine, Greeke, and Hebrewe: so are wee. They have studied the artes, so have wee: they have read the Doctours, the generall Councels, and the scriptures: so have wee. (Jewel 1583: sig. M5r)

From this point of view, the Catholics had surrendered their advantage in the debate merely by acknowledging that there was a debate to be had. And while Jewel was quite prepared to cite the Fathers in order to refute his opponents’ claim to antiquity, he did not regard them as an indispensable guide to the interpretation of scripture, still less as an independent source of authority in their own right. Another Paul’s Cross preacher, in January 1566, was at pains to stress that the teaching of the Fathers was strictly subordinate to scripture: ‘The Doctors have their heresies, as Tertullian condemneth second mariage as unlawfull, Origen sayth that Christ after his ascention suffered the second passion . . . besids this the Doctors be contrary one to another, and therfor Augustyne sayth, we must not judge of the scripturs but accordinge to the scripturs, but of the doctors we must judge accordinge to the scripturs’ (Bodl. MS Tanner 50, fo. 37r). Jewel would have agreed, even if he would not have made the point so bluntly. For our present purposes, however, Jewel’s attitude to the Fathers is arguably of less relevance than the strategy of persuasion he adopts in the Challenge sermon. He is acutely conscious of preaching to audiences who have, until very recently, heard Catholic doctrine delivered from the very same pulpits: ‘These thinges, good brethern, I know have ben often times spoken out of such places as this is, & stoutly avoutched in your hearing’ (Jewel 1560: fo. 130v). Simply denouncing it as false is therefore not an option. Instead, he adopts a strategy of placing his opponents’ arguments side by side with his own, almost in the manner of a formal academic disputation, and inviting his audience to choose between them,‘that after ye have once taken aswel sum tast of theyr arguments, as ye have of ours: ye may the better, and more indifferently, judge of both’. He frankly admits that this is a high-risk strategy, and that he would have preferred not to go into such detail about Catholic doctrine, ‘yet at this tyme the importunitye of them forceth me so to do . . . And let not them, that privilie and untrulye fynd fault with our reasons, be agreved, if they heare openlye, and truly, sumwhat of their own.’ This approach reveals an awareness of Catholicism as a very close and present danger. At the same time Jewel flatters his audience by suggesting that, rather than being prejudiced in favour of one side or the other, they are capable of judging impartially between the alternatives set before them. ‘Nowe, good people, judge ye in your conscience indifferently, us both, whether of us, bringeth you the better & sounder arguments’ (Jewel 1560: fos 147r, 150v).



arnold hunt

Jewel’s sermon was the opening shot in an exchange of hostilities that continued for another ten years, with the circle of English Catholic exiles at Louvain contributing most of the ammunition. But to see this simply as a paper war conducted through the printing presses of London and Antwerp would be to miss the point. The pamphlet controversy was important in setting the terms of the debate and forcing both sides to lay claim to patristic authority, but Jewel’s opponents plainly felt that the real battle for hearts and minds was taking place not in print but in the pulpit. Thomas Dorman accused Jewel of whipping up a frenzy of popular agitation by inciting the crowds at Paul’s Cross to shout ‘Amen’ in response to his anti-Catholic tirades: ‘Is he not noted by yow for a papist, and in daunger of a shrewde turne that being present at youre sermones answereth not Amen, to youre blasphemies uttered against the moste holy sacramentes?’ Thomas Harding claimed that Jewel had chosen to issue his challenge in a sermon, rather than in an academic disputation, because he did not want to risk putting his arguments to the test: ‘you will not yet adventure the triall of them with making your matche with learned men, and in the meane tyme set them forth by sermons busyly among the unlearned and simple people’ (Dorman 1564: 127; Harding 1565a: 17r). This view of Jewel as a shameless crowdpleaser makes little sense unless we see the controversy not just as a textual exchange but as a pulpit event. We can follow the progress of this controversy through the sermons preached at Paul’s Cross and other London pulpits, week by week, with the help of four contemporary manuscripts. Two of these are comparatively well known: the diary or chronicle of Henry Machyn, parish clerk of Holy Trinity the Less, recording sermons and other public events in London between July 1550 and August 1563, and the memoranda of John Stow, providing a similar record of public events from February 1561 to July 1567. The other two are less well known: a manuscript in the Bodleian Library (MS Tanner 50) containing a full and detailed record of the sermons preached at Paul’s Cross from June 1565 to November 1566, and another volume of sermon notes in Lambeth Palace Library (MS 739) recording sermons preached by two prebends of St Paul’s, John Bullingham (later bishop of Gloucester) and John Mullins (archdeacon of London), between September 1565 and November 1568. Together, these manuscripts make it possible to reconstruct the staple fare of the London pulpits in those crucial early years of Elizabeth’s reign when the new religious settlement was being constructed. Yet they do not always speak with one voice. The contrasts between them serve as a reminder that sermons were filtered through the experience of individual hearers, who often differed sharply in how they responded and what they chose to record. The most opinionated voice is that of John Stow, whose notes frequently register his disgust with the strongly anti-Catholic tone of the sermons at Paul’s Cross. In September 1563, for example, when the Marian bishops were moved out of the Tower of London and placed under house arrest, Stow records that ‘theyr delyveraunce (or rather chaunge of prison) dyd so much offend the people that the prechars at Poulis Crosse and on other placis bothe of the citie and cuntrie prechyd (as it was thowght of many wysse men) verie sedyssyowsly, as Baldwyn at Powlls Cros wyshyng a galows set up in Smythefyld and the old byshops and othar papestis to be hangyd theron’ (Stow 1880: 126). In this case

preaching the elizabethan settlement



Stow, like Dorman and Harding, sees the preachers as deliberately fuelling the fires of popular anti-Catholic prejudice. In other cases, however, he depicts them as actually taken aback by the strength of popular feeling, particularly as directed against those preachers who had conformed to the official line on clerical vestments. In June 1566 he notes that, when a preacher at St Margaret Pattens appeared in a surplice, ‘a certayne nombar of wyves threw stons at hym and pullyd hym forthe of the pulpyt, renting his syrplice and scrattyng his face, &c’, and in January 1567 that, when Bishop Grindal came to preach at St Margaret’s Old Fish Street,‘the people (especially the wymen) that ware in the sayde churche unreverently howtyd at hym with many oprobrious words’, shouting ‘Ware horns’ in reference to his cornered cap (Stow 1880: 136, 140). The impression given by Stow’s memoranda is of a volatile and often violent Protestant mob that even the preachers themselves were not fully able to control. The preachers were equally concerned to take the temperature of popular opinion, but the impression they give is, not surprisingly, very different from Stow’s. Again and again they expressed anxiety about the fragility of the religious settlement, which appeared to them to rest on a very shaky foundation of popular support. Matthew Parker’s chaplain Nicholas Robinson, preaching at court early in the new reign, warned that there were many who ‘thinke ynough to be thought protestantes’ without believing it in their hearts: It is a pittiful case to see abrode in cuntrey and towne, and we maye see it dayly, if we shut not owre eyes. Godly preachinges heard with owt remorse or repentance: lawfull prayers frequented with owt any devotion: fastinges kept with owt any afflictione: holly daies celebrated with owt any godlines: almes geven with out compassion: Lent openly holden with owt any discipline. And what frute of life maye be looked for, upon so symple a seedesowing?

The target of Robinson’s attack was the reluctant conformist whose outward observance was only a cloak for crypto-Catholicism or irreligion: ‘He will not come to church but that the law compelleth him . . . He cometh to the sermon for fashion sake only . . . He is a protestant because of his lands.’ Such hypocrites, he declared, were everywhere to be found, not least at court. Dropping a hint to the queen, he commended the example of Constantius, father of the emperor Constantine, who put his courtiers to the test by offering preferment to anyone who would renounce Christianity: where upon (saith Eusebius in the first booke of the Life of Constantine) it came to passe that many hypocrites fell to false religione agayne: whom when Constantius perceaved, he bannished by decree from his court for ever, saying, Thei cold not be trustie to his life and crowne, who were so unfaithfull to their Lord and saviour. (Corpus MS 104, p. 325)

Robinson returned to the charge in a sermon preached at Paul’s Cross on 4 November 1565, in which he warned that the English, like the Israelites of old, were only too ready to draw back from the promised land. He described how the Israelite spies sent to explore the land of Canaan had come back with tales of giants, ‘which set the people in such a fear that they begane to rise agaynst the magestrats and would have stoned them to



arnold hunt

death, so that they might have turned backe into Egipt agayn’, until Caleb and Joshua intervened to prevent them. Even so now a dayes do certen which willfully runne into other contreys and there do lyve at lesse ease then they might at home, and persuade the people that they do fight agaynst the Pope, agaynst stronge bulwarks, custome and antiquitye, therby to drive the people agayn into the bondage of Rome. But in have stept the Bishope of Salisbery and Mr Nowell whom I may well terme Calibe and Josua, and have showed the weaknes of their foundation. (Bodl. MS Tanner 50, fo. 25v)

He was echoed by Thomas Cole, archdeacon of Essex, who, preaching at the Cross a week later, argued that the greatest threat to the new settlement came from religious lukewarmness and lack of conviction. ‘Some dastards ther be’, he told his audience, ‘that will fight on neyther side’; they will not be Protestants ‘for fear lest they be marked with nigra carbone, a blacke coal, if any change should happen’, but they will not be papists either, ‘because they have not the upper hande now’, and so ‘they soothe up the one side, and smile on the other’ (Bodl. MS Tanner 50, fo. 26r). This sense of the Protestant settlement as fragile and at risk provided the justification for the fierce anti-Catholic preaching at Paul’s Cross. There was evidently some doubt about how far this could be justified. In drawing up the 1565 Advertisements, Parker and his fellow-bishops seem to have considered the option of banning controversial preaching altogether but finally, as Parker reported to Cecil, came to the conclusion that this would not be feasible. ‘To be proscribed in preaching, to have no matter in controversy spoken of, is thought far unreasonable, specially seeing so many adversaries as by their books plentifully had in the court from beyond the sea, do impugn the verity of our religion’ (Parker 1853: 233). The final version of the Advertisements stipulated that all clergy admitted to preach should be ‘admonished to use sobriety and discretion in teaching the people, namely in matters of controversy; and to consider the gravity of their office and to foresee with diligence the matters which they will speak, to utter them to the edification of the audience’ (Frere 1910: iii. 172). This left considerable liberty to individual preachers to engage in anti-Catholic controversy as they saw fit. It was a liberty of which the Paul’s Cross preachers took full advantage. The dispute at Paul’s Cross was inevitably one-sided, as the Catholics were unable to respond from the pulpit. Yet they were very much present through their printed books, which were frequently quoted at length and in considerable detail. Alexander Nowell, dean of St Paul’s, took the opportunity offered by his sermon on 27 January 1566 to respond to the latest publications of his Catholic opponent Thomas Dorman, ‘two bookes come over since I last preached here, an aunswer to the Apologye of the Englishe churche, and a disproffe to my reproffe, wherin Mr Dorman sayth I was very rashe in aunsweringe certen poynts in this place, of Mr Hardinges booke befor I had red it over’. Stung by Dorman’s charge that he had answered only the first part of Harding’s book, he declared that he had felt it unnecessary to tackle the remaining parts because he knew these would be dealt with in Jewel’s Replie unto M. Hardinges Answeare (1565), which at that time was ‘redy to come into print’. Nowell’s sermon is of interest for the way it shows

preaching the elizabethan settlement



the controversy proceeding on two fronts simultaneously, in print and in the pulpit, with preachers using their sermons to influence the reception of their books and to amplify or justify points of perceived vulnerability. It also shows how preachers took it for granted that many members of their audience would be familiar with the latest Catholic publications. Speaking of his previous sermon at the Cross, Nowell explained a little lamely that he had had only limited time to prepare a response to Harding’s book, as it ‘cam not to my hands past three days befor I preached heer, and rather two days than three’, but that he had felt obliged to say something about it, as it was ‘come in all mens hands allmost’ (Bodl. MS Tanner 50, fo. 38v). It is hardly surprising that the preachers chose to confront their Catholic opponents so openly, even at the cost of giving their writings more publicity. Their difficulty was not just that the Marian regime was too recent to be ignored, but that it had enjoyed too much popular support to be easily dismissed as a period of oppression and persecution. They therefore sought to come up with a persuasive and coherent critique that would explain why it had attracted so much popular allegiance. Jewel, in his Challenge sermon, was careful to avoid any personal attack on Mary, suggesting instead that she had reintroduced Catholicism out of force of habit, ‘for that she knew none other religion, and thought well of the thyng that she had ben so long trained in’ (Jewel 1560: fo. 130v). Other preachers appealed directly to their listeners’ memories of the 1550s, and attempted to turn the popularity of the Marian regime back on itself by presenting it as evidence of popular folly and superstition. One Paul’s Cross preacher in October 1565 recalled the street processions in London, noting that ‘not longe ago such a necessitye was in knelinge required, that who so kneled not at the Sacrament when it went by in the street, yea and put not of his cap at the hearing of the bell, he was condemned as an heretike’. Parker’s chaplain Thomas Bickley, preaching at the Cross in December 1565, singled out John Stow for attack, claiming that in his recent Summarie of Englyshe Chronicles (1565) he had deliberately omitted to mention the popular rejoicing over Mary’s supposed pregnancy in 1554: ‘Now a days it is knowen wel enoughe how in Queene Maries tyme, their was a talke of the Queens delyvery, processiones and bonfyers for the same, but one John Stowe in his cronicle perceavinge this to mak agaynst their vanitie hath left it clean out’ (Bodl. MS Tanner 50, fos 20r, 30v). These sermons operate on several different levels, constantly shifting back and forth between the high ground of theological disputation and the rough-and-tumble of insult and invective. Not coincidentally, they are also much preoccupied with questions of rhetoric and style. Both sides in the debate sought to position themselves as more moderate by drawing attention to the intemperate language of their opponents. Harding declared that ‘the manner of writing which I have here used, in comparison of our adversaries, is sober, softe, and gentle’, a boast he may later have come to regret when Jewel responded with a two-page catalogue of his choicer terms of abuse, including ‘your filthy railing rabble’, ‘your detestable blasphemies’, ‘your malignant church’, and much more in the same vein (Harding 1565b: preface; Jewel 1567: sig. A5r). The ‘railing’ language of Harding and other Catholic controversialists was soon seized upon by the preachers at Paul’s Cross. John Bridges, preaching there in March 1566, attacked the ‘ruffianly termes’



arnold hunt

used by his opponents, and sarcastically enquired whether the university at Louvain had a ‘school of railing’ rather than a school of rhetoric. James Calfhill made a similar observation: ‘They say I do nought ells but rayle, indeed I must not contend with them in words nor in raylinges for then I shalbe surely overmatched, but yf they looke and compare my sayenges with others, they shalbe found but cold reproffs to their sharpe raylings.’ In fact Calfhill gave as good as he got. Dorman, in a casual aside, had patronisingly suggested to Calfhill that he would have done better to have stuck to his studies at Oxford, ‘in the quiet haven at the ancre wherat once he lay’, rather than ‘committing him selfe to the mercye of the windes and waves of these troubelouse seas of controversies, wherein no skilfuller pilote than he sheweth him selfe to be, maye easely make a foolishe shipwreke, and be cast awaye’. Calfhill shot back: ‘I would he should know it, that I was admitted to be a Pilot befor he was thought worthy to be a shipe boy’ (Dorman 1565: fo. *3r; Bodl. MS Tanner 50, fos 41v, 46v). As this example suggests, the tone of the debate was often highly personal, reflecting the fact that the participants had, in many cases, known each other at Oxford. Particular odium was directed at Calfhill, a student of Christ Church, on account of his relative youth and rapid preferment. Ordained by Grindal in 1560, he had been chosen to preach at Paul’s Cross only a year later, in January 1561, and delivered a sermon in which ‘amongst other thyngs he lamented the myserye of Oxford, that it was yet under the papystycall yoke’; the sermon was rapturously received, moving ‘a nomber of teares’ from the audience and causing one admiring bystander to thank God for raising up ‘such yong ymps’ to take the place of ‘the old preachers’ martyred under Mary (BL MS Harleian 416, fo. 170v). Thereafter Calfhill’s rise was unstoppable: later that year he took his BD degree and in 1564 became Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford. It was almost certainly Calfhill whom Dorman had in mind when he observed sourly that if Grindal would take more care to examine those ‘whome he admitteth to preache at Powles crosse (a place sometime for bachilers and Doctours of Divinitie) . . . suche store of unlearned but most railing sermones should not be made there as daily there are’ (Dorman 1565: fo. *1r). Here again we find the relationship between theological argument and popular preaching emerging as a central theme of the controversy. John Martiall, another of Calfhill’s opponents, argued that Calfhill had demeaned his academic position by descending into the arena of public debate, and sketched a vivid little vignette of the calland-response between the preacher and his audience: ‘at Poules crosse . . . the precher talking against the papistes, saieth, the Lord confounde them’, to which ‘the prentises and dentye dames . . . answer Amen’ (Martial 1566: 60).

Consolidating the Settlement, 1565–70 The success of the preaching campaign in support of the Elizabethan settlement depended, in large part, on maintaining a united front against the Catholic opposition. Yet this task was made considerably more difficult by divisions within the preachers’ own

preaching the elizabethan settlement



ranks. Archbishop Parker’s efforts to enforce the wearing of the cap and surplice, as required by the Act of Uniformity, were hindered by the fact that many of the bestknown preachers in London were opponents of the vestments. These included Calfhill and Robert Crowley, who as prebendaries of St Paul’s were on the regular preaching roster at Paul’s Cross. The difficulties that Parker faced, not only in finding suitably conformable men to fill the pulpit at Paul’s Cross but even in bringing the appointment of preachers there under his control, were starkly revealed in the spring of 1565 when he discovered that two of the leading opponents of the vestments, Thomas Sampson and Laurence Humphrey, had been invited without his knowledge, either by Grindal or by the lord mayor, to preach at the Cross during Easter. Parker was tempted to remove them, but admitted to Cecil that, ‘if these solemn sermons should stay for want, now after so short a warning, it would raise a marvellous speech’ (Parker 1853: 239–40). This was only one instance of the wider difficulty he faced in weeding dissenters out of the London pulpits. Stow records that, even after the major crackdown on clerical nonconformity in the spring of 1566, many of the suspended ministers simply carried on preaching as before, using ‘words of great vehemencie agaynst the ordar before sayd set forthe, as also agaynst the quene, counseyll, and byshops for settynge forthe the same’ (1880: 138–9). Stow’s report of the vestiarian controversy is skilfully designed to illustrate his favourite theme of the violent and unruly Protestant mob. Typical of his approach, with its artfully casual use of anecdote, is his account of a sermon preached in the church of All Hallows, Thames Street, in April 1566, at the height of the controversy, by a visiting minister who fiercely denounced the vestments, ‘with very byter and vehement words’, despite the fact that the vicar of the parish had chosen to conform by wearing the cap and surplice. Halfway through the sermon the vicar was seen to smile at the preacher’s ‘vehemente talke’, angering some of the hearers, who remonstrated with him after the sermon. As the quarrel escalated, the parishioners divided into factions, and the preacher’s supporters ‘toke the matter so grevowsly that they fell from roughe wordes at the last to blowes with them who toke parte with the mynystar’ (Stow 1880: 138). Stow’s account is clearly highly partisan, but the widespread extent of clerical opposition to the vestments is confirmed by other sources. From the other end of the religious spectrum, Thomas Earle, minister of St Mildred’s, Bread Street, noted in his diary that, while the majority of London ministers had ultimately chosen to conform, many did so with considerable reluctance, complaining that ‘we are kylled in the soule of our soules, for this pollutyon of ours’ (CUL MS Mm.1.29, fo. 3v). Earle, as it happens, is the subject of another of Stow’s anecdotes, which describes how ‘the worshypfull of the paryshe of Seynt Myldred in Bred strett’, having brought in a conformable minister to say the afternoon service, were resisted by Earle and his supporters and eventually had to stand beside the minister to protect him from being physically assaulted. These bitter disputes were naturally reflected in the sermons at Paul’s Cross. Our main record of the sermons preached at the Cross, in MS Tanner 50, does not begin until June 1565, by which time Parker’s campaign against clerical dissidents was already under way, but the anti-vestiarian tone of some of the sermons is unmistakable. Particularly notable in this regard is the sermon preached by Robert Crowley in the cathedral on St Luke’s



arnold hunt

Day (18 October) 1565, in which he exhorted his audience to be sober in all things, ‘which doth not consist only in dyet, but allso in gesture, behaviour and apparell’. On the subject of apparel, Crowley went on, ‘though I might heer speake muche, yet at this tyme I will speake but a little, because in my last sermon that I preached heer I spake somwhat of it, which was taken and otherwise reported than I ment’. In his previous sermon he had said that it did not matter what the clergy wore as long as it did not go beyond the bounds of sobriety, for ‘Peter was not knowen to be Christs disciple by his apparell but by his language, Mathew by the apparell he used being a publican, and Luke to use the apparell of a phisitian as well after he was an Evangelist as before’. Some members of his audience had apparently taken this to mean that the cap and surplice were acceptable clerical dress. However, Crowley was at pains to stress that he was not advocating total freedom in clerical apparel: ‘for who would thinke that it were sober apparell for the prophets to use the apparell of the prests of the Ethnikes’ (Bodl. MS Tanner 50, fo. 23v). Here was a sermon that made no attempt to disguise its nonconformist sympathies, preached openly from one of the most prominent pulpits in London in blatant defiance of the official line on clerical vestments. The Catholic controversialists were, of course, well aware of these divisions and sought to turn them to polemical advantage. How, they demanded, could the Protestant preachers claim to be obedient to the queen’s authority, when, ‘even in a matter of no greater importance than is the wearing of a square cappe, they refuse the ordre of the supreme governour’? (Dorman 1565: sig. *2v). Some of the Catholics’ most effective polemical thrusts came from exploiting the disagreements among their opponents. Dorman mounted a particularly damaging attack on Calfhill’s Aunswere to the Treatise of the Crosse (1565), pointing out that in condemning material images of the cross Calfhill was effectively condemning the crucifix in the queen’s chapel, and that his breezily dismissive attitude to the Fathers—notably his description of St Cyprian as ‘proud and blasphemous’—did not square with Jewel’s profession of respect for patristic authority. Calfhill’s efforts to defend himself at Paul’s Cross, first by reiterating his view that ‘the material crosse is a will-worshipe and abhominable’ and then by declaring that the writings of the Fathers had no authority independent of the Scriptures, may have pleased some members of his audience but only served to make these points of difference even more embarrassingly obvious (Bodl. MS Tanner 50, fo. 41v). By the summer of 1566, however, a new tone is discernible in the sermons at Paul’s Cross, as a number of more conformable preachers attempted to close up the divisions that their Catholic opponents had prised open. A Mr Pady, chaplain to Bishop Horne of Winchester, argued in September 1566 that the dispute over vestments was not only trivial in itself, but had actually benefited the Church of England by causing the enemies of the religious settlement to reveal themselves in their true colours: Ther is a scisme at this day in the Churche of god, not of great and principall matters as god be thanked therfor but of a trifle, but of a small sparke a greater flame may arise, and that which heerin Satan goeth about to deface, god stoppeth it and turneth it to his glory. The Ipocrits are mad manifest, the Atheists and Epicures take hart againe to open them selves, the secret Papists they open them selves, they will have

preaching the elizabethan settlement



crosse and candles and omnia bene, and so the secret enemies are mad now open enemies. When the Quens maiestie shall see these hot enemies, I trust god willinge, that when they be rooted out, this scisme allso shalbe rooted out, and omnia bene all thinges shalbe well, let us not prevent gods worke, but tarry his leasur. (Bodl. MS Tanner 50, fo. 83r)

Like Robinson in his earlier sermon at court, Pady offered counsel to the queen by way of a classical exemplum, recounting an anecdote from the Historia augusta of a man who, having had a request refused by the Emperor Hadrian, dyed his hair black in the hope that the emperor would not recognize him when he asked a second time: So the Queens maiestie hath many such about her, they seemed in the begynninge in grey beards, but now they follow the auncient man in dyeng them blacke, counterfettinge protestants, yet she like unto wise Adrian perceavinge them under the collor of a protestant to be a papist may say I denyed it to thy father the Pope and so to thee. (Bodl. MS Tanner 50, fo. 80r)

Several Paul’s Cross preachers also drew attention to the problems of clerical negligence and popular ignorance in the Church of England. These were hardly new topics, but the frequency with which they appear in the sermons of the later 1560s suggests a deliberate effort to move away from the vestiarian controversy by refocusing attention on basic issues of teaching and preaching. A Mr Eggrave, preaching at the Cross in September 1566, bewailed the ‘lamentable’ state of the clergy and urged his audience to petition parliament for redress of grievances. ‘And thoughe thou art none of the parliament house yet do thy dewty, the doors are open and never shut agaynst any, so that every man may put in his complaynt . . . every man may put his bill into thes parliament, and this is no excuse to say I am not of the house.’ It had been a mistake, Eggrave admitted, to allow dispensations for pluralism and non-residence, but there was still time for the mistake to be corrected: ‘the parliament then erred, and the parliament now may redresse them’ (Bodl. MS Tanner 50, fo. 87r). John Mullins, in a visitation sermon preached around 1567–8, attacked unlearned ministers but confessed, with startling honesty, that ‘the miserye of this tyme requireth us to choose them to the ministrye of whom we hope that thei will learne afterwards, which thei will not’. In Mullins’s view, the greatest danger to the Church of England was not the survival of Catholic doctrine but the legacy of popular ignorance that the Catholics had left behind them: ‘The papists have so pluckt thinges into lattyn, that thei have almoste brought olde men from ther belefe’ (Lambeth MS 739, fo. 155v). This was also a recurring theme in Jewel’s sermons, notably his sermon on Joshua 6:1–3 in which he set out his agenda for the reform of the church. Like most of his surviving sermons, this bears no date, but his nineteenth-century editor John Ayre assigned it on internal evidence to November 1569, and this dating has been generally accepted by later scholars. The sermon has a retrospective flavour, as Jewel looks back at the collapse of Catholicism in England, comparing it to the fall of the walls of Jericho, a miraculous deliverance that could have been accomplished only with God’s help. But he warns his audience not to be complacent. ‘God can give peace, God can withdraw



arnold hunt

it . . . That thing which hath bin done, may be done again.’ To safeguard England against the re-establishment of Catholicism, he argues for the instruction of the common people, the maintenance of schools and learning, and the removal of the familiar abuses of unlearned ministers, non-residence, and pluralism. Like Mullins, he sees popular ignorance as the greatest threat to the survival of the Elizabethan settlement: When we see the miserable blindnesse and ignoraunce in all places abroade, what hope may wee have to see Hiericho [Jericho] suppressed and quite overthrown? It cannot be but great inconveniences shall followe in the Churche of God, as confusion of order, and dissolution of life, to the indangering of the state, unlesse by godly care of the Magistrates, some helpe be provided. (Jewel 1583: sig. D3v)

Jewel also glances briefly at the vestiarian controversy, remarking that some things may lawfully be salvaged from the destruction of Jericho, but that ‘they may not be things meet to furnish and mainteine superstition, but such thinges as be strong, and may serve either directly to serve God, or els for comelines and good order’ (1583: sig. C6r). This passage is particularly interesting for what it does not say. It is fairly clear that Jewel is thinking of the disputed vestments, crosses, images, and other vestiges of popery when he refers to ‘things meet to furnish and mainteine superstition’, yet he leaves his audience to draw the application, and leaves open the possibility that the vestments could be justified on grounds of ‘comelines and good order’. This was as far as he was prepared to go in support of clerical nonconformity. These hints of a new strategic direction in the sermons of the later 1560s are brought into focus in the sermon preached, at Grindal’s invitation, by John Foxe at Paul’s Cross on Good Friday (24 March) 1570, almost exactly a decade after Jewel’s Challenge sermon. Several versions of this sermon have been preserved. According to his own account, Foxe kept no copy of the sermon and had therefore to reconstruct it from memory, ‘having nothing written before . . . wherby either to ease my labour or to direct my penne’ (Foxe 1570: sig. A2r). Among his surviving papers, however, are several pages of notes taken by William Aylward, rector of St Anne and St Agnes, London, and corrected by Foxe himself (BL MS Harleian 425, fos 131–3). These may have provided the basis for the printed edition, A Sermon of Christ Crucified, published by John Day later the same year, in which Foxe claims to have followed the ‘sentence, order and principall poyntes’ of the sermon as he had delivered it, ‘so farre as remembrance could serve me’, with some extra material added. As Day’s printing-house was located in Aylward’s parish, it seems very likely that Aylward was involved in putting the sermon into print. Despite Foxe’s protestations that he had consented to publish the sermon only at the insistence of his friends, and then only reluctantly, it appears that the sermon was recognized very soon after its delivery, if not before, as providing an opportunity for a major public statement, comparable to Jewel’s Challenge sermon, on the present position and future prospects of the English church. Foxe’s sermon, like Jewel’s, is governed by the overriding need to defend the Elizabethan settlement against its Catholic enemies, and at first glance there may seem to be little to choose between them. Certainly Foxe does not regard Catholicism as any

preaching the elizabethan settlement



less of a threat than Jewel had done; indeed, his anti-Catholic rhetoric is in some respects even more ferocious. Jewel tends to avoid strong apocalyptic language about the papal Antichrist, commenting in one sermon: ‘I knowe many men are offended to heare the Pope pointed out for Antichrist, and thinke it an uncharitable kinde of doctrine: therefore I refraine to use any such names.’ Foxe, by contrast, has no hesitation in describing the pope as ‘the great Antichrist . . . with his whole Colledge of Babylonicall strumpets and stately Prelates of Romish Iericho dronken with the bloud of persecution’ (Jewel 1583: sig. E6v; Foxe 1570: sig. H4r). But, while Foxe sees Catholicism as an imminent threat, he also sees it as operating at a distance. At the beginning of his sermon he recalls the letter of reconciliation from the pope, brought to England by Cardinal Pole at the beginning of Mary’s reign in 1554. At the time, he notes, it was hailed by Stephen Gardiner as ‘the greatest message that ever came into England’. But what is left of it now? ‘The sender is gone, the messenger is gone, the Queene is gone, and the message gone.’ The pope and his reconcilers are ‘already gone (God be thanked) and I besech God so may they be gone, that they may never come here agayne’. All that remains is the ‘whispering of certaine privy reconcilers, sent of late by the pope, which secretly creepe in corners. But this I leave to them that have to do withall’ (Foxe 1570: sigs B2v, R4v). The effect of these remarks is to portray popery as a foreign rather than a domestic enemy. Whereas Jewel regards himself as speaking to a religiously mixed audience, Foxe presents himself as cautioning a Protestant audience against an external threat. Moreover, his view of the chief points of disagreement between Protestantism and popery is very different from Jewel’s. In summing up ‘the most and the greatest controversies, whereupon hath risen all the contention and variance that we have seen’, Jewel identifies five key elements of Protestant worship: the institution of Holy Communion in place of the private mass; communion under both kinds; vernacular prayers; vernacular scriptures; and the abolition of images in churches. ‘These are, I say, the controversies whereon hangeth all our debate.’ Foxe, by contrast, shifts the basis of disagreement away from questions of worship and towards what he sees as the central differences of doctrine, commenting in a postscript at the end of his sermon that ‘the controversies between [the papists] and us are weighty, and chiefly stand upon the effect and working of Christes passion’ (Jewel 1607: sig. C4r; Foxe 1570: sig. T3v). By focusing on this as the main battleground, Foxe gives pivotal importance to the relationship between the preacher and his audience. In a double exhortation, he urges ‘you that be preachers’ to open to the people ‘the promises of grace, the word of life’, and ‘you that be the hearers’ to ‘give diligent hearing unto your preachers, and harken to the word of God’. This relationship bears fruit in repentance and forgiveness of sins, which Foxe—now bringing his argument full circle—presents as the true offer of reconcilation, as opposed to the false offer of reconciliation made by the pope and his messengers. This model of preaching—in which the preacher, addressing a Protestant audience, reminded them of their sins and called them to repentance—was to become the basic paradigm of the Paul’s Cross sermon for the remainder of Elizabeth’s reign and beyond. Already, in the sermons of the later 1560s, there are signs of what was to follow. A Paul’s Cross preacher in August 1566, after devoting the majority of his sermon to a detailed



arnold hunt

refutation of the Catholic doctrine of baptism, ended with a condemnation of the sins of London and a warning of divine retribution if the city did not repent: Nynyvy [Nineveh] was converted at the preaching of Jonas, London hath had many preachers, and lyveth yet in synne, and as he sayd, wo be to thee Chorazin, wo be to thee Bethsaida . . . so may I say unto you o London and Londiners, if the preachinge which is in you, had ben in the barbarouse contres, they would have repented and turned unto the Lord. (Bodl. MS Tanner 50, fo. 63r)

This is the classic mode of the Paul’s Cross jeremiad, familiar to anyone who has read the printed Paul’s Cross sermons of the early seventeenth century (Morrissey 2000). A strong controversial element still remained, but the urgent excitement of the mid1560s, as, Sunday after Sunday, the Paul’s Cross preachers denounced the latest books hot off the presses of Antwerp and Louvain, gradually gave way to a more standardized type of anti-Catholic polemic. London itself, and the nature of the civic community, now became the defining theme.

Conclusion One of the perpetual complaints of Dorman, Harding, and the other Catholic controversialists was that their opponents, instead of engaging in debate with learned men, were courting the support of the common people. This was a polemically motivated attempt to occupy the moral and intellectual high ground, but it was not without cause. The Protestant preachers knew how to use the weapons of scorn and ridicule to get the crowd on their side. Stow records, with distaste, a passage from a sermon at Paul’s Cross in November 1565 in which the preacher compared Catholic priests to apes, ‘for, saythe he, they be both balld alyke, but the pristes be balld before, the appes behynd’ (1880: 133). They also knew the value of smear tactics and vicious ad hominem attacks. A visiting preacher from Oxford, responding to John Martiall’s Treatyse of the Crosse (1564) in a sermon at Paul’s Cross in March 1566, retailed some old university gossip about one of Martial’s pupils who had committed suicide. Even wearing a crucifix around his neck, the preacher declared with gleeful satisfaction, ‘could not save him from drowninge’ (Bodl. MS Tanner 50, fo. 45r). It is no accident that so much of the material in this chapter comes from, or makes reference to, the sermons delivered at Paul’s Cross. These sermons epitomize preaching in the 1560s, just as court sermons epitomize it in the 1620s and parliamentary fast sermons in the 1640s. Even at the time, Paul’s Cross seems to have been associated with a peculiarly aggressive and populist style of preaching. It may be significant that one of the few misjudgements in Calfhill’s meteoric career was a sermon preached at court in 1564, which one observer, Walter Haddon, described as the worst sermon he had ever heard there. We do not know what Calfhill said to cause such offence, but, from Haddon’s remarks about the need for more ‘reverence’ and ‘modesty’ when preaching before the

preaching the elizabethan settlement



queen, it appears that the problem was one of style rather than substance. Having developed a blunt, hard-hitting style that went down well with the crowd at Paul’s Cross, Calfhill seems to have found it difficult to adjust to the greater level of decorum deemed appropriate for a sermon at court (Parker 1853: 218–19; McCullough 1998: 78–9). Preaching at the Cross was certainly not for those of delicate sensibilities. Foxe dreaded the ordeal of being ‘crucified at Paul’s Cross’, and, in what seems more than a conventional protestation of unworthiness, wrote to Grindal of his fears that in this ‘renowned theatre’ (tam celebre theatrum) he would ‘either draw upon myself the mockery of the crowd, or be driven off the stage by their hisses’ (BL MS Harleian 417, fo. 131r). The theatrical metaphor is not inappropriate. In their constant awareness of being on a public stage, and in the way they play to their audience by shifting abruptly from theological controversy to personal mockery, many of the Paul’s Cross sermons have a dramatic, performative aspect that invites comparison not just with the theatre but with the Marprelate Tracts (1588–9). Joseph Black, in the introduction to a recent edition, describes them as having ‘shattered conventions of decorum that had governed debates about the church since the Elizabethan Settlement’ (2008: p. xvi). This could hardly be more mistaken. Indeed, the attacks levelled against the Marprelate Tracts for adopting the techniques of the popular stage closely resemble some of the attacks levelled against the Paul’s Cross sermons twenty years earlier. Sir John Popham described one of the tracts in 1588 as ‘a most seditious and libellous pamphlet, fit for a vice in a play, and no other’. Whether he realized it or not, he was echoing the words of Thomas Harding in his reply to Jewel, in which he compared the defenders of the Elizabethan settlement to a troupe of comedians: ‘It should have becomme Scoggin, Patch, Iolle, Harry Pattenson, or Will Sommer, to have tolde this tale much better than your superintendentships. And if ye would nedes have played the part your selves, it had ben more convenient to have done it on the stage, under a vises cote, than in a booke set abrode to the world in defence of all your newe Englishe church’ (State Trials 1809–26: i. 1265; Harding 1565b: fo. 256v). The difference was that some of the stars of the Paul’s Cross pulpit in the 1560s now, in the Marprelate Tracts, found themselves on the receiving end. Self-evidently, these sermons were intended to have a direct impact on public opinion. The preachers saw themselves as engaged in a contest for popular allegiance, and one that was crucial to the survival of the Elizabethan settlement. If we are looking for a public sphere in sixteenth-century England, then Paul’s Cross would appear the obvious place to find it. But to locate a public sphere does not necessarily take us very far in identifying the ‘public’ under discussion. The preachers and their opponents were not neutral observers of the public they encountered at Paul’s Cross; they were calling the public into being, holding up to the audience at the Cross an image of itself. To Jewel, it was an audience of the uncommitted who needed to be persuaded out of their old familiar ways by having the choice between Protestant antiquity and popish novelty clearly set out before them. To Harding, it was a raucous Protestant mob cheering on the preacher’s anti-Catholic diatribes. To Foxe, it was an audience of the faithful who needed to be shown the right path to repentance and forgiveness of sins. All of these imagined audiences undoubtedly contain an element of accurate social observation, but none of them



arnold hunt

provides a particularly secure basis for generalization about the attitudes of the London sermon-going public. Moreover, the fiercely confrontational style of Paul’s Cross preaching, while, then as now, attracting most of the attention, was not the only available option. Foxe’s sermon offers an alternative mode of preaching in which the basic message of repentance—‘be ye now reconciled unto God, as he is to you’—leads on to an exhortation to be reconciled with one’s neighbours. Here Foxe is appropriating a tradition that long pre-dates the Reformation, one that, as John Bossy (1998) has shown, carried great moral weight and was enormously influential all over Europe in its embrace of charity and peacemaking: So if your neighbours, equals, or inferiours have offended you, or you them: stand not so much in your reputation to abase your selves, but either come, or send forth your messengers of peace, not onely to byd hym good morow or good even, but thus say: Neighbour, I have offended you and you me. Come therfore, let us be reconciled, and live in love and charitie lyke brethren in Christ, as Christ hath reconciled us both unto his father. (Foxe 1570: sig. G1r)

John Bullingham, in a series of sermons preached at London livery company feasts in the mid-1560s, emphasized the same theme of neighbourly unity. ‘Who is our neighbour?’ Bullingham asked the assembled members of the Haberdashers’ Company. ‘That is he that standeth in nede of owre helpe. We may not suffer owre neighbour to be evill spoken of.’ Bullingham’s sermons at Paul’s Cross show that he was capable of strong antiCatholic polemic when the need required, but here we find a different aspect of his preaching, a plain, heavily proverbial style in which true religion is emphatically linked with the social virtues of charity and promise-keeping. ‘Brother take hede be circumspecte, loke ere thow lepe, beware of brekinge promese . . . The lacke of providence and lokinge to makethe manye an one kepe in prisson. This makethe the wickede say lo where is ther god, is this ther Religion, is this ther gospell’ (Lambeth MS 739, fo. 131v). We should not neglect the possibility that the popular acceptance of preaching, and with it the acceptance of the Elizabethan settlement, had less to do with its ability to persuade through controversy than with its ability to recast this moral tradition in a Protestant guise. The notes of one London sermon-goer point towards a similar conclusion. Henry Machyn, whose chronicle runs from the end of Edward’s reign to the beginning of Elizabeth’s, is generally assumed to have been a man of Catholic, or at least conservative, religious sympathies, as shown by the episode in 1561 when he was made to do penance at Paul’s Cross for slandering the French Protestant preacher Jean Véron. Several entries in his chronicle clearly reveal a lingering attachment to the old religion. In 1560, he noted with obvious approval that in some parts of the country Rogationtide had been celebrated in the old way, with processions and banners, ‘and in dyvers places they had good chere after’. Yet even after the accession of Elizabeth he continued to attend the sermons at court and at Paul’s Cross, and does not appear to have been particularly disturbed by the Protestant doctrines he must have heard there. In April 1560, he noted that Matthew Parker preached at court ‘and made a nobull sermon’, while on other occasions he noted

preaching the elizabethan settlement



that the preacher made a ‘goodly’ or ‘godly’ sermon (he uses the two words interchangeably) and ‘ther was grett audyence’ (Machyn 1848: 230, 236; see also Mortimer 2002). These tantalizingly brief notes leave much unsaid about Machyn’s religious opinions, but they suggest that, despite his underlying conservatism, he had weathered the transition to Protestantism with remarkably little difficulty and even some sense of continuity. Machyn may not have given his heart to the new religious settlement, but he was prepared to lend his ears to the preachers. Perhaps, in the final analysis, that was good enough.

Bibliography manuscript sources Bodl. (Bodleian Library, Oxford), MS Tanner 50. Notes on sermons at Paul’s Cross, 1565–6. BL (British Library), MS Harleian 416. Papers of John Foxe. BL (British Library), MS Harleian 417. Papers of John Foxe. BL (British Library), MS Harleian 425. Papers of John Foxe. CUL (Cambridge University Library), MS Mm.1.29. Notebook of Thomas Earle. Corpus (Corpus Christi College, Cambridge), MS 104. Papers of Matthew Parker. Lambeth (Lambeth Palace Library), MS 739. Notes on sermons preached in London, c.1565–8. printed sources Anselment, Raymond A. (1979). ‘Betwixt Jest and Earnest’: Marprelate, Milton, Marvell, Swift and the Decorum of Religious Ridicule. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Black, Joseph L. (2008) (ed.). The Martin Marprelate Tracts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bossy, John (1998). Peace in the Post-Reformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Churton, Ralph (1809). The Life of Alexander Nowell, Dean of St Paul’s. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dorman, Thomas (1564). A Proufe of Certyne Articles in Religion, Denied by M. Juell, Sett furth in Defence of the Catholyke Beleef therein. Antwerp. —— (1565). A Disproufe of M. Nowelles Reproufe. Antwerp. Duffy, Eamon (2006). ‘Cardinal Pole Preaching: St Andrew’s Day 1557’, in Eamon Duffy and David Loades (eds), The Church of Mary Tudor. Aldershot: Ashgate. Elizabeth I (1558). By the Quene (Proclamation, 27 Dec. 1558 forbidding preaching without licence). Foxe, John (1570). A Sermon of Christ Crucified, Preached at Paules Crosse the Friday before Easter, Commonly Called Goodfryday. Frere, W. H. (1910) (ed.). Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Period of the Reformation. 3 vols. Longmans, Green & Co. Harding, Thomas (1565a). An Answere to Maister Juelles Challenge. Antwerp. —— (1565b). A Confutation of a Booke Intituled An Apologie of the Church of England. Antwerp. Jewel, John (1560). The True Copies of the Letters betwene the Reverend Father in God John Bisshop of Sarum and D. Cole, upon Occasion of a Sermon that the Said Bishop Preached



arnold hunt

before the Quenes Majestie, and hir most Honorable Counsel. [printed with:] The Copie of a Sermon Pronounced by the Byshop of Salisburie at Paules Crosse the Second Sondaye before Easter in the Yere of our Lord 1560. [n.d., ‘1560?’, STC 14613]. —— (1565). Replie unto M. Hardinges Answeare. —— (1567). A Defence of the Apologie of the Churche of Englande. —— (1583). Certaine Sermons Preached before the Queenes Maiestie, and at Paules Crosse. —— (1607). Seven Godly and Learned Sermons. —— (1850). The Works of John Jewel . . . the Fourth Portion, ed. John Ayre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCullough, Peter E. (1998). Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Machyn, Henry (1848). The Diary of Henry Machyn, ed. John Gough Nichols. MacLure, Millar (1958). The Paul’s Cross Sermons 1534–1642. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Martial, John (1566). A Replie to M. Calfhills Blasphemous Answer Made against the Treatise of the Crosse. Louvain. Morrissey, Mary (2000). ‘Elect Nations and Prophetic Preaching: Types and Examples in the Paul’s Cross Jeremiad’, in Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter McCullough (eds), The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History 1600–1750. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 43–58. Mortimer, Ian (2002). ‘Tudor Chronicler or Sixteenth-Century Diarist? Henry Machyn and the Nature of his Manuscript’, Sixteenth-Century Journal, 33/4: 981–98. Parker, Matthew (1853). Correspondence of Matthew Parker, ed. J. Bruce and T. T. Perowne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pilkington, James (1562). Aggeus and Abdias Prophetes the one Corrected, the Other Newly Added. Quirini, Angelo Maria (ed.) (1744–57). Epistolarum Reginaldi Poli . . . Pars I–V. Brescia. State Trials (1809–26). Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials, ed. T. B. Howell. T. C. Hansard. Stow, John (1880). Three Fifteenth-Century Chronicles, with Historical Memoranda by John Stowe, ed. James Gairdner. Strype, John (1822). Ecclesiastical Memorials, relating Chiefly to Religion, and the Reformation of it, and the Emergencies of the Church of England, under King Henry VIII, King Edward VI and Queen Mary I. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. —— (1824). Annals of the Reformation and Establishment of Religion, and other Various Occurrences in the Church of England, during Queen Elizabeth’s Happy Reign. 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wilson, Thomas (1553). The Arte of Rhetorique. Zurich Letters (1842–5). The Zurich Letters, Comprising the Correspondence Of Several English Bishops and Others with Some of the Helvetian Reformers, during the Early Part of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, ed. Hastings Robinson. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

chapter 19

v eil ed speech: pr e achi ng, pol it ic s a n d scr ipt u r a l t y pol ogy kevin killeen

The Lincolnshire preacher Thomas Granger, addressing the Manner how to Hear the Word with Profit, asks how far the listeners should apply biblical tales of wrath and war to themselves. He notes the tendency to murmur against the kind of preacher who ‘breedes much disquietnes among you, through his bold and indiscreet Sermons . . . when your Preacher applies the Word to your towne in particular . . . for your owne instruction and reformation, then you say, he goeth from his text’. While the uneasy congregation depicted here seem to be seeking a quiet homiletic life, somewhat unwilling to have their own town indicted, for Granger the application is crucial, and he roundly condemns the imaginative failure and the typological timidity of such parishioners: ‘you thinke because you finde not the name of your towne and townes-matters expressed word by word in the text . . . that therefore the text concernes not you’ (Granger 1616: 36–7). Such forewarning of the direct political application of the Bible is not, however, always borne out in the printed texts of sermons, which all too often appear to stop just short of naming the town or the king they intend. Historians have, in fact, been somewhat disappointed with sermons as a political resource, their promise of exegetical brimstone yielding far less commentary on contemporary events than they threaten (Appleby 2007: 7–8). Such reticence on the part of sermon writers has been attributed to a mixture of prudent caution, censorship, and a potential disparity between the spoken and printed text. Historians have made the case in recent years that political comment in the early modern era was regularly and successfully smuggled into sermons, so that, at times of national crisis, typological speech could circumvent the policing of criticism, with regard especially to foreign policy, through its ‘Aesopian’ language. Christopher Hill, most brilliantly, depicted a discursive landscape in which this evasive ‘veiled speech’



kevin killeen

constituted a well-formed political sub-language, while David Appleby has explored the preaching culture of the excluded ministers following the Restoration and the ways in which their valedictory sermons were infused with political presence (Hill 1993: 49; Appleby 2007: 92; see also Patterson 1984 on strategies of circumlocution in the era). Similarly, the rich sermon culture at the Jacobean court under the watchful patronage of the king, together with the Paul’s Cross pulpit as a parallel Jacobean forum, have provided ample evidence of engagement, more or less direct, with contemporary events, particularly the crises surrounding the Spanish Match and the Palatinate Wars (Ferrell 1998; McCullough 1998; Morrissey 2006). This chapter will explore a set of responses to continental crisis and the beginnings of the Thirty Years War in the sermon literature of the 1620s, arguing that the pulpits of England were, for the space of a few years, aflame with what might be called a biblical Enemy Theory. Not by any means restricted to outright opponents of the king’s policies, sermons, at court and in the country at large, begin to engage in wide-ranging and often subtle exploration of biblical instances that bore on the looming catastrophe and models and precedents for intervention, military reticence, and pacific kingly behaviour. The purpose of such an enquiry is, however, less to reveal the political mood in the midst of the immediate crisis, though it certainly does that, than to explore the ways in which the homiletic use of the Bible constituted, in its own terms, a primary discursive language of political thought. The idea of sermon literature as Aesopian subterfuge may usefully have served to reinvest the genre with political import. However, to view sermons as a radar-ducking form of speech, which occasionally went too far, drawing down upon themselves an aggressive state censorship, also underestimates the political daring of the early modern sermon. This chapter makes the case that there was a language of scriptural politics that dominate the early modern pulpit and that was anything but evasive. While preachers are not shy of the ‘application’ of the Bible and direct reference to current events as part of a sermon’s rhetorical unfolding, this does not, by any means, constitute the moment at which the sermon begins to be politically charged. Biblical exemplarity did not intrinsically need to be transposed into a language of secular politics to be understood. On the contrary, the nature of early modern religious culture was such that the biblical idiom was its own and sufficient political comment: a measured, subtle, and precise medium of criticism and a vocabulary of political exordium whose force is at times obscured for modern readers, less submerged in the intricacies of Old Testament exemplarity. The early modern sermon presents a phenomenal scriptural lattice-work, a fleet-footedness with the text and a presumption of its familiarity. Such a dense weave of examples across the Scriptures is what Thomas Jackson calls, when listing those biblical figures who came to repent their neglect of God’s generally warlike stance, a ‘cloud of witnesses, out of the old and new Testament’ (1622: 29). The politics is constituted, not in the often isolated contemporary references, but in the biblical copia itself, in the piling-up of examples from biblical history of those who are not sufficiently alert to God’s warnings. Viewing the sermon literature, such as we have it, as an Aesopian language, largely coded for those in the radical know, also suggests, quite wrongly, that the intense biblicism and flexibility in Old Testament discourse were the natural waters of puritan

veiled speech



or radical thought and that the Anglican culture of the early Stuarts (or for that matter the Royalist culture of the Civil War and Restoration context, for the longevity of this biblical discourse is also evident) was somehow less embroiled in the scriptural lexis (see Webster, Chapter 20; Adlington, Chapter 21; Jenkinson, Chapter 22, this volume). This is to underestimate the pervasiveness of a biblical culture that, as Patrick Collinson describes it, was one of ‘minds saturated in scripture and able to move around in it with the familiarity and ease of a blind man who knows the position and feel of every stick of furniture in his own house’ (1995: 103). The language of typology is no covert code. On the contrary, the political inflections of typological exegesis are the normative medium of commentary on contemporary events and all the more controversial for it. In a perhaps counter-intuitive fashion, the neglect of sermon literature until the latter years of the twentieth century served less to occlude the ‘Puritan’ voice, than Anglican writing, which was equally at home in the biblical idiom. Court sermons on the Gowrie and Gunpowder conspiracies, by, for example, Thomas Playfere, Anthony Maxey, and Lancelot Andrewes, exemplify the ways in which such contemporary politics were transposed through a scriptural lens in a distinctly high Anglican context that is wholly immersed in its Old Testament idiom and that, indeed, hardly deigns to spell out the resemblances (McCullough 1998: 116–225). Before coming to the political inflections that sermon literature wove around the Palatinate crisis, however, it is worth considering the basis, exegetical and theological, of typology and how this mode of reading and interpretation came to have such political weight in the era.

Typology: Reading the Old Testament Typology does not have a high literary reputation and nor is it seen, by and large, as involving any very sophisticated political inflection, barely rising above the base flattery or insult by which, for example, James VI & I might be compared with Solomon, or Cromwell might, depending on the viewpoint, be a Davidic type or a perfidious biblical rebel, an Achan or a Jeroboam (on James as Solomon see, for example, Williams 1625; more generally, see Mazzeo 1962). While such identification is certainly prominent in the rhetoric of kingship, it is the mere tip of the typological iceberg, so to speak. Typology constituted a far more flexible tool of political and theological thought than it is usually given credit for. Typological exegesis was a highly theorized topic in the era, depending on a set of complex reading strategies. These hermeneutic strategies are important for decoding the politics of sermons, in that they clarify the manner in which an Old Testament text was deemed to inhabit and interpret subsequent events. For seventeenth-century writers, typology was resolutely distinct from allegory, a mode of interpretation liable to appear arbitrary and, for English Protestants, deeply tainted with Roman Catholic obfuscation of meaning. In typology, by contrast, the resemblances constructed were not deemed to be arbitrary, but inwritten and in some sense ‘natural’. A type meant a physical



kevin killeen

‘blow’ or mark, which came to be seen as a blow that perforated through historically separate events, marking them as inherently linked and yet still encompassed within literal interpretation (Kannengiesser 2006: 228–9). Mary Morrissey notes, rightly, that interpreting the Bible as a comment on the contemporary constituted ‘application’ or ‘exemplarity’ rather than typology. It is also clear, however, that the deployment of the Old Testament in a seventeenth-century jeremiad is of a different order from an exemplary Roman or an analysis of a classical political theorist. Biblical applications carried weighty presumptions about the nature of history, providence, and eschatology that lent them a force quite different from classical precedents, and that justifies retaining the term typology as a specifically biblical category of exemplarity; early modern usage is, in any case, by no means clear-cut in its use of the term (Bultmann 1957; Dickson 1987; Morrissey 2000: 48). Typology, strictly speaking, is a reading tool that serves to construct or discern an interpretative unity between the Old and New Testaments, so that Jesus might be seen, by for example Tertullian, as a ‘recapitulation’ of Adam (Lampe and Woollcombe 1957; Daniélou 1960: 11; Young 1994: 29–49). This exegetical function is widely theorized in early modern thought. A ‘Type’, Thomas Blount explains in his dictionary of hard words, Glossographia (1661) is ‘a figure, under which is signified some other thing; an example, a likeness, the shadow of a thing’. Thomas Middleton, in Gods Parliament-House: or, The Marriage of the Old and New Testaments, compares the Old and New Testaments to two houses of parliament, upper and lower, heaven and earth, a comparison that no doubt idealized parliamentary relations, and he goes on to discuss the relations between the Old Testament prophets and Christ,‘how one foretels and the other answers’ (1627: sig. B3r). Vast intellectual resources went into ensuring coherence between the Old and New Testaments, which are in many respects, stylistically and ethically, very different. The era was by no means unaware of the disparity, and yet there is a great deal invested, theologically and philosophically, in the two testaments constituting what Paul Korshin describes as ‘a seamless historical fabric from biblical times’ (1982: 3; see also Miner 1977). Francis Roberts in Clavis Bibliorum (1648) gives a set of reading instructions, to ‘parallel Types with Anti-Types or things typified. The Types more familiarly lead us to the understanding and apprehending of things typified, and consequently more firmly fix them in our memories: The Anti-types more evidently unfold and unveyle the Types unto us’ (1648: 54). John Lightfoot, discussing the nature of biblical language in 1629, notes the conformity and dissonance between the books: The two Testaments are like the Apostles at Jerusalem (when the confusion of tongues at Babel was rerecompensed [sic] with multiplicitie of tongues at Sion) speaking in different languages, but speaking both to one purpose. They differ from each other onely in language and time: but for matter the new is veiled in the old, and old reveiled in the new. (1629: 114–15)

The ways in which the Testaments are mutually ‘veiled’ in each other could be extended, quite naturally, to the Bible’s application to the present, itself similarly veiled in the Scriptures. The same hermeneutics that reveal the relation between the Old and New,

veiled speech



their status as mutual interpretative keys, could readily provide a methodology for reading the present. Henry Ainsworth notes the difficulties inherent in reading a text whose ostensible (Mosaic) meaning had been abolished: ‘because his writings were the Old Testament, under which the New was veiled and which many reading, even to this day have a veile laid upon their hart, so that they cannot fasten their eyes upon the end of that which is abolished’ (1627: sig. A4r). Ainsworth’s poor readers, who ‘even to this day’ have a veil over their reading hearts, are handicapped precisely because they do not exercise the typologies that would enable them to understand the abolition of Old Testament law and the way in which the text speaks only to the future. Figuring the relations between the two testaments was, clearly, a major task of seventeenth-century expository work and one that had vital implications for history and politics. It is noteworthy that Roberts, Lightfoot, and Ainsworth all speak in their comments on typology of the way in which the Old Testament is ‘veiled’ in the New, while, conversely, the New is ‘veiled’ in the Old, notions emerging from 2 Corinthians 3:13–18. This could mean, at times, the opaque nature of the ceremonial law, as in Paul’s characterization of Jewish misreading, or it might suggest the dimly transparent nature of the one in the other, reading through a glass darkly (1 Cor. 13:12). This constituted and announced an exegetical task, rather than being an expression of the intangible and mystical nature of the matter. Veiled speech carried presumptions about the multivalence of the scriptural text, as opposed to denoting a secretive and insular code. Being veiled is what made the text interpretable as history and what made the political interpretable through readings of the Bible. The extensive working of Old Testament themes in early modern sermon literature depends upon a set of typological presumptions not only that divine battles are reiterated in the New Testament, which abrogates and transposes the meaning of the Old, but also that such wars were still being fought in the quasi-eschatological European moment. This presumption of historical reverberation, that the battles fought by the biblical Israel were echoing still in war-torn Europe, is fundamental to the seventeenth-century pulpit. The language of sermons does not become political only at the point in which England or its Protestant neighbours are mentioned or when the details of state are explicitly raised. The lattice of reference to kings, judges, punishments, places, tardiness, and retribution are inherently political for early modern congregations across the denominational spectrum. By no means a clandestine code, the biblical was rather the natural language in which events were conceived, and in which commentary was formulated.

Typology in the Thirty Years War The outbreak of the Thirty Years War and the brief, belated, and half-hearted English intervention occasioned an outpouring of writings interpreting and exploring the ideologies of biblical war, its injunctions and conditions, how it was prosecuted and the



kevin killeen

consequences of neglecting it. The war in the heart of Europe and the mooted Catholic marriage alliance became a national obsession. From theatre to pulpit, from satire to pamphlet, the standing injunction to avoid the arcana imperii, the secrets of state and foreign policy, was routinely flouted, in satire, in drama, but most notably in contemporary sermon culture (McRae 2004: 129–52; Jowitt 2006). The crisis emerged with the ousting of the Protestant elector, Frederick V, and his English wife, Elizabeth (James I’s daughter), from the Bohemian throne, which he had briefly occupied. The Catholic imperial and Hapsburg armies not only drove the Protestant forces from Prague, but invaded the Palatinate itself, the Protestant heart of southern Germany (Cogswell 1989; contra Russell 1979: 6–20; see also Parker 1997). Pressure in England to support Frederick V was intense, as evident in the 1621 parliament’s decision to vote subsidies to the king without the usual wrangles and concessions, but James, aware of how little military leverage he had over a landlocked war, aside that is from any ideological unwillingness to intervene, continued in his delicately balanced and deeply unpopular attempts at the Spanish marriage alliance. Portraying his policy as wise pacific caution (though he did permit a ‘benevolence’ to be collected for the Palatinate), the situation remained on a knife edge until James abandoned the marriage plans in 1623 and England entered, if feebly, into the war (Fincham and Lake 1985: 198–202). For several years, then, this failure to intervene on behalf of continental Protestantism constituted for many a national scandal, a shameful dereliction of both policy and religious duty. Prayers, exhortations, and at times harsh criticism of James’s policy are evident, even in printed sermons, despite the substantial royal efforts to suppress and punish disparaging comment on English foreign policy (Fincham and Lake 1985: 198–9; Cogswell 1989: 20–35; Fincham 1990: 244–6; for the legislation, see Cardwell 1839: 146–54). Indeed, Peter McCullough has taken this to be a crux of Jacobean sermon culture, that James’s vigorous promotion of a preaching ministry returned to haunt royal policy and that a series of reprimands and imprisonments only highlighted the somewhat uncontainable licence to criticize that the preaching court coterie had been granted over a number of years. The royal chaplain George Hakewill, for example, was disciplined for a prose tract against royal marriage policy, but not for a collection of sermons preached at court, a fact that ‘speaks for the importance of the sermon as a means for viable political commentary upon the arcana imperii, both orally and in print’ (McCullough 1998: 204). Beyond the court, too, the country was aflame with a sense of betrayal and shame that English policy was so neutered. Anxieties about Protestant Europe return again and again in the pulpit literature. Thomas Scott, for example, concludes a sermon preached in 1620 at the Assizes in Norwich, with a set of prayers that shade into typologies: ‘Blesse the King and Queene of Bohemia, and their royal Yssue; restore to them what they have lost, what Sathan and his associates, the Sabeans and Chaldeans, or men more cursed and cruell, have taken away from them’ (1623: 38).1 The Sabeans and Chaldeans evidently need no gloss, nor any direct transposition into the politics of European affairs. 1

On the complexity of writers named Thomas Scott, two of whom, one from Norwich and one from Ipswich, produced works entitled Vox dei, see Lake (1982) and Kelsey (2004).

veiled speech



Nehemiah Rogers, in a tract that at times blurs into preaching notes, and that was more graphic and intrusive upon the royal prerogative than most, compares the martyrdoms of continental Protestantism with the sloth of English luxury through a weighty side swipe at the king’s pacific policy: Our brethren in France and Germany are whirled about in these bloudie tumults; they heare the dismall cries of cruell adversaries, crying kill kill; the shrikes of women and infants; the thundering of those murdering peeces in their eares; while we lye upon beds of Ivory, and stretch our selves upon our couches, and eat the lambes out of the flocke, and the calves out of the midst of the stall; while wee drinke wine in bowles, and anoint our selves with the chiefe ointments. (1623: 265–6, re Amos 6:6)

While such direct comment, in the form of prayers for suffering Protestants of Germany, is by no means infrequent, the historian who quotes such phrases as evidence of political feeling (which it is) is nevertheless quoting out of context, in choosing to pick a singular secular cherry from long biblical sermons. Certainly, it does not convey the experience of reading, nor we can presume of hearing, early modern sermons, with their sweeping, lengthy, and agile rendering of their chosen pericope, around which is drawn the thick weaving of text upon text (on the potential difference between a written and printed sermon, see Webster 1997: 106). Early modern sermons are, hour after hour, biblical, but not, for all that, lacking in substantive content; their politics inhabit the intricacies of their biblical analysis as much as the direct ‘application’. A more characteristic example would be Thomas Jackson’s sermon, preached in 1622 in Canterbury Cathedral, which takes up what becomes one of the major homiletic themes of the era, one’s afflicted neighbours: There was a curse, yea a bitter curse, laid upon the inhabitants of Meroz, because they did not helpe the Lord against the mighty, Judg. 5. 23. And no lesse curse doth lie on the Inhabitants of any Place and Countrey, when the Lord is in armes, that doe not by their prayers helpe the poore weake Church against God: that doe not lay hold on him and resist him, but suffer him to crush and destroy. (1622: 60–1)

No comment on the trials of Germany and Bohemia is necessary. The typology does the political work, not in a manner of a subterfuge, but plainly and in the evident context of biblical war. Listeners in the early modern congregation would have had little problem recognizing Meroz as the city condemned for inaction, a city that is mentioned with such frequency in these years as to constitute a byword of popular dissatisfaction (see, e.g., Calderwood 1620: 118; Gee 1620; Buggs 1622: 17–18; Rogers 1623: 202; Taylor 1624: 14; Ussher 1624: 10;). Jackson’s text is characteristic in another respect too, in that it weaves a thick enemy theory, how one responds biblically to the ungodly and the exemplary dangers of inaction. If the arcana imperii should, by both protocol and edict, have been kept out of the pulpit, foreign affairs were nevertheless plainly and repeatedly discussed, in the ability of preachers to wield and adapt biblical Syrians, Persians, and Babylonians against the trials of Judea and Israel. Alliance, aggression and abject appeasement could all receive transparent public attention.



kevin killeen

Tony Claydon talks of the sermon as being the ‘crucible of public debate’ in the latter part of the century, indicating the longevity of such biblical discourse (2000: 224; see also Claydon, Chapter 24, this volume). An important corollary of this is that the language of such public debate is not primarily one of secular politics. The bone-deep conviction of much English historiographical thought has it that as politics developed into constitutionalism it was straining to free itself not only from the shackles of religious authority, but equally from the fetters of biblical language. This is, however, a notion that fundamentally misrepresents both the understanding of history in the early modern era, in which providential and eschatological presumptions play such a major part, and the discursive flexibility that the era found in scripture and in the nuances of typological representation. Such flexibility is premised on the common currency of scriptural reference, its availability as a discursive framework, rather than a view of the Bible as an Aesopian language by which one cunningly masks one’s true intentions. When writers and preachers deploy the veiled speech of typology, this is to be understood as a technical exegetical method for reading the ways in which an Old Testament text speaks through and is fulfilled in a New Testament text and, eschatologically, how the biblical drama of recalcitrance and redemption might be re-enacted in contemporary battles of religion.

Enemy Theory Sermon literature in these few years turns with a remarkable frequency to a set of Old Testament texts describing those Israelites who neglect God’s call to arms, the failure to support one’s allies in need and the unpliable will of God. These themes not only occupy those who are intrinsically hostile to the king’s attempts to negotiate Catholic alliances. The violence of the biblical histories, together with their providential and unyielding interpretation in the prophets, were the (perhaps inevitable) intertexts in which were heard the noisy echoes of international wars. But the Bible did not only provide, in the minds of early modern Protestants, exemplary models. Rather, it offered an always precariously balanced recapitulation of events, in which the backsliding and obdurate people of God might be offered a last-chance pitch for national redemption by proving their colours. This did not constitute any simple scheme of resemblance, whereby England was the modern correlate of Israel. On the contrary, the outlook of English Protestantism was a distinctly international one, with little sense of the country as a uniquely covenanted nation (Morrissey 2000). Indeed, when a homily did allow England to take on, in contingent fashion, the mantel of Israel, it was far more often its neglect of God and its national turpitude that was at issue. In any case, it is the pliable and contingent nature of biblical exemplarity, the shifting identities it permitted, that allowed it to be such an effective homiletic resource, though the one constant was the exegetical presupposition that every battle was the same battle, be it those of the Israelites, those of Revelation, or those in Bohemia and the Palatinate.

veiled speech



The early modern sermon, constructed as it so often is in bricolage scriptural fashion, can certainly come to resemble a mere blur of name upon biblical name, but the narratives built up in successive allusion can also often be impressive, encouraging the congregation to negotiate the shifting weight that a scriptural passage may bear in the context of the sermon itself and of contemporary events. Thomas Gataker’s A Sparke toward the Kindling of Sorrow for Sion (1621), delivered ‘at Sergeants Inne in Fleet-Street’ by the occasionally combative Rotherhithe preacher, while making a certain amount of explicit comment on the crisis, derives its main force through juggling texts on the divine wrath that ensues from the neglect of duty and care and from its dexterity with an evidently familiar theo-political vocabulary. The sermon, on Amos 6:6 (‘[they] drink wine in bowls, and anoint themselves with the chief ointments: but they are not grieved for the affliction of Joseph’), uses the occasion of those failing in their fellow feeling towards Joseph as the lynchpin for a thick trawl through biblical acts of omission, the numerous failures of magistrates to carry through their appointed judicial tasks and God’s frequently brutal response. This is the leitmotif of sermons in the era; neglect of corporate responsibility, within the international body of Protestantism: ‘wee observe, that There are privative sinnes as well as positive . . . It was the not slaying of Agag, that lost Saul his Crown’ (1621: 8–9). Saul, neglecting to slay the Amalak king, Agag, inflames the generally mild-mannered Samuel to hack the king to pieces, and the text hovers with the inference that this is all too applicable to contemporary acts of pacifism. God’s commands are, Gataker notes, not subject to negotiation: ‘Goe and speake to them, saith God to Jeremy, all that I command thee, or else I will destroy thee’ (1621: 12; Jer. 1: 17), upon which he builds, to emphasize how a minister may not neglect his prophetic duty to warn, any more than a rich man may neglect his duty to relieve poverty, or a king his Protestant alliances (1621: 17). There is, in such a historical moment, a distinct political weighting to statements on how ‘we ought to have a fellow-feeling of our fellow-members afflictions’, a comment that might at other times be an exhortation to moral neighbourliness. Gataker exemplifies the point with a number of examples, showing the afflictions that may rebound upon the nation for the omissions of its leaders: For Achans sinne, many of the hoast of Israel were slain and yet Achan still untouched. Abimelechs whole houshold were plagued for this oversight: and thousands of Davids subjects destroyed for the trespasse of their Soveraigne. Jeroboams deare sonne died for his Fathers offence. (1621: 25)2

The implied threat to the audience merely bubbles under the surface, without any direct parallel being made to contemporary events. Gataker proceeds to quote 2 Samuel 11:11, in which the reluctance or apathy of the Israelites angers God: ‘The Arke of God, and Judah and Israel abide in tents, and my Lord Joab and my Lords servants are encamped in the open fields.’ This is both provocative and unambiguous. It is not necessary to think 2 See similarly Gataker (1620: 84): ‘for when corruptions are crept into place of judicature, they become the sinnes of the Land, of the State.’



kevin killeen

of it as timidity or an Aesopian gesture. On the contrary, its meaning, the tardy hanging back in tents while the battle is raging, is clear. Gataker goes on later in the sermon to apply the situation, but this is into the second hour of the sermon, and any offence that might be taken has already been thoroughly given in the biblical analysis: Nor let us thinke that we have no such cause, because all is well (if all be so well yet) with us at home . . . Can we heare daily reports of our brethren in foraine parts, either assaulted, or distressed, or surprised by Popish forces . . . and yet esteeme all as nothing, or thinke that we have no just cause to mourne and lament? (1621: 32)

If such statements seem like the most overt political statements in such a homily, this chapter would suggest that in the early modern mind they do not outweigh the kind of typological exhortation that forms the bulk of so many contemporary sermons: ‘If we with-hold our helping hand, as Mordecai sometime told Ester, God may by other means end help and deliverance to his distressed ones; but the Curse of Meroz may light upon us . . . Many, I doubt not, there are, of whom Deboraes [sic] song may bee sung, Praise yee the Lord, for the willing people’ (1621: 37–8; Esther 4:15; Judg. 5:23). A thick set of meanings accrues around scriptural warriors, judges, and kings, and around biblical geographies, a ready and at times provocative language. A claim implicit here is that in early modern England biblical literacy was both impressive and widespread. Certainly a more thorough history of sermon reception might be required to substantiate such a claim that a broader constituency of the people, outside of the educational elite, had such a familiarity with this pantheon of people and places. What is plain, however, is that preachers in London parishes and across the country were not shy of scriptural complexity in their preaching. There is a ready presumption that the congregation has the necessary knowledge to follow such juggling of texts and an appreciation of the virtuoso scholarship involved; Samuel Hieron claims: ‘It is an honour to the sermon (when as the saying is) it shal smell of the candle’ (1616, in 1635: 586). Attention to the audience and the social standing of the preacher is, clearly, a vital contextual clue to the intention and effect of sermon literature, but most pulpits, including royal ones, are capable of fierce and seemingly fearless words. In a 1622 sermon preached before the king at Theobalds and published the following year as The Kings Shoe, Made and Ordained to Trample on, and Treade downe Edomites, William Loe introduces Psalm 60:8 as intended ‘to teach both Prince and people what to do, and how to deale in cases of greatest import, and consequence’. The text tells of the lack of peace for a king surrounded by alliance and rebellions: ‘Yet hath not the King his Quietus est; Idumæa also is to be subjected, for they of Edom had rebelled and ayded Siria’ (1623: sig. B1r–v). Burying one’s regal head in the sand is, for Loe, not an option (McCullough 1998: 207–8; Shami 2003: 128–9). Taking his audience through a history of shoes in Old Testament culture, their symbolic use in disputes over possession, tribute, and domination, Loe notes the psalmic injunction to aggressive military policy, that Edom ‘must be so subdued, that it must be subjected even unto vilenesse . . . so the text speaketh plainely, over Edom will I cast out my shoe’ (1623: sig. B2v). The sermon’s agile exegesis walks a fine line in criticism,

veiled speech



particularly when it addresses how Israel’s failure to rouse itself to war leaves it open to scorn, even to the point where Doeg the Edomite, a mere herdsman, betrays David to Saul (1 Sam. 22:22). Doeg becomes a precursor to and type of the history of insults upon Protestants, which Loe diligently traces. The text may be thought to be hedging at this point, evasive enough that Loe, should he find himself at the king’s displeasure, could claim that it was merely biblical commonplacing, but its political purpose is made evident when he addresses James directly: ‘And thinke not Dread Soveraigne that you shall escape the scorne of Edomites’ (1623: sigs C1v, C3r–v, C4r). In what is an astute psychology of injunction, Loe informs the king, with little ambiguity, of his increasingly shoddy reputation, while also denying his own merely clerical competence to judge the king, who, he implies, no doubt has policy up his sleeve: The height of Soveraigntie is dayly encumbered with an exceeding waight and world of occurrences, affaires, and deepe designes, all of surpassing and especiall care, singular skill, exquisite cunning, and important consequence. (1623: sig. C4v)

Loe acknowledges James’s weighty isolation: ‘Who is troubled with forraign affaires but the king?’ Given such flagrant political exegesis, however, it is plain that it is by no means the king alone who is troubled with foreign affairs. Loe does, however, concede the king’s sole prerogative in such matters: ‘The Lawe hath a directive power, not a coactive over kings’, but respectfully reminds the monarch that he and his fellow Protestant princes are being disgracefully and shamefully walked upon by popes, who, ‘trample upon the neckes of Kings and other Gods annointed’. Loe is bold enough to suggest, in all meekness, that biblical shoes have a military lesson for James: ‘the King must cry for an ensigne to be displayed, that his beloved may bee delivered, that God may save with his right hand, and may heare the king when he calleth upon him’ (1623: sigs E2r, E4v, C4v). The pattern repeated in sermon after sermon in the period is one in which the military histories of the Israelites are presented as models for the present time. The theme of biblical figures who were unduly tardy in exercising justice is raised over the course of some fifty pages by George Hakewill in King Davids Vow for Reformation (1621), delivered before King James, which notes how the nation is liable to suffer from the misdemeanours of an individual: by sparing wicked and wilfull transgressors, the wrath of God is provoked, and his judgement pulled down upon a Nation . . . When Achan has stoln the consecrated thing, the wrath of the Lord was so kindled against all the Hoast of Israel, that they could not stand, but were discomfited before their enemies, but as soone as Achan with those that belonged unto him were stoned to death, the Lord turned from his fierce wrath against Israel. (1621: 302).

Princes who are slow to action have an evident relevance in 1621, but, if a stick to beat the king is insufficient or inappropriate, others try a carrot approach (see Rhatigan forthcoming). In Christs Answer unto Johns Question (1625), Thomas Jackson embarks on an array of biblical examples of remarkable military odds being overcome. He notes how the victory over the Assyrians by Cyrus—God’s proxy and tool for the temporary



kevin killeen

redemption of Judah—might have seemed a thoroughly unlikely victory, and in comparison, plucking an example out of the air: more incredible, than if a man in this Age should take upon him to fore-tell that the Duke of Saxony, or some other Prince of Germany, should conquer the LowCountries, France and Spaine, and leade all the Royall Race of both those Kingdomes Captives unto Dresden, or to some other Princely Court of Germanie within these hundred yeeres next following. (1625: 52).

The sermons of the era, though composed of lengthy biblical tapestries, nevertheless rarely fail to make the application to contemporary events on the Continent. The ‘application’, rhetorically, is the culmination of the sermon, and, for historians, the most direct and forceful evidence of the politics of preaching, but its polemical force is, in general, dependent on the preceding typologies that the sermon has developed. In a 1622 sermon, preached before ‘the worthie company of practizers in the military garden in the well governed citie of Coventry’ and published ‘with authoritie’, alongside a speech to the king by Philemon Holland, Samuel Buggs makes little attempt to deliver a coded version of his politics. Rather, he presents a discursive world in which Israel and England are palpably and emphatically intertwined. Addressing the pacifism that would keep the country at peace at any length, Buggs counters: ‘If any shall aske, why our royall Jehu should gather Israel, and march so furiously, I answer, It is not peace, nor can there bee so long as the Romish Jezabell, and the Kings of the earth conspire and take counsell together against the Lord and his annointed’ (1622: 12). He goes on to address the fears about whether Britain was in any military shape to reap a victory: Seeing then the Arke of God is amongst us, and the Man of God is for us; let it never be said but Israel can afford a Sheild and a speare, and that Britaine shall yeeld some to buckle with the enemy, and cramme their words downe their throats that shall dare to blaspheme the living God, or offer to violate the peace of Jerusalem. (1622: 14)

England is, for Buggs, unassailable if it holds to its Protestant role, just as the Ark’s talismanic status empowered the Israelites that carried it into battle. Other sermons, more cynically, suppose that economics are trumping religious duty: ‘I make no question if now I should propound some admirable project, how to raise great summes of mony, filling the Exchequer . . . I should be welcome to Court’ (Scott 1623: 18). Discussion of biblical war is not, however, intrinsically hostile to the king, even though in relation to the Palatinate crisis there is a great deal of simmering dissatisfaction. If there is a pattern to be seen in the sermons of the period, it is not the particular political slant adopted on the continental wars, but rather the seemingly inevitable resort to biblical typology as the natural discursive medium in which to consider events, encompassing also those preachers who support the king’s policy. War, like so many early modern topics, is thought through in terms of its biblical precedent. William Laud, for example, preaching to the king at Whitehall in March 1621, in a sermon that stands wholly by the official pacific wisdom, considers the policy very much within the same discursive terms as his preaching peers:

veiled speech



Why, but there is a time for Warre, as well as for Peace, is there not? Yes, there is, Eccles. 3. And this time is in God to fit. I make peace, and create evill, Esa. 45. And in the King to denounce and proclaime. But it is not Dies Belli, the day of warre it selfe that can make voyd this duety Rogandi pacem, of praying for peace. (1622: 120)

Such weighing-up of biblical injunctions on war is ubiquitous. Clearly, however, these typologies were incendiary, and strenuous efforts were made to control sermon content. Instructions to preachers were issued, and many found themselves reprimanded or imprisoned for overstepping the mark. John Chamberlain reports in a letter of 22 December 1620 how the bishop of London ‘was willed to call all his clergie before him, and to charge them from the King not to meddle in their sermons with the Spanish match, nor any other matter of State’, and he reports a long succession of instances in which the admonition was flouted, involving, for example, Thomas Scott, James Ussher, Samuel Ward, John Everard, and George Hakewill (1939: ii. 331). Historical studies have, naturally enough, paid such instances a good deal of attention (Cogswell 1989: 27–32; Fincham 1990: 243–6; McCullough 1998: 133–45; Mutchow Towers 2003: 33–77). While it is not easy to discern where the boundaries of acceptability lay, not least because the offending sermons were by and large not printed, it is clear that typologies were a part of the problem. Joseph Mead reported in a letter to Sir Martin Stuteville how the chaplain Samson Price had infuriated the king with his insult to the Spanish ambassador: ‘Dr Price, of Oxford, was committed for a sermon, wherein he was too busy with Rochelle, the Palatinate and the Spaniard . . . Of the Spaniard, he related, by way of application that of Baladan, King of Babel’s ambassador to Hezekiah: 2nd Kings, chap. xx. Verse 13–18 . . . they say the king answers, he will hang Price’ (July 1621, in Birch 1849: ii. 265–6; see also Chamberlain 1939: ii. 387, reporting that Price was ‘clapt up for glauncing at somwhat in his sermon’). Price escaped execution, but the case reveals how the deployment of biblical figures, in this case the diplomat sent by Judah’s enemy, Sennacherib, was anything but a diplomatic form of commentary. John Donne was delegated the task of defending the king’s preaching orders against ‘unprofitable, unseasonable, seditious and dangerous doctrine, to the scandal of the Church and disquieting of the State’ (see App. I.10, and App. III.10). While his sermon, delivered at Paul’s Cross in September 1622, turns eventually to such a defence, it is not before some elaborate engagement with the sort of ‘enemy theory’ that so dominated the late Jacobean pulpit (Abbot 1622: sig. A2v; Maclure 1958: 104). A prominent design of the orders was to circumscribe the kinds of text that preachers would address. Given such a remit, Donne chooses to enlarge upon an impressively inappropriate pericope, ‘They fought from heaven; the Stars in their courses fought against Sisera’ (Judges 5:20), a text that is ‘part of the Song which Deborah & Barak sung after their great victory over Sisera’, and that might seem to contemporaries to announce the community of the militant cosmos, demonstrating how even the stars incline to the war. This could very well seem to be to a banner text for the forces of international Protestantism. Indeed, Donne is wholly aware of the applicability of the passage, talking of the text as having two ‘hemispheres’: ‘first the literall, the historical sense of the words, and then an emergent, a collaterall, an occasionall sense of them’ (1953–62: iv. 181). The ‘occasion’, it is clear is the Palatinate:



kevin killeen

I speake of this subject, especially to establish and settle them, that suspect Gods power, or Gods purpose, to succour those, who in forraine parts, grone under heavie pressures in matter of Religion, or to restore those, who in forraine parts, are devested of the lawfull possessions, and inheritance. (1953–62: iv. 183)

Donne notes how the song commemorates and celebrates all those who aided Deborah, from the princes and governors, the merchants and judges, even down to ‘Those that walked by the way; Idle, and discoursing men, that were not much affected, how business went’ (1953–62: iv. 182). That even ‘idle and discoursing men’ might be numbered in his song is, again, hardly a strong argument for the arcana imperii, that it is policy beyond the discursive limits of the common preacher. John Chamberlain, the prolific letter-writer and commentator on court news (see App. II.5), noting that the sermon was intended to ‘certifie the Kings goode intention in the late orders concerning preachers’, added, understandably, that this was a ‘somwhat straunge text for such a business’ (1939: ii. 451). Donne is hardly exemplifying the abstemious spirit of the preaching instructions. He too is caught up in the rhetorical deployment of Old Testament war theory, though he emphasizes that his purpose is pacific and at one with the king’s policy: ‘I am farre from giving fire to them that desire warre.’ Protestantism may be saved, he argues, by the king’s unseen hand and, to illustrate, Donne enters into a series of examples by which God devastates his enemies’ armies without resort to human politics: ‘as God sits in Heaven and yet goes into the field’, so too kings ‘may stay at home, and yet goe too. They goe in their assistance to the Warre; They goe in their Mediation for Peace . . . Kings goe many times, and are not thanked, because their wayes are not seene; and Christ himselfe would not alwayes bee seene’ (1953–62: iv. 187). James, Donne implies, is working his god-like manipulation of the war outside the public eye. Clearly, it was not an explanation that satisfied everybody when he continued: ‘the Warre, which wee are to speake of here, is not as before, a Worldly warre, it is a Spirituall War’ (1953–62: iv. 192). With a somewhat poor pun, Donne returns from the Palatinate to both his text and his purpose, to remind the congregation of the duties and efficacy of sermons: ‘Preaching is Gods ordinance, with the Ordinance hee fights from heaven, and batters downe all errors . . . to maintain this War, he hath made Preachers Stars’ (1953–62: iv. 192). Donne’s sermon makes a curious job of justifying the king’s censorious orders, but it would not be right to infer any intrinsic ambivalence about his task. Rather, the text embodies a discursive dilemma, that the Bible, for all that it might be inflected to radical ends, also provided a deeply ingrained language of politics across the early modern religious-political spectrum. The conclusion, such as it is, from this study of typology, is one that has primary reference to histories of political thought: that the early modern sermon yields its full political dividend only by attention to the intricacies of the biblical texts that are its subject. These constitute an adaptable, subtle, and, for the early modern listener and reader, a readily accessible language of political analysis. Typology is a reading technique with some longevity, intrinsic perhaps to any Christian sense of the Old Testament, from the patristic period onward. But it also has a specific and pointed political life across the early modern period, which continues apace in political dialogue over the seventeenth

veiled speech



century. We might, of course, trace it to earlier generations: Henrician and Elizabethan uses of speculum principum, the mirror for princes, are plentiful enough. However the seventeenth century saw a mushrooming of typological thought, with the increasing availability of and familiarity with the Bible throughout society, the spread of print, and increasing literacy rates. If court sermons constitute a main source of our knowledge of such typologies in the 1620s, by the 1640s it is evident that biblical literacy is widespread, that sermon-led typologies are woven deep in the fabric of early modern society, and that they constitute a primary discursive form of political language.

Bibliography Abbot, George (1622). The Kings Majesties Letter to the Lords Grace of Canterbury touching Preaching and Preachers, in George Abbot, The Coppie of a Letter. Oxford. Ainsworth, Henry (1627). Annotations upon the Five Bookes of Moses. Andrewes, Lancelot (1618). A Sermon Preached before His Majestie at Whitehall. Appleby, David (2007). Black Bartholomew’s Day: Preaching, Polemic and Restoration Nonconformity. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Birch, Thomas (1849) (ed.). The Court and Times of James the First. 2 vols. Henry Colburn. Blount, Thomas (1661). Glossographia, or, A Dictionary. Buggs, Samuel (1622). Miles Mediterraneus: The Mid-land Souldier. Bultmann, Rudolf (1957). History and Eschatology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Calderwood, David (1620). The Speach of the Kirk of Scotland to her Beloved Children. Amsterdam. Cardwell, E. (1839). Documentary Annals of the Reformed Church of England. 2 vols. Oxford. Chamberlain, John (1939). The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. Norman E. McClure. 2 vols. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society. Claydon, Tony (2000). ‘The Sermon, the “Public Sphere” and the Political Culture of Late Seventeenth-Century England’, in Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter E. McCullough (eds), The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History 1600–1750. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 208–34. Cogswell, Thomas (1989). The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of War, 1621–1624. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collinson, Patrick (1995). ‘The Coherence of the Text; How it Hangeth Together: The Bible in Reformation England’, in W. P. Stephens (ed.), The Bible, The Reformation and the Church. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 84–108. Daniélou, Jean (1960). From Shadows to Reality: Studies in the Biblical Typology of the Fathers, trans. Dom Wulstan Hibberd. London: Burne and Oates. Dickson, Donald R. (1987). ‘The Complexities of Biblical Typology in the Seventeenth Century’, Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Reform, 11/3: 253–72. Donne, John (1953–62). The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson. 10 vols. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Ferrell, Lori Anne (1998). Government by Polemic: James I, the King’s Preachers, and the Rhetorics of Conformity, 1603–1625. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ——, and McCullough, Peter E. (2000) (eds). The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History 1600–1750. Manchester: Manchester University Press.



kevin killeen

Fincham, Kenneth (1990). Prelate as Pastor: The Episcopate of James I. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ——, and Lake, Peter (1985). ‘The Ecclesiastical Policy of James I’, Journal of British Studies, 24/2: 169–207. Gataker, Thomas (1620). Gods Parley with Princes. —— (1621). A Sparke toward the Kindling of Sorrow for Sion. Gee, Edward (1620). Two Sermons . . . the Curse and Crime of Meroz. Granger, Thomas (1616). Pauls Crowne of Rejoycing, or the Manner how to hear the Word with Profit. Hakewill, George (1621). King Davids Vow for Reformation. Hieron, Samuel (1616). The Dignity of Preaching. —— (1635). The Workes of Mr Sam. Hieron. Hill, Christopher (1993). The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution. Penguin. Houlbrooke, Ralph (2006) (ed.). James VI and I: Ideas, Authority, and Government. Aldershot: Ashgate. Jackson, Thomas (1622). Judah must into Captivitie: Six Sermons on Jerem. 7.16. —— (1625). Christs Answer unto Johns Question. Jowitt, Claire (2006). ‘ “I am Another Woman”: The Spanish and French Matches in Massinger’s The Renegado (1624) and The Unnatural Combat (1624–5)’, in Alexander Samson (ed.), The Spanish Match: Prince Charles’s Journey to Madrid, 1623. Aldershot: Ashgate, 151–72. Kannengiesser, Charles (2006). Handbook of Patristic Exegesis: The Bible in Ancient Christianity. Leiden: Brill. Kelsey, Sean (2004). ‘Thomas Scott (d. 1626)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online edn. Knott, John, Jr. (1980). Sword of the Spirit: Puritan Responses to the Bible. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Korshin, Paul J. (1982). Typologies in England 1650–1820. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lake, Peter (1982). ‘Constitutional Consensus and Puritan Opposition in the 1620s: Thomas Scott and the Spanish Match’, Historical Journal, 25: 805–25. Lampe, Geoffrey W. H., and Woollcombe, Kenneth J. (1957). Essays in Typology. SCM Press. Langford, George (1621). Manassehs Miraculous Metamorphosis. Laud, William (1622). A Sermon Preached at White-hall, on the 24. of March, 1621. Lawson, George (1662). An Exposition of the Epistle to the Hebrewes. Lightfoot, John (1629). Erubhin or Miscellanies Christian and Judaicall. Loe, William (1623). The Kings Shoe, Made and Ordained to Trample on, and Treade downe Edomites. McCullough, Peter E. (1998). Sermons at Court, 1559–1625: Religion and Politics in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maclure, Millar (1958). The Paul’s Cross Sermons, 1534–1642. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. McRae, Andrew (2004). Literature, Satire, and the Early Stuart State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maxey, Anthony (1605). The Sermon Preached before the King. Mazzeo, Joseph A. (1962). ‘Cromwell as Davidic King’, in J. A. Mazzeo (ed.), Reason and the Imagination: Studies in the History of Ideas, 1600–1800. New York: Columbia University Press, 29–55.

veiled speech



Middleton, Thomas (1627). Gods Parliament-House: or, The Marriage of the Old and New Testaments. Miner, Earl (1977) (ed.). Literary Uses of Typology: From the Late Middle Ages to the Present. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Morrissey, Mary (2000). ‘Elect Nations and Prophetic Preaching: Types and Examples in the Paul’s Cross Jeremiad’, in Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter E. McCullough (eds), The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History 1600–1750. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 43–58. —— (2006). ‘Presenting James VI and I to the Public: Preaching on Political Anniversaries at Paul’s Cross’, in Ralph Houlbrooke (ed.), James VI and I: Ideas, Authority, and Government. Aldershot: Ashgate. Mutchow Towers, S. (2003). Control of Religious Printing in Early Stuart England. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. Parker, Geoffrey (1997) (ed.). The Thirty Years’ War. London: Routledge. Patterson, Annabel (1984). Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Playfere, Thomas (1609). A Sermon Preached before the Kings Majestie at Drayton. Cambridge. Porter, Stanley E., Paul Joyce, and David E. Orton (1994) (eds). Crossing the Boundaries: Essays in Biblical Interpretation in Honour of Michael D. Goulder. Leiden: Brill. Redworth, Glyn (2003). The Prince and the Infanta: The Cultural Politics of the Spanish Match. New Haven: Yale University Press. Rhatigan, Emma (forthcoming). ‘Preaching to Princes: John Burgess and George Hakewill in the Royal Pulpit’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History. Roberts, Francis (1648). Clavis Bibliorum: The Key of the Bible. Rogers, Nehemiah (1623). A Strange Vineyard in Palaestina in an Exposition of Isaiahs Parabolical Song of the Beloved. Russell, Conrad (1979). Parliaments and English Politics, 1621–29. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Samson, Alexander (2006) (ed.). The Spanish Match: Prince Charles’s Journey to Madrid, 1623. Aldershot: Ashgate. Scott, Thomas (1623). The Projector . . . Delivered in a Sermon before the Judges in Norwich. Shami, Jeanne (2003). John Donne and Conformity in Crisis in the Late Jacobean Pulpit. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer. Stephens, W. P. (1995) (ed.). The Bible, The Reformation and the Church. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Taylor, Thomas (1624). An Everlasting Record of the Utter Ruine of the Romish Amaleck in Two Sermons. Tertullian (1844–1904). De anima, in Jacques-Paul Migne, Patrologiae cursus completus. Series Latina, 11. Paris: Garnier Frères. Ussher, James (1624). A Sermon Preached before the Commos-House [sic] of Parliament, 1620. Webster, Tom (1997). Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England: The Caroline Puritan Movement, c.1620–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, John (1625). Great Britains Solomon: A Sermon Preached at the Magnificent Funerall of the Most High and Mighty King James. Young, Frances (1994). ‘Typology’, in Stanley E. Porter, Paul Joyce, and David E. Orton (eds), Crossing the Boundaries: Essays in Biblical Interpretation in Honour of Michael D. Goulder. Leiden: Brill, 29–49.

chapter 20

pr e achi ng a n d pa r li a m en t, 1640 –1659 tom webster

It would be a category error to divide ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ in the early modern sermon. In the broad sense, sermons were always political, either as purveyors of national, regional, or parochial news, necessarily weighted in a specific direction, or as a vehicle for a particular spirituality, defined by its emphases, its absences or omissions, and its relationship to always febrile orthodoxies, whether they be relating to personal behaviour, devotional practices, or the means for grace. Style of delivery, from sources to bodily comportment to linguistic composition, also carried elements that positioned the preacher on a politico-religious spectrum. This much accepted, it should also be noted that the period between 1640 and 1660 saw the broad political dimension to preaching and sermons rise a substantial degree above that experienced since the Elizabethan settlement, as a reflection and constituent of the fractious contestation of all the givens of the inherited religious context. This is not to suggest that earlier struggles pale by comparison; it is simply to state that between 1640 and 1660 there was a shift from a religious culture of orthodoxies versus heresies, to one marked by the proliferation of heterodoxies with little common ground of engagement and with an insufficiently rooted or accepted mode of governance to deliver a stable, authoritative judgement. To give an account that is sufficiently broad while remaining coherent, I will explore a number of avenues. I will start with sermons delivered to parliamentary fasts through the period as a political compass for the shifting expectations and centres of attention of the Houses, with Stephen Marshall, a moderate Presbyterian, serving as a weathercock for the fluctuations of this central stage. However, the canvas needs to be broader and attention must be paid to the opportunities offered to formerly silenced or muted preachers in the 1640s, and to printed sermons—some old, some imported, and some the fruits of the new conditions. Attention will also be paid to shifts in patronage and personnel. These were years of deprivations as well as opportunities, and the development of the ever-present question of patronage had a serious impact on the voice from the pulpit. The waters of power

preaching and parliament, –



must be profitably muddied in terms of geography, patrons and clients, imposition and licence. To change the metaphor, a broader panorama is also necessary to appreciate the full scale and purposes of sermons in these years. A caveat should be added in that nomenclature is always troublesome and should be taken throughout as indicative rather than determinative (Davis 1991: 485–90). Attention will be paid to ‘Anglicanism’ and to ‘moderate radicals’ (always fluid and relational terms) and to their relations with less constrained radicals.

The Parliamentary Fast Sermons, 1641–50 With the benefit of hindsight, Clarendon observed that ‘the first publishing of extraordinary news was from the pulpit; and by the preacher’s text, and his manner of discourse upon it, the auditors might judge, and commonly foresaw, what was like to be next done in the Parliament or Council of State’. Specific to the fasts or ‘days of public humiliation’ or thanksgiving staged by the Long Parliament, he complained that, without doubt, ‘the archbishop of Canterbury had never so great an influence upon the counsels at court as Dr Burges and Mr Marshall had them upon the Houses’ (Clarendon 1888: iv. 194; i. 401). Indeed, it was Cornelius Burges, an elderly and established reformer, and Stephen Marshall who opened the first fast in 1640 on the anniversary of Elizabeth’s accession, 17 November, setting out the need for the completion of the Elizabethan Reformation, building stronger bulwarks against the dual threat of popery and tyranny. Marshall made plain the place of preaching in this task: The preaching of the Word is the Scepter of Christs Kingdome, the glory of a Nation, the Chariot upon which life and salvation comes riding . . . if all the good Lawes in the world were made, without this, they would come to nothing. (Marshall 1641a: 33, 49)

Burges matched this with his own call for the priority of ‘more frequent, and better performance’ of preaching,‘which, albeit be Gods own arme and power unto salvation, is yet brought into so deep contempt . . . that it is made a matter of scorne, and become the odious Character of a Puritan, to be an assiduous preacher’ (Burges 1641: 72–3). Sermons given to support fasting within the Houses of Parliament were an established practice at the opening of parliaments. Each house would hear two sermons, with different pairs of preachers for each house. The longevity of this parliament, effectively sitting from 1640 to 1653, with the effectiveness of the sermons as a clarion call, meant that this was translated into a monthly spiritual fix, indicating which way the wind was blowing, usually by the success of the sermons, sometimes by their failure. The ministers were invited by parliamentary selection committees, although some members were more active in bringing the voices of their particular clients to the pulpit. The early sessions worked to maintain a broad church committed to reform. Marshall was unusual in the length of his service, but the emphases of his sermons share common ground with many of his colleagues. In September 1641, he was joined by Congrega-



tom webster

tionalist Jeremiah Burroughes at a thanksgiving, celebrating the arrival of reformation, and in December by Edmund Calamy with a slightly more negative tone, both preachers calling for more zeal and fervency for the task. The project of building sides became sharper after Charles had withdrawn from Whitehall to Windsor in January 1642. On 23 February 1642, Calamy emphasized the duty of reformation, thus providing the opening for Marshall’s most famous delivery, Meroz Cursed. In Marshall’s sermon commitment to reformation is taken as a measure of salvation both in parliament and also ‘in every congregation where godly Minister and godly people shall, according to publick direction, lay in the dust, fasting, and mourning, and praying before the Lord’ (Marshall 1641b: 45). The harshest words are reserved for ‘All the people who fight against Jerusalem, that their flesh shall consume whilest they stand upon their feet, their eyes shall rot in their holes, their tongue shall consume away in their mouth’ (Marshall 1641b: 22; Zech. 14:12). The target of this vitriol reveals the purpose of this sermon and much of the genre as tensions rose: Meroz was cursed not for opposition but for apathy. Hence, the condemned were not active royalists but those who simply sought to keep out of trouble. It should be noted that Meroz was a recurrent target for Congregationalists and Presbyterians alike at fast sermons through to early 1643. Meroz Cursed also provides an opportunity to dispel any sense that these were ‘merely’ addresses to parliament. There are four correctives. The first is the frequent note in the introductions to the printed versions explaining that this text incorporates material for which there was insufficient time in the delivery and that this was a formalization of an extempore sermon resting upon, if anything, short notes. The second point is that parliament need not be the only auditor: Marshall was said to have given this sermon over sixty times, often to troops. The third is that the printed version took the message into an emergent public sphere. In these circumstances, the fourth point is that such a text was now detached from its author; two shortened, cheaper, unauthorized versions appeared within weeks. Throughout the 1640s, fast preachers were always willing to take the call for humiliation seriously; token apologies routinely prefaced prolonged hectoring of congregations to further reformation on a personal, local, and national level. Marshall makes plain the source of this licence: In a word, preaching is that whereby Christ destroyes the very Kingdome of Antichrist, though it is the Devills master-piece laid the deepest in policy, and founded not onely in States, but in mens consciences, yet Christ destroyes it by the Word of his mouth, that is the preaching of the Gospel in the mouthes of his Ministers. (Marshall 1646: 22)

The immediate target shifted early in 1643; the ongoing conflict and impending peace talks led preachers to seek to renew the commitment of religious and political conservatives. John Arrowsmith stressed the tone of revenge, a need reiterated by John Ellis in February. Ellis’s preaching partner, William Bridge, made the fear more explicit, identifying royalist councillors and flatterers when he addressed Charles through Joab:

preaching and parliament, –



Sir your Absolom and your Adonijah, you may love them wel, but not better then your own peace, your own people. If the Queene of your bosome stand in competition with your Kingdome, your people, you must not love her better then us. (Bridge 1643: 20)

The accusation that fast preachers were mere self-serving temporizers barely stands up to examination. As early as April 1645 Marshall threatened external force if reformation did not progress and, while his willingness to emphasize Erastianism (the ascendancy of the state over the church) in his later pleas may be seen as swimming with the tide, this willingness was growing out of a constant vision, that ‘interest in the Kingdome of God’ was ‘the unum necessarium’ (Marshall 1647 [i.e. 1648]: 23). However, shared priorities did not always rest with shared means. The anti-Erastian tone of four Scottish ministers invited to address the Commons in 1644 meant that only Alexander Henderson was to return, to give thanks for Marston Moor. In October a less divisive issue was combined with calls for resolution in the hate-figure of William Laud, whose trial was coming to a climax. Calamy preached on the duty of magistrates to spill guilty blood, and Henry Scudder emphasized the complicity of undelivered justice. Scudder made it plain that, ‘When the Prophets and Ministers of God speake to any people from God, in his Name, it is the voice of God; God, in and by them, speaketh’ (Scudder 1645: 6), before laying out the trials and demands of divine judgement. Edmund Staunton had the hard task of taking the message to the Lords; there he set out the expectations and benefits of delivering rigorous justice, concluding his sermon as follows: And now could I lift up my voyce as a trumpet, had I the shrill cry of an angell, which might be heard from East, to West, from North to South, in all the corners of the Kingdome, my note should be, execution of judgement, execution of judgement, execution of judgement, that is Gods way to pacifie Gods wrath; Then stood up Phinehas and executed judgement, and so the plague was stayed. (1645: 29–30)

The end of 1644 and the following year saw a raising of factional strain and a shift in personnel. The tensions around the Self-Denying Ordinance, the exclusion of members from military command, were so high that the fast was held for both houses, the preachers being Marshall, Obadiah Sedgwick, and Thomas Hill. Revealingly, their sermons remain unpublished. The animosities over church government returned very clearly in the summer of 1645 with Thomas Coleman, an established preacher for fasts, taking a thoroughly Erastian line. Coleman pleaded that parliament should lay ‘no more burden of government upon the shoulders of Ministers, then Christ hath plainly laid upon them, no more hand therein, then the Holy Ghost clearely gives them’, with the duties of conversion and pastoral advice being more than enough. ‘A Christian Magistrate, as a Christian Magistrate, is a Governour in the Church’ (Coleman 1645: 25, 27). George Gillespie mentioned this disagreement very moderately when he preached to the Lords on the same day. In the printed version, however, Gillespie added a ‘Brotherly examination’, half the length of the sermon, where he set forth his position, claiming that ‘I was then unwilling to fall upon such a Controversie so publickly, and especially in a Fast Sermon’ (1645: 31). The disagreement spilled over into a more hot-tempered exchange in



tom webster

the press but, unsurprisingly, Coleman’s stance was more appealing to the magistrates in parliament. While Sedgwick and Marshall stayed on the stage, they were also sharing it more often with figures more associated with Cromwell and the army; Hugh Peters especially and, later, John Owen came to occupy the pulpit before the Houses. As factional divisions in the houses sharpened, fewer sermons were published by the authority of parliament. William Dell, who rose as one of the chaplains to the New Model Army, judged his sermon well but overstepped the mark in the preface to the printed version. Dell presented any dismissal of his refutation of Christopher Love, his copreacher, as literal evidence of lack of inspiration: When you reade what you have heard, you must needs acknowledge it to be the minde of god, if you received the anointing of the Spirit: and the truth herein contained, shall prevaile with all that belong to god. For my part, I am not carefull touching the successe of it, I can trust god with that, whose Word it is. (Dell 1646: sig. A2v)

From the other side, timing could be crucial. Nathaniel Ward preached two days after the army ejected eleven more moderate members. Ward bravely stuck to his guns, offering commiseration to the king, calling for the army to be paid and disciplined, and for extirpation of ‘heresy’ within the troops. Naturally, the printing of the sermon was without the approval of the Commons; indeed, it was said to be against Ward’s own inclination. In the letter that served as an introduction, however, he struck a note that must have encouraged nods of agreement, stating that: in a distempered time, when occurences of State are so violent and various that a man speaks for life, it is hard to speak pertinently to the case, and acceptably to all hearers, especially when there are so many counterparties, tuning their eares to the key of their own Interests. (Ward 1647: sig. A3r)

Timing called upon the courage of the Presbyterian Thomas Watson: he was invited before Pride’s Purge, the serious winnowing of parliament by the army, and preached after, delivering a castigatory denunciation of hypocrisy, citing, among others, Pilate, Herod, and Jezebel as examples of those using religion as a cloak for self-interest. Sometimes Covetousnesse pretends Conscience; Judas fisheth for money under a pretence of Religion, This Oyntment might have beene sold for three hundred pence and given to the poore, John 12. 5. how charitable Judas was! but his charity beganne at home, for he carried the Bag. (Watson 1649: 20)

It comes as no surprise to note that this sermon was published without the thanks or order of the Rump. Given the rapid pace of change at the end of 1648, the proportion of successful selections should be noted. In the period before Pride’s Purge, George Cokayn made clear the grounds and consequent responsibilities of the assembly: ‘The Saints that walk with God in Union with Holiness and Righteousness are the men by whom God at last will judg all the causes of the sons of men’ (1648: 17). Pride’s Purge was followed by a careful mix of old and new in Marshall, Joseph Caryl, and Hugh Peters, although none of their

preaching and parliament, –



contributions was printed. After the execution of Charles I, two preachers with connections to Cromwell were chosen for the Commons, John Cardell and John Owen, and both delivered fairly celebratory sermons, but moderate nonetheless. Their emphasis on the need to ‘Be tender towards Fainters in difficult seasons’ allowed for uncertainty in times of change; they also encouraged patience in waiting for waverers to return to governance, and thoughtfully appended to the printed version guidance on toleration and the duties of civil magistrates for reformation (Owen 1649: 13). Stephen Marshall took on the task of preaching to the Lords, probably the smallest congregation of his career. Sermons relating to fasts and thanksgivings did not disappear in the 1650s but came more to relate to specific occasions and tended to be printed less often. This is not to suggest that they decreased in impact or importance. In March 1651, for instance, the line-up showed a continued desire for breadth in that John Owen was joined by the Presbyterian John Ley and the more radical John Simpson. Simpson ran counter to this spirit of inclusion by attacking the claims of educated ministers and denying university education to be a measure of spiritual worth; this led to a raucous two-hour debate replete with denunciations. A more pragmatic conclusion may be found in Stephen Marshall’s November 1653 fast sermon to the Nominated Assembly, the parliament consisting of members selected by the Council of Officers. His message was appropriately Erastian, albeit moderate: To Order what men shall believe, is to exercise Dominion over mens Consciences: It is One thing to cause the people to attend the means, and another to make them believe the truth, the first they must doe, but not the second: Faith is Gods gift. It is one thing to hinder idolatry, and blasphemy spreading, another thing to make people renounce an opinion, and embrace the truth. (Marshall 1657: 5)

The chosen text was, perhaps with a note of optimism, 1Timothy 2:2: ‘That we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty.’

Print, Patronage, and Personnel The lengthy debates in the Westminster Assembly, the primarily clerical organ charged with reforming the church (see App. III.14), meant that parliament could choose from across the spectrum of godly ministers for the fasts. It also meant that the pulpits of London provided satiety for enthusiasts. With established London ministers joined by celebrities from elsewhere, the choice was broad. Jeremiah Burroughes and William Greenhill, for instance, provided morning and evening exercises in Stepney. Devotional sermons were delivered in St Paul’s Cathedral by ministers unlikely to have been accepted there before, and ministers like John Goodwin were preaching both to their former parishes and to their own gathered churches. The attractions (and difficulties) of the breadth of choice are captured in the account of Anna Trapnel, later to be known as a visionary prophet. In the early 1640s, in the depth of doubt and insecurity, she ‘ran from



tom webster

Minister to Minister, from Sermon to Sermon, but I could find no rest; I could not be contented to hear once or twice in the week, but must hear from the first day to the last’, fearing that she might miss the best source of spiritual guidance (Trapnel 1654: 2). If we turn to printed versions of sermons, there is a series of elements to be taken into account (see also Rigney, Chapter 11, this volume). The first is that at the start of the period there were many sermons published that had hibernated in the previous decade, because of the perceived and actual restraints upon the press. Other freshly printed sermons included ones that would have been more clearly caught in the censor’s web of the 1630s: some farewell sermons from ministers about to depart for foreign climes, or broad jeremiads making conditional threats of divine retribution if the church did not mend its ways. Sermons with a more contemporary political agenda also appeared in print for the first time in this period, including works of practical divinity by established pastors in New England. On one level, such works were printed for their inherent moral and religious value, but there was also a political dimension to their publication. The printing of such works was part of an effort by Congregationalist preachers in England to proclaim their mainstream spiritual orthodoxy (and implicitly to dissociate themselves from more marginal brethren). For instance, Thomas Goodwin and Philip Nye expressed misgivings about the demands Thomas Hooker placed on his auditors, ‘perhaps by urging too much upon that as Preparatory . . . a man may be held too long under John Baptists water’ (1656: sig. C2v). Other sermons, both delivered and printed, some with less explicit ‘political’ purpose, some with more, were also consequent upon the changed circumstances: hence the sermons and collections of some already encountered, such as Burroughes, Greenhill, and Marshall, and of rising stars such as Richard Baxter and John Owen. Despite an initial agreement to limit preaching and publishing on ecclesiological issues, after the publication of An Apologeticall Narration in 1644, the market for controversy over church government and the ‘proper’ relation of religious and civil government was more than satisfied in pulpit and press. In the 1650s, it became a de facto dead horse, or, as Simeon Ashe told Robert Baillie in response to the latter’s proposal to publish more on ecclesiology in 1655, ‘that controversie lyeth dead among us’ (Baillie 1841–2: iii. 306). Overlapping with ecclesiological dispute and continuing after, was the ‘debate’, a mixture of tirade and engagement with and between the emergent alternatives to the national churches, with verbal blows passed between Presbyterians, Congregationalists, General and Particular Baptists, as well as between Congregationalists with a national ideal and more exclusive Separatists. In addition, the debate on religious toleration simmered and occasionally flared in this period; ‘religious toleration’ was a term always simple enough to define when applied to oneself, but contentious when claimed by others. There is one ironic consequence of the free rein that godly preachers had now acquired for print publication of their sermons. The appetite for sensation and news created uneasy bedfellows among the stock available to readers from the same stationer. For preachers, this also represented loss of control of their wares, with additional or alternative versions of the same sermon appearing on booksellers’ stalls. As Nathaniel Hardy complained in the

preaching and parliament, –



preface to a sermon at the end of the period, this meant that preachers, stenographers, and preachers ‘beget and bring forth a Bastard brood of Sermons’ far from the ideal of carefully crafted poesies of piety (1658: sig. A2r). London’s smorgasbord of choice should not be taken as synecdochical for the whole country. While some Puritan ministers, such as Samuel Fairclough, declined invitations to the Assembly and attractive job offers to remain attached to their flocks, politics and the attractions of the capital left some pulpits at least temporarily empty. In the provision of preachers in the provinces, patronage is important for the 1640s. Existing rights were protected apart from those of the Crown, the bishops, deans and chapters, and those of sequestered royalists. The concerns of Parliament for lay property rights meant that change was slow and modest. This can be seen in terms of the ejected personnel. The process had two stages: the first, up to 1643s, came from below, with parishes urging the ejection of Laudian ministers; the second came from the centre and was thereby limited to more parliamentarian regions, with ministers sometimes being ejected for insufficiency as preachers. While around 3,000 clerics were harassed, many obtained new livings; others were pluralists who were allowed to retain one post, and some re-intruded themselves into their pulpits despite parliamentary ejection notices. The broader complexion of preaching was modified rather than transformed, the consequences of which we will return to below. The changed conditions of the 1650s brought a relative stability that allowed changes in patronage, personnel, and preaching. The immediate demands of 1649 produced the Printing Act. This Act attempted to prevent sermons interfering with matters of state, partly to silence Presbyterians feeling betrayed by the trial and execution of Charles I. As we will see, this was a recurrent issue. Efforts to change and maintain the church in the nation came to the fore, slipped onto a back burner, and came back to the fore throughout the decade, not least because of the persistent efforts of Oliver Cromwell. Groundwork was established by an impressive survey under the commonwealth, identifying more explicitly the scale of the task. One of the duties laid down in 1653 for the Lord Protector, Cromwell’s post as head of state, was provision ‘for the encouragement and maintenance of able and painful teachers, for the understanding of the people, and for the discovery and confrontation of error, heresy, and whatever is contrary to sound doctrine’ (Gardiner 1906: 416). Trustees were appointed to supervise augmentation of preachers’ livings, and, with the funds and some opportunity to rationalize parish size, they met with some success. Ordinances established ‘Triers’ and ‘Ejectors’ in 1654. The Triers were to test applicants for public funding, ensuring that they met broad standards of doctrinal orthodoxy and ability. With central committees of clerics and laymen dominated by Congregationalists but including Presbyterians and non-separating Baptists, they oversaw more than 3,500 approved ministers by 1659. The task of the Ejectors, to remove scandalous or insufficient ministers, was more bound by local conditions and sometimes lacked central support: Cromwell repealed a number of their decisions. In any case, measurement of ‘success’ rests upon definitions of the target. Greater efficiency under the heavy hand of the Major Generals, the relatively authoritarian rule between 1655 and 1657, may have



tom webster

been attained at the local levels in some regions, but, without knowing how many ‘should’ have been ejected, a definitive assessment is unattainable. Certainly, the morass of bureaucracy was of little help, but it should be noted that the maintenance of the broad church of assessors was in itself a source of stability. In the relationship between patronage and personnel, Cromwell is central. As Protector he held the patronage of the Crown, of sequestered royalists, and of livings that had sat vacant for six months. For him as an individual, this patronage grew once he had been appointed Chancellor of Oxford University. His performance was informed by two complementary outlooks. First, his self-image as the parish constable writ large kept him sensitive to the particular conditions of individual parishes, making promises to keep an eye out for suitable candidates when incumbents died, responding sympathetically to petitions from parishes, and seeing candidates through the administrative process with a remarkable degree of efficiency given his substantial in-box. Secondly, this efficiency and responsiveness worked well with his commitment to an understanding of the ‘godly minister’, which could encompass moderate Presbyterians across to moderate Baptists. It might be added that the intention was to lessen conflict, to win or maintain loyalty, and to achieve change by small steps rather than by more aggressive strides.

Devotional and Theological Content To turn to the devotional content of the sermons of the 1640s and 1650s would, to most of those who delivered them, be finally to get round to the real business, away from the frippery of government and organization. It will become clear that this is not to abandon politics completely, but it should be stressed that this period saw a flowering of Puritan practical divinity in the pulpit. The lasting heritage of the English Reformed tradition would not be the same without the works of Richard Baxter and John Owen. At its heart was preaching. Owen made this clear when he preached on the duty of pastors: after distinguishing them from priests, whose inappropriate claims to authority inherent in the office merely revealed them to be ‘shavelings of Antichrist’, he identified the work of the ministry as ‘the slaying of men’s lusts, and the offering up of them, being converted by the preaching of the gospel, unto God’ (Owen 1644: 20, 25). As Vavasor Powell, prominent in the propagation of the gospel in Wales, put it: ‘I would not neglect for the Printing of a thousand Books, the preaching of one Sermon’ (Powell 1650: sig. A4v). To put it succinctly, John Bunyan built his reputation as a preacher rather than as the author of Pilgrim’s Progress. It would be dangerous to suggest determinative links between shifts in practical divinity and the new political and religious context, but suggestive connections between the relative freedom and empowerment of the moderate radicals, alongside the threat of Antinomianism, are present. Owen, for instance, remained a staunch defender of orthodox Calvinism throughout his career. His piety, however, has a strong sense of human agency, working with the Holy Spirit, to promulgate and strengthen assurance of

preaching and parliament, –



election. Richard Baxter took this further, building upon the hypothetical universalism of John Preston and the preparationist theology of Thomas Hooker to create what would formerly have been seen as anomalous Puritan Arminianism. John Goodwin arrived at similar conclusions, preaching to his gathered church and his parish in Coleman Street, London, of greater human agency in the salvific process. (Goodwin has a lower place than Baxter or Owen in the pantheon of Reformed preachers, but it should be remembered that John Wesley saw in him a kindred spirit and published some of Goodwin’s works for Wesleyan Methodists.) Although the coupling of Baxter and Goodwin shows that it would be rash to assume that theological differences always correlate with ecclesiological allegiances, there are differences in emphasis in preaching. Congregationalists did not lack fervour for conversion and many maintained the vision of a national church—indeed many served in parish churches—but the Presbyterian passion for evangelical outreach accompanied their ecclesial stance. This stance could also be seen as an implicit criticism of the failures of the settlement. In the mid-1640s, the London Presbyterian classis created an adaptation of the old combination lecture to deliver short exercises on weekday mornings. This produced a sermon of about half an hour with an attractive variety of celebrated preachers. It combined a sermon of unusual brevity by early modern standards with an appropriate time in the working day. In itself this can be seen as an appeal to more cautious parishioners, less likely to be given to the full performance of three hours of painful preaching. The evangelical intent was made explicit by its publicist, Thomas Case, who highlighted the neglect of proper ordinances such as preaching. He noted that many ‘that have been dubious and staggering about their way, have been setled and resolved: some have drawn their first breath in this aire, others have been preserved and secured, in the sad Apostasy from Anabaptisme, Antinomianisme, Antiscripturisme, Atheisme, Ranterisme of these times’ (Case 1655: 26–7). Presbyterian preaching as a means to broaden the base of parochial piety can be taken further. There were catechetical sermons to ease the path of climbers who found godly mountains too steep; such sermons often concentrated on preparation for the Eucharist. Thomas Bedford emphasized the need to encourage frequent attendance as ‘A Duty most needfull to be preached and pressed in this Age wherein we live: An age of much loosenesse, and prophanenesse’ (Bedford 1649: sig. A4v). Presbyterian ministers may have been cautious in the targets they chose to make explicit in their sermons; the restraint of ‘Anglicans’, however, make Presbyterians look positively brash. Critical attention given to the less sensational appetite of those Anglicans who wanted to return to what some saw as the Jacobean golden years has been salutary (Maltby 2004). However, attention has tended to concentrate on the popularity of the liturgy, the sacraments, the festivals, and the ceremony; this has resulted in critical neglect of the sermon. This is understandable but limiting; the sermon was an important part of worship for Prayer Book Protestants too. Part of the expression of resistance to calendrical reforms in Gloucester was to have special services at Easter with guest preachers. It is worth noting the emphases noted by John Evelyn when he attended services on his visits to England (see App. II.10). Shortly before his withdrawal to his estate in Deptford in June



tom webster

1649, Evelyn reported a sermon preached by the Archbishop of Armagh at Lincoln’s Inn: ‘I receiv’d the B:[lessed] Sacrament preparatory to my Journey: his text was 5 Rom: 13.’ In March 1652: ‘at St Gregories, Mr Godard preached on 2. Joel: 3 Concerning the real mortification of the Spirit &c: I receivd the Holy Comm:’ (Evelyn 1955: ii. 556; iii. 61). He is rather more plaintive, even resentful, upon his return in early 1652: I went to Leusham [Lewisham] where I heard an honest sermon on: 2 Cor: 5–7. shewing that the universal practise of the Church, was the Surest Intrepreter of H. Scripture: This was the first Sonday I had ben at Church since my returne, it being now a very rare thing to find a Priest of the Church of England in a Parish pulpet, most of them fill’d with Independents & Phanaticks. (Evelyn 1955: iii. 60)

While Evelyn clearly has a desire for the ‘good old days’, it should be noted that this included recording the text and subject of the sermon as well as the sacrament. This was also the case when he attended a more provocative service in Exeter Chapel in London on Christmas Day 1657. Soldiers surrounded the chapel and arrested many of the communicants; the sermon text, appropriately enough, was Micah 7:2: ‘they all lie in wait for blood; they hunt every man with a net.’ Evelyn may give a stronger sense of persecution than is representative because of the places in England in which he spent time, but one consequence of this experience of persecution was Evelyn’s participation in more secretive religious services. In March 1649, for instance: ‘Mr [Richard] Owen a sequesterd, & learned Minister, preach’d in our Parlor, & gave us the Blessed Sacrament, which was now wholy out of use: in the Parish Churches on which the Presbyterians & Fanatics had usurped’ (Evelyn 1955: iii. 552). With the domestic setting and the sermon, this resembles nothing so much as a Puritan conventicle in the 1630s, although it should be remembered that such luxuries were less likely to be available to less privileged Anglicans. Anglicans, of course, did not have a monopoly on nostalgia or the desire to keep reformation under restraint. In the summer of 1644, the concerned Presbyterian ministers of London erected a lectureship for the heresiographer Thomas Edwards at Christ’s Church, intended to provide a space for him to concentrate on decrying zealotry gone astray. The same ethos of resistance to the seductions of sectaries can be found elsewhere. In Wiveliscombe, Somerset, a combination lecture was established specifically to protect the ‘ignorant and credulous people’, unaided by pulpits lacking a minister or occupied by ‘a dumb dog’, a ‘blind watchman’, or a ‘hireling’. The aim was to ‘confirm every one that loves the truth in the good old way’, with lectures being given against Antinomianism, on the authority of ordained ministers, and on the lawfulness of infant baptism. It was this last that caused the greatest furore as, in 1652, Baptists were at their strongest in the West Country, not least due to the presence of Thomas Collier, an outspoken and effective lay preacher. When Francis Fullwood finished his two-hour sermon, Collier took to his feet and declared his dissatisfaction with its content; this led to seven hours of dispute, which, according to the Presbyterian account, Fullwood won with ease (Darby 1652: sigs B1r–D1v). The Baptists present particular problems for an account, such as this one, intended to address ‘mainstream’ preaching. Partly this is due to the shifting place of the Baptists on

preaching and parliament, –



the religio-political spectrum—moving from extreme nonconformity in the early 1640s to the heart of ‘establishment radicalism’ during the Barebones Parliament. This dramatic change in fortune is as much to do with the shifting of the centre ground between 1640 and 1659 as it is with changes in the Baptists’ religious or political stance; compared to the Quakers, the Baptists were less confrontational. Part of the problem is also in the fissiparous nature of the group. ‘Baptist’ includes, simplified for the sake of clarity, the Calvinist Particular Baptists, the more Arminian General Baptists, and, from the early 1650s, the Seventh Day Baptists, who saw that Jewish law assigned the Sabbath to Saturdays. For our purposes there are two consequences of this contested identity and shifting ground. The contested identity of Baptists helps us to understand the vitriolic preaching and counter-preaching with targets within the community united by a belief in believer baptism. The preachers had a constant desire to convert dissenting Baptists within the community and to avoid being tarred by the same brush outsiders employed on ‘erring’ colleagues. The shifting ground helps us to understand two strains and splits in the movement. In the late 1640s Baptists benefited from preachers within and around the parliamentarian army. Part of Collier’s early fame came from a sermon to the troops at Putney in 1647; the sermon shared much common ground with the Levellers. There were also, however, strains in keeping common cause with the secularism and religious toleration of the Leveller programme, and there was a bitter and recriminative split around the crisis point of 1649. The second strain came in the early 1650s with the establishment of the Protectorate. While Baptists preached a clear separation between church and state, this was not taken to mean that sermons were to refrain from dealing with politics. Indeed, the apocalyptic urgency of the Baptist creed demanded regular critique. This also required spreading the word as widely as possible, partly to the dark corners of the land but also at the centre. Baptist preachers often delivered to substantial congregations in public, outdoor venues. It is no surprise that outspoken, charismatic preachers such as Vavasor Powell (see App. I.15), delivering politically resonant sermons to considerable crowds, produced fireworks, albeit ones that the government had to dampen rather than snuff out because of strong Baptist connections with the army. Powell had accepted the new government, and approved strongly of the Act for the Propagation of the Gospel in Wales, a project close to his heart. The proclamation of Cromwell as Lord Protector, however, was a step too far, and he and others preached at Blackfriars, where he also bore ‘a publick Testimony against it’. Powell and Christopher Feake were arrested and taken to the Council; Powell then took the opportunity to preach to the assembled crowd. Having been held for a few days, Powell was released, and on the following day he preached at Christ’s Church, Spitalfields, London, on Acts 5:25, presumably identifying himself and Feake with the Apostles, and Cromwell and his council with the High Priests of the Temple (Bagshaw 1671: 128). One of the stimuli that brought more conservative Baptists into line with the Protectorate was the emergence of aforementioned radicals like the Quakers (see App. I.17). Despite, or perhaps because of, much common ground, Baptists of many stripes were to the forefront in denouncing their competitors, partly because Baptist churches



tom webster

were a major recruiting ground for Quakers. It is certainly ironic, perhaps hypocritical, that one of the Baptist complaints was of the Quaker tactic of intruding upon or interrupting Baptist sermons; this complaint must have produced a wry smile among Presbyterians and Congregationalists who had suffered similarly at the hands of Baptists. This kind of irony arose because of a fault line running through the Baptists, between ministers of the Word and preachers inspired by the Spirit of the Word. This distinction almost defines the boundary between ‘moderate’ and ‘radical’ Baptists in this period. The arena for the contestation of this boundary was the pulpit. It is for this reason that sermons in the 1640s, and even more so in the 1650s, became the target of interruptions by sectaries. Thomas Edwards reported two incidents in Bedfordshire. In one, a preacher was in full flow when ‘a great Sectary . . . called to him to come down, and asked him what he did there, saying, he had no calling’; in another, a minister was preaching on repentance when ‘a woman stood up and said to him openly, that he Preached Lyes and false Doctrine’. While one Colchester minister was preaching against schism: a Sectary spake these words with a loyd voyce so that all that stood near were disturbed, O what a vile wretch is this? O what a devil is this? And when Sermon was immediately done, O what an Enemy of Gods People is this? He hath Preached Blasphemy: That he came from the Devil, and to the Devil he would go. (Edwards 1646: i. 106–7)

Thomas Hall was driven by such an intrusion to consider the grounds of his preaching authority. He stoically recalled his sufferings from the ‘episcopal party’, followed by abuse from the ‘Cavaliering party’: ‘And now at last I have been set upon by the Sectaries, who sometimes have spoken to me in the middle of Sermon, sometimes after, sometimes challenge me to dispute, &c.’ (Hall 1651: sigs A1v–A2r). This resentment partly grew from a grievance about poaching of adherents; Baptists were accused of taking converts from Presbyterians and Congregationalists, and Quakers were charged with stealing from Baptists, and this without having performed the labour of groundwork: ‘they gather members out of other Churches in whose conversion they were not at all instrumental’ (Winter 1656: 168). There was also the outrage of unlicensed competition. John Downham named the ‘shamefull abuse of these Times, wherein men, having no Calling, presumptuously take upon them the Office of Gods Ministers, and to preach publiquely unto the people’ (Collinges 1651: imprimatur). The criticisms of Quakers against ‘steeplehouses’ and ‘hireling priests’ are familiar, and we should be appreciative of the confrontations with ministers in the process of preaching. One ‘strange Christian’ occupied the pulpit before the preacher arrived and sat, silently sewing the cushion in the pulpit, possibly unpicking the cross on the cushion (Weekly Intelligencer 1659: 96). Between 1654 and 1659 there were over 350 instances of Quakers disturbing public worship. The outraged reaction to sermon interruptions raises an issue so far neglected and opens the way to responses of considerable consequence that were part of, and reflected, a fundamental shift in religious authority. The neglected issue is the sermon as event, as performance. The task of the godly preacher was to communicate to auditors who

preaching and parliament, –



lacked his own educational background. The label of ‘plain style’ should not be taken as synonymous with simplicity. It demanded the translation of abstruse theology into a language comprehensible to all laypeople. This was, necessarily, an affected style that rarely survives the movement to print. A hostile reviewer of Marshall provides a sense of this style: ‘He was acquainted with all the Vulgar Proverbs, and odd Country Phrases and Bywords which he would sprinkle up and down in his Sermon; which captivated the People at a strange rate’ (Anon. 1680: 9). Similarly, when Dorothy Osborne, educated and urbane, saw Marshall in 1653, she was surprised at the style of this renowned preacher. His speech was: Enterlarded with the prittyest od phrases that I had the most adoe to look soberly enough for that place I was in that ever I had in my life; he do’s not preach alway’s sure; if he do’s I cannot believe his Sermons will do much towards the bringing anybody to heaven, more than by exerciseing there Patience. (Osborne 1928: 85–6)

Clearly, Dorothy Osborne was not the intended audience of plain style. The chief priority of plain style was to communicate, whether it be pastoral counsel or the need for repentance. For such a performance to be intruded upon by anything other than appreciative sounds or silence was an intrusion upon the central measure of a minister of the Word and the primary means of conversion. In the early years of the Quakers, a surviving Marian statute was employed to prosecute Quakers interrupting sermons. This was a source of pleasure for ministers in the north-east of England, who delighted that the employment of the statute discouraged such action: ‘At their first breaking forth it was otherwise; but since they have found that their speaking in the time of our publique worke, is punishable by Law, they can now be silent till we have closed up the worke’ (Weld et al. 1653: 47). (The irony of Puritans protected by Marian legislation was not dwelled upon.) The Proclamation of February 1654 made the offence very clear. Threats were issued to those ‘found in a Spirit of Bitterness towards their Brethren’, who would, ‘by rude and unchristian practises, disturb both the Publique and Private meetings for Preaching the Word’ (A Proclamation 1655: n.p.). This sensitivity to the protection of the pulpit brought reformers alienated by the late 1640s back into the fold and underpinned an ecumenical mission that stretched as far as more conservative Baptists (who by now were less in tune with millenarian Fifth Monarchists than they had been). This shared insecurity helps to explain the breadth of the Triers and Ejectors. It also makes comprehensible the alliances between preachers of different stripes, united in their efforts to discredit Quakers. In London, John Goodwin worked with George Cokayn, Thomas Brooks, John Tombes, and others to preach and print anti-Quaker material, and in the north-east returnees from New England found common cause with Presbyterians. In October 1653, Cromwell sent Peter Sterry and likeminded ministers to try and persuade Christopher Feake and Baptists of his ilk to tone down their sermons at Blackfriars. At the same time, a fast was declared in Exeter, with eight ministers preaching at two churches in order to fight ‘the great hatred the Gospel and its Ministers is in at this time’; and to ‘unite the honest people, but especially the Ministery of this place’, ‘the Presbyterians and Independents joyned together in the duty’



tom webster

(Mercurius Politicus 1653). This brings us back to Marshall’s fast sermon at this time. The focus of the magistracy’s duty was the maintenance, education, funding, and provision of ‘approved, faithful Ministers, by whom truth of religion, puritie of worship, wayes of holiness, may be published [and] inculcated’ (Marshall 1657: 6–7). Behind the concern to maintain and control the preaching ministry, and behind the need to contain the exegetical authority of a godly, educated clergy, lay the fear of hermeneutical chaos. While the English Reformed tradition always had an experiential side, this was always to be measured against the Word. Good preaching was to provide a voice for the Holy Spirit, and the discernment of the spirit was to be through the Word of God. Radical Baptists and Quakers took this further in that preaching and visions were to be measured by whether the spirit—the infallible spirit that was the origin of scripture—was within one. To test the spirit by the ‘mere’ letter of the Word was inadequate. This distinction appears in William Dell’s sermons and the consequent dispute he had at Cambridge with the Congregationalist Sydrach Simpson; it is present in the bitter exchanges between ministers and Quakers over Quaker interruptions of divine worship, and the spirits being given expression in Quaker meetings. To restore the primitive churches represented in the New Testament to the spirit that inspired the accounts of those churches was, for most Puritans, to take the ideal of ‘true’ religion too far. The theologically and experientially critical distinction was between the Holy Spirit in or behind/before scripture; this distinction could also be thought of as the difference between the spirit represented in scripture and the true spirit that inspired scripture. For Puritans, scripture was a restraint, a measure of the Holy Spirit; for Quakers, scripture was an instance of the work of the Holy Spirit, as they were themselves. For Puritans this was to open a chasm of uncertainty. When Obadiah Sedgwick asks his fictional ‘Doubting Beleever’ why he lacked faith, the doubter replied that, if he ‘had assurance that God were my God, and Christ were my Christ, and the Promises were mine, I would: But say, Is the Word or thy Assurance the ground of Faith?’ Sedgwick goes on to emphasize the dangers of speculation without the guidance of scripture and the means of its provision, godly sermons: ‘Experiences are good encouragements to the future acts of faith, but the Word of God is still the ground of faith: they are not intrinsecall grounds, but extrinsecall motives’ (Sedgwick 1653: 125–6, 128). What drove the preachers to the broader church of the 1650s was the epistemological morass of the spirit within, the etymologically literal ‘inspiration’ and ‘enthusiasm’. In effect, the radicals had ‘out-puritaned’ the Puritans.

Bibliography A Proclamation Prohibiting the Disturbing of Ministers and other Christians in their Assemblies and Meetings (1655). Anon. (1680). The Godly Mans Legacy to the Saints upon Earth. Bagshaw, Edward (1671). The Life and Death of Mr Vavasor Powell.

preaching and parliament, –



Baillie, Robert (1841–2). The Letters and Journals of Robert Baillie, AM, ed. David Laing. 4 vols. Bedford, Thomas (1649). Some Sacramentall Instructions . . . All of them Explicated in the Way of an Afternoon Catechism-Lecture. Bridge, William (1643). Joabs Counsell and King Davids Hearing It. Burges, Cornelius (1641). The First Sermon, Preached to the Honourable House of Commons. Case, Thomas (1655). The Morning-Exercise . . . Preached in Giles in the Field. Clarendon, Edward, earl of (1888). The History of the Rebellion, ed. W. D. Macray. Cokayn, George (1648). Flesh Expiring, and the Spirit Inspiring in the New Earth. Coleman, Thomas (1645). Hopes Deferred and Dashed. Collinges, John (1651). Vindiciæ Ministerii Evangelici. Collins, Jeffrey R. (2002). ‘The Church Settlement of Oliver Cromwell’, History, 87/285: 18–40. Darby, Charles (1652). ‘A Preface to the Reader’, in Francis Fullwood, The Churches and Ministery of England, True Churches and True Ministery. Davis, J. C. (1991). ‘Puritanism and Revolution: themes, categories, methods and conclusions’, Historical Journal, 34/2: 479–90. Dell, William (1646). Right Reformation: or, The Reformation of the Church of the New Testament. Durston, Christopher (1992). ‘ “For the better humiliation of the people”: Public Days of Fasting and Thanksgiving during rhe English Revolution’, Seventeenth Century, 7.: 129–49. ——, and Maltby, Judith (2006) (eds). Religion in Revolutionary England. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Edwards, Thomas (1646). Gangræna: or, A Catalogue and Discovery of many of the Errours. Evelyn, John (1955). The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. De Beer. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ferrell, Lori Anne, and McCullough, Peter (2000) (eds). The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History 1600–1750. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Gardiner, S. R. (1906) (ed.). The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gillespie, George (1645). A Sermon Preached Before the . . . Lords. Hall, Thomas (1651). The Pulpit Guarded with XVII Arguments. Hardy, Nathaniel (1658). A Sad Prognostic of Approaching Judgment. Hooker, Thomas (1656). The Application of Redemption. Keeble, N. H. (2001) (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maltby, Judith (2004). ‘ “The Good Old Way”: Prayer Book Protestantism in the 1640s and 1650s’, in R. N. Swanson (ed.), The Church and the Book. Studies in Church History 38. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer. Marshall, Stephen (1641a). A Sermon Preached to the House of Commons November 17th 1640. —— (1641b). Meroz Cursed, or, A Sermon Preached to the . . . Commons. —— (1646). A Two Edged Sword. —— (1647 [i.e. 1648]). A Sermon Preached to the Honorable House of Commons. —— (1657). The Power of the Civil Magistrate in matters of Religion Vindicated. Mercurius Politicus (1653). No. 176 (Oct.). Morrill, John (1993). ‘The Church in England, 1642–1649’, in Morrill, Nature of the English Revolution: Essays by John Morrill. Harlow: Longman. Morrissey, Mary (1999). ‘Interdisciplinarity and the Study of Early Modern Sermons’, Historical Journal, 42/4: 1111–23.



tom webster

Osborne, Dorothy (1928). Letters of Dorothy Osborne to William Temple, ed. G. C. Moore-Smith. Owen, John (1644). The Duty of Pastors and People Distinguished, in The Works of John Owen (1850–3), xiii. —— (1649). A Sermon Preached to the . . . Commons. Powell, Vavasor (1650). Christ and Moses Excellency. Scudder, Henry (1645). Gods warning to England by the Voyce of his Rod. Segwick, Obadiah (1653). The Doubting Beleever. Smith, Nigel (1994). Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Staunton, Edmund (1645). Phinehas’s Zeal in Execution of Judgement. Trapnel, Anna (1654). A Legacy for Saints. Trevor-Roper, Hugh (1967). ‘The Fast Sermons of the Long Parliament’, in Hugh Trevor-Roper, Religion, the Reformation and Social Change. MacMillan. Ward, Nathaniel (1647). A Sermon Preached before the . . . Commons. Watson, Thomas (1649). Gods Anatomy upon Mans Heart. Weekly Intelligencer of the Common-wealth (1659). No. 12, 19–26 July. Weld, Thomas, William Cole, William Durant, Samuel Hammond, and Richard Prideaux (1653). The Perfect Pharisee under Monkish Holinesse. Wilson, John F. (1969). Pulpit in Parliament: Puritanism during the English Civil Wars, 1640–1649. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Winter, Samuel (1656). The Summe of diverse Sermons.

pa rt i v

E NGL ISH SER MONS , 1660172 0

This page intentionally left blank

chapter 21

r e stor ation, r eligion, a n d l aw: assize ser mons, 1660 –1685 hugh adlington

On 1 May 1660 both houses of the Convention Parliament voted unanimously for the restoration of Charles II to the English throne. New laws were placed swiftly on the statute books to fashion the political and religious settlement. The most controversial of these, the Act of Uniformity (1662), sought to purge the church of nonconformists. In the same year, the new regime also took steps to silence dissenting voices, passing the Printing Act (or Licensing Act), which placed printing under the full statutory authority of the king in parliament (Statutes 1819: 226, 242, 321, 364, 428; Hutton 1985: 125; Spurr 1991: 29–42; Treadwell 2002: 756). Opposition to the new laws was considerable, yet the instrument of governance, the legislative process itself, was widely approved. In this flurry of post-Restoration legislation, most broadly conformist parliamentarians, lawyers, and clergy were united in seeing religion and justice as ‘the main pillars which support the king’s Crown’ (English Reports 1907: 1241 [11 Coke 70b]). Edward Coke’s constitutional commonplace, deriving in part from 1 Kings 7:21, was echoed in Restoration pulpits by preachers from across the ecclesiological spectrum: ‘Justice and Religion, are the two Pillars upon which the Fabrique of a Kingdom stands’ (Glover 1663: 3); ‘’Tis Religion ever that holds up Justice, ’tis from the Temple that the two pillars of a Common-wealth, strength and stabilitie doe proceed’ (Reynolds 1636: 16); ‘Magistracy and Ministery . . . are the two great standing Ordinances of God, which must stand so long as the world stands. They are the Pillars of Church and State’ (Hall 1660: sig. A2v). The role of the preaching ministry in forging the post-Restoration settlement was a crucial one, and, as these remarks suggest, links between legal and ecclesiastical institutions and processes were integral to it. In exploring these connections between religion and law, this chapter directs its attention to assize sermons, the preaching subgenre most self-evidently concerned with the bonds between the tenets of religion and the administration of justice. Brief case studies of three assize sermons, each delivered and



hugh adlington

subsequently published in the aftermath of the Act of Uniformity, aim to show how quite different churchmen, Thomas Bradley, Obadiah Howe, and John Martin, preaching to congregations in York, Lincoln, and Dorchester, adapted the established conventions of the assize sermon to achieve quite different effects and purposes. That a sermon’s contemporary resonance should depend profoundly upon the precise historical conditions of its preaching or publication is now a critical commonplace (McCullough 2003: 179). The context-specific nature of a sermon’s meanings, however, depending on time, place, and auditory, does serve to remind us of broader debates in Restoration historiography: over the limited usefulness of thinking in the stark terms of a conformist/nonconformist dichotomy, or even of speaking in terms of categories such as Anglican, Presbyterian, Independent, Baptist, and Quaker. The merits and shortcomings of rival categorical models—comprising, for example, conformist, semi-conformist, and dissenting groups, or Episcopalian, Reformed, and sectarians—have been debated elsewhere (De Krey 2008: 752–3), yet the evidence of the assize sermons considered here may prompt fresh consideration of the appropriateness of some or all of these labels. In particular, this chapter argues that awareness of the local differences of emphasis and approach discernible in assize sermons, and their specific configurations of the relationship between law and religion, can add to our understanding of Restoration preaching more broadly, and the terms traditionally used to describe it. But how? To begin to answer this question it will be useful briefly to assess the picture that emerges from existing scholarship on Restoration preaching. Traditionally, accounts of Restoration preaching have placed little emphasis on its political and legal dimensions. Most narratives, with some variations, have tended to focus on the form and style of Anglican preaching in the period. E. C. Dargan’s early twentieth-century account is paradigmatic in this respect. Dargan depicts Restoration preaching as a welcome stage in the reform of a baroque early modern prose style: ‘Toward the end of the [seventeenth] century a group of divines marks the transition from the quaint beauties of Adams, Donne, Hall, and Taylor, and the elaborate and ponderous stateliness of Owen, Howe, and Barrow, to a simpler and more direct and popular method of preaching’ (1912: 163). The late-seventeenth-century ‘group of divines’ referred to here comprises a familiar roll call of the three ‘great’ Restoration preachers: Robert South, Isaac Barrow, and John Tillotson. (Other Anglicans, such as Edward Stillingfleet, William Beveridge, Thomas Ken, and William Sherlock, often constitute a second tier of important preachers in scholarly accounts.) The same roll call is reproduced in 1932 by W. Fraser Mitchell in his teleological version of this ‘change from the bizarre and pedantic preachers of the early part of the seventeenth century to the genuinely “modern” note which we find struck at its close’ (1932: 343). Irene Simon’s 1967 account reiterates the emphasis of Dargan and Mitchell on the rationalism of South, Barrow, and Tillotson, and of Restoration Anglican theology more broadly. Simon finds an inevitableness in the reform of sermon style in this period: this ‘great improvement in pulpit oratory . . . was bound to be in the direction of reasonableness, decorum and plainness’ (1967: 38, 73). The reasons given by commentators for this ‘direction’ are various. They include the ‘influence of the preachers at the French court, such as Masillon,

restoration, religion, and law



Bossuet, and Bourdaloue’; the Royal Society’s need for ‘exact, clear, and denotative language’; the new theology of the Latitudinarian movement in the English Church, in which the ‘chief duty of men was to imitate divine charity by good works’; and, above all, the influence of the ‘plain and functional style of Puritan preaching’ (Davies 1975: 177–80; Sisson 1976: 15; Rivers 1991: 25–88; Stevenson 2001: 202–19). In each of these commentaries, Restoration sermons are regarded chiefly as specimens in the evolution of English prose style. More recent accounts have sought to change the frame of reference. The focus has shifted to preaching beyond the pale of the established church, and away from prose style to politics. Such commentaries have built upon Dargan’s twofold division of the dissenting preaching tradition: (1) low church Episcopalians (for example, Thomas Adams, Thomas Goodwin, Richard Baxter); and (2) Presbyterians (for example, Edmund Calamy), Independents (for example, John Owen, John Howe), and Baptists (for example, John Bunyan, Vavasor Powell, Benjamin Keach) (1912: 168–85). Recent scholarship has qualified and added considerable detail to this depiction. Important developments include placing Restoration nonconformist ministers and their writing in a broader religious and political culture of dissent (Keeble 1987), drawing valuable contrasts between varieties of nonconformity in the period (Rivers 1991: 89–163), and reconstructing the polemical print context of Restoration nonconformity (Appleby 2007: 18–54). The scholarly attention paid to Restoration preaching, however, remains minimal when compared to the wealth of studies on the so-called golden age of Jacobean pulpit oratory. Preoccupation with prose style has also meant the neglect of crucial aspects of pulpit oratory: modes of exegesis, textual transmission, publication, and the role of Restoration sermons in reflecting and shaping local and national religious politics in the period. Recent works by Tony Claydon (2000: 211–28) and David Appleby (2007) stand as correctives to these tendencies. In their reading of post-Restoration sermons in the light of their legal, political, and polemical contexts, they invite us to examine the preaching of this period anew. Before turning to the assize sermons themselves, in response to this invitation, it is worth asking, briefly, what it means to read Restoration sermons in the light of their legal contexts. Religion’s affinity with law in Restoration preaching amounts to more than simply the mollifying response of the established church to the new statutes governing conformity and toleration. The age-old ethical dilemma, ‘Whether Humane Laws do binde the Conscience? (Hall 1660: 41–2), attends even the most conformist sermons in this period. Anglican preachers such as Thomas Cartwright (1676), Thomas Ashenden (1682), and Nathaniel Bisbie (1684) urged auditors to subordinate the dictates of personal conscience to the decrees of royal authority. Their chosen scriptural text, Judges 17:6, spelled out the dangers of doing otherwise: ‘In those days Israel had no king; everybody did as he saw fit.’ Such appeals to obedience were rooted in biblical proof-texts. Restoration preachers’ confidence in rational analysis of scripture may well derive in part from their participation in what Robert Zaller calls ‘a discourse of law’. In this discourse, ‘St German’s maxims, Coke’s doctrine of artificial reason, and Selden’s notion of law as a community of obligation expressed in various ways their shared sense of the



hugh adlington

common law as a constitutional system yielding first principles on proper analysis’ (2007: 353). While philosophies of law may have influenced methods of scriptural exegesis in the period, specific branches of law supplied preachers with topics of intense contemporary interest. Fraught questions of constitutional law, whether veiled or not, are rarely absent from these works. The branches of common, civil, and canon law, including laws of contract, equity, marriage, slander, treason, inheritance, and property, provide potent images and analogies for amplifying such questions. The affinity between religion and law in the preaching of this period, then, is intricate and complex. Yet the two disciplines are also separated by crucial differences. Subha Mukherji has recently remarked that apparent resemblances between law and early modern theatre concern ‘the form and representational structures of the two media, not their methods and aims’ (2009: 709). A similar kind of distinction may be made between early modern legal advocacy and the preaching of religion. The former aims to persuade, to make a case in an adversarial setting in the larger interests of justice; the latter aims to explicate eternal truths in a setting of communal worship, to edify and to inculcate moral reform. Assize sermons seek, in some senses, to do both things at once. The following sections aim to show how.

Assize Sermons: History and Role The assize sermon has, until recently, been largely overlooked by literary critics and historians, regarded as little more than a platitudinous formulary concerning the divinely endorsed authority of magistrate and monarch. J. S. Cockburn gave the subject just a single page in his classic account of the English assizes 1558–1714 (1972: 65–7). In the 1980s and 1990s, the subject attracted some attention from legal, social, and political historians, all of whom saw in assize sermons at least a partial index of the chief areas of conflict and accommodation between clergy and judiciary throughout the seventeenth century (Brooks 1986: 132–4; Prest 1986: 224–5; Herrup 1987: 51–3; Hughes 1987: 68–9; Sharpe 1992: 425; Hindle 2000: ch. 7). The most recent published account also picks up on this mediating function: ‘Assize sermons were occasions when the country heard from the crown and the crown from the country’ (Shapiro 2008: 5–6). In Barbara Shapiro’s account assize sermons function as instruments of political theology, disseminating doctrines of the divine origin of government and the divine right of kings. Yet assize sermons also indicated the need for constraints on monarchical absolutism: ‘the king, not alone, but in his courts, with his judges and magistrates and through judicial processes, is the voice of the law, and the law rather than mere royal fiat governs’ (2008: 28). Nevertheless, preachers of assize sermons are still seen here,‘[as] agents of the established church and government who preached conformity and punishment for those who rejected it’ (2008: 18). Recent research offers refinements of, or alternatives to, this view. Arnold Hunt argues that, far from being exclusively complaisant with the magistracy, assize sermons

restoration, religion, and law



work through rhetorical commonplaces to offer criticism or counsel to the judiciary, and through print to the reading public more widely. Recurring topoi include the diagnosis of problems in the body politic in terms of illnesses in the human body; or, using the figure of the spider’s web, an image used by Anacharsis in Plutarch’s Lives, to illustrate inequitable judicial procedure: small, unimportant flies become enmeshed in the web, but large and important wasps and hornets burst through without hindrance. That is not to say that assize sermons express a radical political theory but rather that they offered preachers the opportunity to express concern about tithe disputes and other threats to the clerical estate. Rhetorical commonplaces in assize sermons were thus a means of persuasion and protection (Hunt 2010: 306–20). Juliet Ingram echoes this finding, developing a picture of assize sermons as a species of the broader genus of clerical complaint. In a micro-historical study of Thomas Foster’s assize sermon at Exeter Cathedral in July 1630 (preached at the command of Bishop Joseph Hall), Ingram uses prosopography and close contextual study of local church and secular politics to show how assize sermons might be used not only to critique the indolence of prebendial clergy, but also, by using the strategy of praise, to direct the practices of the episcopal authorities (in this case, Joseph Hall) (Ingram 2004: 233–82). Both of these recent studies, and others by Tom Charlton and Jacqueline Eales, in their sensitivity to rhetorical and exegetical conventions, and through close historical contextualization, find assize sermons to be something more than merely ritualized calls for obedience to legal and royal authority. Some preliminary remarks about the corpus of English assize sermons will be useful before turning to the case studies themselves. The earliest printed assize sermon dates from 1571 (Kethe), with approximately 200 others extant in print before 1700, either in stand-alone editions or in compilations of preachers’ works. A smaller number survive in manuscript. Most assize sermons, though not all, are limited to a single edition; Samuel Ward’s sermon preached at the assizes at Bury St Edmunds, in Suffolk, went through six editions between 1618 and 1636. One of the reasons for this popularity must lie in Ward’s uncompromising attack on corrupt lawyers and magistrates: ‘These Muckwormes of the world, which like the Gentles breede of putrefaction, & Beetles fed in the dung, relishing nothing else but earthly things’ (1618: 52). Approximately three-fifths of printed assize sermons were preached on Old Testament texts, with Psalms, Proverbs, and Exodus being the favourite sources. Acts, Romans, and Hebrews were the most popular sources of New Testament texts. Not surprisingly, the choice of scriptural text for assize sermons tended to reflect the political realities of the day. Hence, a favourite text in the early years of the Restoration was Isaiah 1:26 (‘I will restore unto you your Judges’); but after the Monmouth rebellion in 1685 we find Romans 13, and its more uncompromising call for obedience, coming to the fore (Charlton 2006: 11). In terms of geography, the Midland assize circuit is the one best represented in the surviving corpus of printed sermons, followed by the West, Norfolk, and Home circuits. Significantly fewer assize sermons survive from the circuits of the North and Oxford (ESTC). Manuscript notes are a crucial source of information regarding the preparation and reception of assize sermons. Notes are of two kinds: either a preacher’s preparatory notes in commonplace



hugh adlington

books, or his full outlines and fair copies (UB MS 425); or listeners’ jotted notes of eloquent turns of phrase, or fuller transcriptions, frequently taken down in leatherbound notebooks by members of the congregation (UB MS 388; BL Add. MS 48106; MT.15/SER/1–5). What were the assizes? Put simply, they were the system by which judges from Westminster visited some fifty provincial towns to deliver gaols (criminal cases) and try civil cases by writ of nisi prius. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the assizes were not exclusively judicial tribunals; they were also potent executive instruments. Assize judges were justices a latere Regis, stewards of royal power charged with implementing the royal will and prerogative. They rode out twice a year from Westminster on the six English circuits (Cockburn 1972: 24), which had been established in the early fourteenth century. Monmouthshire was added to the Oxford Circuit in 1543; in the same year the Court of the Great Sessions in Wales was instituted, and the principality divided into four circuits (Cockburn 1972: 23; Baker 2002: 31). In Ireland, the assizes were modelled on the English system (Garnham 1998: 30). In Scotland, justice-ayres were held twice a year in every shire, with eight persons specially commissioned to conduct them (Walker 2001: 107). Prior to each year’s winter and summer assizes, the judges received their circuit charge from the Lord Keeper in Star Chamber, which admonished them with generalities concerning maintaining justice and order, and topical particularities (e.g. Bacon 1874; Barnes 1960–1). Also contained within the charge were instructions for the local justices of the peace (Cockburn 1972: 1–22). Assizes were suspended for more than three years after the summer circuit of 1642 because of the breakdown in local order (1972: 241). It was not until the formal removal of judges from the political arena in 1701 (12 & 13 Wm. III, c. 2, s. 3) that it becomes possible to draw a firm line between their judicial and political functions (Statutes 1820: 636). The sermon’s role in assize proceedings was effectively to be an oratorical and instructional complement to delivery of the charge. It was preached as a curtain-raiser to the assize proceedings themselves, and aimed to remind the judges of their duties and to assert the divine legitimacy of their proceedings. The preacher was officially selected by the county sheriff (many printed sermons are dedicated to sheriffs), but bishops often had a role in selection. Judges tended to ride the same circuits for many years in succession in the Elizabethan period, but this happened less frequently in the seventeenth century. Ministers, too, might preach in the same county at assizes for several years in succession, but with less consistency than judges. As befitted their importance, assize sermons were often delivered by the bishop or one of the senior clergy of the diocese (Cockburn 1972: 1–22). From the evidence of the printed sermons themselves (though this is not remarked upon by Cockburn), it appears that assize sermons were sometimes preached both at the beginning and at the end of proceedings, often by the same preacher (Stephens 1661; Atterbury 1684; Beaulieu 1684; Bisbie 1684; Lightfoot 1684: ii. 1065, 1073; Winter 1669). The following case studies aim to show how individual preachers adapted the generic expectations of the occasion to deliver highly specific and localized discourses, each of which offers its own configuration of the relationship between religion, law, and politics.

restoration, religion, and law



Assize Sermons in York, Lincoln, and Dorchester, 1663–1664 On 30 March 1663, Thomas Bradley, a prebendary at York and former royal chaplain to Charles I at Oxford (1642–4), preached at the Lent assizes at York. Bradley took as his text Job 29:14–17: ‘I put on righteousness as my clothing; justice was my robe and my turban. I was eyes to the blind, and feet to the lame. I was a father to the needy; I took up the case of the stranger. I broke the fangs of the wicked and snatched the victims from their teeth.’ The text’s allusions to righteousness and justice made it a popular choice for assize preachers in the period (Stokes 1667). Bradley broadcasts many of the themes typical of assize sermons: he endorses the divine authority of royal governance, exhorts political obedience, and offers moral counsel to the participants in the ensuing court proceedings. The sermon is unusual, however, in that it was censured after publication; Bradley was forced to recant some of his words in his next York assize sermon (delivered in August 1663). Bradley’s offence lay in three key passages. In the first, Bradley attacked the excise and excise men, comparing them to Job’s oppressors of the poor, and defaming them as ‘biters’ who ‘will all gaine, let it fall never so heavy upon the subject’ (1663a: 38). Bradley concluded his invective against corrupt tax-collection practices with the more general charge that ‘the Government of this Kingdome is in no particular Arbitrary, but in this Male-administration of the Excise’ (1663a: 39). Clearly, dissatisfaction with the administration of excise was widespread; in December 1662 the new regime had felt it necessary to issue ‘A Proclamation for the Prevention of Frauds and Abuses in the Payment of Excise for Beer and Ale’ (Crawford and Steele 1910: ii. 62). The second offending passage concerns Bradley’s call for a degree of regional legal autonomy. Bradley urged the restoration of a Northern Presidentiary Court of Justice, and claimed that the Westminster lawyers sought to ‘engrosse all the law unto themselves, as if they meant to make of it, one great Monopoly’ (1663a: 23; 1663b: 39). In Bradley’s third passage, he ‘was very bitter against Rack-renting Land-lords, and Depopulators’ (1663b). Bradley exempts the nobility and gentry from blame, because they keep up ‘the Ancient hospitality of their houses’ (1663a: 48), and directs his animus instead against those merchant parvenus who had made good during the Interregnum: ‘your City-purchaser, that hath rais’d himself into an estate out of small wares’ (1663a: 48). In Bradley’s recantation, published in 1663 as Cesars Due, and the Subjects Duty, each relevant passage—against excise, the monopoly of Westminster lawyers, land enclosure, and nouveau-riche landlords—is followed by variations on the same rhetorical formula: ‘the words then delivered I confesse were unadvisedly spoken’, and ‘I went too farre in that charge’ (1663b: 39). The pressure for recantation, according to Bradley, appears to have come from the king himself: ‘his Majestie thought it was my duty to preach conscience unto the people, and not to meddle in State-affaires’ (1663b: 40). Yet, while Cesars Due certainly urges obedience to royal authority, especially in the matter of paying taxation (Matt. 22:21: ‘Give unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsars’), Bradley’s sermon is also



hugh adlington

explicit in promoting ‘Monarchy limited by Law’ as the ‘most happy’ form of government: ‘Democracy is very apt to degenerate into Anarchy, Aristocracy into Oligarchy, Oligarchy into Democracy again’ (1663b: 15–16). By contrast, other assize sermons printed in 1663, preached by John Riland at Warwick, Henry Glover at Dorchester, and John Lightfoot at Hertford, are less inclined to spell out the statutory limitations on, and legitimization of, the king’s authority. By the standards of mid-seventeenth-century religious and political polemic, Bradley’s outburst, and his subsequent retraction, are unremarkable. Yet the incident does demonstrate, pace received critical opinion, that assize sermons could overstep the bounds of acceptable criticism of the functioning of law and government. In his recantation, Bradley remarked wryly, ‘I wish they [the offending words] had not fallen from me, much more that they had not been Printed’ (1663b: 39). Yet, given the tightly controlled nature of assize proceedings, how did Bradley come to preach such criticisms, and how did they come to be published? Could it be simply a case of zeal overriding discretion? The pattern of Bradley’s clerical career between 1640 and his death in 1673 suggests otherwise. Sequestered, as a royalist, from his Yorkshire livings in 1644, in 1655 Bradley urged Cromwell and the council of state to adopt his scheme for raising large sums of money through the extortion of first fruits and tithes (Lee 2004). Aspects of this scheme were subsequently published in A Present for Caesar (1658), in which Bradley called himself ‘a friend and servant to the Commonwealth’ (1658: sigs 3r–v). After the Restoration, Bradley published Appello caesarem (1661) in a dubious attempt at vindication, arguing that his scheme had been designed to secure the Church of England and provide a steady revenue for the Stuarts after their return from exile. In the same publication, Bradley styled himself ‘an Episcopal-Presbiterian’ (1661: 39); such a designation allowed him to conform to the Act of Uniformity while still indicating his allegiance with less zealously conformist factions in his Yorkshire parishes. By the time of the Restoration Bradley was 60 years old, and his career was marked, if nothing else, by his mastery of the art of survival. Given such acuity, is it credible that zeal alone would have prompted Bradley to deplore the new regime’s administration of the excise, to call for a Northern Presidentiary Court, and to attack landholders in the county, many of them doubtless with powerful connections? The dedication and licensing of the two sermons, and the immediate historical context of the so-called Farnley Wood plot of 1663, may shed at least some light on this incongruity. Despite the passing of the Printing Act in June 1662, Bradley’s March 1663 sermon was unlicensed. This was not in itself highly unusual, although all other extant printed assize sermons in 1663 show the imprimatur of the relevant licensing authority (the appointees of the archbishop of Canterbury, or of York). That Bradley’s sermon was unlicensed does mean, however, that retrospective blame for its contents might fall on the author and publisher alone, not on the episcopal authority. The sermon was published by Alice Broad, widow of the printer Thomas Broad, with premises at Stonegate, York (Plomer 1907: 33), and so appears to have been directed at a specifically Yorkshire readership. At first sight, the dedication of the sermon to Sir Thomas Gower, MP, and high sheriff of York, to whom no doubt Bradley owed his commission to preach at the assizes, seems

restoration, religion, and law



entirely consistent with the pattern of other such dedications. Bradley’s dedicatory epistle praises Gower for ‘your noble and prudent carriage and deportment in all the great Offices of Honour and Trust which you bear, (which renders you so worthy a Patriot)’ (1663a: sig. A1r). Ironically, though, one of Gower’s offices ‘of Honour and Trust’ was collector of taxes; Bradley’s attack on the excise and its collection seems poorly judged given his patron’s official duties. The local printing and distribution of Bradley’s sermon, and its dedication to Gower, however, take on a different complexion when seen in the light of Yorkshire’s mid-century political history. Strongly sympathetic with the parliamentarian cause in the Civil Wars, many in the county remained disaffected after 1660, giving rise to the Farnley Wood plot, the Yorkshire focus of the so-called Northern Risings of 1663. Sir Thomas Gower learned early of the plot, planting spies at a preliminary meeting at Harrogate in June 1663. By 8 August approximately 100 suspected rebel leaders had been arrested and taken into custody in York. Gower concealed his knowledge of the conspiracy by charging suspects with attending conventicles rather than plotting. The suspects were released, only to be rearrested in October at Farnley Wood, by which time Gower had secured further evidence to prosecute the planned uprising (Greaves 1986: 177–83; Hopper 2002: 288–9). The fact that Bradley’s March assize sermon seems to foreshadow some of the grievances of the plotters raises fascinating questions. Bradley’s condemnation of rack-renters and enclosures, and his call for the restoration of the northern court of justice, reflect the social, economic, and constitutional sources of dissatisfaction that underpinned the Northern Risings. It is possible, of course, that Bradley’s remarks in favour of a regional court of law, rather than having anything to do with the specific complaints of the rebels, were aimed more directly at Sir Thomas Twisden, the presiding Northern Circuit judge at the winter and summer assizes of 1663. Twisden was well known for his attacks on judicial corruption, and consequently ‘argued consistently to expand king’s bench’s supervisory powers over lesser courts and administrative bodies’ (Halliday 2004). This was just the sort of ‘monopolizing’ of the law by Westminster lawyers and judges that Bradley inveighed against in his March 1663 sermon. But whether aimed at Twisden in person, or at the kind of grievances held by the disaffected in Yorkshire more generally, Bradley must have known that his remarks would prove controversial. Was it mere coincidence that his recantation, Cesars Due, should be licensed for publication on 11 August, by the archbishop of York, Accepted Frewen, just three days after the suspected rebel leaders had been arrested and taken to York? As with Bradley’s winter assize sermon, Cesars Due was printed and sold in York by Alice Broad, and would certainly have served to disseminate the message that the new regime was not prepared to tolerate dissent, whether from the plots of rebels or from the pulpit. In reality, the course of these events is almost certainly best explained by a combination of happenstance and opportunism on the part of the main actors involved. The March 1663 sermon probably remained unlicensed because of administrative oversight. Bradley himself may well have let his tongue run away with him in the pulpit, and, in the press of other business, neglected to remove potentially incendiary passages from the printed version of the sermon. Then, when the opportunity presented itself in August,



hugh adlington

Thomas Gower may have seen the propaganda value of Bradley’s recantation at a moment when he was busy suppressing potential uprisings by other means. And yet doubts remain. Bradley’s flirtation with dissent certainly seems to have done his career no harm. Made canon of York Cathedral between 1666 and 1670, in 1665 Bradley petitioned the queen for presentation to the rectory of Castleford as a reward ‘for his services at home and abroad to the King’ (Lee 2004). The living was awarded. Could there have been more to the 1663 assize sermons of Thomas Bradley than meets the eye? In the absence of further documentation it seems unlikely that we will ever know. What does seem clear, though, is that the assize sermon, and the circumstances surrounding its delivery, publication, and reception, perform a far more complicated religious and political role than simply to be a ritual oratorical endorsement of authority. In the same year, a quite different sermon was preached by Obadiah Howe at the Lincoln summer assizes on the Midland Circuit. Howe, fifteen years younger than Bradley, had hung on to his Boston, Lincolnshire, living after the Restoration, and ‘became conspicuous for loyalty to the new order’ (Wright 2004). In the sermon’s published version, God and the Magistrate, preached in Lincoln Cathedral before the assize judges and the high sheriff, Sir Edward Dymocke, Howe, like Bradley and countless other assize ministers, preached the divine origin of government: ‘When the magistrate commands, it’s not man in the magistrate, but God in the magistrate that obligeth’ (1663: 23). The published version was dedicated to Dymocke, licensed by the archbishop of Canterbury, Gilbert Sheldon, and printed in quarto ‘for William Mallory book-seller at Boston in the county of Lincoln’ (1663: title page.). The local printing and distribution of Howe’s sermon, like Bradley’s, suggest again that the local gentry, clergy, judiciary, and middling sort constituted the primary audience for assize sermons. Again, however, it would be a mistake to see assize sermons merely as formulaic vehicles for the regional implementation of central authority. The way in which Howe explicates his scriptural text, and the means by which he brings that explication to bear on current affairs, specifically on the question of nonconformity in the wake of the Act of Uniformity, shows how assize sermons negotiated a far more multidimensional relationship between religion, law, and politics than simply one of validation. Howe takes as his text Psalm 82:6: ‘I have said ye are Gods; and all of ye are children of the most High.’ This was a frequently preached text at assizes (Swinnock 1660; Lodington 1674), but what distinguishes Howe’s sermon is the exhaustive philological analysis he brings to his exposition. The knottiest problem for the exegete of Psalm 82:6 is the word ‘Gods’ (Elohim in Hebrew); as Howe dryly observes, ‘it is not easie to apprehend, how Men should be Gods’ (1663: 7). To resolve the crux, Howe deploys philology and biblical commentary, and embarks on a learned excursus on the Hebrew names of God and their grammatical forms, illuminated by the commentary of Buxtorf the Younger’s De nominibus dei hebraicis (1665) and a range of patristic sources. Howe proceeds on the basis that the Hebrew word for ‘Gods’ is used metaphorically to mean ‘judges’ or ‘magistrates’. He scans the Bible for other such occasions, such as Exodus 22:9 and 1 Samuel 2:25, and concentrates his analysis on the metaphorical use of the word Elohim in Exodus 21:6: ‘If the Servant will not depart from his Master, he shall bring him ‫ה אלהים‬-‫ אל‬to read it well, to the

restoration, religion, and law



Judges, though in the text it is to the Gods’ (1663: 14). Howe plunges into the history of rabbinical interpretation of the text, focusing on Buxtorf ’s commentary on the gloss of the fifteenth-century Portuguese exegete,Yitshak ben Yehudah Abarbanel. In Abarbanel’s reading, the solution lies in textual emendation, that ‘some word being understood, must be added to make up the sense’ (1663: 15). Thus, according to Howe, Abarbanel would read the words ‘his Master shall bring him: ‫האלהים‬-‫ ’למשפט‬as ‘ad Iudicium Dei, to the judgement of God, not of the Gods; so the Elohim to denote not Man, but God’ (1663: 15). But Howe demurs from Abarbanel’s emendation as neither ‘necessary’ nor ‘convenient’. It is ‘not necessary, because the Chaldee Paraphrast, the Interlineary, the Hæbreo-Samaritan, the Arabick, the Syriack Versions all of them have coram Judicibus, ad Judicem, or ad Judices, as we read it before the Judges’ (1663: 16). Thus Howe reads ‘Judges’, pace Abarbanel’s ‘God’. It is not ‘convenient’ because such a reading is at odds with other scriptural texts where magistrates are called Gods, and where the supposed ellipsis cannot be reduced or massaged to make constructive sense. Howe therefore concludes: ‘I think we shall force this truth against all Cavil, that Magistrates are called Elohim, or Gods, in Scripture, according to that in the Apostle, There be many that are called Gods’ (1663: 17). By way of brief comparison, to illuminate the nature of Hall’s exegetical approach, Thomas Hall’s explication of the same text in his Beauty of Magistracy (1660) relies far more heavily on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant and Catholic commentary, including English Calvinist conformists such as William Gouge and Thomas Gataker. Rather than dwell on the philology of the word Elohim, Hall instead deploys a circular argument based on the function of magistrates: ‘They are Gods, not by Nature (for we see they Die) but by similitude and in respect of their Office, because they represent Gods Majesty in Governing of men, and have a special character of his glory stampt upon them’ (1660: 142). By contrast, the significance of Howe’s painstaking explication of this textual crux becomes clear in the light of the sermon’s topical application. Howe presses home his text in applying it to current affairs. He argues that the judge’s aim should be to bring about God’s glory by his judgements, so that the population might lead quiet and peaceable lives, but also godly and honest ones (1660: 43). This brings Howe, with implacable logic, to the necessity to crack down hard on nonconformity: Then I hope I may tell you that all that Atheistical contempt of Gods holy Worship, all those irreligious and horrid blasphemies, oaths, and cursings of those whose language is of Ashdod, and their tongues swords and spears to God himself, all that impious prophanation of the Lords Day; That Torrent of Belial, and Inundation of Debauchery that comes in upon us as a Flood, and abounds in every corner; and well were it if it would content it self with corners; whereby not onely the power and heart, but the forme and face of Religion seems to be lost: Such as these, are Iniquities to be punished by the Judges. (1660: 44)

Howe’s call for suppression of dissent takes on added significance when seen in the light of contemporary local events. By March 1661, eighty Quakers were held as prisoners in the Lincoln city and county gaols, as a result of Charles II’s Declaration on Ecclesiastical Affairs (25 October 1660), which made concessions to Presbyterians, but



hugh adlington

not to Independents, Baptists, and other dissenters (Hill 1956: 177–8). Quakers could expect little quarter from the bishop of Lincoln, Robert Sanderson, who had been a leading participant on the episcopalian side at the Savoy Conference, and is thought to have drafted the preface to the revised 1661 Book of Common Prayer, annexed to the Act of Uniformity. Indeed, the treatment of nonconformists in Lincolnshire seems to have been particularly harsh: ‘the neglect of due process at their [Quakers] trials was so flagrant that the judges of assize rebuked the local magistrates’ (Holmes 1980: 222). Even the idea of limited toleration was removed by the Act of Uniformity. About forty ministers were ejected in Lincolnshire, twenty-six of them in 1662 (Hill 1956: 178). This divisive and punitive atmosphere was just as present in non-ecclesiastical life. As a result of the Act for the Well Governing of Corporations (1661), which required local officials to swear oaths of loyalty to the crown, ‘nine of the thirteen aldermen and eight of the eighteen common council members’, in Howe’s own parish of Boston, Lincolnshire, ‘were swept away’ (Holmes 1980: 223; Hill 1956: 173). It is partly for these reasons, therefore, that Howe is adamant about the need for unbiased adjudication, for fair dealing and equal justice for all. Howe’s peroration to the judges is explicit in its plea for judicial even-handedness: Do it impartially, God doth so, and respects no mans person in Judgement. The Jews tell us that ‫אזנים‬, signifieth both Aures and Bilances, the ears and a ballance, upon this ground that a Judges ear should be as the tongue of a ballance, stand in æquilibrio, equal to both parts, till the weight in the scale make it incline to either side; Causa non persona, The Cause not the Person, should be a Judges Motto. (1663: 51)

The judges riding the Midland Circuit in the summer of 1663 were Sir Edward Atkyns and Sir Thomas Tyrrell. Both had been active in support of the parliamentary cause in the Civil Wars, both had taken part in the trial of the regicides (Hart 2004; Handley 2004), and both, therefore, must have been more than usually sensitive to the potential for bitter political and social divisions arising from the administration of justice. Their rebuke to the local magistrates for the lack of due process shown to Quakers certainly demonstrates this sensitivity, and echoes Howe’s plea that judges should administer justice on the merits of the case, not on the identity and allegiances of the person. Howe’s urging of judicial impartiality, though a relatively standard feature of seventeenth-century assize sermons, takes on additional resonance when preached in Lincoln at such a febrile political moment. What distinguishes Howe’s sermon from others are the scholarly rigour and exhaustiveness he brings to his interpretation of his text. Not only does his sermon call for fair judicial dealing, but, in its methods of deliberation and examination, it also models the kind of care and impartiality that Howe wishes the judges to imitate. Once again we see not only that an assize sermon might function as a simple homiletic endorsement of authority, but that it might also stand as a model of scrupulous enquiry, discrimination, and judgement. The last case study features a sermon preached and published in 1664 by John Martin, rector of Melcombe Horsey, Dorset, at the summer assizes held at Dorchester on the

restoration, religion, and law



Western Circuit. In many ways this is the most conventional of the three assize sermons considered here. Martin, belonging to the same generation as Howe, was resolutely royalist in his sympathies: ejected from his Wiltshire benefice for refusing the Solemn League and Covenant in 1647, he was briefly imprisoned seven years later on suspicion of being involved in an unsuccessful royalist insurrection in Salisbury. Thirty-six years later he would suffer for his loyalty to the Stuart monarchy once more when he refused to take the oath of allegiance to William and Mary (Spaeth 2004). In his 1664 assize sermon Martin took Deuteronomy 17:12 as his text: ‘And that man will do presumptuously, and will not hearken unto the Priest (that standeth to minister there before the Lord thy God) or unto the Judges; even that man shall dye, and thou shalt put away evill from Israel.’ The text’s admonition to listen and obey the priest and the judge, or face punishment, made it a favourite among assize preachers (Johnson 1670; Bennion 1681). The first two parts of Martin’s sermon are a learned disquisition on laws. Martin explores the jurisprudential nature of the punitive law referred to in Deuteronomy 17:12, and questions whether such a law might be revived in modern times. His textual exegesis deploys Greek, Latin, and Hebrew philology, a formidable array of classical, patristic, and scholastic historical and theological sources, and contemporary legal and antiquarian authorities. Citations of Diogenes Laërtius, Eusebius, Livy, and Justinian crowd the margins, as do references to Alexander of Hales, Francisco Suárez’s De legibus, Domingo de Soto’s De justitia et jure, Hugo Grotius, Henry Spelman, and conciliar law. Latinisms and legal phraseology abound. The third part of the sermon, its topical application, asks whether there is an equivalent law to the Deuteronomic one in the seventeenth-century English church and state. This section is overtly concerned with quelling dissent in the English church: ‘How light soever it may seem to some in these days to reject the just commands of our Lawful Superiours in Church and State, yet ab initio non fuit sic’ (Martin 1664: 10). The strongly Erastian flavour of Martin’s exposition, echoing the views of John Lightfoot, is evident throughout: ‘The sober and learned Clergy of this Church must needs know, that the Spiritual Jurisdiction stands in need of the temporal power: and that the Miter is only safe, under the shadow of the Crown’ (Martin 1664: 9). Martin’s sermon reflects, and contributes to, the atmosphere of hostility to nonconformism that led to the issuing of the first Conventicle Act in May 1664, and its more stringent successor in 1670, both of which legislated against meetings of nonconformists (De Krey 2008: 748–9). In particular, Martin deliberately blurs the distinctions between different shades of semi-conformity and nonconformity, thereby refusing to allow for Presbyterians such as Calamy and Baxter who could pledge loyalty to a monarch. Martin’s strategy is to present the execution of Charles I as a direct outcome of dissenters’ calls for freedom of private conscience: Certainly men ought to be very jealous over the importunities of their Consciences against publike Laws, when they shall reflect upon the miserable delusions of those Miscreants amongst us, who having besmear’d themselves with the blood of their King, should dare publikely to justifie (in the very face of Death and Judgement) so grievous a Crime, from the dictates of their private Conscience, and their following of God, as they term’d it. (1664: 25)



hugh adlington

Martin directs his peroration at three distinct groups: dissenters, conformists, and the judges of the assize. His exhortation to obedience to lawful authority quotes both Soto’s maxim from De justitia et jure, ‘there is no contrariety betwixt a just Law and a good Conscience’ (1664: 26), and the preface to the fourth book of Sir Edward Coke’s Reports, in which Coke urges the judges to punish as fully as possible those who would flout the law: A Prince ought not to suffer his Laws to become a laughing stock: and woful experience hath often taught (which I my self have sometimes observed) that many of those men that have strained their wits, and stretched their tongues to scandalize or calumniate these Laws, had either practised or plotted some heynous crimes; and therefore hated because they feared the just sentence and heavy stroke. (1664: 34)

There can be no mistaking the uncompromising tone. Assize sermons preached in the same year, by Henry Glover in Dorchester, and John Lightfoot in Hertford, echo Martin’s call for church unity, but only the assize sermons preached by Antony Scattergood in Northampton and by William Reresby in Lincoln come close to matching Martin’s vituperative appeal to judges to discipline nonconformists (Scattergood 1664: 36; Reresby 1664: 52–7). Martin’s determination to land his blows may well be due in part to the fact that Dorchester was well known as a Puritan stronghold (evidenced by the notorious incident in 1642 when, after the execution of the Catholic chaplain Hugh Green, Dorchester men played football with his head). Dorchester fell in the diocese of Salisbury; both of the bishops of Salisbury in the early 1660s, Humphrey Henchman and John Earle, were known for being relatively indulgent towards nonconformists (Spurr 2004a, b). Moreover, the judge commissioned to ride the Western Circuit in the summer of 1664, Sir John Archer, was a man of long-standing parliamentary and presbyterian sympathies. Martin’s overtly Erastian, loyalist sermon, which deliberately frames the debate in starkly binary terms—conformists versus dissenters—thus seems motivated at least in part by the specific identities and religious and political sympathies of its auditory. Unlike the assize sermons of Howe and Bradley, Martin’s was published and sold in the capital, printed for Richard Royston for sale at the Angel in Ivy Lane. The choice to distribute the sermon in London may well reflect the eminence of one of its dedicatees, Sir Matthew Hale, Lord Chief Justice of His Majesty’s Court of Exchequer. It might equally reflect the limited sales potential of such a tract in Puritan Dorchester.

Conclusion To a large extent, Restoration preaching remains a Cinderella subject in sermon studies. Where interest in Jacobean preachers has led to monographs, essays, and scholarly editions of their works, the sermons of all but a few Restoration preachers are largely

restoration, religion, and law



forgotten. Where studies do exist, Restoration sermons still tend to be mined for examples of broad trends in political and religious culture, English prose style, or, more recently, the history of the book, rather than being objects of study in their own right. Such approaches also tend to privilege the most famous preachers, conformists and dissenters, while draining their works of historical context. Restoration assize sermons, if even acknowledged, are regarded as nothing more than examples of an inert ceremonial genre. Yet, as this chapter has tried briefly to show, assize sermons often represent significant interventions in local and national religious politics at a crucial historical juncture. The three case studies have revealed how assize sermons, in the wake of the Act of Uniformity, function both as instruments of political theology enjoining obedience to royal authority, and as sources of counsel and correction to the judicial administration of that authority. Thomas Bradley’s York assize sermons, and the circumstances surrounding their publication, demonstrate clerical participation in contemporary debates usually regarded as off limits for pulpit oratory: the collection of excise, regional legal autonomy, and landowner abuse of the poor. Obadiah Howe’s Lincoln assize sermon, while overtly conformist in ecclesiology and politics, nonetheless models exemplary procedures of impartial enquiry, deliberation, and judgement. John Martin’s Dorchester sermon reflects the strategies of a minister preaching to a less receptive auditory: urging implementation of new anti-tolerationist laws to magistrates, judges, and clerics inclined to toleration. Preachers of assize sermons, however high-minded, can have had no illusions about the realities of trial procedure on circuit. Brawls in court, even murder, were not unknown, and the disdain of judges for the judged was commonplace. Juries were often rigged, the accused commonly had no counsel, and judges had the final word, not the jury. Procedural abuse, perjury in particular, was widespread at quarter sessions and assizes. A single judge in the 1620s processed fifty Crown cases in a working day. Even in the more sophisticated civil procedure of nisi prius cases, in which both parties were represented by counsel, and postea referred for judgment to the court in banc at Westminster, few such cases detained the court for more than twenty minutes (Cockburn 1972: 109–11, 136–8). Yet it was precisely because of the imperfect nature of the justice doled out on circuit that assize sermons performed a vital role in holding witnesses, lawyers, judges, and juries to account. As has been seen, print publication reinforced the sermons’ messages locally and conferred further prestige upon the proceedings. And, as has also been seen in the three case studies, the prose styles of assize sermons offer a telling glimpse of the diversity of rhetorical approaches adopted by Restoration preachers, a diversity that presents a significant challenge to traditional accounts of the ‘inevitable’ shift in prose style over the course of seventeenth century, from baroque to plain.1

1

I am grateful to Tom Charlton, Jacqueline Eales, Arnold Hunt, and Juliet Ingram for generously allowing me to see unpublished work; and to Chanita Goodblatt for assistance with Hebrew transcription.



hugh adlington

Bibliography primary sources Manuscript BL (British Library), Add. MS 48106. Sir Christopher Yelverton, hearer’s notes. MT (Middle Temple Archives), MT.15/SER/1. James Buck, hearer’s notes. UB (University of Birmingham, Special Collections), MS 388. John Archer, hearer’s notes. UB (University of Birmingham, Special Collections), MS 425. William Pierce, preacher’s notes. Print Ashenden, Thomas (1682). No Penalty, No Peace in a Sermon Preached at the Assizes Held at Leicester, August the 10th, 1682. Atterbury, Lewis (1684). A Good Subject, or, The Right Test of Religion and Loyalty in a Sermon Preached July the 17th at the Last Summer-Assizes Held at Buckingham, for the County of Buckingham. Bacon, Francis (1874). ‘26 June 1618. Star-Chamber. My L. Chancellor’s Speech to the Judges’, in Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding. 7 vols. Longmans. Beaulieu, Luke (1684). The Terms of Peace and Reconciliation betwixt All Divided Parties A Sermon Preach’d at the Assizes Held for the County of Buckingham, at the Town of Wicomb, July the I, 1684. Bennion, John (1681). Moses’s Charge to Israel’s Judges Opened in an Assise Sermon Preached at Salisbury, Feb. 27, 1680. Oxford. Bisbie, Nathaniel (1684). Two Sermons. Bradley, Thomas (1658). A Present for Caesar. —— (1661). Appello cæsarem. York. —— (1663a). A Sermon Preached at the Minster in Yorke, at the Assizes there Holden the Thirtieth Day of March, 1663. York. —— (1663b). Cesars Due and the Subjects Duty . . . in a Sermon Preach’t in the Minster at Yorke at the Assizes there Holden Aug. 3, 1663. York. Buxtorf, Johannis, the Younger (1645). De nominibus dei hebraicis. Basle. Cartwright, Thomas (1676). A Sermon Preached July 17, 1676, in the Cathedral Church of St Peter in York. English Reports (1907). The English Reports, vol. 77, Kings Bench Division VI, containing Coke, parts 5–13. Edinburgh: Wm. Green & Sons. ESTC (English Short Title Catalogue), http://estc.bl.uk Glover, Henry (1663). An Exhortation to Prayer for Jerusalems Peace in a Sermon Preached at Dorchester at the Assizes Holden there for the County of Dorset, March 19, 1662. Hall, Thomas (1660). The Beauty of Magistracy in an Exposition of the 82 Psalm, where is Set forth the Necessity, Utility, Dignity, Duty, and Mortality of Magistrates. Howe, Obadiah (1663). Eloheem or, God and the Magistrate. Johnson, James (1670). The Judge’s Authority or Constitution A Sermon Preached in the Cathedral Church of St Peter in York, upon Monday the 7th Day of March 1669/70. Cambridge. Kethe, William (1571). A sermon made at Blanford Forum, in the countie of Dorset on Wensday the 17. of Januarii. Letsome, Sampson (1734). An Index to the Sermons, Printed since the Restoration.

restoration, religion, and law



Lightfoot, John (1684). The Works of the Reverend and Learned John Lightfoot D. D., Late Master of Katherine Hall in Cambridge. 2 vols. Lodington, Thomas (1674). The Honour of the Magistrate Asserted. In a Sermon Preached at the Assizes Holden at Lincoln on Monday, March the 23. 1673/4. Martin, John (1664). Lex pacifica . . . in a Sermon Preached at Dorchester, at the Assizes Holden there for the County of Dorset, August 5. 1664. Reresby, William (1664). A Warning-Piece to Repentance Presented in an Assize-Sermon Preached in the Cathedral Church of Lincoln. Aug. 15. 1664. Reynolds, Edward (1636). The Shieldes of the Earth. Riland, John (1663). Confirmation Revived, and, Doom’s-Day Books Opened in Two Sermons. Sanderson, Robert (1656). ‘At the Assises at Lincolne in the year 1632’, in Twenty Sermons. Scattergood, Anthony (1664). Jethro’s Character of Worthy Judges an Assise-Sermon Preached at Northampton, March 22, 1663. Statutes (1819). The Statutes of the Realm, v. 1625–1680. G. Eyre and A. Strahan. —— (1820). The Statutes of the Realm, vii. 1695–1701. G. Eyre and A. Strahan. Stephens, Thomas (1661). Ad magistratum. Three Sermons Preached before the Justices of Assize, at Bury-St-Edmunds in the Countie of Suffolk. Cambridge. Stokes, David (1667). A Sermon upon Job 29.15. Preached before the Judges, at a General Assise in Hertford. Oxford. Swinnock, George (1660). Men are Gods, or, The dignity of Magistracy . . . a Sermon at the Assize Holden at Hertford for that County on August 2, 1653. Ward, Samuel (1618). Jethro’s Justice of Peace. A Sermon Preached at the Generall Assises held at Bvry St Edmunds for the Countie of Suffolke. Winter, John (1669). Two Sermons Preached at the Assizes Holden for the County of Norfolk. secondary sources Appleby, David J. (2007). Black Bartholomew’s Day. Preaching, Polemic and Restoration Nonconformity. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Baker, J. H. (2002). An Introduction to English Legal History. 4th edn. Butterworths & Tolley. Barnes, T. G. (1960–1). ‘A Charge to the Judges of Assize, 1627/8’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 24: 255. Brooks, C. W. (1986). Pettyfoggers and Vipers of the Commonwealth: The ‘Lower Branch’ of the Legal Profession in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Charlton, Tom (2006). ‘The “Due Administration of Justice”: The Restoration, Romans 13, and the Assize Sermon’. Unpublished conference paper. Claydon, Anthony (2000). ‘The Sermon, the “Public Sphere” and the Political Culture of Late Seventeenth-Century England’, in Ferrell and McCullough (2000), 208–34. Cockburn, J. S. (1972). A History of English Assizes 1558–1714. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crawford, James, and Steele, Robert (1910) (eds). A Bibliography of Royal Proclamations of the Tudor and Stuart Sovereigns and of Others Published under Authority, 1485–1714. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dargan, Edwin Charles (1912). A History of Preaching, ii. From the Close of the Reformation Period to the End of the Nineteenth Century 1572–1900. New York: Burt Franklin; repr. 1968. Davies, Horton (1975). Worship and Theology in England, ii. From Andrewes to Baxter and Fox, 1603–1690. Princeton: Princeton University Press.



hugh adlington

De Krey, Gary S. (2008). ‘Between Revolutions: Re-Appraising the Restoration in Britain’, History Compass, 6/3: 738–73. Ferrell, Lori Ann, and McCullough, Peter (2000) (eds). The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History 1600–1750. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Garnham, Neil (1998). ‘Assizes’, in The Oxford Companion to Irish History, ed. S. J. Connolly. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 30. Greaves, Richard L. (1986). Deliver Us from Evil: The Radical Underground in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Halliday, Paul D. (2004). ‘Twisden, Sir Thomas, first baronet (1602–1683)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online edn. Hart, James S., Jr (2004). ‘Atkyns, Sir Edward (1587–1669)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online edn. Handley, Stuart (2004). ‘Tyrrell, Sir Thomas (1593/4–1672)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online edn. Havighurst, Alfred F. (1950). ‘The Judiciary and Politics in the Reign of Charles II’, Law Quarterly Review, 66: 62–78. Herrup, Cynthia (1987). The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in SeventeenthCentury England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hill, J. W. F. (1956). Tudor and Stuart Lincoln. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ch. IX. Hindle, Steve (2000). The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c.1550–1640. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Holmes, Clive (1980). Seventeenth-Century Lincolnshire. Lincoln: History of Lincolnshire Committee for the Society for Lincolnshire History and Archaeology. Hopper, Andrew (2002). ‘The Farnley Wood Plot and the Memory of the Civil Wars in Yorkshire’, Historical Journal, 45/2: 281–303. Hughes, Ann (1987). Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hunt, Arnold (2010). The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and their Audiences, 1590–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hutton, Ronald (1985). The Restoration: A Political and Religious History of England and Wales 1658–1667. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ingram, Juliet (2004). ‘The Conscience of the Community: The Character and Development of Clerical Complaint in Early Modern England’. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Warwick. Keeble, N. H. (1987). The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Lee, Sidney (2004). ‘Bradley, Thomas (1599/1600–1673)’, rev. Jason McElligott, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online edn. McCullough, Peter E. (2003). ‘Donne as Preacher at Court: Precarious “Inthronization”’, in David Colclough (ed.), John Donne’s Professional Lives. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 179–204. Mitchell, W. Fraser (1932). English Pulpit Oratory from Andrewes to Tillotson: A Study of its Literary Aspects. SPCK. Morrissey, Mary (2002). ‘Scripture, Style and Persuasion in Seventeenth-Century English Theories of Preaching’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 53: 686–706. Mukherji, Subha (2009). ‘ “Understood Relations”: Law and Literature in Early Modern Studies’, Literature Compass, 6/3: 706–25.

restoration, religion, and law



Nenner, Howard (1977). By Colour of Law: Legal Culture and Constitutional Politics in England, 1660–1689. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Plomer, Henry R. (1907). A Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers who were at Work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1641 to 1667. Prest, Wilfrid (1986). The Rise of the Barristers: A Social History of the English Bar 1590–1640. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Rivers, Isabel (1991). Reason, Grace and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England 1660–1780, i. Whichcote to Wesley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shapiro, Barbara J. (2008). ‘Political Theology and the Courts: A Survey of Assize Sermons c.1600–1688’, Law and Humanities, 2/1: 1–28. Sharpe, Kevin (1992). The Personal Rule of Charles I. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Siebert, Fredrick S. (1952). Freedom of the Press in England 1476–1776: The Rise and Decline of Government Controls. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Simon, Irène (1967) (ed.). Three Restoration Divines: Barrow, South, Tillotson. Selected Sermons. Paris: Société d’Édition ‘Les Belles Lettres’. Sisson, C. H. (1976) (ed.). The English Sermon: An Anthology, ii. 1650–1750. Cheadle: Carcanet Press. Spaeth, Donald A. (2004). ‘Martin, John (1619–1693)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online edn. Spurr, John (1991). The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. —— (2004a). ‘Henchman, Humphrey (bap. 1592, d. 1675)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online edn. —— (2004b). ‘Earle, John (1598x1601–1665)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online edn. —— (2006). The Post-Reformation: Religion, Politics and Society in Britain, 1603–1714. Harlow: Pearson. Stevenson, Kay Gilliland (2001). Milton to Pope, 1650–1720. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Treadwell, Michael (2002). ‘The Stationers and the Printing Acts at the End of the Seventeenth Century’, in John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie, with the assistance of Maureen Bell (eds), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iv. 1557–1695. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 755–76. Walker, David M. (2001). The Scottish Legal System: An Introduction to the Study of Scots Law, 8th edn. rev. Edinburgh: W. Green. Wright, Stephen (2004). ‘Howe, Obadiah (1615/16–1683)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online edn. Zaller, Robert (2007). The Discourse of Legitimacy in Early Modern England. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

chapter 22

pr e achi ng at t h e cou rt of ch a r les ii: cou rt ser mons a n d the r e stor ation ch a pel roya l matt jenkinson

There were few congregations in early modern Britain more troublesome than that at the court of Charles II. There are indeed few courts more notorious and with a reputation for greater indulgence in the sins of both flesh and mind than that at Whitehall between 1660 and 1685. For many contemporaries this court was governed by a king with a codpiece too easily led by royal mistresses, the most nefarious of whom, the duchess of Portsmouth, exposed prince and polity to the dangers of the ambitions of Louis XIV. Restoration Whitehall was also the playground of the rich and infamous. The most disreputable and publicly offensive of the circle of court wits that assembled under George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, included John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, Sir Charles Sedley, and Charles Sackville, Lord Buckhurst. Their periodic decampment from the luxuries of wine, women, and wit to the chapel royal would have comprised a greater hardship had it not provided an array of chaplains to which they could direct their censure and ridicule. Indeed, Restoration court preachers found themselves in conflict with some of their congregation, especially the libidinous court wits who accused them—in response to the churchmen’s frequent moralistic haranguing—of rank hypocrisy. The preachers were, claimed these satirists, concerned more with the material benefits of the current world than with preparing their congregations for the next. Not that service in the chapel royal provided much financial recompense. While royal chaplains might hope for the episcopal preferment enjoyed by their predecessors under Charles I (Cranfield 1996: 121, 131, 133), one observer wondered why they should be envied, when ‘the world knows’, for those in that role,‘there’s nothing but trouble and honour, no Emolument at all’ (Dobson 1663: 4).

preaching at the court of charles ii



Between 1660 and 1685, over 500 different churchmen were appointed to serve at court, ranging from archbishops to domestic chaplains (Jenkinson 2007: 348–51). The chapel royal was headed by the dean, who appointed the subdean and thirty-two gentlemen of the chapel. Twelve of these gentlemen were clergymen (one of whom was confessor to the household). The remaining twenty were clerks of the chapel who assisted in the performance of services. The most influential religious court offices were the dean, subdean, almoner, and clerk of the closet. The last of these was in closest proximity to the king during services and offered him clarification on spiritual matters. Indeed, the early Stuart clerk of the closet has been described as ‘a crucial Stuart point of political contact’. William Laud had been eager to have William Juxon in that role, so that he would have ‘one that I might trust’ near the king (McCullough 1998: 110–11). The Lord Chamberlain was most prominent in the selection of court preachers. At any one time there were forty-eight chaplains in ordinary, four of whom were on duty each month. this body was supplemented by chaplains extraordinary, who were appointed ad hoc (Chamberlayne 1671: 155–9; Keay 2008: 146–55). Following the traditions of the English court, the season of Lent was characterized by a timetable of sermons delivered by those in the upper echelons of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. In theory, the dean preached on Ash Wednesday, followed on subsequent Wednesdays by the more accomplished court chaplains. Friday sermons were delivered by cathedral deans, and on Good Friday the dean of Westminster appeared in the pulpit. Bishops preached to the court every Sunday, until Palm Sunday, when that privilege was granted to an archbishop. The Lord High Almoner, usually a principal bishop, delivered the sermon on Easter Day (Chamberlayne 1671: 158–60). In practice, however, the timetable was more flexible. For example, in 1683 bishops were excused from their duty because Charles planned to be at Newmarket, though chaplains and deans were still to preach at Whitehall (Morrice 2007: ii. 344). Lists of Lent preachers were published individually, with the imprimatur of the Lord Chamberlain. From 1665 they were also printed in the London Gazette, during the December that preceded the Lent timetable.1 In February 1664 Charles remarked to his sister on the turgid sermons at the court of Louis XIV: ‘I hope you have the same convenience that the rest of the family has, of sleeping out most of the time’ (Norrington 1996: 73). But the king’s flippant assessment detracts from the lively culture of his own chapel royal, a theatre for early modern monarchical devotional performance (Adamson 1999: 24–7; Fincham and Tyacke 2007: ch. 8; on the architectural setting of court preaching, see Rhatigan, Chapter 6, this volume). Part of the symbolically potent reconstitution at the Restoration of the etiquette and structure of the royal court was the return to frequent and regular public royal worship. Moreover, three dates were particularly politically sensitive in Restoration Britain: 30 January (commemorating the anniversary of the execution of Charles I); 29 May (marking the birthday and return of Charles II); and 5 November (commemorating the failure of the Gunpowder Plot). Court sermons engaged with the politics of the Restoration period, changes in royal 1 See, e.g., London Gazette, 1781 (11–14 Dec. 1681). Individual separate lists of Lent preachers were printed in 1660, 1675, 1679/80, 1681, and 1684/5.



matt jenkinson

religious policy, the difficulties and dangers presented by Protestant nonconformity and Roman Catholicism, political disloyalty, and the immorality of king and court. Religious and moral disputes were played out by those preaching from, or sitting before, the chapel royal pulpit. Furthermore, because of the appearance of court sermons and their animadversions in print, the audience for, and participants in, these debates were wider than the denizens of Whitehall, Winchester, or Newmarket. Approximately 100 court sermons were published in the reign of Charles II (on sermons in print, 1660–1700, see Dixon, Chapter 23, this volume). Twenty-one were entered into the Stationers’ Company Register, while forty-eight were advertised in the Term Catalogues. Alongside the Term Catalogues, court sermons were also advertised in stocklists compiled by individual booksellers. The most comprehensive of these was by Robert Clavell, who in 1680 catalogued Richard Baxter’s Life of Faith (preached before the king in July 1660), as well as court sermons by Allestree and Wilkins (Clavell 1680: 1, 4, 16). The majority of the printed sermons were published by royal command. Considering the large number of churchmen who preached before Charles in his reign, it is important to remember that only approximately 10 per cent of them had their sermons published in an individual (usually quarto) format. Fewer than 5 per cent had more than one of their court sermons printed. To receive the royal command for the publication of four or five of one’s separate court sermons was rare, and this honour went to just five preachers: Benjamin Laney, Edward Stillingfleet, John Tillotson (see Fig. 28), Francis Turner, and Seth Ward. Richard Allestree, John Wilkins, and Tillotson enjoyed the publication of collections of sermons that had been delivered before Charles and his courtiers (Allestree 1669; Wilkins 1677; Tillotson 1678; see also Dixon, Chapter 23, this volume). A collection of five of Laney’s court sermons that had already been ‘published severally by command’, was to ‘give satisfaction in Certain Points to such [as] have . . . endeavoured to unsettle the state and Government of the church’ (1669: frontispiece). Court sermons, at 6d for an individual copy, sat at the lower end of the price scale for religious works, the average price of which was around a shilling (Sommerville 1977: 21). Court sermons were distributed by a network of approximately eighty printers and booksellers. The most prolific was Timothy Garthwait, who was involved in the distribution of thirteen before his death in 1669. James Allestree, whose shop ‘was the resort of the wealthy and the learned’, sold four different court sermons. Benjamin Tooke, who produced four, was ‘one of the largest publishers of the time’ (Plomer 1968: i. 2–3; ii. 293). Samuel Gellibrand sold at least six court sermons from his famous shop, The Ball in St Paul’s Churchyard. Henry Brome, Henry Mortlock, Anne Maxwell, and Richard Royston (the owner of the monopoly on the works of Charles I) all offered between seven and ten. Beyond London, court sermons were sold by Richard Davis in Oxford, John Hayes in Cambridge, and Joseph Lawson in Lincoln. Allowing for the other sixty or so printers and sellers of court sermons, there were evidently a significant number of outlets for their production, distribution, and purchase. That printed Restoration court sermons were read is illustrated firstly by the number of editions to which some ran, secondly by the large number of readers’ responses, and thirdly by the response that some provoked in the press. Tillotson and Stillingfleet,

preaching at the court of charles ii



alongside Standish, Wilkins, Laney, Thomas Cartwright, and John Lambe, were among those who had their court sermons reprinted (Arber 1903–6: i. 241, 278, 279, 409, 424, 482). The Buckinghamshire gentleman Sir William Drake read and noted Gilbert Sheldon’s court sermon of 28 June 1660 (Sharpe 2000: 250). In December 1667 Pepys purchased a court sermon in which William Lloyd, later bishop of St Asaph, castigated the ‘monstrous absurdities’ of the Catholic Church (Pepys 2000: viii. 587). Sir Richard Temple held in his library at Stowe printed court sermons by John Wilkins (19 March 1671), John Tillotson (25 February 1676; 4 April 1679; 2 April 1680), and John Standish (26 September 1675), as well as a response to Pierce’s Primitive Rule of Reformation (1663) (Huntington Library, ST 365). Indeed, Thomas Pierce satisfied all the above criteria when his fiercely antiCatholic Primitive Rule, delivered at court in February 1663, ran to at least eight editions. This would have meant a circulation of up to, although probably fewer than, 16,000 copies (Green and Peters 2002: 80). The sermon also led to an outcry in the Catholic press.

Court Preachers and Catholicism The attention afforded Thomas Pierce’s Primitive Rule can be understood in the context of the fear of Roman Catholics that pervaded the reign of Charles II. This fear was stoked by memories of Marian persecution, the Spanish Armada, and the Gunpowder Plot. The anti-Catholic flames were fanned by a wide range of factors: the influence on the king of Catholic royal mistresses; the immediate threats posed by Louis XIV’s military ambitions; the allegation that it was Catholic arsonists who set fire to London in 1666; the duke of York’s withdrawal from Anglican communion; the king’s attempted indulgence of non-Anglicans in 1672; and the alleged Popish Plot of the late 1670s, with its stories of murder and England’s forced return to the Roman faith. Observers would have seen Catholicism at the heart of the court. Eleven Portuguese Franciscan friars, or Arabados, and six Benedictine monks attended the queen’s Catholic chapel in St James’s Palace (Corp 2002: 59). At the Queen Mother’s chapel in Somerset House, Basile Dubois de Soissons had eloquently offered 300 defences of the doctrine of the Real Presence (Barbeau Gardiner 1998). In the king’s own chapel a stream of preachers, for twenty-five years, denounced Catholicism in the most strident terms. Perhaps the most famous of these, John Tillotson, was highlighted by John Wilkins as a particular preacher against ‘Papists’ (Wilkins 1669: 98). Four of Tillotson’s court sermons were printed by royal command between 1675 and 1680, amid a period of intense anti-Catholic hysteria. It was the ‘Church of Rome’s Fifth Monarchy men’, warned the Tory churchman Francis Turner in the chapel royal in 1681, who had taught England’s regicides ‘the Act of killing a King Ceremoniously’ (1681: 13, 35). Thomas Pierce was the first churchman in Charles II’s reign to level such claims against the Catholic Church so prominently in the chapel royal. Pierce was a polemical Arminian, a vigorous apologist for episcopal Anglicanism, and an inveterate adversary of Puritanism. Yet on 1 February 1663 he directed his invective against Roman Catholics,



matt jenkinson

using the text Matthew 19:8 (‘But from the beginning it was not so’) to dismantle Catholics’ claims that the practical elements of their worship were endorsed by their lengthy and continuous use. In the course of an hour’s sermon Pierce carefully dissected Catholic doctrines and practices. He argued that the doctrine of papal infallibility had not been ‘perfected’ until as recently as the Council of Trent. Purgatory, at its earliest, could be dated from Tertullian, but only then through the ‘Arch-heretick’ Montanus, who had claimed to be the incarnation of the paraclete from the Gospel of John. The denial of marriage to priests came from Pope Callistus. The doctrine of transubstantiation came from the Lateran Council. Half-communion came from Aquinas. ‘Publick praying before the people in an unknown Tongue’ came from Gregory the Great. The ‘Invocation of Saints departed’ dated from no earlier than the seventh century (Pierce 1663: 8–9). Quite understandably for an exposition from the Whitehall pulpit before the king, Pierce refuted papal supremacy, and he highlighted the threat this doctrine posed to Charles’s dominions. Invoking the Jesuit Bellarmine, he argued that papal supremacy was ‘the chief, if not only Hinge . . . on which does hang the whole stress of the Papal Fabrick’. It was a ‘prosperous usurpation’, dating from 607, when Flavius Phocas Augustus ‘sold’ the supremacy to Boniface III, restating the legal recognition of the supremacy of the Bishop of Rome bestowed by Justinian I (Pierce 1663: sigs A4r–A4v, 16). The threat became all the more immediate for Charles II because Phocas, active in this restatement, was himself ‘a Regicide’. He had murdered Emperor Maurice (‘Mauritius’), the ‘Royall Image or Type of our late Royall Martyr of Sacred Memory’, as well as Maurice’s sons (1663: 16). One respondent to Pierce’s sermon illustrated the breadth of the sermon’s print distribution and the excitement it provoked. He noted the ‘many reimpressions of that Sermon in several forms’, ‘diligent Translations of it into forraign Languages’, and the ‘incredible avidity with which so many thousand Copies of it have been snatched out of the hands of the Readers, and from the Stalls of the Sellers’. He also spoke of the ‘triumphing applauses’ with which the sermon was met, and the ‘general greedinesse’ by which ‘thousands of the printed Copies have been bought up, even by those that formerly have not been curiously inquisitive after Court Sermons’ (Cressy 1663: sig. A7r, 9–10). The sixth edition, printed in Oxford, was both a corrected version of those editions printed in London, and an opportunity for Pierce to reflect on the ‘Romanists from the Press’, his ‘not onely learned and subtil, but restless enemies’ (Pierce 1663: sigs A2v, A3r). Indeed, Pierce’s sermon had provoked a number of responses from Catholic observers. In May 1663, in a dedication to Henrietta Maria, Serenus Cressy sympathized with the Queen Mother who had been ‘forced to hear frequent and loud Triumphs’ wherein ‘by a Court-Sermon, scarce an hour long, the English Protestant Church at one blow, and without any resistance, pretends to have gained over the Catholick’ (1663: sig A2r–v). Cressy, in over 320 pages, was to provide some of this resistance: ‘both at Court, and all over the Nation’, he lamented, ‘Some [Catholic] Doctrins have been charged to be contrary to the honour and safety of the State; others to be Doctrins of Devils; all of them to be Novelties and usurpations’ (1663: sig. A6v). In contrast, he refuted in detail Pierce’s accusations of such novelties, he insisted on the fidelity of Catholics to princes, and he accused Pierce of deliberate obfuscation and of invoking obscure references so that ‘the Ladies at least,

preaching at the court of charles ii



were a little puzled’ by these ‘pompous Sounds’ (1663: 2). He further accused Pierce of misinforming Charles and the court and, because he had preached such a ‘distemper’d’ sermon, of disobeying injunctions concerning preaching set down by the king, ‘who lov’d the peace of his Kingdoms, and still feels so much by their disunions’ (1663: 12). The following month another attack, also addressing the Queen Mother, was launched against Pierce. A ‘Philistin in black’, Pierce allegedly preached ‘but wind’, and deceived his royal audience through ‘pretended corruptions’, spitting ‘venome at the Roman See’ (Simons 1663: sig. A2r, 103). For this author the Reformation itself was like a ‘cruel Tyrant’, ‘trampling over Crownes, profaning Churches, destroying Altars, violating Vowes, and every where tearing the peace of Christianity’. To the assertion that the papacy ‘trod upon Crownes and Scepters’, Simons claimed that this was ‘hyperbole fetcht from the hornes of the Moon’. He challenged: ‘When? where? what Crownes and Scepters?’ (1663: 116). Yet another response to Pierce asked: why should true faith be tested against the earliest Christian Church, with any later additions to worship denounced as unnecessary or heinous novelties? Such a line of reasoning, it was argued, could also be used against Pierce’s Anglican Protestants: where do you find (saith the Fanatick) Lordbishops in the beginning? where were the Bishops Courts in the beginning? where was Infant Baptism in the beginning? where was your Sunday a Sabbath in the beginning? you use Cross, Surplice, Copes, Altars, Organs, Church-musick, but in the beginning it was not so? . . . you hinder men to preach the Gospel, necessary for salvation, for things in themselves not necessary for salvation, in the beginning it was not so: you sing your prayers, you use vain repetitions, you pray by book they say, in the beginning it was not so: you, they say, have rich Bishopricks, Deanaries, Prebendaries, Sinecures, Pluralities . . . in the beginning it was not so. (Anon. 1663: 6)

This commentator also argued that the Protestant reformers themselves had originally been members of the Catholic Church, otherwise they had not been Christians at all, and thus ‘not fit’ to reform the church. And, if they could reform the church in the sixteenth century, why could not others who desired a ‘further reformation’ now do the same? This proposal was designed to alarm some of those readers who thought that this ‘further reformation’ might include the toleration or comprehension of non-Anglican Protestants, many of whom might be perceived to pose a threat to church and state every bit as great as the threat posed by Catholics.

Court Preachers and Protestant Nonconformity At their most extreme, the regicidal ambitions of nonconformists posed a threat to the stability, or even to the existence, of the Restoration polity. This threat seemed all too real in the early 1680s. For example, the ‘Protestant Joiner’ Stephen College, a Whig



matt jenkinson

propagandist for the exclusion from the succession of the Catholic duke of York, was executed for treason in August 1681. The Tory press capitalized on College’s dying-speech admission of Presbyterianism in order to associate religious dissent with an assault on episcopacy, Anglicanism, and the Crown itself. Tories identified Protestant nonconformists with the sectarian (and innovative, cruel, fanatical, ambitious, impious) Jesuits who taught them Bellarminian doctrines of rebellion against, deposition, and/or murder of their monarch. It was convenient for such Tory propagandists that their Whig enemies, who were closely associated with Protestant nonconformists, borrowed directly from Catholic texts that, at the expense of the authority of secular rulers, bestowed authority on the pope (as codified by the Fourth Lateran Council) or the people (as demonstrated by the assassination of Henri III of France). So, for example, the Whig John Somers’s A Brief History of the Succession (1682) utilized the Jesuit Robert Parsons’s A Conference about the Next Succession to the Crown of England (1594) (Goldie 1983: 71–3). While the association between Protestant nonconformists and the nascent Whig party made anti-dissenting court sermons a prominent feature of the early 1680s, such sermons had already appeared throughout Charles’s reign. In 1668 Richard Lingard bemoaned ‘the horrible crime of Schism’ (1668: 28), whilst Samuel Scattergood in 1676 excoriated ‘Schisms and Factions’ that shook ‘all into disorder and Confusion’ (1676: 4). Benjamin Laney, bishop of Lincoln, also railed against ‘the whole Herd of sectaries, who are but a kinde of godly Atheists’ (1663: 18). Other court preachers, however, were less severe in their attitude towards non-Anglican Protestants. Thomas Cartwright advocated to the court, not persecution of ‘dissenting brethren’, but charity, ‘pull[ing] them into our freindship’: ‘’Twas love wch first made Societyes, & ’tis that which must continue them’ (Lambeth Palace, London, MS 4250, 15v, 24r, 34v, 35v). John Wilkins, bishop of Chester, a Low Churchman who abhorred the Act of Uniformity, was invited to court in February 1670. He too had his sermon published by royal command, even though, in the same year, this ‘promoter of comprehension in 1668 and protégé of the duke of Buckingham’ publicly opposed the anti-nonconformist Second Conventicle Act (Spurr 1991: 57; Wilkins 1670). Charles II’s attitude towards churchmen at court and the printing of their sermons was reminiscent of two of his predecessors. Henry VIII had, through engagement in the print trade, attempted to project a ‘philosopher-king image’. Henry allowed dissent to be made public through the royal printer, Thomas Berthelet, so appearing a ‘disinterested seeker after truth who, for the good of the realm, welcomed open debate and truthful counsel’ (Warner 1998: 3). Charles’s ostensible patronage of opposing views also echoed the policy of James VI & I, who had commanded the printing of Lancelot Andrewes’s anti-Calvinist sermons on liturgical ceremony while still accepting the remonstrance of the chapel royal’s Calvinist dean. In doing so, James ‘kept both sides happy—or at least kept them guessing’ (McCullough 1998: 114–15). Charles II’s cynicism and allusiveness kept plenty of people guessing in Restoration England too. Low Church Anglicans could be attacked for expressing sympathy towards, or even countenancing the toleration or comprehension of, non-Anglican Protestants who, in much excited polemic, were descended from Civil War and Interregnum sectaries. These

preaching at the court of charles ii



Anglicans, who might loosely be termed ‘Latitudinarians’,2 were churchmen like Isaac Barrow, Simon Patrick, Edward Stillingfleet, and John Tillotson, all of whom served some time at court. So-called Latitudinarians were also attacked for what was perceived as their inappropriate focus on ‘reason’ as the logical, accessible, simple guiding light for moral and religious practice, satisfaction, and understanding, and therefore a crucial element of conduct on the route to Heaven (Rivers 1991: ch. 2). Reason had been established as a cornerstone for acceptable conduct by preachers at court. One court chaplain on 7 August 1663 warned that ‘Hope like strong wine too much exhilerates, & too often transports us beyond Sense & Reason’ (Harvard MS Eng 638, 13–14). In 1671, while instructing courtiers in natural law, John Wilkins put great store in ‘the common Reason of Mankind’ (1671: 9). William Lloyd counselled that ‘for sins of Weakness and daily Incursion . . . ‘tis necessary there should be a general Repentance. Every one that has the use of knowledge and reason should make such a daily Confession in his Prayers’ (1674: 9). Thomas Sprat insisted ‘that we try to suppress all Licentiousness of Life, and Manners, not by Enthusiasm, not by Superstition, but by a sober, unaffected, reasonable, that is, by a true Christian Piety’ (1678: 41). On 23 February 1682, Stillingfleet referred at court to ‘the Concurrence of this Divine Grace, the clearest evidence of Reason’. He also invoked reason the following Easter when he called for rejoicing,‘not wth a carnal, sensual, worldly Joy; but wth a divine, spiritual [and] heavenly Joy’ (St John’s College Cambridge MS 0.81, 49r, 93r–94v, 100r). Reason also characterized the style of preaching by some of the most prominent Restoration court preachers. Charles II himself had a taste for the plain style of sermon, the exponents of which were both protagonists of the new science and court preachers who had their sermons published by royal command. As Sprat was promoting rationality in his History of the Royal Society (1667), Tillotson, Stillingfleet, Patrick, and Wilkins were at the forefront of those Anglican preachers whose prose was reasonable, clear, and judicious. Their plain—yet still graceful—sermon style was a rejoinder to Puritan enthusiasm and typology, and a departure from the rich and intricate sermons delivered by their early Stuart forebears, John Donne and Lancelot Andrewes (for an extended reading of a Donne sermon, see McCullough, Chapter 12, this volume). Restoration court sermons usually began with the statement of the scriptural text under discussion, followed by an exposition, and then a more specific application. Court preachers like Tillotson tended to concentrate on a chosen theme and generally shunned overelaborate semantic contortions, allegorical and metaphorical conceits, and classical lacing (Wright-Henderson 1910: 109–24; Mitchell 1932: 306–33; Jones 1951: 112–38). Yet Jonathan Swift did concede that even Tillotson offered more ‘elaborate’ sermons when preaching before ‘princes or parliaments’ (Sykes 1955: 297–302). Also, as is shown by the case of Pierce’s alleged ‘puzling’ (sic) pomposity, not all of the 500 or so churchmen who preached before Charles would have followed the stylistically clear lead of Wilkins or Tillotson.

2

Though, for the complexities of this term, see Spurr (1988a: 61–82).



matt jenkinson

One High Church court preacher, John Standish, turned on his fellow churchmen, rebuking his Latitudinarian peers for making ‘reason’ too prominent a feature of their homiletic exposition. On 26 September 1675, Standish, Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, from 1656, preached before Charles and his court on 2 Corinthians 5:20: ‘Now then we are Ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us, we pray you in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God.’ In a sermon that was subsequently printed by royal command, Standish focused on church ministers’ role as ambassadors, the subject matter of their ‘embassy’, and the correct ways in which to execute this responsibility (1676: 8). Standish identified some of Christ’s ‘ambassadors’ who, he claimed, were carrying out their ministry incorrectly and dangerously; he attacked ‘false Apostles’ and ‘deceitful Workers’, those who hit at the foundation of the Christian faith with ‘Axes and Hammers’ and with ‘great Blasphemies’. These ‘goodly Masters of Reason’, he argued, were attempting to ‘supplant Christian Religion with Natural Theologie’, trying to ‘turn the Grace of God into a wanton Notion of Morality’, and making ‘Reason, Reason, Reason, their only Trinity, and sole Standard, whereby to measure both the Principles and Conclusions of Faith’. These churchmen threatened to bring in the ‘Cracovian Catechism’, Standish continued unrelentingly, when they believed there was ‘no such thing as supernatural Grace—That CHRIST dyed in vain—That ye are yet in your sins—and every man must be his own Saviour, or he is damn’d for ever’ (1676: 16, 24–7). Standish’s attack provoked its own respondents. The Latitudinarian Simon Patrick countered one of Standish’s supporters in October 1676. Standish, attacking those whom he thought made ‘Reason, Reason, Reason’ their only trinity, effectively accused these churchmen of Socinianism, of denying the divinity of Christ. But, Patrick insisted, there was not one ‘to be named among our Clergy, who is guilty of these foul detestable Heresies’ (Anon. 1676b: 3–4). He claimed that Standish had acknowledged his errors by maintaining a dignified silence. In contrast, the Peterhouse Fellow’s supporters perpetuated the breach in the church that Standish may have begun (but only ‘in a heat’) by placing inappropriate words in his mouth, and levelling accusations against individuals such as Henry Hammond and Jeremy Taylor that Standish himself would not have made (Anon. 1676b: 21). Word of Standish’s sermon reached beyond London, such that another respondent, ‘one that very seldom sees those new Books that come abroad, but was Tempted by what [he] heard’, requested a copy after it had ‘flown up and down the City a Quarter of a Year’ (Anon. 1676a: 1). The sermon troubled this reader, even apparently causing sleepless nights, because of the ‘heavy, nay Bloody’ accusations made therein. If Standish was right, it was perturbing that the Church of England nourished ‘Vipers in its Bosom’ who ‘would supplant Christian Religion with Natural Theology, and turn the Grace of God into a Wanton notion of Morality . . . The Fruits and consequents of whose Doctrines are, that there is no such thing as Supernatural Grace; That every man must be his own Saviour, or he is Damn’d for ever’. If Standish was wrong, it was equally disquieting that a preacher should stand in the Whitehall pulpit and ‘Spit such Venemous words against his innocent Brethren’ (Anon. 1676a: 2–3). It was further troubling that, while Standish made such strong accusations, he did not offer the names of these devils who were dressed as

preaching at the court of charles ii



saints. So, Standish was implored, ‘speak, and tell us who the men are, on whom you have set so black a Character’; ‘if you have any compassion in you, let us know where they haunt, and who they are, lest they draw us to Hell with them’. If he could not prove that ‘these Antitrinitarian and other Hereticks’ were among them, then Standish himself was to be punished. This was not only because he slandered the clergy who faced ‘innumerable difficulties’ in the ‘constant Cure of souls’; not only because it was done in front of the king; but also because Standish did so before removing himself to his own ease and security at Peterhouse (Anon. 1676a: 6–8, 16–21). The fear in this pamphlet was palpable. How many souls were in danger of eternal damnation from the allegedly Socinian churchmen, who were all the more frightening because of their anonymity?

Court Preachers and Morality Latitudinarian court preachers’ focus on reason provoked, and then in part was a response to, one of the most learned and dangerous satirical challenges to Restoration churchmen and Christian morality. The earl of Rochester, in his Satyr against Mankind (1674), demonstrated that he also made use of reason. But this was a different kind of reason from that expounded by those who would, from the chapel royal pulpit, so frequently and passionately attack him and his libertine peers (Rochester 1999: 57–63; see also Paulson 1971). The Satyr was concerned with both general philosophical enquiry and the specific atmosphere of anti-libertinism fomented by enemies of the court wits (Fujimura 1958; Knight 1970; Griffin 1973: 162–245; Manning 1993; Thormählen 1993: 162–239). It was inspired in part by Hobbes, Epicurus, Lucretius, and Boileau’s version of Juvenal’s fifteenth satire (Moore 1943). But Rochester focused on his personal experience of mankind: on the proud, flattering, nepotistic, corrupt statesmen at court (1999: 57–63, ll. 179–90) or the vain, envious, lying, gluttonous prelates, who hypocritically ‘chide at Kings, and rail at men of sense’ (ll. 191–209). The Satyr focused its attack on those individuals—secular and clerical—who expounded reason. Rochester cast reason as an Ignis fatuus of the Mind, Which leaving Light of Nature, sense, behind; Pathless and dangerous wandring wayes it takes, Through Errours fenny boggs and thorny brakes. ( ll. 12–15)

This reference to ‘an Ignis fatuus’ resonated with Latitudinarian churchmen’s celebration of reason, which, according to Benjamin Whichcote, was ‘the Candle of the Lord set up in him, and by this he should be directed, and see his way before him’ (Rivers 1991: 63–4). But the true consequence of their reason, for Rochester, was a stumble ‘Into doubts boundless Sea’ (l. 19). While ‘some formal band and beard’ (a generic Restoration divine) (l. 46) argued against the satirist, he nonetheless held fast: ‘tis this very Reason I despise. |



matt jenkinson

This supernatural Gift, that makes a mite | Think hee’s the Image of the Infinite’ (ll. 75–7); ‘This busy puzzling stirrer up of doubt, | That frames deep Mysteries, then finds them out’ (ll. 80–1). Rochester professed to ‘own’ and ‘obey’ what he called ‘right reason’: ‘That Reason which distinguishes by Sense, | And gives us Rules of Good and Ill from thence’ (ll. 99–101). For Rochester, ‘Hunger calls out, my Reason bids me eat; | Perversly yours your appetites does mock’ (ll. 107–8). Thus, ‘Tis not true Reason I despise, but yours’. That is, he despised speculative reason (l. 111). In the context of the court wits, the reason that ‘bids me eat’ had unmistakably bibulous and sexual implications. Rochester was not just subordinating reason to sense; he was advocating more than ‘reason used “rightly”’ (Spurr 1988b: 571 n. 33). He was innately redefining reason so it was entirely appetitive, sensual. Rochester’s ‘right reason’ reflected the libertine subversion of accepted Christian moral norms. He skilfully toyed with, and appropriated, his opponents’ language —not only ‘reason’, but ‘right reason’. Rochester’s Satyr was attacked for its deference to Hobbesian atomism and nominalism, and court preachers were among those ranks of Hobbes’s critics who with varying emphases also attacked the philosopher’s ethical relativism, voluntarism, determinism, pessimism, materialism, alleged impiety, and atheism, and their consequences for human conduct and morality (Mintz 1962: 55, 69–70, 141, 157–60; Goldie 1991; Parkin 2007: passim). For example, in 1674 Nathanael Vincent, Fellow of Clare Hall in Cambridge, argued that true honour must be learnt ‘from the School of Christ, and not of Plato, Aristotle, or any other, and worse Philosopher’. By ‘worse Philosopher’, Vincent meant Hobbes, as he attacked the conception of honour ‘from the Leviathan and his Disciples’ (Vincent 1685: 5–6; Jenkinson 2006). For Vincent, ‘In the Sight of God, and the opinion of all good Men, Persons of Honour are far less noble by their Birth, and the Highest Extraction, than by Virtue and humble Piety’ (1685: 17). Yet virtue and humble piety were not always prominent at the Restoration court. On 16 July 1663, Sir Charles Sedley mocked churchmen when he appeared on the balcony of the hostelry Oxford Kate’s, following a drunken dinner with Charles Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, and Sir Thomas Ogle, ‘acting all the postures of lust and buggery that could be imagined, and abusing of scripture’, and then ‘preaching a Mountebanke sermon from that pulpitt’ (Pepys 2000: iv. 209–10). Five years later, Samuel Pepys heard of the duke of Buckingham’s Newmarket entertainment before the king, a sermon ‘out of the Canticles’. This may have been, in whole or part, the sermon parody, ‘Upon these words. A Lewd woman is a Sinfull Temptation, her eyes are the snares of Satan, And her flesh is the Mousetrapp of Iniquity’. This trap, the mock-preacher lamented, ‘I feare you have all been Caught in’. His ‘congregation’ had been exposed to the dangers of ‘this Satan’s gimcrack’. The ‘unsanctify’d flesh’ of lewd women had broken through ‘the Confines of Modesty’, rambling ‘through the brambles of Impurity to graise on the Loathsom Commons of Adultery And glut their insatiable appetites with the unsavoury fodder of Fornication till they’ve fired their tayles like Sampsons foxes’ (Buckingham 2007: ii. 400–2; see also App. II.11). To wits like Buckingham who frequently found themselves berated by those possessed of ‘formal band and beard’, the genre of the sermon was no doubt irresistible fodder for parody. Thus Restoration court preachers could line up

preaching at the court of charles ii



alongside John Dryden, Edmund Waller, and any individual who attempted grandiosely or high-mindedly to celebrate Carolean achievements, to have their rhetorical or moralistic balloon punctured by the satirical pin of Andrew Marvell or Buckingham, Rochester, and the rest of the court wits. Real preachers’ concern for the moral rectitude of their congregation was not something peculiar to the Restoration. Lancelot Andrewes (see Fig. 30) had asked the court in 1617, ‘Were we liberati, to become libertines, to sett us downe, and eate, and to drinke healths, and rise up, and see a play?’ (quoted in McCullough 1998: 120). During the Restoration period, such criticism, of course, was not limited to the court. The practicalities of the godly life dominated Anglican literature and sermons: the popularity of Richard Allestree’s The Whole Duty of Man (1658) demonstrated this concentration on ‘moral reform rather than theological speculation’ (Cope 1954; Spurr 1991: ch. 6; Champion 1993: 424). It cannot be denied, however, that the libidinous tendencies and sometimes notorious profanity of Charles II, the duke of York, and the court wits gave this moral edification greater urgency. When George Morley rebuked the court on Christmas Day 1662 for their ‘excess in playes and gameing’, Pepys observed ‘how far they are come from taking the Reprehensions of a bishop seriously, that they all laugh in the chapel when he reflected on their ill actions and courses’ (2000: iii. 292–3). The libertines’ response to churchmen was summarized in a poem by Tom D’Urfey, professional poet and playwright, who attended court from 1676: Whilst Love Predominates over our Souls, A Pox on Counsel from tedious Old Fools; Reproofs of the Church-men but whet us the more, Whilst liberty Teaches, And appetite Preaches, No wealth like a Bottle, no joy like a Wh—— (D’Urfey 1683: 72–3)

It was in this atmosphere that court preachers counselled their social, if not spiritual, superiors. These preachers were also aware, for the reputation of the restored Anglican Church, of the need to be seen to be correcting them. Thus court preachers adopted a variety of methods to curb the moral stagnation of Charles and his courtiers. The virtues of chastity, temperance, sobriety, and moderation were constantly championed. At the Restoration, Sheldon warned against ‘Luxury and Prophaneness, Lust and Uncleanness’. The court must thank God, not ‘sacrifice to Bacchus’, to avoid peace becoming a burden (1660: 35–6, 41). Jasper Mayne apparently forced an exposition against adultery into his sermon at Whitehall in April 1662,‘besides his text’ (Pepys 2000: iii. 60). Richard Allestree railed against ‘Worldlyness, Ambitions and Lusts’ (1663: 36). John Dolben preferred ‘Spiritual Holy rejoycing’ to ‘Sensual Revellings, and Bacchanal Rites’ (1665: 27). After the fire that engulfed London in 1666, an appropriate time for meditation on divine judgement for the sins of the nation and its leaders, William Sancroft lambasted ‘A kind of Moral Rickets, that swells, and puffs up the Head, while the whole inner Man of the Heart wasts and dwindles’ (1694: 64). Another royal chaplain told his congregation at



matt jenkinson

St Martin in the Fields that, when London, ‘this large Volume in Folio’, was ‘abridged almost to an Octavo’, ‘both Prince and People’ had reason to blame themselves for the kindling of the fire (Hardy 1666: 21, 28). Henry Killigrew in the same year insisted to the court, that ‘A Soul immers’d in Lust and Sensuality, is fouler than the Stalls of Brute Beasts’ (1666: 29–30). On his return to court in May 1668, Killigrew ambitiously offered Charles greater incentive to live the godly life. If he did: we shall not fear the Potency and Ambition of our neighbours abroad, nor our worse Enemies, Poverty and Distraction at home; Schism shall not spread over the Kingdom like a Gangren, nor Discontent be catching and communicative like a Plague; open Rebellion shall be dasht, and the secret Treason that lurks in a Counsel shall be seen through. (1668: 35–6)

Some preachers highlighted the court’s responsibility to set the moral tone for the rest of the nation. The court was a ‘common fountain’, from which the whole nation sipped; an immoral court was, therefore, poisonous (Bellany 2002: 2). Edward Stillingfleet vilified the wits that made sport with religion, arguing that there was ‘nothing more unbecoming the Majesty of Religion, than to make it self cheap, by making others laugh’; ‘Who ever suffered in their reputation by being thought to be really good?’ More importantly, ‘who are we to give the Laws of civility to the rest of the Nation, there should any be found who should deride religion?’ (Stillingfleet 1667: 7–8, 26). William Cave and Henry Hesketh concurred: ‘Vice is never more fatally prosperous and successful, than when it has the patronage of great Examples to recommend it’ (Cave 1676: 20); ‘as you prescribe Rules of Civility and Deportment to us all, so you will give us our true measures of Religion too’ (Hesketh 1684: 34). Charles was informed that court proceedings would become public, the subject of lively discussion in the burgeoning areas of social exchange, especially in those ubiquitous fixtures of Restoration England: coffee houses. And every Coffee Room’s a Council board; Where Publick News in Print each Day’s convey’d, And all Court Mystery’s are open lay’d: (D’Urfey 1719–20: 1. 338; see also Cowan 2005)

In 1669, John Wilkins told the court that ‘A Private Person is not so much concern’d to look after Publick Fame, as that Man is, who is ingag’d in Publick Imployment’. The following year he warned Charles that kings ‘must be careful to give publike testimonies of their being religious and devout’ (1674: 16; 1670: 24). This was precisely what Charles was doing when he ordered the printing of court sermons. Court preachers offered counsel from the chapel royal pulpit by establishing parallels between the king and his court and biblical figures; between the Restoration court and ill-fated biblical courts. Charles was regularly taught the duty of kings to punish the idolatrous and corrupt. Frequent references to Jacob, Joshua, Moses, Solomon, and David offered Charles edifying examples of wisdom, military success, and grandeur, but also the dangers of fallibility. Davidic references and parallels persisted in sermons and poems both inside and outside the court (Gregory 1660; Dolben 1665: 2; Zwicker 1972:

preaching at the court of charles ii



passim). The tone was set in Gilbert Sheldon’s sermon on Charles’s return from exile: this was to be David’s deliverance from the ‘hand of Saul’ and the ‘Rebellion of Absalom and Sheba’ (1660: 1). Indeed, Charles’s personal history—his hiding in Boscobel (David’s Ziphinia) wood; his exile and return—was helpfully reminiscent of that of David. But, for the purposes of a preacher at the court of Charles II, the story of David’s sin with Bethsheba was most pertinent. Robert Creighton utilized it, ‘over and over instancing how for that single sin in David, the whole nation was undone’ (Pepys 2000: viii. 362). The proceedings of the Restoration chapel royal were thus punctuated by lively responses to contemporary political developments and national crises. Hundreds of court sermons were enjoyed, endured, or slept through by a king renowned neither for his religiosity nor for his enjoyment of the company of clergymen. Still, Charles II was willing to have almost 100 court sermons printed by royal command, demonstrating publicly that he was being counselled in the godly life, even if he had little intention of forgoing his priapic pleasures. He was also willing to be seen to be counselled in the correct form of faith and worship, visibly patronizing anti-Catholic exhortations when many commentators viewed with suspicion the open or crypto-Catholicism of the royal family, royal mistresses, and courtiers. The printing press acted as a prism, refracting royal counsel, altering its direction towards the ‘public’, and presenting the religious life of Charles, his courtiers, and courtesans. Preaching at court during the reign of Charles II was a hazardous honour, with few emoluments and the all-too-present risk of censure. One contemporary guide to advancement at court even encouraged readers to ‘beware of Men in Orders’. Translated into English from La fortune des gens de qualité (Paris, 1664), and licensed by the government censor Roger L’Estrange, it levelled three charges against churchmen at court. First, ‘they are commonly possest with chymerical fancies’; second, ‘they think they have authority to judge the whole world’; and, third, ‘they do most rashly and unworthily decry the most Gallant & accomplisht men upon the first report’ (Anon. 1675: 62). Censure of court preachers came not just from the audience seated in Whitehall pews, or the royal closet, but also from those closely observing and discussing proceedings at court, including its chapel, in Restoration England’s manifold areas of social exchange. Yet court preachers did not cower when faced with the stinging wit of Buckingham or Rochester. Rather, such invective merely emboldened the ‘Men in Orders’, further convincing them of the necessity of their godly counsel—for themselves, and for the nation.

Bibliography Adamson, John (1999).‘The Making of the Ancien-Régime Court, 1500–1700’, in John Adamson (ed.), The Princely Courts of Europe. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 7–41. Allestree, Richard (1663). A Sermon Preached before the King at White-Hall, October the 12th 1662. —— (1669). Eighteen Sermons, Whereof Fifteen Preached before the King. Anon. (1663). Certain Queries upon Dr Pierce’s Sermon at Whitehall Feb. 1.



matt jenkinson

Anon. (1675). The Courtier’s Calling: Shewing the Ways of Making a Fortune, and the Art of Living at Court. —— (1676a). An Earnest Request to Mr John Standish. —— (1676b). Falshood Unmaskt. In Answer to a Book, called Truth Unveil’d. Arber, Edward (1903–6). The Term Catalogues. 3 vols. London: Edward Arber. Barbeau Gardiner, Anne (1998). ‘A Witty French Preacher in the English Court, Dryden, and the Great Debate on the Real Presence, 1661–1688’, English Literary History, 65: 593–616. Bellany, Alastair (2002). The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Buckingham, George Villiers, Duke of (2007). Plays, Poems, and Miscellaneous Writings Associated with George Villiers Second Duke of Buckingham, ed. Robert D. Hume and Harold Love. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cave, William (1676). A Sermon Preached before the King at White-Hall, January xxiij. 1675/6. Chamberlayne, Edward (1671). Angliæ notitia. Champion, Justin A. I. (1993). ‘Review: Religion after the Restoration’, Historical Journal, 36/2: 423–30. Clavell, Robert (1680). A Catalogue of All the Books Printed in England since the Dreadful Fire of London. Cope, Jackson I. (1954). ‘Joseph Glanvill, Anglican Apologist: Old Ideas and New Style in the Restoration’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, 69/1: 223–50. Corp, Edward (2002). ‘Catherine of Braganza and Cultural Politics’, in Clarissa Campbell Orr (ed.), Queenship in Britain, 1660–1837. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 53–73. Cowan, Brian William (2005). The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Cranfield, Nicholas W. S. (1996). ‘Chaplains in Ordinary at the Early Stuart Court: The Purple Road’, in C. Cross (ed.), Patronage and Recruitment in the Tudor and Early Stuart Church. York: Borthwick Institute, 120–47. Cressy, Serenus (1663). Roman-Catholick Doctrines No Novelties: or, An Answer to Dr Pierce’s Court-Sermon, Mis-call’d the Primitive Rule of Reformation. Dobson, John (1663). Queries upon Queries: or Enquiries into Certain Queries upon Dr Pierce’s Sermon at Whitehall, Feb. 1. —— (1665). A Sermon Preached before the King on Tuesday, June 20th. 1665. Being the Day of Solemn Thanksgiving for the Late Victory at Sea. D’Urfey, Thomas (1683). A New Collection of Songs and Poems. —— (1719–20). Wit and Mirth: Or Pills to Purge Melancholy. Fincham, Kenneth, and Tyacke, Nicholas (2007). Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Religious Worship, 1547–c.1700. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fujimura, Thomas H. (1958). ‘Rochester’s “Satyr against Mankind”: An Analysis’, Studies in Philology, 55: 576–90. Goldie, Mark (1983). ‘John Locke and Anglican Royalism’, Political Studies, 31/1: 61–85. —— (1991). ‘The Reception of Hobbes’, in J. H. Burns (ed.), with the assistance of Mark Goldie, The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 589–615. Green, Ian, and Peters, Kate (2002). ‘Religious Publishing in England, 1640–1695’, in John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (eds), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iv. 1557–1695. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

preaching at the court of charles ii



Gregory, Francis (1660). David’s Returne from his Banishment Set Forth in a Thanks-Giving Sermon for the Returne of His Sacred Majestie . . . Preached at St Maries in Oxon. Oxford. Griffin, Dustin H. (1973). Satires against Man: The Poems of Rochester. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Hardy, Nathaniel (1666). Lamentation, Mourning and Woe Sighed Forth in a Sermon. Harvard MS Eng 638. Collection of Eleven Sermons by a Chaplain (or Chaplains) to Charles II. Hesketh, Henry (1684). A Sermon Preach’d before the King in his Royal Chappel of Windsor, July the 27th 1684. Huntington Library, San Marino, ST 365. Library of Sir Richard Temple. Jenkinson, Matt (2006). ‘Nathanael Vincent and Confucius’s “Great Learning” in Restoration England’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 60/1: 35–47. —— (2007). ‘The Politics of Court Culture in the Reign of Charles II, 1660–1685’. D.Phil. thesis, Oxford. Jones, R. F. (1951). ‘The Attack on Pulpit Eloquence in the Restoration: An Episode in the Development of the Neo-Classical Standard for Prose’, in R. F. Jones (ed.), The Seventeenth Century: Studies in the History of English Thought and Literature from Bacon to Pope. Stanford and London: Stanford University Press. Keay, Anna (2008). The Magnificent Monarch: Charles II and the Ceremonies of Power. London and New York: Continuum Killigrew, Henry (1666). A Sermon Preach’d before the King the First Sunday of Advent 1666. —— (1668). A Sermon Preach’d before His Majesty at White-Hall. May 29th. 1668. King, Henry (1661). A Sermon Preached at White-Hall on the 29th of May. Knight, Charles A. (1970). ‘The Paradox of Reason: Argument in Rochester’s “Satyr against Mankind”’, Modern Language Review, 65: 254–60. Lambeth Palace, London, MS 4250. ‘A Sermon preacht before his Majesty by Tho. Cartwright DD, one of his Maiesties chaplains in ordinary’. Laney, Benjamin (1663). A Sermon Preached before His Majesty at Whitehal, April 5. 1663. —— (1665). A Sermon Preached before His Majesty at Whitehall March 27th 1664. —— (1669). Five Sermons, Preached before His Majesty at Whitehall. Lingard, Richard (1668). A Sermon Preached before the King at White-Hall, July 26. 1668. In Defence of the Liturgy of our Church. Lloyd, William (1674). A Sermon Preached before the King at White-Hall, March 6 1673/4. McCullough, Peter E. (1998). Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Manning, Gillian (1993). ‘Rochester’s Satyr against Reason and Mankind and Contemporary Religious Debate’, Seventeenth Century, 8/1: 99–121. Mintz, Samuel I. (1962). The Hunting of Leviathan: Seventeenth-Century Reactions to the Materialism and Moral Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mitchell, W. Fraser (1932). English Pulpit Oratory from Andrewes to Tillotson: A Study of its Literary Aspects. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Moore, John F. (1943). ‘The Originality of Rochester’s Satyr against Mankind’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, 58/2: 393–401. Morrice, Roger (2007). The Entring Book of Roger Morrice [1677–1691], ed. Mark Goldie et al. 6 vols. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer. Norrington, Ruth (1996) (ed.). My Dearest Minette: The Letters between Charles II and his Sister Henrietta, Duchesse d’Orléans. London: Peter Owen.



matt jenkinson

Parkin, Jon (2007). Taming the Leviathan: The Reception of the Political and Religious Ideas of Thomas Hobbes in England, 1640–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Paulson, Kristoffer F. (1971). ‘The Reverend Edward Stillingfleet and the “Epilogue” to Rochester’s A Satyr against Reason and Mankind’, Philological Quarterly, 50: 657–63. Pepys, Samuel (2000). Diary, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews. 11 vols. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Pierce, Thomas (1663). The Primitive Rule of Reformation. Delivered in a Sermon before His Majesty at Whitehall, Feb. 1. 1662. Oxford. Plomer, Henry Robert (1968). A Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers who were at Work in England, Scotland and Ireland [1641–1725]. 2 vols. London: Bibliographical Society. Rivers, Isabel (1991). Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study in the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780, i. Whichcote to Wesley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rochester, John Wilmot, Earl of (1999). The Works of John Wilmot Earl of Rochester, ed. Harold Love. Oxford: Oxford University Press. St John’s College, Cambridge, MS 0.81. Sermons by Edward Stillingfleet. Sancroft, William (1694). Occasional Sermons. Scattergood, Samuel (1676). A Sermon Preached before the King at New-Market, April 2, 1676. Cambridge. Sharpe, Kevin (2000). Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Sheldon, Gilbert (1660). Davids Deliverance and Thanksgiving: A Sermon Preached before the King at Whitehall upon June 28. 1660. Simons, Joseph (1663). An Answer to Doctor Pierce’s Sermon Preached before His Majesty at White-Hall. Smith, N. A., H. M. Adams, and D. Pepys Whiteley (1970). Catalogue of the Pepys Library at Magdalene College Cambridge, I: Printed Books. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer. Sommerville, C. John (1977). Popular Religion in Restoration England. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. Sprat, Thomas (1678). A Sermon Preached before the King at White-Hall, December the 22. 1678. Spurr, John (1988a). ‘ “Latitudinarianism” and the Restoration Church’, Historical Journal, 31/1: 61–82. —— (1988b). ‘ “Rational Religion” in Restoration England’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 49/4: 563–85. —— (1991). The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Standish, John (1676). A Sermon Preached before the King at White-hal, Septem. the 26th 1675. Stillingfleet, Edward (1667). A Sermon Preached before the King, March 13. 1666/7. Sykes, Norman (1955). ‘The Sermons of Archbishop Tillotson’, Theology, 58/422: 297–302. Thormählen, Marianne (1993). Rochester: The Poems in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tillotson, John (1678). Sermons Preached upon Several Occasions. Turner, Francis (1681). A Sermon Preached before the King on the 30/1 of January 1680/1. Vincent, Nathanael (1685). The Right Notion of Honour: As it was Delivered in a Sermon before the King at Newmarket, Octob. 4 1674. Warner, J. Christopher (1998). Henry VIII’s Divorce: Literature and the Politics of the Printing Press. Woodbridge. Boydell and Brewer.

preaching at the court of charles ii



Wilkins, John (1669). Ecclesiastes: or, A Discourse Concerning the Gift of Preaching. —— (1670). A Sermon Preached before the King upon the Twenty Seventh of February 1669/70. —— (1671). A Sermon Preached before the King upon the Nineteenth of March 1670/1. —— (1674). A Sermon Preached before the King, upon the Seventh of March, 1668/9. —— (1677). Sermons Preached upon Several Occasions before the King at Whitehall. Wright-Henderson, P. A. (1910). The Life and Times of John Wilkins. Edinburgh and London: W. Blackwood and Sons. Zwicker, Steven N. (1972). Dryden’s Political Poetry: The Typology of King and Nation. Providence, RI: Brown University Press.

chapter 23

ser mons i n pr i n t, 1660 –1700 rosemary dixon

‘I Know very well that every Book-sellers Stall groans under the burthen of Sermons, Sermons’, wrote Edmund Hickeringill in the ‘Epistle to the Reader’ to one of his own published sermons, The Horrid Sin of Man-Catching (1681). ‘Sermons as common (and as commonly cryed about the Streets) as Ballads’, he continued: Sermons before his Majesty, before the Judges, before the Right Honourable, the Right Worshipful, &c. In Court, in City, in the University, in the Country, &c. Sermons of good use, Sermons of little or no use, Sermons of great use, (especially to those reading Don’s of the Pulpit, that transcribing other Men’s Works, make a shift to read them . . .) Sermons of Learned Composure both for Matter and Style; and Sermons given, and Sermon’s sold (over and over again) and some Sermon’s (perhaps) published out of meer Vanity and Itch to be seen in print. (1681: sig. A2r)

Hickeringill gives an indication of the vast numbers of sermons published in the period. Searching the English Short Title Catalogue for works published between 1660 and 1700 with the words ‘sermon’ or ‘sermons’ in their titles produces nearly 5,000 results (for an overview of the book trade in this period, see Barnard and McKenzie 2004 and Raven 2007). But this description also suggests the breadth of the sermon market. Printed sermons encompassed both two-penny chapbooks hawked about the streets like ballads, and elite occasional sermons preached at court or parliament, as well as sermons of ‘Learned Composure’ by well-educated theologians. Hickeringill gives us a sense of the uses of sermons, in particular berating those who borrow material from printed sermons for use in their own preaching. He suggests the varying commercial status of sermons for the book trade: some published sermons were bestsellers, others were printed at the expense of their authors, and sermons were also given away. Sermons were published by a range of authors from the Church of England, from the lowliest parish clergy to the archbishop of Canterbury. An important group of published sermons to which Hickeringill does not explicitly refer is the large number of sermons and works

sermons in print, –



based on sermons published by nonconformists. The purpose of this chapter is to use some of Hickeringill’s categories to explore the publishing and reception of printed sermons in the later seventeenth century, discussing the most prominent sermon-writers and texts, the commercial concerns of their publishers, and their use by different groups of readers. Recent historical and literary studies of sermons have tended to concentrate on the immediate historical contexts in which they were preached. Such an approach, which allows for consideration both of the ‘rhetorical artfulness’ and of the ‘political engagement’ of preaching, has shed much light on the operations of the sermon as a genre (Morrissey 1999: 1111). Where recent research has been interested in publishing, it has tended to be concerned with pamphlet sermons, treating them as a means to transfer the political and occasional aspects of preaching into the increasingly dominant medium of print. Little is known, however, about the broader conventions of sermon publication: what were printed sermons for, how were they promoted and packaged by their authors, editors, and publishers, and what evidence do we have about how they were read? By integrating the study of sermons with the history of the book, focusing on the material forms and publishing histories of sermon texts, this chapter attempts to provide a fuller account of the sermon in print. What is a printed sermon? Even though many preachers wrote their sermons out in full before delivering them from shorthand notes, the sermon as it was preached necessarily differed from the sermon as it was printed (Rigney, Chapter 11, this volume). Moreover, although this chapter concentrates on printed sermons, it is important to note that sermons also circulated in manuscript, whether in the form of preachers’ records, listeners’ notes on the sermons they heard, or published sermons transcribed by their readers (Craig, Chapter 10, this volume). In some cases printed sermons had been prepared for the pulpit but never preached, in others it is impossible to tell whether published sermons had their origins in preaching at all. Printed sermons nonetheless shared a set of generic conventions that made them a recognizable category for contemporary readers: they were headed by a scriptural text, and consisted of its exposition and application. The extent to which these conventions had become established by the early eighteenth century is apparent in the numerous published mock sermons, which exploited the generic features of the printed sermon for satirical ends. For example, the bookseller and author John Dunton produced a series of mock-sermons in 1715, including Bungey: or, The False Brother Prov’d his own Executioner (on Matt. 27:5), a satire on Henry Sacheverell; Frank Scammony: or, The Restoring Clergy Detected (on Ezek. 22:26), an attack on High Church clergymen; and The Hereditary-Bastard: or, The Royal-Intreague of the Warming-Pan (on Zech. 9:6), which revisited the allegation that James II’s son had been smuggled into his mother’s bed in a warming-pan. For this reason, I have adopted the broadest possible definition of a ‘sermon’, not only those printed works that we can be sure derived from a preached sermon, nor just works described as sermons on their title pages. Though a printed sermon did not necessarily correspond to a particular occasion on which preaching had occurred, it nonetheless drew on the idea and experience of preaching in general. The way in which theories of preaching could affect sermon



rosemary dixon

publication has recently been explored in work on preachers in the earlier seventeenth century, who were anxious that, by making their sermons available in print, they risked destabilizing the relationship between preacher, hearers, and the holy spirit (Rigney 2000). By the Restoration period, these concerns seem to have disappeared, perhaps as a result of a changing conception of the role of preaching in explicating the word of God. Despite this, preachers’ ideas about the function of their preaching continued to inform the ways in which their sermons were presented in print.

Publishing Occasional Sermons Elite sermon publishing in the later seventeenth century came to be dominated by a group of Church of England clergymen who can be loosely categorized by the label ‘latitudinarian’, including John Tillotson, Edward Stillingfleet, Simon Patrick, and Gilbert Burnet. Many of these preachers became particularly successful under William and Mary; Tillotson, Stillingfleet, Patrick, and Burnet were all advanced to the episcopate after 1689. However, in characterizing these writers as ‘latitudinarians’, I by no means want to suggest that they held identical doctrinal or ecclesiological positions, or that they followed similar career trajectories. Rather, these preachers form a coherent literary group: they adopted the new preaching style popularized by John Wilkins; produced similar kinds of printed sermons in a variety of subcategories; and were often published by the same booksellers.1 Tillotson was by far the most prolific: a total of 54 of his sermons appeared during his lifetime, and a further 200 after his death. Indeed, looking back at the sermons of their predecessors, eighteenth-century commentators saw Tillotson as the most important preacher of the seventeenth century. As his biographer Thomas Birch put it, Tillotson had composed ‘the greatest variety of sermons, and on the best subjects, that perhaps ever any one man has yet done’, and his preaching provided ‘the best model for all succeeding ages’ (Birch 1753: 20–2). But all these divines published sermons during their careers, many of which continued to be reprinted well into the eighteenth century. The sermons and sermon collections published by these authors between 1660 and 1700 included a range of publications, with various different contexts, purposes, prices, audiences, and textual forms. The first section of this chapter will discuss the different categories these sermons fall into, and what they can tell us about the reception of these preachers in print, paying particularly close attention to Tillotson’s preaching and publishing career. Critical attention has largely been focused on elite preachers’ ‘occasional’ sermons. Preached to important audiences at court or parliament on fast days and festivals, they provided a vehicle for their preachers to comment on public affairs. Occasional sermons were frequently published, often at the request of their auditors, and this allowed their

1

On the origins and use of the term ‘latitudinarian’ see Spurr (1988, 1991) and Rivers (1991: ch. 2).

sermons in print, –



influence to be widened beyond the temporal and spatial limitations of the pulpit. The textual features of these sermons encouraged readers to view them as authoritative official documents: a sermon preached at court, for example, tended to be published in a well-printed quarto edition, with a title page that gave information about its delivery, and announced that it had been printed ‘at his Majesties special command’. Tillotson published six sermons preached to Charles II, two sermons before the House of Commons, six sermons before Queen Mary, and three before William and Mary, as well as sermons preached at Lincoln’s Inn, and to the lord mayor and aldermen of the City of London. Sermons were delivered to commemorate the various anniversaries of the Restoration church, including the Gunpowder Plot (5 November), the martyrdom of Charles I (30 January), and the Restoration (29 May), and many of these subsequently ran through several printed editions. Sermons for 5 November took on a new importance after 1688, as they also memorialized William III’s ‘providential’ landing in England and the nation’s subsequent deliverance from the threat of popery (see, for example, Gilbert Burnet’s sermon preached before the House of Lords on 5 November 1689). The content of these occasional sermons often reflects their initial contexts, and it has been argued that they were influential in shaping public responses to national events. The sermons of Tillotson, Burnet, and others have been interpreted as a kind of Williamite propaganda in the years following the Revolution of 1688 (Claydon 1996). The pamphlet sermons of the 1670s and 1680s, on the other hand, can be seen as a part of the Restoration divines’ systematic onslaught on the misleading doctrines and political dangers of popery. Tillotson’s sermon preached to the House of Commons on 5 November 1678 and Stillingfleet’s preached to the same audience eight days later, both of which denounced the secret plots and conspiracies typical of papists, were undoubtedly important in shaping public reactions to the Popish Plot. Both these sermons, priced at sixpence each, were sold in vast numbers: Tillotson’s went through six London reprintings by the end of the year, while the entire first edition of Stillingfleet’s sermon was sold in one afternoon (McKenzie and Bell 2005: ii. 213–15). An appreciation of the potential influence of published sermons against popery appears to have been widespread. Charles II refused Tillotson permission to print a sermon he had preached at Whitehall on 22 April 1672 on the grounds that ‘it would occasion heats and disputes’ (2005: ii. 36). The sermon, a response to fears about popery at court in the wake of Charles’s Declaration of Indulgence, eventually appeared in an anonymous edition bearing no publisher’s name in its imprint as A Sermon Lately Preached on I Corinth. 3.15 (1673). Despite their subjects, these sermons were not presented as explicitly controversial works, and their authors portrayed themselves as irenic and reasonable preachers, keen to promote the practice of true religion. Claydon has suggested how Tillotson’s and Burnet’s stress on practical religion in the early 1690s can be interpreted as part of William III’s ‘godly revolution’ (1996). In the context of the anti-popery sermons of the 1670s and 1680s, such a stance was similarly deployed for controversial purposes. In his 5 November sermon Tillotson stressed the barbarity of popery: the plot is described as ‘Such a Mystery of Iniquity’, ‘Such a Master-piece of Villany’, and ‘so prodigiously Barbarous’. Yet this becomes a means for Tillotson to illustrate his own reasonableness,



rosemary dixon

and he reminds himself not to imitate the ‘destructive spirit’ of popery in his own sermon ‘whilst I am inveighing against it’ (1678: 24–8). In A Sermon Lately Preached on I Corinth. 3.15 he lamented that ‘the necessary defence of our Religion, against the restless Importunities and attempts of its Adversaries upon all sorts of persons, hath engaged me to spend so much time in matters of Dispute, which I had much rather have employed in another way’, that is in the discussion of practical Christianity (1673: 32). The structural features of the sermon made it an ideal genre for promoting the practical over the controversial. The explication of a biblical text allowed preachers to argue against popish doctrines, and its application gave them an opportunity to denounce plots and conspiracies, but the concluding passages and prayers of sermons could emphasize the ‘invaluable blessing of our Reformed Religion’, and stress the need for personal piety on the part of hearers and readers (Tillotson 1678: 35). This strategy of stressing the pastoral and practical aspects of preaching in order to distance sermons from political or theological controversy could be further developed in the textual forms of published sermons. Two small collections of Tillotson’s sermons illustrate the way sermon paratexts, such as title pages and prefaces, could provide an interpretative gloss. In the context of the trinitarian controversies of the early 1690s, Tillotson was put under increasing pressure to publish his Sermons Concering the Divinity and Incarnation, and in doing so to clarify his own views on the doctrine of the Trinity. His ‘Advertisement’ claimed that the sermons were ‘made publick’ not to satisfy his friends, but to silence the ‘importunate clamours and malicious calumnies of Others’ (1693: sig. A2v). Unfortunately they had the opposite effect, precipitating attacks on Tillotson from all angles. He then tried to use the publication of Six Sermons . . . on Stedfastness in Religion to distance himself from the ‘irksome and unpleasant work of Controversy and wrangling about Religion’. In this group of sermons concerned with family piety and religious education, Tillotson turned his attention to ‘the promoting of true Religion, to the happiness of Human Society, and the Reformation of the World’ (1694: sig. A2r). Gilbert Burnet further enhanced this portrait of Tillotson as an irenic divine in his funeral sermon, preached and published shortly after Tillotson’s death in November 1694. Burnet provided not just an account of Tillotson’s exemplary life, but also a commentary on Tillotson’s preaching and publishing career: in Burnet’s account, Tillotson had set himself to compose ‘the greatest Variety of Sermons, and on the best Subjects’ (Burnet 1694: 13). The sermon was the first biographical account of Tillotson to appear in print and was crucial in the development of his posthumous biography, distancing Tillotson from theological and political controversy with the nonjurors, and stressing his contributions to practical divinity. Publication could distance sermons from their initial contexts, particularly when sermons were reprinted and repackaged. The Sermon Lately Preached on I Corinth. 3.15 was reprinted in the 1680s, appearing in an octavo edition at threepence in 1686, and in a two-penny duodecimo edition in 1687 entitled A Seasonable New-Years Gift, suggesting that it was intended to be bought by the rich for distribution to the poor. First preached as a response to Charles’s Declaration of Indulgence in March 1672, Tillotson’s court sermon found a renewed relevance as a tract for charitable distribution in the context of

sermons in print, –



fig. 28 Frontispiece of John Tillotson’s Works (4th edn, 1704).

James II’s Declaration of Indulgence in April 1687. The transformative powers of print are particularly evident in large collections of sermons. Including sermons in an author’s collected works removed them from their initial contexts, turning them into theological reference works that memorialized their preachers. After Tillotson’s death, the booksellers Brabazon Aylmer and William Rogers, who had published his sermons over the previous two decades, produced the first folio collection of his Works (1696) (Fig. 28). This authoritative volume assembled all Tillotson’s previously published sermons in a uniform format, with a portrait of the author, contents pages, and an index of the texts preached on and discussed. Tillotson also left a substantial corpus of unpublished sermons. These were transcribed from his shorthand records by one of his chaplains, and published by the leading theological bookseller Richard Chiswell in a series of octavo



rosemary dixon

volumes (1695–1704). Chiswell arranged the sermons thematically—with volumes on topics such as sincerity, the attributes of God, and natural religion—encouraging readers to use the sermons systematically and further distancing them from the occasions on which they had been preached (Dixon 2007). It is through collections like these, rather than through the publication of pamphlet sermons, that booksellers like Aylmer and Chiswell saw the opportunity to make their fortunes. Aylmer paid Isaac Barrow’s father around £470 for the copyright in Barrow’s Works, which were edited by Tillotson and published by subscription from 1683 to 1687 (Lindenbaum 2002). A decade later, Chiswell was reported to have paid the huge sum of £2,500 for the copyright in Tillotson’s posthumous sermons, a decision that received the approbation of the bookseller John Dunton, who declared that Chiswell knew ‘how to value a Copy according to its worth; Witness the Purchase he has made of Arch-Bishop Tillotson’s octavo-sermons’ (1705: 280). Payments of this size for copyrights were almost without precedent, and reflect the profits booksellers were able to make from publications like these; it was in the form of these large collections, rather than as pamphlets, that sermons were most important as a commodity for members of the book trade.

Sermon Collections and their Readers However, Barrow’s and Tillotson’s Works were by no means the earliest important sermon collections to appear in folio. Folio collections of sermons, as a part or whole of an author’s collected works, had begun to appear in the late sixteenth century, and the publication of sermons in folio had become relatively common by the second half of the seventeenth. Nor was the publishing of sermons in folio specific to any group or party; authors with a diverse range of ecclesiological and doctrinal positions had their sermons come out in folio. The sermons of the staunch Calvinist Ralph Brownrig came out in two folio volumes, Fourty Sermons (1661) and Twenty-Five Sermons (1664), as did Jeremy Taylor’s sermons, which appeared in Eniautos (1651–3), a collection with a very different doctrinal complexion, consisting of sermons for every Sunday in the liturgical year. Both sets of sermons were reprinted after their authors’ deaths over a similar time period: further editions of Brownrig’s appeared in 1674 and 1685, and of Taylor’s in 1668, 1673, and 1678. In addition to this newer sermon material, a variety of older works continued to be reprinted. Lancelot Andrewes’s liturgically organized XCVI Sermons, first published in 1629, appeared in a new edition in 1661. If the initial publication of this volume was an attempt on the part of its editors to deploy Andrewes in support of Laudian policy, then the Restoration edition can be interpreted as a continuation of this aspect of Andrewes’s textual legacy (McCullough 1998). But older sermons by authors with Puritan leanings also appeared in Restoration editions: Threnoikos, or, The House of Mourning, a collection of funerary preaching, including sermons by Daniel Featley and Richard Sibbes, had first been published in 1640, and appeared in updated editions in 1660 and 1672.

sermons in print, –



fig. 29 Frontispiece of Edward Leigh’s Systeme or Body of Divinity (2nd edn, 1662).

It was common for folio editions of the sermons of eminent divines to appear posthumously, standing as a kind of monument to their authors. The title page of Henry Hammond’s Sermons (1675) announced that it was printed ‘According to the Authors own Copies’, while Richard Allestree’s Forty Sermons (1684) included a life of Allestree by John Fell, bishop of Oxford. Other sermon collections to appear with accounts of their authors’ lives included Robert Sanderson’s XXXV Sermons (1681), which came out with Izaak Walton’s life, first published as a stand-alone work in 1678. An account of an exemplary author’s life reinforced the message of his sermons; as Jeremy Taylor put it, ‘the good example of the Preacher is alwayes the most prevailing Homily; his life is his best Sermon’ (1649: 115). But lives were also a selling point: it was the ‘Interest of the Bookseller’, claimed Abraham Hill in his preface to Isaac Barrow’s Works, that had ‘made it usual to prefix the Life of an Authour before his works’ (1683–7: i, sig. a1r). These volumes tended to include engraved frontispiece portraits, depicting their authors in decorated, inscribed, or monumental oval frames, often including mottoes and episcopal



rosemary dixon

fig. 30 Frontispiece of Lancelot Andrewes’s The Morall Law Expounded (1642).

coats of arms. Like biographical accounts, frontispiece portraits connected sermons with the identities and authority of their preachers (Figs 28, 29, and 30). Collections by nonconformists also began to appear in folio; examples include the collected works of William Bates (1700), John Flavell (1701), and John Bunyan (1692). These publications adopted the conventions used in the folio collections of Hammond, Allestree, Barrow, and Tillotson (particularly the frontispiece portrait), perhaps in an attempt to give nonconformist authors the same status and legitimacy. Which readers had access to sermon collections like these, and how did they use them? Folio volumes costing between twenty and thirty shillings each would have been too expensive for most readers, while their size meant that they could be read only at a desk or table, suggesting that they were to be used for serious and systematic study. Probably the most important constituency of readers for works like these were

sermons in print, –



clergymen and students studying for holy orders, and copies were certainly acquired for clerical and institutional libraries. As John Wilkins observed, preachers needed books ‘for the invention [i.e., finding] of matter’ for their sermons (1646: 61). His preaching manual Ecclesiastes (1646; see Kneidel, Chapter 1, this volume; see also Figs 1–3) thus provided not only instructions on the composition and delivery of sermons, but also a series of detailed reading lists. Wilkins particularly recommended the practical treatises and sermons of English writers, which ‘for their clearnesse and fulnesse in matters of practicall Divinity, are generally esteemed to be of a speciall use and eminency’ (1646: sig. A2r). Ecclesiastes continued to be reprinted for eighty years after its initial publication and had reached its thirteenth edition by 1718, with major revisions by Wilkins for the second 1646 edition and the 1669 edition, and by John Williams for the 1693 edition. Over the course of these different editions, Wilkins’s reading lists were expanded to include new authors and publications (Rivers 1993). Wilkins’s original lists are crammed with references to the sermons of eminent divines, including Donne, Andrewes, and Sanderson, and the updated reading lists in later editions of Ecclesiastes added more recent authors as well, including Barrow, Patrick, William Sherlock, Stillingfleet, and Tillotson. The updates were not to the taste of all Ecclesiastes’s readers: John Edwards complained that the editors had ‘filled [the book] with a great deal of Trash’ or ‘MushromDivinity’ (1705: pp. xxii–xxiii). Nonetheless, surviving interleaved and annotated copies of the 1693 edition suggest that Ecclesiastes was used intensively by both Church of England clergymen and dissenting ministers: a copy belonging to Theophilus Pickering, prebend at Durham in the early eighteenth century, is now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (8vo Rawl. 414); and Isaac Watts’s copy, in which he recorded the recommendations of his tutor Thomas Rowe, is in Dr Williams’s Library, London (564.D.6). In addition to recommending sermons as a source of material, Wilkins also suggested that sermons be used as a tool for understanding the Bible (1646: 44–5). The form of sermons dictated that they deal with ‘particular parcells and texts of scripture’, and so it made sense to use sermons as a kind of biblical commentary (Green 2000: 112). Other guides to the corpus of printed sermons, such as John Verneuil’s Nomenclator of such Tracts and Sermons (1637, 2nd edn 1642) and William Crowe’s An Exact Collection or Catalogue of our English Writers on the Old and New Testament (first published in 1663, with another edition in 1668), also suggest that sermons be used in this way. Verneuil praised sermons with the flourishing rhetorical question: ‘where can the judicious Reader finde a more ample and well furnished field, then here? where like the Bee, he may sucke the juice of various and sweet flowers, to make up his owne hony combe’ (1637: sig. A2v). His Nomenclator indexed sermons according to their texts, so that readers could use the catalogue to find expositions of particular places in scripture. Crowe’s Exact Collection was also organized by biblical text, though it drew on a wider variety of works, including commentaries and expositions as well as sermons. For Crowe, as for Verneuil and Wilkins, sermons were the characteristic form of English theological writing: ‘Neither do I remember that I have ever read, or seen . . . Sermons any manner of ways comparable to what our English treasury affords.’ Printed sermons are ‘a key whereby you may unlock to your self, all the treasures of holy Scripture’ (1663: sigs A5v–6v).



rosemary dixon

Annotated copies of reading lists and guides to sermons in print also provide evidence about which books clergymen and students had access to and read. Two interleaved copies of the 1663 edition of Crowe’s Exact Collection give contrasting pictures of the reading carried out by their owners. The owner of the first of these copies is not identifiable, but seems to have begun using and annotating his copy soon after its initial publication (Bodl., 8vo Rawlinson 296). He added references not only to various recent publications not included, such as the sermons of Brownrig, Hammond, and Taylor, but also to the sermons of an older generation of divines, including Donne’s LXXX Sermons (1640), and the posthumously published folio collection of Sermons (1629) by Arthur Lake. He appears to have used Andrewes’s sermons intensively, and went through the laborious process of changing the page numbers of all Crowe’s references to Andrewes’s XCVI Sermons from the 1661 edition to an earlier one. This annotated copy is a reminder of the shelf life of books like these, which were still being used decades after they had first been published. The second copy belonged to Edward Rudd, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and later rector of North Runcton in Norfolk, and was being used in the early eighteenth century. Rudd noted that, ‘I interleaved ys Book in order to insert such late Expositors & Sermons as have been printed since ys Catalogue was drawn up’ (BL, 4999.a.6). This annotation is on the interleaved sheet following the title page. Among Rudd’s numerous and meticulous additions are references both to many of the important sermon collections published in the 1670s and 80s, such as Allestree, Hammond, and Barrow, and to more recently published collections by Sherlock, Tillotson, and William Wake. Where the owner of the first of these copies of the Exact Collection used and referenced the older publications of Jacobean divines, Rudd looked forward to a newer generation of preachers who would dominate sermon publishing in the early eighteenth century.

Nonconformist Sermons in Print The genre of sermons in print was by no means restricted to the clergy of the Church of England, and printed sermons and other texts based largely on sermon material were also published by authors from a range of different positions on the nonconformist spectrum.2 Print was strategically deployed by nonconformist groups, and became particularly important after the Act of Uniformity (1662). No longer able to communicate with their flocks from the pulpit, ejected ministers turned to publishing as an alternative means of pastoral instruction. As Richard Baxter put it: 2 Though the sermons of at least some nonconformist ministers differed in style and content from those preached by Church of England clergymen, little has been written about changing sermon styles in this period (though see Morrissey 2002). For a conformist’s polemical representation of the differences, see Patrick (1669), in which he made specific attacks on published sermons by two ejected ministers: W[illiam] B[ridge], Christ and the Covenant (1667), and Thomas Watson, The Doctrine of Repentance (1668).

sermons in print, –



The Writings of Divines are nothing else but a preaching the Gospel to the eye, as the voice preacheth it to the ear . . . Books are (if well chosen) domestick, present, constant, judicious, pertinent, yea, and powerful Sermons: and alwayes of very great use to your salvation: but especially when Vocal preaching faileth, and Preachers are ignorant, ungodly or dull, or when they are persecuted and forbid to preach. (1673: pt 1, p. 60; see also Walsham 2004)

In addition to restrictions on preaching, nonconformists also faced obstacles to publishing their works, particularly the Licensing or Printing Act of 1662, which required that theological books be licensed by representatives of the bishop of London or archbishop of Canterbury. Licensing as a whole was an impractical and unworkable system, and many books were published without licences. But the easily provable offence of being published without a licence could be used to attack works that were perceived as seditious or schismatic, and it is clear that authorities targeted prominent nonconformist authors. Not only the Licensing Act, but also statute and common law against defamation, slander, libel, and sedition, could be used to proceed against published works by nonconformists (Keeble 1987; McKenzie 2002). Printed sermons were an important genre for nonconformists, but were potentially limited by legal restrictions on both preaching and printing. Did these restrictions affect the way that nonconformists adapted and appropriated the conventions of the printed sermon for their own ends? In answering this question it would be misleading to suggest that nonconformist sermons were necessarily a coherent group or category, or that all nonconformist groups had the same attitude to sermons in print. To some nonconformist sects printed sermons were anathema: most Quakers considered it important not to record their ‘preaching’ in textual form, despite the fact that they used printed texts of other kinds as an integral part of their ministry (Peters 2005). The published sermons of moderate nonconformist ministers, on the other hand, had a great deal in common with the sermons of latitudinarian clergymen. Just as too sharp a division between the categories of nonconformist and conformist obscures the common ground between moderate ejected ministers and Low Church clergymen, a distinction between the sermons published by the two groups is similarly misleading. Their sermons were not only similar in content, but were often also similar books, published by the same booksellers, and presumably marketed in the same way to similar audiences. Brabazon Aylmer, for example, published the nonconformist ministers William Bates and John Howe as well as Barrow and Tillotson (Lindenbaum 2002). Richard Baxter’s preaching and publishing career provides a good illustration of the way that the political position of nonconformists affected the textual status of their sermons (Keeble 1984). At the Restoration, Baxter was appointed as a royal chaplain and invited to preach in important London pulpits. Two occasional sermons published in 1660 both appeared in handsome and official quarto editions: A Sermon of Repentance, preached before the House of Commons and printed at the order of parliament, and The Life of Faith, preached before Charles II and published by royal command. Post-1662, such prestigious pulpits and publications were off limits to Baxter, and he published relatively few sermons, the exceptions being a trio of funeral sermons from the early 1680s:



rosemary dixon

A True Believer’s Choice and Pleasure (1680), preached at the funeral of Mary Coxe; Faithful Souls shall be with Christ (1681), preached at the funeral of Henry Ashurst; and A Sermon at the Funeral of John Corbet (1681). However, many of Baxter’s sermons from the 1650s and early 1660s continued to be reprinted and reworked over the course of this period. The Life of Faith, for example, was published in expanded form in a quarto edition in 1670 with a directory instructing the reader how to live by faith, and in an abridged form in 1690 as a broadsheet entitled Memorables of the Life of Faith, Taken out of Mr B’s Sermon, ‘Published thus for the poor that want money and memory’. Now or Never (1662), based on a series of sermons preached at St Anne’s Blackfriars in 1661 and 1662, had appeared in at least five London editions by 1689, as well as three editions published in Scotland. Baxter also reworked sermon material in his bestselling devotional works. The Saints Everlasting Rest, which was first published in 1650 and had reached its twelfth edition by 1688, was, as its title page announced, ‘Written by the Author for his own use’ during a period of illness, ‘and afterwards Preached in his weekly Lecture: And now published’. A Call to the Unconverted (1658), which was in its twenty-third edition by 1685, was also based on sermons, as its structure makes clear. It is headed by a scriptural text, divided into a series of ‘doctrines’ and ‘uses’, and gives the reader the illusion he is listening to a spoken discourse: ‘You see then, though this be a rough unwelcome Doctrine, it is such as we must preach, and you must hear’ (Baxter 1658: 22–3). Several of these works circulated in vast numbers, and were read by conformists and nonconformists alike. Baxter himself claimed that more than 20,000 copies of A Call to the Unconverted were printed within a year of its appearance ‘besides many thousands by stollen Impressions, which poor Men stole for Lucre sake’ (1696: pt 1, pp. 114–15). The Call was sufficiently cheap to be reasonably accessible: a duodecimo edition cost around a shilling. Forgoing any profits from publishing, Baxter made special arrangements with his publisher Nevill Simmons to receive free copies of his books for charitable distribution (1696: apps, 117–18). Baxter’s published works were, of course, aimed at different readers with varying levels of education, religious experience, and financial means. While the prices and textual features of some of his sermons suggest an elite, mostly London-based audience of ministers and wealthy laymen, others were directed to the poorest (and remotest) sorts of readers. In the preface to a sermon collection from the 1650s, for example, Baxter claimed that he would rather that his sermons ‘might be numbred with those Bookes that are carryed up and downe this Country from doore to doore in Pedlers Packs, then with those that lye on Booksellers Stalls, or are set up in the Libraries of learned Divines’ (1655: 120). Whatever their intended audiences, Baxter’s own categorization of his works stressed the pastoral utility of his published sermons: he classified almost all of them as ‘practical’, rather than ‘doctrinal’ or ‘controversial’ (Keeble 1983: 156). Just as Tillotson later used published sermons in an attempt to distance himself from controversy, Baxter too emphasized the pastoral aspects of his sermons, stressing that they were a contribution to practical rather than controversial divinity: ‘My work is to plead the Cause of God and holiness against the profane and sensual world, and no further to plead any Cause of my own, then is necessary to that’ (1662: sig. A7v).

sermons in print, –



However, Baxter’s own stated aims for the sermons he saw through the press represented only one of the possible strategies for presenting nonconformist sermons. The numerous collections of ‘farewell sermons’ by ejected ministers published in 1662 and 1663, many of which included a version of Baxter’s last London sermon, took a different approach. Baxter claimed to be horrified that his sermon was included in these collections, and condemned the actions of ‘covetous’ Booksellers who ‘abused’ his sermon: ‘they stiled it A Farewel Sermon, and mangled so both Matter and Style, that I could not own it; besides the printing it to the offense of Governours’ (1696: pt 2, p. 303). While Baxter had emphasized only the practical aspects of his sermons, and attempted to procure licences so that his work could be published legally, the compilers of collections of farewell sermons had no such compunctions. Though the prefaces to many of these collections denied that their contents were in any way seditious or schismatic, the very robustness of the denials perhaps suggests the opposite: ‘We are bold to tell thee, that in all the Volume, there is no Design, but against Sinne; no Plot, but against Hells Policy; no Treason, but to seize upon the Treasury of Heaven, and to obtain a Glorious Crown there’ (Calamy et al. 1662: sig. a3v). Those hostile to dissent certainly interpreted these collections politically: in Roger L’Estrange’s opinion, farewell sermons were ‘most Audacious, and Dangerous Libels’, and he cited them in his arguments for more stringent control of the press (1663: sig. A3v). Farewell sermons were particularly important in the construction of a specifically nonconformist identity in the early 1660s (Appleby 2007). The title pages of the various different collections were often illustrated with sets of miniature portraits of the ejected ministers, giving them a collective visual identity. Their prefaces used the same figurative language to describe both the sermons and the fate of their preachers. In a pun on the terms of the Act of Uniformity, which stipulated that the livings of ejected ministers should be filled as if ‘the person so offending were dead’, the sermons were described as ‘the Preachers last Legacies to their several Congregations, a little before their Civil, though Voluntary, Deaths’. Congregations had assembled to ‘hear their dying Pastors preach their own funeral sermons’, their farewell sermons ‘the words of dying men’ (Calamy et al. 1663: sig. A2v). Sermons published by representatives of the nonconformist sects, particularly Baptist preachers like John Bunyan, were different again. Much of Bunyan’s published output was produced during his imprisonment in Bedford Jail, and he presented himself as a very different kind of author from the learned divines discussed so far. Some of Bunyan’s published works, particularly The Pilgrim’s Progress, appeared in multiple editions, sold in vast quantities, and must have been read across ecclesiological and doctrinal divides. Several of Bunyan’s published sermons also appeared in multiple editions and presumably had a wider audience than Bunyan’s immediate circle: A Few Sighs from Hell (1658) and Come and Welcome, to Jesus Christ (1678) had both been through at least ten editions by 1700, Good News for the Vilest of Men (1688) was in its fourth by 1700, and all three of these treatises continued to be reprinted in the eighteenth century. In these works, Bunyan, like Baxter, focused on the practical rather than the controversial. In A Few Sighs from Hell, he admonished his readers: ‘Read it not to pick quarrels with it, but to profit by it; and let not prejudice either against the Authour, or manner of delivery,



rosemary dixon

cause thee to stumble and fall at the truth’ (1658: sig. C1v). Like Baxter’s Call, both Good News and Come and Welcome were directed to the unconverted and encouraged them to turn to Christ. Bunyan explained that he had written and printed Good News ‘to try this simple Method of mind: Wherefore I make bold thus to Invite and Encourage the Worst to come to Christ for Life’ (1688: sig. A2r–v). Much of Bunyan’s published sermon material, though, was far less successful, at least in terms of the numbers of editions produced. The sermon-treatises first published in the posthumous folio collection of Bunyan’s Works, such as Israel’s Hope Encouraged, The Desire of the Righteous Granted, The Saints Privilege and Profit, and Christ a Compleat Saviour, remained relatively obscure. The folio, organized by the Baptist comb-maker Charles Doe, was published by subscription in 1692 with the imprint of the bookseller William Marshall, also the publisher of the leading Independent minister John Owen. With its frontispiece portrait and elaborate index, the folio can be seen as an attempt to give Bunyan the same kind of status as the learned divines who appeared in this format (Owens 2002). Certainly the preface to the volume commended Bunyan’s pastoral labours using the usual commonplaces: ‘His design was, in Preaching, and Publishing (what he Preach’d,) to recommend the Truth and Grace of God to all, that either heard him, or should read his Works’ (Bunyan 1692: sig. A2v). The resulting book was, however, less than a complete success. Disputes with the booksellers who owned the copyrights in Bunyan’s previously published works meant that the volume was incomplete, subscribers were required to make an additional payment as the size of the volume had been underestimated, and the material form of the book (with multiple typefaces and inconsistent indexing) detracted from its imposing folio status. If, as seems likely, the book circulated mainly among Baptists, it can hardly have had great significance in placing Bunyan alongside more established sermon authors. We might question, then, how far authors like Bunyan were meaningfully part of the same market for printed sermons in which preachers like Tillotson were so successful.

Chapbook Sermons and Cheap Print Though a variety of sermons by Church of England and nonconformist divines were made available in small formats and at low prices, the cheapest and most accessible sermons published in the later seventeenth century were probably chapbook sermons. These duodecimo pamphlets of twenty-four or forty-eight pages (that is, one or two sheets), often printed in old-fashioned black-letter type, cost only two- or threepence each.3 The trade in religious chapbooks like these had begun in the early seventeenth century, and grew up alongside the trade in chapbook romances and ‘merriments’, and secular and religious ballads. Much of the trade in chapbooks remained in the hands of 3 The prices of a selection of chapbooks are given in an advertisement in The Christians Best Garment (1678).

sermons in print, –



those booksellers who also published ballads, and in the 1670s and 1680s chapbook publishing was dominated by Thomas Passinger (or Passenger), William Thackeray, John Wright, and John Clarke (Blagden 1953; Watt 1991). These booksellers used their ballad distribution networks to sell chapbooks as well, and produced special trade lists to advertise their little books to chapmen. Around a third of the chapbooks in Thackeray’s trade list of 1689 were religious in character, and, though relatively few of these are explicitly described as sermons, many are loosely based on the sermon form, and consist of the explanation and application of a scriptural text. The religious instruction offered by these texts, however, can never be entirely separated from their status as commodities, as the following advertisement for chapbook sermons makes clear: ‘Read them over carefully, and practice them constantly, and rest assuredly thou wilt find much comfort in them to thy own soul; and are but two pence a piece’ (Jones 1685). It is arguable that the publishers of chapbooks were far more concerned with profits than presenting readers with the authentic writings of important divines, and they certainly used a variety of less than scrupulous practices in marketing their books. In some cases, the chapbook publishers produced bastardized versions of works by famous authors, such as Now or Never (1683), based on Baxter’s series of sermons with the same title. In others, they may even have invented authorial personae to go with the texts they were trying to sell. The most frequently reprinted chapbook sermons were attributed to two authors whose origins remain mysterious: John Hart, usually styled ‘DD’ (Doctor of Divinity), and Andrew (sometimes William) Jones, MA, described in the generic phrase ‘student in divinity’. Though John Hart may have begun as a genuine author, he later became a ‘publisher’s creation’, his name a convenient marketing label (Green 2000: 483–7). It seems probable that many of the chapbook sermons attributed to Hart and Jones were never preached at all, though their publishers used the conventions of the printed sermon to suggest that they had been. The text of Great Britain’s Warning Piece; or, Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem (1689?), for example, was accompanied by a woodcut of a divine in the pulpit, with an hourglass on one side and a skull on the other, preaching to an attentive congregation. Chapbook sermons also appeared with woodcut portraits depicting generic divines (often in rather old-fashioned dress), suggesting that they had been delivered by eminent preachers from important pulpits. Including some kind of authorial portrait was a marketing trick that worked equally well for these two-penny pamphlets as for expensive folio collections. Chapbook sermons were published in vast quantities and over long periods of time. R[obert] J[ohnson]’s Dives and Lazarus, preached at St Paul’s Cross and published in 1620, first appeared as a chapbook in 1623; Thackeray published the ‘twenty-second’ edition in 1684. Not all chapbook sermons had quite such long histories, and many of the most frequently reprinted titles originated in the 1650s and continued to be printed until the early eighteenth century. If the edition numbers provided by booksellers are to be believed, then ‘Andrew Jones’s’ Morbus Satanicus went from its fifth edition in 1656 to its thirty-sixth in 1685, and his Black Book of Conscience from a sixth edition in 1658 to a forty-fifth in 1698. ‘John Hart’ was only marginally less successful: his Godly Sermon of Repentance had reached its fourteenth edition by 1682, and Christ’s First Sermon was in



rosemary dixon

its twenty-sixth edition by 1680. The volume of stock handled by chapbook publishers was certainly high: the stock of just one chapbook publisher in 1664 would have been sufficient to supply a chapbook to one in every fifteen families (Spufford 1981: 100). Though religious chapbooks and sermons would have accounted for only a proportion of these books, this nonetheless gives an indication of the scale of the business of chapbook publishers. These texts may have been the fruits of profit-hungry publishers, but their religious content was nonetheless seriously received. A group of chapbook sermons survives from the library of Frances Wolfreston (d. 1677), the wife of Francis Wolfreston of Statfold, near Tamworth, a churchgoing landowner with an income of around £500 a year (Morgan 1989). In addition to various books of interest to literary historians, such as early editions of Elizabethan and Jacobean poets and playwrights, Wolfreston acquired at least sixteen religious chapbooks, including a number of sermons, such as editions of Andrew Jones’s Morbus Satanicus (1662) and The Black Book of Conscience (1658), Matthew Killiray’s The Sinners Sobs; or, The Sinners Way to Sions Joy (1667), and The Afflicted Souls Preparation for Death (1668), spuriously described on its title page as ‘written by Tho. Robins, B. of D.’ .4 Wolfreston annotated her books with her name, and in their blank spaces she wrote verses, apparently of her own composition, meditating on religious subjects. The responses of readers like Wolfreston to chapbook sermons are a reminder that these little books could be read seriously and carefully. Another reader and annotator of chapbooks, about whom far less is known, also illustrates this point. Thomas Hutton owned a series of chapbooks ascribed to Matthew Killiray, including two sermons: The Godly Mans Gain and the Wicked Mans Woe and The Sinners Sobs. These books may have been the result of commercial endeavours, but were nonetheless seriously read by those concerned with their own salvation. On the back of the title page of the Sinners Sobs Hutton added the following: ‘Thomas Hutton[’s] / Book God give / him grace on it to look / and when the bells / begines to knowl / the lord in heaven / Receive his Soul.’5

Conclusion Exploring the various categories of sermons Hickeringill discussed in his preface begins to illustrate how the genre operated in print. The importance of the printed sermon is clear not just from the sheer numbers of sermons we know to have been published and their profitability for the book trade, but also from the variety of these publications. Sermons in print ranged from chapbook sermons available to the poorest and remotest

4

Now in the British Library, Cup. 408 d.8 (1–16). Hutton’s copies of Killiray’s chapbook sermons are now in the William Andrew Clark Memorial Library, UCLA; an electronic facsimile of this volume is available through Early English Books Online. 5

sermons in print, –



readers on the fringes of print culture, to monumental collected folio editions fit to stand in the most eminent clerical and institutional libraries. Sermon authors and publishers alike developed strategies for packaging sermons, extending their specific contexts and occasions, or even manufacturing false histories for sermons that had never been preached at all. Yet the conventions of the printed sermon, particularly the inclusion of preachers’ portraits, were remarkably consistent across the breadth of the sermon market. On the one hand, it is necessary to investigate the ways that print gave sermons new relevance outside the contexts in which they had been preached, extending their pastoral utility. On the other, it is important to consider how the material features of printed sermons continued to connect them to the occasions on which they had been preached and the identities of their preachers. The printed sermon was a genre that could be adopted by different individuals and groups for their own purposes, and one that would have been familiar to most seventeenth-century readers in one or other of its many incarnations. Through detailed attention to the publishing histories, material forms, and, above all, the purchasers and readers of sermon texts, we can begin to understand its significance and appeal.

Bibliography Appleby, David (2007). Black Bartholomew’s Day: Preaching, Polemic and Restoration Nonconformity. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Barnard, John, and McKenzie, Donald F. (2004) (eds). The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iv. 1557–1695. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barrow, Isaac (1683–7). The Works. 3 vols. Baxter, Richard (1650). The Saints Everlasting Rest. —— (1655). True Christianity. —— (1658). A Call to the Unconverted to Turn and Live. —— (1662). Now or Never. The Holy, Serious, Diligent Believer Justified, Encouraged, Excited and Directed. —— (1673). A Christian Directory. —— (1696). Reliquiæ Baxterianæ. Birch, Thomas (1753). The Life of the Most Reverend Dr John Tillotson. 2nd edn. Blagden, Cyprian (1953). ‘Notes on the Ballad Market in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century’, Studies in Bibliography, 6: 161–80. Brown, David D. (1958). ‘The Text of John Tillotson’s Sermons’, The Library, 5th ser., 13: 18–36. Bunyan, John (1658). A Few Sighs from Hell. —— (1688). Good News for the Vilest of Men. —— (1692). The Works of that Eminent Servant of Christ, Mr John Bunyan. Burnet, Gilbert (1689). A Sermon Preached . . . on the 5th. of November. —— (1694). A Sermon Preached at the Funeral of the . . . Lord Archbishop of Canterbury. Calamy, Edmund, et al. (1662). An Exact Collection of Farewell Sermons. —— (1663). A Compleat Collection of Farewell Sermons. Caudle, James (2000). ‘Preaching in Parliament: Patronage, Publicity and Politics in Britain, 1701–60’, in Ferrell and McCullough (2000), 235–64.



rosemary dixon

Claydon, Tony (1996). William III and the Godly Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (2000). ‘The Sermon, the “Public Sphere” and the Political Culture of Late SeventeenthCentury England’, in Ferrell and McCullough (2000), 208–34. [Crowe, William] (1663). An Exact Collection or Catalogue of our English Writers on the Old and New Testament. Dixon, Rosemary (2007). ‘The Publishing of John Tillotson’s Collected Works, 1695–1757’. Library, 7th ser., 8: 154–81. Dunton, John (1705). The Life and Errors. —— (1715). Bungey: or, The False Brother Prov’d his own Executioner. —— (1715). Frank Scammony: or, The Restoring Clergy Detected. —— (1715). The Hereditary-Bastard: or, The Royal-Intreague of the Warming-Pan. Edwards, John (1705). The Preacher. A Discourse, Shewing, what are the Particular Offices and Employments of those of that Character in the Church. Ferrell, Lori Anne, and McCullough, Peter E. (2000) (eds). The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History 1600–1750. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Green, Ian (2000). Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hickeringill, Edmund (1681). The Horrid Sin of Man-Catching. [Jones, Andrew?] (1685). Morbus Satanicus. 36th[?] edn. Keeble, Neil H. (1983). Richard Baxter: Puritan Man of Letters. Oxford: Clarendon Press. —— (1984).‘Richard Baxter’s Preaching Ministry: Its History and Texts’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 35: 539–59. —— (1987). The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England. Leicester: Leicester University Press. L’Estrange, Roger (1663). Considerations and Proposals in order to the Regulation of the Press. Lindenbaum, Peter (2002). ‘Authors and Publishers in the Late Seventeenth Century, II: Brabazon Aylmer and the Mysteries of the Trade’, Library, 7th ser., 3: 32–57. McCullough, Peter E. (1998). ‘Making Dead Men Speak: Laudianism, Print, and the Works of Lancelot Andrewes, 1626–1642’, Historical Journal, 41: 401–24. McKenzie, Donald F. (2002). Making Meaning: ‘Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays, ed. Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. ——, and Bell, Maureen (2005). A Chronology and Calendar of Documents Relating to the London Book Trade 1641–1700. 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Morgan, Paul (1989). ‘Frances Wolfreston and “Hor Bouks”: A Seventeenth-Century Woman Book-Collector’, Library, 6th ser., 11: 197–219. Morrissey, Mary (1999). ‘Interdisciplinarity and the Study of Early Modern Sermons’, Historical Journal, 42/4: 1111–23. —— (2002). ‘Scripture, Style and Persuasion in Seventeenth-Century English Theories of Preaching’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 53: 686–706. Owens, W. R. (2002). ‘Reading the Bibliographical Codes: Bunyan’s Publication in Folio’, in Neil H. Keeble (ed.), John Bunyan: Reading Dissenting Writing. Oxford and New York: Peter Lang, 59–78. Patrick, Simon (1669). A Friendly Debate between a Conformist and a Nonconformist. Peters, Kate (2005). Print Culture and the Early Quakers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. R., B. (1683). Now or Never Work out your Salvation with Fear and Trembling.

sermons in print, –



Raven, James (2007). The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade. New Haven: Yale University Press. Rigney, James (2000). ‘ “To Lye upon a Stationers Stall, like a Piece of Coarse Flesh in a Shambles”: The Sermon, Print and the English Civil War’, in Ferrell and McCullough (2000), 188–207. Rivers, Isabel (1991). Reason, Grace and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England 1660–1780, i. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (1993). ‘ “Galen’s Muscles”: Wilkins, Hume, and the Educational Use of the Argument from Design’, Historical Journal, 36: 577–97. Spufford, Margaret (1981). Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth Century England. Methuen. Spurr, John (1988). ‘Latitudinarianism and the Restoration Church’, Historical Journal, 31: 61–82. —— (1991). The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689. New Haven: Yale University Press. Taylor, Jeremy (1649). The Great Exemplar. [Tillotson, John] (1673). A Sermon Lately Preached on I Corinth. 3.15. —— (1678). A Sermon Preached November 5. 1678. —— (1693). Sermons Concerning the Divinity and Incarnation. Tillotson, J. (1694). Six Sermons . . . on Stedfastness in Religion. [Verneuil, John] (1637). A Nomenclator of such Tracts and Sermons. Oxford. Walsham, Alexandra (2004). ‘Preaching without Speaking? Script, Print and Religious Dissent’, in Julia Crick and Alexandra Walsham (eds), The Uses of Script and Print, 1300–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Watt, Tessa (1991). Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilkins, John (1646). Ecclesiastes, or, A Discourse Concerning the Gift of Preaching.

chapter 24

the ser mon cu lt u r e of the gl or ious r evolu tion: w il l i a m ite pr e achi ng a n d jacobite a n tipr e achi ng, 1685–1702 tony claydon

It is easy to assume that the Glorious Revolution of 1688–9 coincided with, or even caused, the death of British sermon culture. Most dramatically, the forced removal of James II compromised notions of divine monarchy, and so weakened providential interpretations of politics that had found a home in the pulpit. The deposition also produced one of the series of mass polemical disputes—ranked alongside the Exclusion Crisis, or the ‘Rage of Party’ under Queen Anne (see Ihalainen, Chapter 25, this volume—in which secular pamphlets, broadsides, and newspapers began to displace preaching at the centre of public debate (Goldie 1980). Again, the Revolution set in train events that ended pre-publication censorship in 1695, and so freed press writers to compete with the clergy as commentators on current events (Astbury 1978). Most obviously, the 1689 settlement included the ‘Toleration Act’. This not only allowed people to avoid the preaching of the established church by going to dissenting meeting houses on Sundays, but permitted many to escape any kind of preaching at all by hobbling the mechanisms that had policed church attendance. One might, therefore, argue that the events of 1688–9 marginalized sermons in national life. Their blow to the medium may not have been instantly fatal, but they surely shortened its reign as a dominant feature of English life. Yet, if the Revolution did this damage, there were ironies. As the first part of this chapter will suggest, the advance of William and Mary, prince and princess of Orange, to the English throne was one of the most intensively preached events of British and Irish

preaching in the glorious revolution



history. It was marked by an elaborate tuning of pulpits, in which Williamite sermons became the centrepiece of Orange propaganda, and careful steps were taken to silence clerical oratory supporting the displaced ruler. Stranger still, it was the Revolution’s opponents who did most to question sermon culture. As the second section suggests, Jacobitism was marked by its hostility to preaching. Suffering ejection from the pulpit, James’s supporters criticized, mocked, and subverted sermons till the very authority of the genre was questioned.

Preaching the Revolution It is not, perhaps, surprising that William made intense use of sermons to justify his armed expedition to England in the autumn of 1688, and to legitimate his acceptance of James’s crown from a constitutional convention a few months later. To start, he came from the United Provinces of the Netherlands. This was a place where sermons were often used to comment upon politics, and where the prince of Orange had benefited from pulpit support as he had come to lead the Republic in the French invasion crisis of 1672 (Ihalainen 2005: 49–69). William’s claim to be saving English Protestants from the Catholic James may also have inclined him to the medium. Choosing this argument, the prince posed as protector of people who had always insisted on preaching as the core of religious life, so it made sense to use a form of propaganda that implicitly supported its message. Moreover, William’s head of publicity during his expedition was Gilbert Burnet. Burnet was an exiled Anglican clergyman who (though a master of many forms of public relations) had a particular reputation as a preacher, and would mount the pulpit frequently as he served as William’s chaplain (Claydon 1996a: 29–30). All this created an affinity between sermons and the Orange cause that became steadily clearer as the prince’s fortunes rose. It was Burnet who first preached William’s virtues in Britain. Once the prince and his chaplain had landed at Torbay on 5 November, they set up their first headquarters in Exeter, a city whose Jacobite corporation, bishop, and chapter had fled. This desertion freed the cathedral for Dutch use. Burnet seized the opportunity, organizing a service of thanksgiving in the building and speaking from its pulpit on William’s first Sunday in England. Unfortunately, we do not know precisely what he said, but comments by contemporary observers give us hints. They record the biblical text on which he based his remarks, they summarize his sentiments, and they suggest that a wide public came to know at least the gist of his oratory (Anon. 1688[?]; Anon. 1689a: 48; Whittle 1689; Morrice 2007: iv. 34).1 The sermon may even have been reproduced on the press the prince brought over with him from Holland. Weaving these clues together with Burnet’s better-evidenced preaching over the revolutionary winter (Burnet 1689a, b, c), we can be 1 The first work quoted here was a spoof sermon (discussed below), which would only have worked with an audience familiar with what Burnet said at Exeter.



tony claydon

pretty sure the chaplain used his Exeter address to launch the main themes of the pulpit propaganda that would mark William’s whole reign. Burnet’s text was the final verses of Psalm 107: 40–3. This passage described how God had lifted the needy out of affliction as he had silenced the wicked, and was thus a hymn to providential rescue from the enemies of the true faith. It is, therefore, likely that the preacher told his audience what they would hear repeatedly in the weeks and years ahead. The English—like the Jews referred to in the psalm—had received blessings for upholding God’s word in a world of idolatrous foes. However, they had also been punished for backsliding in the cause, and under James this had endangered their liberty and the Protestant religion. Now, though, God was giving them another chance. He had raised up a glorious instrument of deliverance in William, and swept away papist idolatry, and now Burnet invited the nation to rally round its saviour in renewed godliness. This pulpit message became even stronger as William’s grip on England tightened. As I have suggested elsewhere, it was pressed into greater service because the prince’s original manifesto to the English—which had argued that he came only to ensure James met a free parliament—was rendered obsolete by events. When the king fled his realm in December, William’s path to the Crown seemed open. Yet simply seizing power would jar with earlier promises, so the Orange party began to stress the providential case for the prince’s greatness, which it had put from the pulpit, rather than the legal reasoning of its manifesto (Claydon 1996b; Claydon 1996a: 24–63). A vital step was to recruit the London clergy. A group of the capital’s clerics had led Anglican resistance to James II’s policies after 1685; they had become widely respected for this, as well as for their popular pulpit oratory; and, once William had arrived at St James’s Palace, they were comprehensively wooed. Won over by William’s invitations to meet him, by his flattery, and perhaps even by hints of ecclesiastical promotion (Burnet had written to the prince naming the men to favour, and many did end up on the episcopal bench in the 1690s), ministers such as John Tillotson, Simon Patrick, William Wake, and Edward Stillingfleet began a series of preached addresses (Claydon 1996a: 64–9). These prepared the public for the prince’s advance to the throne, and then justified his elevation once it occurred on 13 February 1689. The most graphic act of approval was to preach in front of William himself. Addressing a man who might be accused of usurping a legitimate king, the London clerics made it clear they rejected this interpretation. They rammed the point home by becoming the new ruler’s chaplains, by printing their sermons to him and his wife, and by repeat performances. The published record shows Tillotson going to William’s pulpit twice in the first half of 1689; Wake going twice as well; and Patrick speaking once before William became king, once after, and once more at his church in St Paul’s Covent Garden, boasting that this was ‘the second part’ of a discourse begun before the prince (Patrick 1689b: title page). Printed versions also advertised the clerics’ stance, as title pages had ‘preached before the prince of Orange’, and later ‘preached before the king’, splayed across them. This was important: frontispieces might be the only part of a work examined by booksellers’ customers and were often produced in extra numbers for fly-posting. And, if audiences had the patience to get beyond titles, the main bulk of the works reinforced

preaching in the glorious revolution



the legitimacy of William’s advance. Like Gilbert Burnet’s own 23 December 1688 address to the prince (which rapidly appeared in multiple editions, including one in French), the preaching stressed the divine blessing of the Orange arrival (Burnet 1689a). Patrick, therefore, told William at St James’s Palace that his expedition had been designed by ‘Gods gracious Providence’ (1689a: 33); while Wake later told the king at Hampton Court that it had been ‘wonderful Deliverance God has given us out of the hand of our Enemies’ (1689: 32). Combined with equally supportive sermons away from William’s court, this preached campaign made a powerful case for the prince’s advance to the throne. As it got going, however, it faced a difficulty. William had arrived in London in December, and called a national convention (constituted in exactly the same way as a parliament) to settle the constitution now that James had fled. This body was elected in early January, it met towards the end of the month, and instantly fell into debate over whether the old king had forfeited his crown and who should be offered it now if he had. Yet, in the middle of this difficult discussion, a powerful reminder of Stuart legitimacy arose. Every year since the 1660 Restoration, the thirtieth day of January had been held as a solemn fast, with appropriate preaching, to atone for the nation’s sin in murdering Charles I. For Orange supporters, this was an embarrassment. Just as they hoped to depose a king, England’s annual denunciation of rebellion cropped up. William’s party, however, coped well; and the reaction showed just how effectively they could use the pulpit as a medium of propaganda. The main tactic was to have the day after the regular fast—so 31 January 1689—declared a day of thanksgiving for William’s ‘glorious’ deliverance of the country. An order decreeing celebration and church services (which would inevitably include a sermon) was issued by the lords assembled for the constitutional convention on 22 January: and this named the 31st of the month as the date for the event in London, with the rest of the country following a fortnight later (House of Lords 1688). This thanksgiving, of course, allowed instant rebuttal of Stuart claims. If royal legitimacy was the message of 30 January, it would instantly be neutralized by a reminder to Londoners that God protected Protestantism as well as monarchs. The short delay outside the city lessened this immediacy a little, but it also permitted provincial clerics to imitate what had been said in the prestigious pulpits of the metropolis. The potential was largely realized. The thanksgiving appears to have been well observed in the capital, and we have numbers of surviving sermons from across the country. Most followed the lead of Tillotson, who spoke at Lincoln’s Inn; Patrick, who addressed his parish at Covent Garden; and Burnet, who preached to the House of Commons (Morrice 2007: iv. 508; Tillotson 1689; Patrick 1689b; Burnet 1689c). So William Wilson preached to his Nottingham audience that all should wonder at the miracle of God’s deliverance of English liberty and Protestantism (1689: 16), while Thomas Watts told the people of Orpington that William was God’s ‘glorious instrument’ (1689: 26–7). George Halley’s preaching to those assembled in York Minister asserted that the prince of Orange had been nursed by heaven for his role in the Revolution: this man of honour, virtue, and courage had spent his life fighting the forces of France and Rome, and had married a princess of England’s own church and nation



tony claydon

(Halley 1689). There was similar pulpit stuff from places as diverse as urban Poplar on the eastern edge of London, and the village of Almer, tucked deep in the Dorset countryside (Peck 1689; Ollyffe 1689); while the participation of such Presbyterian divines as Timothy Cruso and John Flavell ensured the message was heard beyond official church services (Cruso 1689b; Flavell 1689). More subtly, the 31 January thanksgiving neutered the repentance of the preceding day by suggesting it should substitute for it. Of course, the proclamation declaring the festivities did not explicitly cancel the fast. Such an annulment would have aligned William with the traitorous regicides in the popular mind, and would have abrogated the 1660 statute establishing the solemnities of 30 January, thus troubling the prince’s claims to constitutional rectitude. Yet the close juxtaposition of thanksgiving and fast still raised doubts about the latter. Clerics must have wondered if they should mark the occasion, and what they should say in sermons if they did. Their confusion is probably revealed in the lack of printed addresses for 30 January in 1689. We know that some clerics preached on the day, but they did not publish their oratory, and other evidence suggests many either shied away from the traditional condemnation of resistance to rulers on this occasion, or were so viciously savaged for their words that they probably wished they had been more prudent. Thus the Whig news-gatherer Roger Morrice noted that only about ten of the capital’s preachers used the fast to argue for James’s continuing legitimacy, and that those who did earned the contempt of the inhabitants (Morrice 2007: iv. 508). Meanwhile, the vicar of Newcastle upon Tyne, John Marsh, gave an address against rebellion of the sort he claimed had not hitherto ‘been thought improper’: yet for his pains was sucked into pamphlet controversy with the Williamite writer James Welwood. Welwood said he had had the ‘unhappiness’ to hear the sermon, had been ‘scandaliz’d’ by suggestions that William’s invasion was an illegitimate revolt, and that he now wondered whether the ‘bad Custom’ of loyalist preaching on the fast should continue (1689: A2v, 14). Similarly, although the rector of St Giles in the Fields, John Sharp, was invited to preach to the lower house of the convention, his address seems to have caused controversy ([Hickes] 1691: 1), and he definitely ran into trouble in the supplications immediately afterwards. Praying for the old king in the collect for the royal family, he raised the hackles of an audience that was trying to persuade the Lords that James had forfeited his position. His subsequent appeal for pardon from the Speaker showed how difficult it was to negotiate this fast, when the very next day was to carry an almost diametrically opposed message (Sharp 1825: i. 99–102). Having neatly done what it could to eliminate the embarrassment of 30 January, the Williamite preaching campaign strengthened through the rest of the year. It enjoyed a set-piece opportunity at the coronation of the new monarchs on 11 April. Although there were several innovations in ceremonial and oaths at this event that stressed the new regime’s commitment to Protestantism and constitutional monarchy (Schwoerer 1992), it was perhaps the sermon by Gilbert Burnet that packed the punch. Published in three London editions and one Scots one by the end of 1689, this legitimated recent events by taking just government as its theme. Burnet said such rule was not possible when kings broke through laws (with the heavy implication that this is exactly what James had done),

preaching in the glorious revolution



and then moved to suggest William would provide true and godly government. In fact, so exciting was the crowning of a just ruler that it might speed the descent of God’s kingdom to bless the world (Burnet 1689b: esp. 20). Weeks later, Burnet moved again to put preaching at the heart of Orange polemic. He suggested to Queen Mary the first of a great series of monthly fasts that would mark the campaigning summers of her husband’s reign (Doebner 1886: 14). Regularly for the next nine years—till the peace of Ryswick in 1697—William’s subjects would be called off work for a day of repentance and churchgoing; and at the heart of the services were sermons that explained God’s divine purpose in promoting a king who would battle the Antichristian forces of Louis XIV (Claydon 1996a: 105–10). By November, Burnet was unveiling the next tactic of Williamite preaching: hijacking the calendar of Stuart legitimacy. Since 1605, the fifth day of this month had been kept as a national thanksgiving for salvation from the Gunpowder Plot, and suitable pulpit oratory against traitors had been delivered. In his address to the Lords on this day in 1689, however, Burnet noted that 5 November also marked the date of William’s landing at Torbay the year before. He followed the altered liturgy for the annual event by saying that this day must now be kept as a memorial for both 1605 and 1688. These were dual Protestant providences that proved God’s care for England, so the full version of the sermon’s title when published stressed that this was not just ‘gunpowder treason day’ but ‘likewise the day of his majesties landing in England’ (Burnet 1689d). All this might leave the impression of a one-man show. Gilbert Burnet was absolutely central to the polemical campaign: he frequently instigated the pulpit propaganda’s elements, and was one of its most prolific and innovative performers. But he was not alone. At least thirty different clergymen published fast sermons during the 1690s war, with Burnet’s allies Tillotson, Wake, and Patrick to the fore. Bishops’ orders would have ensured clergy in every parish would respond to the need to say something from the pulpit on these humiliations (Patrick 1692: 8–9; Kidder 1693: 18–19; Burnet 1694: preface). Nor was Burnet unique in commandeering the Stuart calendar. In the years after the Revolution, other clerics helped to reinterpret not only 5 November but also— audaciously—the annual fast on 30 January. This event was retained despite its embarrassment to the Orange cause in 1689, and the techniques of a preacher like William Lloyd showed why. In his hands, memory of the regicide was made to serve the joint monarchs by arguing that the true cause of the Civil Wars had been national sin. Charles I’s loss had been a punishment for England’s transgressions, but now, after 1689, England was ruled by moral and reforming princes, whose example led the kingdom away from any danger. Keeping the January fast could be a useful reminder of what might happen if William and Mary were not followed and obeyed (Lloyd 1691, 1697). Similar numbers of people joined in a further element of the regime’s self-presentation. Following the example of James I in 1603 (McCullough 1998), Queen Mary increased the frequency of sermons preached at court by holding services on Wednesday afternoons, and she encouraged a much higher publication rate of these addresses than any previous monarch had (compare Jenkison, Chapter 22, this volume). As a result, she broadcast the royal household as a great engine of piety and religious instruction; the very many clergy



tony claydon

who printed their oratory before the rulers served as accessories to this campaign (Claydon 1996a: 96–8). In many ways the apogee of this sermon campaign came when the queen died in 1694. Her tragically early death released a flood of preaching lamenting that her virtues were now evident only in heaven. This outpouring was led by Thomas Tenison, who as the recently promoted archbishop of Canterbury spoke at the Westminster Abbey funeral, but he was followed by many others around the country, at least twenty of whom printed their efforts, and by an anthology of the sermons given in the Netherlands (Tenison 1695; Anon. 1695). In fact, as Williamite preaching unfolded over the reign, its true triumph may have been to draw in a wide variety of clergy. By providing a range of ways in which people might get involved, and making participation a virtual condition of holding a post in the established church, the campaign recruited people from a diverse political and ecclesiological spectrum. So, for example, dissenters joined enthusiastically in fast-day preaching. Such calls to repentance fitted their Puritan heritage well, and participation was a way to demonstrate that the nonconformists’ allegiance to the monarchs could continue even though the 1689 toleration had allowed them to reject the state’s church (Cruso 1689a; Shower 1694; Fuller 1696). At the other end of the scale, while many Tory-leaning clergy would have found it hard to avoid preaching for the regime because of the bishops’ energetic enforcement of fasts and thanksgivings, many would have been positively happy to get involved in the sermon campaign because there was little to object to in large parts of it. For instance, Queen Mary seemed quite happy with generalized calls to faith and morality in preaching to her court. Thus, although Tory clerics may have worried that the new regime encouraged popular rebellion, or that it had granted too much liberty to dissent, they were not forced to endorse all the rulers’ policies as they advanced an image of the court as a pulpit powerhouse (Claydon 1996a: 186–8). Even men who had worried about the legality of William’s invasion could find a way back to loyalty through the pulpit propaganda. Since the campaign’s main message was the godly blessing of 1688 rather than its strict constitutional rectitude, men concerned about the latter could bury doubts in vigorous expression of the former. A prime case here is William Sherlock. Wrestling over whether to swear loyalty to the new monarchs for a year after the Revolution, this leading London cleric rowed furiously with Burnet over the change of regime, but finally saw God’s hand in the events of 1688 and accepted William as a providential rather than popular choice of ruler. Sherlock publicized this personal conversion in a controversial, if anonymous, political tract ([Sherlock] 1691). Yet he also advertised it in printed sermons to the court, an addess of 30 January before William’s House of Commons, and a moving pulpit eulogy to his congregation in the Temple on the death of Mary in 1694 (Sherlock 1692a, b, 1694). Overall, therefore, there are considerable difficulties with a view of 1688 as the death of sermon culture. Not only did the new regime invest heavily in the pulpit as a medium of its polemic, but it found the strategy paying dividends as it drew a wide range of people to support it. One might, indeed, argue that preaching reached a peak of prominence within Williamite publicity. In several areas, particularly the use of monthly fasts and the printing of court sermons, the Orange court stimulated an output of pulpit oratory that

preaching in the glorious revolution



had rarely, if ever, been matched before. And the challenge to common conceptions did not stop there. As has been suggested, if there was an attack on sermon culture in this period, it did not come from the Revolution itself or its supporters, but from those who rejected the change of regime.

Jacobitism and Preaching English preaching was as naturally averse to James II’s cause as it was well disposed to William’s. While the stress on passive obedience in Anglican sermons after the Restoration might have suited him, James faced a deeper problem with the genre that he never quite overcame. This, of course, was his Catholic faith. Across Europe, the CounterReformation had a vigorous preaching tradition, but it was hard to deploy this in England or in favour of Catholic rule over a Protestant country. If James tried to use clerics of his own religion to promote his power, he would face obvious difficulties. Catholic priests would not only be excluded from the most prestigious and widespread pulpits (those in the Protestant establishment’s churches), but would stoke suspicion that his cause was hopelessly popish. Yet, if James tried to use Protestant preachers, the situation was as bad. They would either be hard to find (at least from the winter of 1685, when many Anglicans joined a polemical campaign against his promotion of Catholicism), or they would face accusations that any use of the pulpit to promote political loyalty to this ruler would inevitably comfort a religion implacably hostile to their own. James faced these difficulties while still king (see App. III.16). For example, he was unable to use an important technique of propaganda that had been deployed by his brother Charles II, and that would be brought to a peak by his daughter. We have seen Mary ordering the printing of much of the preaching she heard in the royal palaces. This enhanced her reputation for godliness, but it also emphasized the close collaboration between the Crown and the official church, and the monarchy’s full involvement in national celebrations and atonements. So, many of Mary’s sermons were written and performed by invited bishops, or by one of the forty-eight Anglican chaplains who were maintained (in teams of four per month in a yearly cycle) by the royal household. Many of the sermons were also delivered on occasions such as Christmas, Lenten Sundays, Easter, fasts, or thanksgivings—events that were supposed to bring the English people together in unified worship of God. Though far less frenetic, Charles had used sermon publication in similar ways; but James could not follow this example (see Jenkinson, Chapter 22, this volume). Although the formal system of royal chaplaincy was preserved between 1685 and 1688, the king did not hear preaching by its members (or any other Anglicans for that matter) because—with the single exception of his coronation—he did not participate in Protestant services. Although there were national days of prayer that generated printed sermons, he could not be fully integrated into these events, as he must attend worship in a different church from that of the huge bulk of his subjects. As a result, although James did publish some of the clerical oratory he heard while monarch, the



tony claydon

corpus of work had strange features and gaps that would have robbed it of much cogency for an English Protestant audience.2 Take, for example, an event that might have been expected to have united James and his people at the start of his reign. On the night of 5 July 1685, the king’s forces defeated a rebel army under the duke of Monmouth at Sedgemoor in Somerset, and a national thanksgiving was organized to celebrate. Monmouth’s actions in trying to claim the throne by force had been broadly unpopular, but the pulpit response misfired. There was an official court sermon on the thanksgiving day. Henry Hesketh, one of the king’s chaplains, preached a thoroughgoing denunciation of resistance to rulers that celebrated the recent victory for loyal forces. Yet the title page of the printed version admitted England’s ruler had not been there (Hesketh 1685). Abandoning the usual formula ‘preached before the king’, the sermon was described merely as preached in the ‘Chapel Royal at Whitehall’; so an audience of palatial stone had to substitute for the king’s physical presence. Other off-notes sounded through the rest of the reign. No addresses to royalty on 5 November were published (and were almost certainly not delivered, given that this festival pretty much demanded a denunciation of Catholicism), and, when sermons preached directly to the king were printed, their advertised location was often his majesty’s own personal chapel at St James rather than any official Anglican space (Persall 1686; Cross 1687; Wall 1687). This left the impression that the oratory was essentially for private rather than national consumption. Even sermons that claimed to have been performed in official churches could call attention to their oddness. On 30 January 1688, Edward Scarisbrike addressed the king in Whitehall’s ‘Chapel Royal’, though in fact this may have been James’s new chapel in the palace, which was completed in 1687 and which he used for services parallel to those in the old Chapel Royal (Thurley 1998: 51–2). To add to the sense of formal appropriateness, the preacher had his efforts printed ‘by his Majesties’ Command’. Yet the impression of a normal royal sermon was undermined both by the explicit identification of Scarisbrike as priest of the Society of Jesus (had Jesuits now penetrated to the heart of England’s spiritual life?) and by entitling the work ‘Catholick Loyalty’. It is unclear what the idea behind this label was, but its effect was almost certainly counter-productive. Scarisbrike may have wished to demonstrate that members of the Roman Church were as supportive of English monarchy as Protestants, or he may have wanted to suggest the principles he outlined were ‘catholic’ in the sense of universal, or he may have been intervening in an internal Catholic debate about the true political principles of his church (did it allow resistance to rulers?), which has recently been highlighted by Steven Pincus (2009: ch. 5). Yet, to a suspicious audience, the sermon title could suggest only that Scarisbrike’s call to unquestioning obedience was a papist instrument to rob them of their faith and liberties. James’s difficulties with English sermons deepened when he lost the throne. Rapidly, it became impossible to advocate his cause from any recognized pulpit in the Stuart realms. Over three 300 English clergy had sufficient doubts about the Revolution that they 2 I am grateful to Andrew Barclay, with his unrivalled knowledge of James II’s court, for reassurance that the available evidence confirms my suggestions here.

preaching in the glorious revolution



refused to swear the oaths of loyalty to William and Mary, but this led swiftly to suspension from pastoral duties and a little later to their dismissal. The bulk of Ireland remained loyal to James, and the old king went to Dublin to lead his forces until he was defeated at the 1690 Battle of the Boyne. But, although Jacobite sermons from this episode were published, they lacked much purchase in England, being preached by Catholics and aimed at an Irish audience that was openly questioning the constitutional link between the two realms (Dulany 1689). No printed sermons emerged from the brief Jacobite rebellion in the north of Scotland after the Revolution, and James’s supporters were rapidly removed from power in overseas colonies. As a result, William’s men soon gained a monopoly of preaching in the English-speaking world. (This, of course, explains why they put so much store in the medium.) Exclusion from pulpits did not mean that Jacobites could not participate in the vigorous print culture of the 1690s. A clandestine propaganda effort ensured the production of pieces promoting the exiled king, and permitted the distribution, for example, of the two declarations James made to his former subjects in 1692 and 1693. In addition, Jacobite writers proved adept at works that did not call overtly for a Stuart restoration, and so were harder to identify as treasonous, but that nevertheless cast William’s regime in black colours. Often, scathingly critical pamphlets were produced just before parliament met in the autumn, and these sometimes set the agenda for backbench criticism of government waste, corruption, or incompetence (e.g. [Lawton] 16933). Yet, for all this print activity, sermons could not be part of the campaign, and were replaced by the other kinds of polemic in Jacobite literary culture. Denied the framing device of an original public performance, James’s polemicists produced little material in anything like a sermon form, even though some of their leading writers—such as George Hickes and Charles Leslie—were deprived clergymen with fine preaching reputations. In fact, William’s opponents turned even more decisively against the pulpit than this suggests. Forced to react to their protagonists’ heavy use of preaching, and unable to respond in kind, supporters of the exiled monarch reacted with denunciation and mockery of their enemies’ polemical efforts. As has been hinted, this gave a distinctly anti-sermon character to Jacobite politics, and may have done more to undermine the genre than any of the more direct effects of 1689. This feature of Jacobitism emerged remarkably early. Above, we noted that the actual words of Burnet’s sermon in Exeter during the invasion in November 1688 have not survived. Yet a superficial glance through certain library catalogues would suggest otherwise. Listed among the holdings of the Bodleian, Yale, and Lambeth Palace libraries, and several other repositories of seventeenth-century material, is a work entitled Dr Burnet’s Sermon before . . . the Prince of Orange, at the Cathedral at Exon. Calling this volume up for consultation, however, resolves the contradiction. Its pages contain a vigorous defence of non-resistance to monarchs that it would have been impossible for Burnet to preach at a time when he was chaplain to a force challenging James’s authority. The chosen text was 3 This was the famous ‘Hush Money Paper’, which stimulated a major parliamentary inquiry into bribery and corruption.



tony claydon

2 Samuel 1:14. Here, Israel’s King David expressed his horror that his predecessor Saul, a divinely anointed ruler, had been killed by a non-royal stranger (albeit at Saul’s own request) after losing a battle with the Philistines. Expanding on this, the sermon stressed the sanctity of monarchs. It emphasized that this could not be dimmed, however much they misbehaved; and then came closer and closer to direct reflection on the sin of William’s actions. It called any attempt to invade a king’s dominions ‘the most fearful and horrid Crime’ (Anon. [1688?]: 9) and went on to launch a standard rehearsal of the doctrine of passive obedience. If any reader had not realized by this point that this address was a fake, the final sentence was explicit. Having expounded a position directly contrary to that of William’s chaplain, the writer pulled off his mask. The discourse he had just provided, he complained, ‘ought to have been insisted on by the Doctor [Burnet], rather than that seditious Sermon that he preach’t at Exon’ (Anon. [1688?]: 12).4 This counterfeit sermon is important because it was one of the first pieces we might label ‘Jacobite’, in the sense of a movement opposed to Williamite power in England. Although undated, it was very probably produced in the winter of 1688–9; its author would want to respond while Burnet’s real oratory was still fresh, and it contains no reflections on slightly later works by Burnet (such as the coronation sermon) that James’s supporters would have found even more offensive. If this is right, the fake sermon was pre-dated in the Jacobite opus only by a few pamphlets written in the actual course of William’s invasion to counter his widely circulated manifesto (for these early pamphlets, see Claydon 1996b: 91–7). Thus one of Jacobitism’s earliest productions was a piece that bitterly satirized preaching; this was a technique to which James’s supporters returned, again with Burnet as the butt. In 1690, a broadside appeared, reputedly listing biblical texts upon which Burnet (by now bishop of Salisbury) recommended the clergy of his diocese to base their sermons. The broadside, though, was another Jacobite spoof, and the texts systematically denounced resistance to monarchs, including such gems as Samuel 26:9; ‘Who can stretch forth his hand against the Lord’s anointed and be guiltless’ (Anon. 1690b). Such satire may have been popular (both the works just analysed reached a second edition, though of course this may have reflected the propagandists’ energy rather than audience enthusiasm), but mockery was not the chief weapon against Williamite sermons. Rather, Jacobites concentrated on an altogether darker set of reflections on the principles and morals of their preachers. Given that anyone who remained in William’s church, and who spoke for him from the pulpit, would have had to have renounced their previously sworn loyalty to James, accusing such men of time-serving became an easy line of attack. Naturally, such a line was particularly attractive to those who had themselves lost positions as a result of less flexible allegiance. This argument was also powerful because the Church of England had reacted to its suffering under Cromwell by stressing non-resistance to monarchs in its preaching under Charles II. William’s clergy could therefore be denounced not only for opportunism, but for reversing a position they had held very recently and very vehemently. 4 Incidentally, Donald Wing’s STC for 1640–1700 lists this as a genuine Burnet piece; it needs to be de-attributed.

preaching in the glorious revolution



Exploiting this weakness, Jacobite pamphleteers savaged the reputation of their rivals. They pointed out the divergence between what had been preached before and after the Revolution, and made few bones about the temporal temptations that they suggested accounted for the change. So, for example, the author of a letter to John Tillotson in the early 1690s demanded that William’s archbishop of Canterbury publish a clarifying discourse as soon as he humanly could. He needed to do this, the letter insisted, to explain how he could now espouse his support for the Revolution, given that it seemed so clear ‘an apostacy from what you [once] preached and writ, pretended to believe, and would have others believe’ (Anon. [1690?]: 3). Other writers noted that true faith had given way to perjury after the Revolution, or noted the inconsistencies of such key Williamite preachers as Burnet, William Beveridge, or William Sherlock, sometimes in somewhat grinding verse (Anon. 1689b; Anon. 1690a; Anon. 1691; Anon. 1692: 4). The early months of 1695 witnessed a particular burst of anger in reaction to the sermon elegies for Mary. As the queen had displaced her own father on the throne, she became a particularly rich symbol of treachery in Jacobite eyes, and the prospect of her virtues being lauded from Williamite pulpits proved too much for two deprived clergy. Thomas Ken, who had been bishop of Bath and Wells until his principles prevented him accepting the Revolution, took aim at Thomas Tenison for his funeral sermon. The pastor, Ken claimed, should have warned Mary about her sins rather than polishing her memory. That he had not was a ‘Scandal to all good men’, and was explained by his fear of losing the favour he had recently enjoyed, and by blatant ‘Time-serving’ (Ken 1695: 3–6). Charles Leslie, meanwhile, attacked a number of orators who had recently spoken about Mary from the pulpit. He accused them of being ‘Foul-mouth’d’ and of having had their ‘prostitute Consciences’ bought by royal hire, and took particular aim at Sherlock’s recent oration ([Leslie] 1695: 17). At its most extreme, this strand of Jacobite writing could rhetorically defrock the entire Williamite clergy. It sought to de-legitimate the whole establishment’s preaching by suggesting its members had no clerical authority. The trick was to suggest that the ministers’ apostasy in swallowing the events of 1688–9 had been so bad that they had ceased to be part of any legitimate church. They had broken the principles of the English establishment so utterly that they had effectively left it. Indeed, some Jacobites argued that the Williamite clergy had transgressed Christian morality so blatantly that their congregations should have nothing to do with them, let alone listen to their sermons. Samuel Grascombe made this point explicitly. He argued that the Williamites’ actions had literally excommunicated them. Thus must they therefore suffer the social ostracism that living outside the gospel community entailed ([Grascombe] 1693). Others used language traditionally directed at the Roman Catholic establishment to declare it a false church. According to these polemicists, supporters of the new regime had adopted ‘damnable’ doctrines to suit their interests; their priesthood was ‘schismatic’, and their liturgy had become ‘Blasphemous and Diabolical’ ([Hickes] 1689: 1; Anon. [1691]: 38, 40). One writer made the point by reminding his audience that the Tudor Reformation had been effected, and so the Church of England had been founded, by the Royal Supremacy. To question monarchical power now by accepting James’s deposition was, therefore, to



tony claydon

remove the ‘palladium’ of the English establishment, and so to destroy the entire basis on which the clergy exercised their functions ([Johnston] 1694: 17). Charles Leslie, meanwhile, suggested that popular disgust had un-churched the establishment clergy de facto, if not de jure. Posing as a conforming cleric, he warned that easy compliance with the revolution had encouraged the Presbyterians in both Scotland and England, but had also ‘broken our authority with the people’ ([Leslie] 1695: 3). The Jacobites, therefore, undermined respect for preaching, and did so as a key element of their rhetorical strategy. From the very earliest days of the movement, they coped with their enemy’s reliance on sermons by mocking the genre, by questioning the motives of those who produced pulpit orations, and by pointing out how messages had conveniently reversed after 1689. Ultimately, they denied the authority of Williamite clerics to lecture congregations at all. Of course, condemnation of preaching was not new. In a society where sermons were an important medium of political ideology, individual addresses had often got into trouble in the seventeenth century; other chapters in this volume will provide more than sufficient evidence. Yet what was unusual, if not absolutely unique, about the Jacobites’ campaign was its comprehensive nature. Denied access to the pulpit themselves, James’ supporters came close to categorizing all preaching in English (and not just particular sermons with particularly offensive contents) as illegitimate. Jacobites argued that it was impossible to speak from the pulpit in William’s realms without perjuring oneself or being complicit with an ungodly regime; in these circumstances all sermons were diabolical, and must be either derided or denounced. Suggesting Jacobites savaged English sermon culture in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution is not, of course, to deny that that culture may have reached a pinnacle in exactly this period. As we saw, the regime put its considerable resources behind preaching; in fact it was the vigour and success of Williamite preaching ministry that forced its opponents to attempt something to dull the impact. What this survey may tell us, however, is to be cautious about overly neat or overly teleological accounts of early modern history. The year 1689 is often seen as a ‘modernizing’ step towards constitutional government, liberal economics, personal freedom, and religious toleration (for a recent summary in this vein, see Dillon 2006). Given this, it is tempting to believe it also harmed such ‘pre-modern’ features of society, such as the central place of preaching within popular experience. In fact, however, the picture is far more subtle and complex. At least in the years immediately after William’s invasion, it was his supporters who promoted sermon culture, and his supposedly backward-looking enemies, the adherents of divine right and hierarchy, who displayed a cynicism more usually associated with later centuries.

Bibliography Anon. [1688?]. Dr Burnet’s Sermon before his Highness the Prince of Orange, at the Cathedral of Exon. —— (1689a). The Expedition of the Prince of Orange for England. —— (1689b). Observations on the Late Revolution in England. Edinburgh [?].

preaching in the glorious revolution



Anon. (1690a). The Trimming Court-Divine or Reflections on Dr Sherlock’s Book. —— (1690b). The Declaration of Almighty God, in Some Few Texts of Scripture, Recommended to the Conforming Divines. —— [1690?]. A Letter Sent to Dr Tillotson Several Months Ago. —— (1691). To the Reverend Dr Beveridge, an Euchariston. —— [1691]. The Loyal Martyr Vindicated. —— (1692). A Modest Apology for the Loyal Protestant Subjects of King James. —— (1695). A Collection of the Funeral Orations Pronounc’d by Publick Authority in Holland. Astbury, R. (1978). ‘The Renewal of the Licensing Act in 1693 and its Lapse in 1695’, Library, 5th ser., 33: 296–322. Burnet, Gilbert (1689a). A Sermon Preached in the Chapel of St James . . . 23 December. —— (1689b). A Sermon Preached at the Coronation of William III and Mary II. —— (1689c). A Sermon Preached before the House of Commons, 31 January, 1688. —— (1689d). A Sermon Preached before the House of Peers in the Abbey of Westminster on 5 November. —— (1694). Four Discourses. Claydon, Tony (1996a). William III and the Godly Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (1996b). ‘William III’s Declaration of Reasons and the Glorious Revolution’, Historical Journal, 39: 87–108. Cross, John (1687). A Sermon Preached before their Sacred Majesties . . . in their Majesties Chapel at St James’ . . . on the Feast of St Benet. Cruso, Timothy (1689a). The Churches Plea for the Divine Presence to Prosper. —— (1689b). The Mighty Wonders of a Merciful Providence. Dillon, Patrick (2006). The Last Revolution: 1688 and the Creation of the Modern World. London: Jonathan Cape. Doebner, R. (ed.) (1886). Memoirs of Mary, Queen of England 1689–1694. Dulany, Edmond (1689). A Sermon Preached before the King in Christ Church, Dublin on AshWednesday. Dublin. Flavell, John (1689). Mount Pisgah, a Sermon. Fuller, Francis (1696). Peace in War by Christ, the Prince of Peace. Goldie, Mark (1980). ‘The Revolution of 1689 and the Structure of Political Argument’, Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, 83: 473–564. [Grascombe, Samuel] (1693). Considerations upon the Second Canon in the Book Entitled ‘Consitutions and Canons’. Halley, George (1689). A Sermon Preached in the Cathedral . . . the Fourteenth Day of February. Hesketh, Henry (1685). A Sermon Preached in his Majesties Chapel-Royal at White-Hall upon the 26th Day of July, 1685. [Hickes, G.] (1691). An Apology for the New Separation. House of Lords (1688). An Order of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal Assembled at Westminster in this Present Convention for a Public Thanksgiving. Ihalainen, Pasi (2005). Protestant Nations Redefined . . . 1685–1772. Leiden: Brill. [Johnston, Nathaniel] (1694). The Dear Bargain: or a Representation of the State of the English under the Dutch. 2nd edn. [Ken, Thomas] (1695). A Letter to the Author of a Sermon. Kidder, Richard (1693). The Charge of Richard, Lord Bishop of Bath and Wells to the Clergy of his Diocese.



tony claydon

[Lawton, Charlwood] (1693). A Short State of our Condition. [Leslie, Charles] (1694). Querela temporum. —— (1695). Remarks upon Some Late Sermons. Lloyd, William (1691). A Sermon Preached before the Queen at White-Hall, January 30. —— (1697). A Sermon Preach’d before the House of Lords . . . 30 January. McCullough, Peter E. (1998). Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morrice, Roger (2007). The Entring Book of Roger Morrice [1677–1691], ed. Mark Goldie et al. 6 vols. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer. Ollyffe, John (1689). England’s Call to Thankfulness. Patrick, Simon (1689a). A Sermon Preached in the Chappel of St James . . . 20 January. —— (1689b). A Sermon Preach’d at St Paul’s Covent Garden on 31 January, 1688. —— (1692). The Bishop of Ely’s Letter to the Clergy of his Diocese. Cambridge. Peck, Samuel (1689). Jericho’s Downfall, a Sermon. Persall, John (1686). A Sermon Preached before the King and Queen . . . in their Majesties Chapel at St James’s on the Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost. Pincus, S. (2009). 1688: The First Modern Revolution. New Haven: Yale University Press. Scarisbrike, Edward (1688). Catholick Loyalty upon the Subject of Government and Obedience. Schwoerer, Lois G. (1992). ‘The Coronation of William and Mary, April 11 1689’, in Lois G. Schwoerer (ed.), The Revolution of 1688–1689: Changing Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 107–30. Sharp, Thomas (1825) (comp.). The Life of John Sharp. [Sherlock, William] (1691). The Case of the Allegiance due to Sovereign Powers. —— (1692a). A Sermon Preached before the Honourable House of Commons. —— (1692b). A Sermon Preached before the Queen at White-hall, February the XIIth. —— (1694). A Sermon Preached at the Temple-Church, December 30. Shower, John (1694). No Peace to the Wicked. Tenison, Thomas (1695). A Sermon Preached at the Funeral of her Late Majesty Queen Mary. Tillotson, John (1689). A Sermon Preach’d at Lincoln’s-Inn-Chappel on 31 January, 1688. Thurley, Simon (1998). The Lost Palace of Whitehall. RIBA. Wake, William (1689). An Exhortation to Mutual Charity and Union among Protestants in a Sermon . . . May 21. Wall, William (1687). A Sermon Preached before the King and Queen in their Majesties Chappel at St James’s on Sunday 24th October. Watts, Thomas (1689). A Sermon Preached upon February the 14th. Welwood, James (1689). A Vindication of the Present Great Revolution in England in Five Letters Pass’d betwixt James Welwood M. D. and Mr John Marsh. Whittle, John (1689). An Exact Diary of the Late Expedition. Wilson, William (1689). A Sermon Preached before the Mayor . . . on the 14th February, 1688/9.

chapter 25

the politica l ser mon i n a n age of pa rt y str ife , 1700 –1720: con tr ibu tions to the con flict pasi ihalainen

Some older surveys motivated by secularization theses may still suggest that the eighteenth century should be seen as an era of the Enlightenment and secularization, as a period when religion was finally excluded from all temporal spheres of life. Thanks to considerable re-evaluations in eighteenth-century studies since the 1990s, however, it has become evident that eighteenth-century thought in general and political discourse in particular cannot be understood without considering its religious context (Schaich 2007). This inherited interconnection is true of any European country in the period before 1720. During the first two decades of the eighteenth century, the sermon retained and even strengthened its role as a medium through which not only theological but also political messages could effectively be delivered to large audiences. It also remained a genre within which the supposedly shared values of politico-religious groups or entire national communities could be defined and those of adversaries disputed. Sermons can even be seen as the key genre in the popularization and polemicization of ongoing debates on theology and political theory. Printed political sermons, published in large numbers and at reasonable prices (Claydon 1996: 87; 2000: 208, 213–14; Caudle 1996: 100, 111–13), continued to provide a forum for political propaganda and discourse in several West European countries, including England, the Dutch Republic, France, Prussia, Austria, Denmark, and Sweden. Indeed, instances of printed political sermons, both accepted and controversial, are to be found in all these countries throughout the eighteenth century (Ihalainen 2005:



pasi ihalainen

2009). In many ways, sermons formed an integral part not only of devotional literature but also of the socio-political discourse of the period. Some sermons repeated ideas presented by major clerics to respectable audiences on national occasions; others contained the exegeses of less prominent clergymen. All of them were edited and some were censored for publication, so that we cannot be entirely certain about correspondence between the preached and printed versions. Sermons given on civic occasions were published more frequently than ordinary Sunday sermons. Sermons could also be written merely for publication in extensive collections that provided models for preachers (McCullough 1998: 7; Edwards 2009: 14, 37; Holtz 2009: 271–2). Political preaching and controversies about sermons were thus not a specifically English phenomenon. However, English political preaching had some peculiar features, which arose from three factors. The first was the unique division of English society in the period 1700–20 owing to party conflicts in political life and within the established church. Sermons not only reflected the continuing politico-religious strife; they also helped to create it. Secondly, English preachers enjoyed a high degree of freedom of publication. It was easy for them to make use of publicity for political purposes, while their mainland European colleagues struggled under the burden of pre-publication censorship. Thirdly, Anglican preaching was already undergoing changes in the form, style, and content of sermons. The transformation had begun during the latter half of the seventeenth century, and it was this very model of ‘Latitudinarian’ preaching that later inspired clerics in continental Europe to adopt new strategies of preaching. Some English preachers were already replacing the heated dogmatic disputes of the Reformation and the religious wars with subjects that their contemporaries could regard as relevant. As a consequence of the rise of experimental natural philosophy and global trade in the course of the seventeenth century, gradually changing societal, political, and religious values were challenging old ways of preaching. The need to provide useful applications of scripture forced clerics to alter the form, style, and content of their pulpit discourses. They had to learn to speak persuasively to audiences who were increasingly interested in practical temporal questions varying from the benefits of trade to the qualities of a proper citizen. Politics was certainly not excluded from sermons; the need to address relevant questions might even encourage preachers to comment on political matters, though they did so mostly in a cautious, moderate, and mainstream manner. One feature of this trend of preaching was that the surrounding social reality was described in ways that played down confessional confrontations (Ihalainen 2005: 579– 80; 2009: 228–9). It was certainly not the case, however, that politicized religious controversies had disappeared altogether; on the contrary, much of the political conflict of the early eighteenth century was in fact instigated by religious conflict (Bennett 1969: 155). In this chapter, I shall analyse the means by which the English party-political conflict was waged in the pulpit, combining three perspectives. First, I wish to view English political preaching from the perspective of the broader West European tradition of delivering political sermons on important national occasions and in political forums. Secondly, I shall summarize the state of research on how the party-political conflict was reflected in Anglican

preaching in an age of party strife



preaching. Thirdly, I shall analyse the political content of two uniquely controversial sermons, viewing their key arguments comparatively in the context of political preaching, the findings of recent research, and the particular contexts of each sermon. My methodology has been inspired both by the study of intentional speech acts in the Anglophone history of political thought and by continental varieties of the history of concepts that study the recycling and redefinition of political key terms by individuals and entire political communities. I read the texts both as politico-religious text acts performed in order to do things in particular contexts and as opportunities to recycle, redefine, and re-evaluate generally held concepts for the purposes of the moment of speaking. In this way, sermons became contributions to a broader politico-religious discourse divided into mutually hostile sub-discourses.

Party-Political Contexts The ideological background of the two competing parties, Whigs and Tories, which had already emerged in the late-Restoration period, was to a great extent religious. The very names of the parties conveyed stereotypes that associated their supporters with the two sides in the Civil Wars of the 1640s. The religious associations of the terms were also augmented by the widespread use of the connected but not completely synonymous or coherent names of the church parties: the High Church and the Low Church (Ihalainen 1999: 229–56; Gregory 2000: 91). These divisions, though never clear-cut, remained relevant from the time of the 1688 Revolution certainly up to the 1720s. Rebecca Warner (1999: 1–14, 19–22) has argued that it was conflicting views about general religious questions rather than clearly defined theological or political opinions that divided the High and Low Churches. Disagreements about the role of Convocation in the government of the church seem to have played a less important role. The conflicting opinions rather concerned the character of the English church, the relationship between the church and the state, attitudes towards nonjuring bishops, views about the 1688 Revolution more generally, attitudes towards Roman Catholicism, and, above all, opinions about the Protestant dissenters. Typical High Church adherents emphasized the virtues of episcopacy, the traditions of the church in addition to the Scriptures, the sacraments, the mysteries of religion, and the independence of the church from state control. On the other hand, they wished to see the state endorsing the goals of the church and clergymen commenting freely on politics. The High Churchmen were in the majority, and they saw themselves as advocating the true tenets of the Church of England. The typical Low Churchman, in contrast, wished to see the church to some extent controlled by the state. He and his fellows were mostly united by their attitudes to Catholics and dissenters. The anti-Catholic principles of some Low Churchmen might even lead them to accuse the Church of England of harbouring popish practices. At the same time, Low Churchmen were convinced that the Protestant dissenters no longer threatened the church in the manner they had done during the Civil Wars. Hence they



pasi ihalainen

should be tolerated in a spirit of moderation and comprehension, with the acceptance of occasional conformity if they could not join the church. The ideal, however, was that all divisions among Protestants could be overcome and the dissenters could be united with the Church of England (Rutherford 2000: 21–2). No strictly defined ‘ideologies’ of the High and Low Churches existed, but there were clear differences of emphasis in religious and related political opinions between the two groups. The division into Tories and Whigs was also a fluid one, but some attitudes typical of the supporters of each party are discernible. The Tories customarily advocated a traditional alliance between the church and a monarchy based on divine right, and in this they were generally backed by High Church clerics. The Tories continued to be highly suspicious of all religious deviance, often interpreting religious dissent, freethinking, and atheism as different aspects of religious degeneration. They were likewise suspicious of political theories that opened up possibilities for popular government, seeing such rule as republicanism of the kind that prevailed in the Interregnum. The Whigs, in contrast, were generally speaking opposed to monarchy by divine right, even though few of their advocates held outright republican ideas. They were, above all, more tolerant of religious dissent and received the support of Low Church clerics in this issue. Attitudes towards religious dissent thus continued to be a major source of the division of the political elite into parties. As the supporters of the parties were more likely to be influenced by politico-religious arguments than by purely secular ones, the language of politics was often borrowed from the sphere of religion by both sides. The widespread involvement of the clergy in party politics as political preachers and pamphleteers also contributed to a constant intermingling of religious and political themes and vocabularies. Controversies about certain sermons, if anything, reinforced this application of religious terminology to politics (Ihalainen 1999: 188–9, 229, 232–3, 237, 248–9, 319). Key terms of sermons and political pamphlets such as ‘sect’, ‘schism’, ‘party’, and ‘faction’ were not yet clearly distinguished from each other, which meant that associations between religious sects and political parties were almost unavoidable and could easily be abused for propaganda purposes. It was only after 1720 that tendencies supporting the secularization of political discourse would be strengthened, leading to a clearer distinction between sects and parties (Ihalainen 1999: 322). This separation of religious and political terms reduced the possibilities for (ab)using sermons as a forum for party propaganda. The politicization of sermons would no longer be so easy or common after 1720. The rest of this chapter will address the subject of the use of preaching as a forum for political commentary during open party confrontations in the late reign of Queen Anne (1701–14) and at the beginning of the reign of George I (1714–27). I shall analyse the sermon as a medium of political education and debate before the heat of the party conflict was dampened by the dominance of the Hanoverian Whigs after 1714, and the style and content of preaching began to be more distinctly remoulded after 1720. Two sermons related to political anniversaries and political public speaking forums—one given on the double anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot and the Glorious Revolution on

preaching in an age of party strife



5 November and the other at the royal court—will serve as exemplary cases demonstrating the characteristics of political preaching. The aim of the preachers on these occasions was not so much to teach particular doctrinal points or to save souls by moving the spirits of their audience as to make politicoreligious points in a context that guaranteed the reception of their messages. Preachers, despite their background as theologians, were acting as political theorists, a role that was widely regarded as appropriate for an Anglican churchman given the interrelatedness of the church and the state, religious and political disputes, and the observance of religious and political anniversaries. Some freethinkers and republicans might question this as priestcraft, but, generally speaking, it was still seen as a preacher’s duty in this period to take a stand on the political controversies of the day. The following sermons were given by leading party propagandists. The first instance is that of Henry Sacheverell, a fervent High Churchman and Tory, who presented his unusually provocative, anti-dissenting, and anti-republican ideas of proper ecclesiology and political theory in a sermon The Perils of False Brethren, given before the lord mayor of London and the local political elite in 1709 on the double anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot and the Glorious Revolution. This particular sermon brought the ideological disagreements of all parties to light in a unique manner, particularly as it was disseminated effectively in pamphlet form, its author prosecuted by the Whig administration, and its content consequently widely debated in public. It was followed by rioting, a decline in the popularity of the government, a change of administration, and a Tory victory in the ensuing general election. Sacheverell’s case, if any, demonstrates how political acts could still be carried out by means of preaching. The second, equally controversial sermon was given by a Low Church bishop, Benjamin Hoadly. Preaching before George I in court on 31 March 1717 in a sermon entitled The Nature of the Kingdom, or Church, of Christ, Hoadly took up the sensitive constitutional issue of the relationship between ecclesiastical and secular government. He argued in favour of the separate characters of religion and politics and criticized what he saw as the ‘popish’ government of the Church of England. Such views provoked fierce reactions at a time when a change in the religious policy of a new Whig administration was expected. This happened soon after the accession of George I (formerly a Lutheran) and the crushing of a Jacobite rising in 1715–16. The arguments of Hoadly’s sermon were politicized to the highest degree by High Churchmen and by some Low Church polemists as well. The controversy led to the suspension of the activities of the lower house of Convocation, which the lower clergy of the High Church had used as a political forum. In that sense, at least, the political impact of the sermon was remarkable. Other developments have also been explained by referring to the controversy. The partly shared yet simultaneously differing arguments, concepts, and metaphors, and the meanings conveyed by them, in the sermons of Sacheverell and Hoadly, are the object of the ensuing analysis. A comparative contextual analysis of their texts demonstrates the area of disagreement that distinguished these party preachers and their supporters respectively.



pasi ihalainen

Henry Sacheverell’s Perils of False Brethren (1709) In the cases of both Sacheverell and Hoadly, the strong personality of the preacher became a factor that exacerbated the politico-religious controversy surrounding each sermon. Sacheverell, a doctor of divinity from Oxford University, had been known for his arrogance and fierce ranting ever since he had published a sermon entitled The Political Union in 1702, depicting the Protestant dissenters as a danger to the true religion. He had pronounced anti-dissenting views on other occasions, too, and he had already preached the sermon of November 1709 on a previous occasion in Oxford in 1705. Both Whigs and Tories became concerned about such extreme views as Sacheverell’s fame as an original orator continued to grow (Holmes 1975: 11; Ihalainen 1999: 106–7; Speck 2004). Many were embarrassed by his aggressive use of language and lack of style, his tendency to draw conclusions based on simplistic dichotomies, and his proclivity for offending people by his exaggerations. Geoffrey Holmes (1973: 1–20, 48–50) has concluded that the only explanations for Sacheverell’s popularity were the spirit of the first age of party and the appetite of the people for politico-religious controversies. His strong voice and commanding physical appearance also played a role. Sacheverell was actually one of a long line of High Church clergymen who preached in support of the Tories, particularly when general elections were approaching. They had constantly used the pulpit to warn people that the church was threatened by dissenters, Low Churchmen, and Whig politicians (Holmes 1973: 44–5). Francis Atterbury and Benjamin Hoadly had been speaking in public for and against the High Church doctrine of passive obedience for several years (Gibson 2001: 78). Given these trends and Sacheverell’s existing fame, the content of The Perils of False Brethren was not particularly surprising. Yet the context of its delivery turned it into a provocation; it was given before the predominantly Whig and Low Church leaders of the city of London, in St Paul’s Cathedral, on 5 November 1709, and by invitation from a Tory lord mayor. Hearing a long list of High Church arguments questioning the legitimacy of the Revolution, attacking toleration towards the dissenters, quoting Lancelot Andrewes’s sermon on conspirators from 1610, and depicting many of the congregation as heirs of the rebels of the 1640s, the audience was bound to react. Sacheverell’s sermon deviated from the tradition of preaching on 5 November, which would have required him to blacken earlier Catholic plots against the Protestant regime and to extol the providential Revolution of 1688. Instead, his focus on the regicide of 1649 opened up the scars of the previous century and insinuated that the Whig leaders were still guided by the same principles in their indulgence of dissenters (see Cressy 1989: 171–2, 185). According to Holmes (1973: 51, 62–3), it is difficult to say how independently Sacheverell was acting in his preaching. He may well have been acting independently, as he had previously exploited many similar chances to put forward his controversial views. Contemporary testimonies to his fervour suggest that he was fully committed to his act of political provocation.

preaching in an age of party strife



Sacheverell’s main point was that religious liberties had been extended so far as to threaten the Church of England, and that the constitutional status of the monarchy was also being undermined. Unwilling to distinguish between political and religious questions, Sacheverell considered it absolutely proper that the clergy should take a political stand. He interpreted his task as being to set the leaders of London right ‘in their Notions of Government, both in Church, and State’. In the dedication of the printed sermon he claimed that only Whigs and Dissenters conspiring against the established politicoreligious order would claim that ‘the Pulpit is not a Place for Politicks’ (Sacheverell 1709: p. ii). Sacheverell’s interpretation of the English constitution was ultra-traditionalist, questioning any separation between its political and religious dimensions. Defining the relationship between church and state, he maintained that the church was ‘so Great, and Considerable Branch of our Civil Constitution, that the Support of Our Government depends upon it’s Welfare, and what Affects That, must strike at the Foundation of Our State’ (p. 18). The relationship between the two institutions was organic: ‘The Natures of Both are so nicely Correspondent, and so happily Intermixt, that ‘tis almost impossible to offer a Violation, to the One, without Breaking in upon the Body of the Other.’ The unavoidable conclusion was that anyone who wished to ‘innovate’ in religious policy was to be regarded as ‘a Traytor to our State’ (p. 12). The only true form of the Protestant religion, the only true form of political constitution, and the fate of the totality of the national community went together, and hence it followed that it was impossible to set ‘the utter Subversion of Our Nation, and Religion’ apart from each other (p. 5). For Sacheverell, politics and religion remained totally indistinguishable, and uniform religion of the traditional type came first. The monarchy was the core of this necessary union between the church and the state. Any attack on the church should be viewed as an attempt parallel to the Presbyterian regicide of 1649, an analogy that indicated the consequences, too: nothing less than the abolition of the monarchy, the church, and the Lords would follow. The dedication claimed explicitly that the Whigs and dissenters aimed at crushing the church and parliament in order to destroy the royal prerogative. Queen Anne herself was presented as the only remaining defender of her beloved church against such conspiratorial attempts (p. 19). This emphasis on the monarchy led to outright divine-right doctrines calling for a total submission to the secular ruler as the God-given principle of all government. Sacheverell challenged not only the official interpretation of the 1688 Revolution but also much of Whig ideology that recognized the right of the people to resist a tyrannical ruler in special cases. He maintained that the subjects had an ‘Obligation to an Absolute, and Unconditional Obedience to the Supream Power, in All Things lawful’ and that it was hence utterly illegal to oppose a ruler for any reason. He implied that the Whigs had been guilty of an innovation of a very questionable kind in both the church and the state (pp. 11–12). Sacheverell’s church was that of the seventeenth-century age of orthodoxy, and it resembled the established churches of mainland Europe in that any distinction between the political constitution and the church as an institution was unthinkable. For him, the



pasi ihalainen

confessional strife of the religious wars still existed in that he viewed the Church of England as ‘the Greatest Bulwark, and only Safe-Guard against Popery in the whole World’ (p. 18), a form of words that was actually used by many Low Churchmen too (Ihalainen 2005: 244–8). But his High Church views entered the picture when he called for a totally uniform church as ‘a Sacred Body, and Fraternity, . . . professing One Faith, One Baptism, One God’ (Sacheverell 1709: 11), thus categorically excluding the dissenters from its membership. To put this condemnation of religious diversity in another way, Sacheverell saw the goal as being that every member of the politico-religious community should share the same faith so that no ‘Confus’d Diversity of Contradictious Opinions’ would emerge in the first place (p. 23). The doctrine, discipline, and worship of the church should remain distinguished from all other religious groups. It was necessary to reject ‘a Wild, Negative Idea of a National Church’ that aimed only at integrating the dissenters with the Church of England (p. 16). Such a national church had remained a goal among some clergymen despite the degree of religious diversity allowed by the Toleration Act of 1689 and increased by the union with Scotland. The concept was used to define the national community and the Church of England as identical, but Sacheverell rejected such usage (Ihalainen 2005: 199). Sacheverell’s attitude to the religious enemies of the church, and concomitantly to the enemies of the state, was an extremely hostile one. For him, the dissenters were ‘Fanaticks’ and ‘Saints’ continuing the Puritan and republican tradition and hence as dangerous as the papists (Sacheverell 1709: pp. ii, 5, 11). They were guilty of utterly damnable sins, including the ‘schism’ itself. In Tory propaganda, the interconnectedness of religion and politics would be taken so far that Jonathan Swift would refer to differences between Whigs and Tories as ‘civil schisms’ and as ‘a schism in politics’ (Ihalainen 1999: 149–51). According to Sacheverell, the policy of the Whigs, the allies of the dissenters, was no better and approached outright atheism. The following quotation from Sacheverell’s attack demonstrates his hyperbolic and uncompromising style: Her Holy Communion has been Rent, and Divided by Factious, and Schismatical Impostors; Her Pure Doctrin has been Corrupted, and Defil’d; Her Primitive Worship, and Discipline Prophan’d, and Abus’d; Her Sacred Orders Deny’d, and Vilify’d; Her Priests, and Professors (like St Paul,) Calumniated, Misrepresented, and Ridicul’d; Her Altars, and Sacraments Prostituted to Hypocrites, Deists, Socinians, and Atheists. (Sacheverell 1709: 8)

There was no need to deal with all these accusations individually, generalization being the express strategy adopted by Sacheverell in his description of an ongoing Whiggishdissenting attack on the church. The accusations would have been received with sympathy by many Tories who were concerned about religious toleration leading first to dangerous religious diversity and subsequently to the dissolution of religion altogether. Hints about irreligion among the Whigs were commonplace in other forms of Tory party propaganda, too, as religious terms created strong negative associations. References to a deistic and atheistic conspiracy against the religious, political, and social order made effective weapons in propaganda (Holmes 1975: 8, 22; Ihalainen 1999: 304–5). Sacheverell

preaching in an age of party strife



was reinforcing the tendency to describe political opponents pejoratively as both forming a faction and being associated with a schism. He added further pejorative terms to the list, talking about a ‘Schism, and Faction’ aiming at universal toleration, moderation, and the so-called liberty of conscience (Sacheverell 1709: 10, 23). In Tory propaganda, ‘toleration’ was consistently presented as leading to religious indifference, and, while the Whigs endeavoured to give ‘moderation’ a positive connotation, the Tories eagerly disputed this (Ihalainen 1999: 201–4, 279, 323). From this it was easy to proceed to accusations of heterodoxy and ultimately atheism. According to Sacheverell, the dissenters would turn the church into a conventicle (that is, make it into a sect). He was irritated by accusations of the doctrines and practices of the Church of England being ‘nothing else but Priestcraft and Popery in Masquerade’ and concluded that the aim of the Whiggish-dissenting campaign was to abolish them all and to replace them with ‘a Diversity of Opinions’, ‘any False, or Heterodox Tenet, or Doctrin’, ‘Vain Philosophical Systems’ and ultimately by ‘Scepticism, and Atheism’ (Sacheverell 1709: 9–11, 16–17). In the end, all religion might appear as mere ‘State-Craft, and Imposture’. Dissent was in the last instance ‘the Rankest Atheism’, productive of nothing but new sects and heresies, which were blooming in England as never before (p. 21). These were provocative charges at a time when the scientific revolution had indeed supported the emergence of some outright scepticism. For Sacheverell and his supporters, there was no doubt about the inseparable nature of the religious and political doctrines of the dissenters. They consisted of nothing but ‘Atheism, Deism, Tritheism, Socinianism, with all the Hellish Principles of Fanaticism, Regicide, and Anarchy’ (p. 15). Some more specific political dangers were also addressed. Sacheverell did not just question resistance to rulers but launched an attack on contractual theories about the original political power in the people. For him, this was the core idea of the republicanism that the Whigs and dissenters entertained. The printed sermon questioned ‘Rebellious Appeals to the People’ and to ‘a Popular Tribunal’ by ‘the Vile Amanuenses of the Mob’ (pp. i–ii). An anarchic kind of popular government, which classical political thought had denounced, seemed to be looming in the background. From the Sacheverellian point of view, it was a violation of the Bible to claim that the people had ‘the Power Invested in Them, the Fountain and Original of it, to Cancel their Allegiance at pleasure, and call their Sovereign to account for High Treason against his Supream Subjects’. It was, after all, God alone, not the people, who was ‘the Original of all Power’ (pp. 12–14). This attack on the allegedly antimonarchical tendencies of the Whigs and dissenters and implicitly on the 1688 Revolution ended with a declaration that their political system would only lead to Christianity being ‘Blasphem’d as a Murtherer of her Own Kings’ (p. 14), the association with the events of 1649 appearing once again. Then there were the serious theological problems that Whiggish political theory and religious policies gave rise to. Talking in the mode of the sermons of 30 January in memory of the execution of Charles I rather than in that of 5 November, Sacheverell claimed in the spirit of Protestant royalism that the ensuing ‘National Sins’ would finally lead to divine punishments involving the whole national community (Sacheverell 1709: 20; Lacey 2003: 192–7). ‘National sins’ was a phrase commonly used in 30 January sermons



pasi ihalainen

up to the 1720s to emphasize the unique gravity of the collective sin that the English had committed in murdering their reigning monarch. The implication was that the consequent divine judgement would fall on the English from one generation to the next (Ihalainen 2005: 374–7). Sacheverell was also arguing that the toleration of dissenters constituted another mortal sin equivalent to ‘Renouncing our Allegiance to our Almighty Sovereign, an Open Denial, and Prostitution of our most Holy Faith, and Church’ (Sacheverell 1709: 20). A political anniversary in memory of successful resistance to an arbitrary religious and political power was thus being transformed into an occasion for teaching total submission to a divinely ordained ruler. The reception of these ultra-traditionalist ideas in the public sphere and parliament would have unique consequences. Only a few hundred persons had heard the sermon, but Sacheverell, without the usual order from the lord mayor, had his text printed, together with the dedication. It was widely pirated, and its different editions sold something like 100,000 copies. Then it was no longer just an ephemeral sermon delivered by a high-flying cleric. The audience had suddenly expanded to hundreds of thousands of readers, and the sermon became a subject of universal discussion (Holmes 1973: 72–5). The debate, with its arguments both for and against Sacheverell’s views, was unprecedented (Madan 1978). Naturally enough, the government wanted to put an end to this predominantly High Church campaign, which also created an opportunity for the people to air all kinds of unrelated grievances, such as those concerning the War of the Spanish Succession. G. V. Bennett (1969: 170) has suggested that the members of the government also used the opportunity to clarify the principles of the Glorious Revolution. The majority of ministers, being Whigs, made the unfortunate decision to prosecute Sacheverell. The charges were that Sacheverell had claimed that the 1688 Revolution had not been an act of justified resistance, that toleration was a mistake, that the administration put the church in danger, and that the Whig ministry was plotting to destroy the constitution of both church and state. Explicit references to the Revolution had been few and unclear in the sermon, but the tradition of High Church preaching made them sufficiently obvious for the ministry to choose this risky strategy. Sacheverell’s sermon was first investigated by the Commons, and the preacher was then impeached before the Lords. The trial of February and March 1710 gave Sacheverell further opportunities to vindicate his views in an authoritative political forum. It provoked widespread polemic in his favour, including a collection of citations from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century preachers—the homilies, John Overall, John Jewel, Richard Hooker, Richard Bancroft, Lancelot Andrewes and others—that ‘proved’ the correctness of Sacheverell’s traditionalist views on obedience. Rioting that escalated into attacks on dissenting chapels also followed. The Lords found Sacheverell guilty, but Queen Anne herself commuted the actual punishment to no more than a ban on preaching for three years (Collections 1710: 2–4; Holmes 1973: 1, 81; Speck 2004). By 1713, Sacheverell would be preaching again, before a Commons with a Tory majority, resulting from their victory in the extraordinary general election of autumn 1710— thanks to the popular reaction against Sacheverell’s impeachment. The Whig ministry

preaching in an age of party strife



lost its fight against the rebellious preacher almost totally. Sacheverell enjoyed popularity for a few years but disappeared from the public arena with the death of Anne and the return of the Whigs to power in 1714 (Speck 2004). His sermon had, in any case, politicized the question of the toleration of dissent to the highest degree, delayed the separation of religious and political debates, and demonstrated the potential of the sermon as a medium of party propaganda (Ihalainen 1999: 107–8).

Benjamin Hoadly’s Nature of the Kingdom, or Church, of Christ (1717) It is hardly possible to find a more distinct contrast to Sacheverell’s High Church Tory ideology and traditionalist vocabulary than Benjamin Hoadly’s Low Church preaching. Hoadly’s sermons throughout reflect a very different understanding of the nature of the Anglican religion, the church, and the essence of the English political community. They contain few references to previous preaching traditions. Together with Sacheverell’s work, they make it possible to reconstruct the politico-religious concepts and stereotypes which the High Church, on the one hand, and the Low Church, on the other, were propagating in this period. Hoadly’s theology and political thought were based on the late-seventeenth-century Low Church tradition and Whiggish, often outright Lockean, ideas (Spellman 1993: 139; Starkie 2007: 12). Two basic attitudes in particular distinguished Hoadly and his associates from Sacheverell and the supporters of the High Church. These had to do with Protestant dissent, on the one hand, and the foundations of the monarchical form of government, on the other. Hoadly’s Puritan family connections contributed to his conviction that the moderate dissenters should be tolerated within a ‘national church’. He became one of the prominent Whig bishops who popularized this idea in order to incorporate at least some of the dissenters in the Church of England, which would still retain its religious monopoly. Hoadly had supported the Protestant Revolution of 1688 and hoped that it might lead to the integration of all Protestants within the church, considering that the existing theological differences were of minor importance. For Hoadly, religion should be established but still an object of free interpretation so that the detrimental effects of human infallibility could be avoided. He also believed that the integration of Anglican and other Protestant believers provided a strong bulwark for opposing both popery and atheism. He had repeatedly engaged himself in theological controversy with both dissenters and High Church Anglicans to promote this unification. Hoadly was also ready to approve the practice of occasional conformity among prominent dissenters and attempted to reform the church in order to accommodate it to the duties of a national church. He would continue to associate religious and political liberty in their Hanoverian form and to argue that Protestantism and patriotism should be regarded as synonymous concepts.



pasi ihalainen

Politically, Hoadly was a stout Whig, advocated monarchical government based on contract, and recognized the right of the subjects to resist a ruler—at least in extreme cases, as in the 1688 Revolution. It was possible to discern revolutionary principles in Hoadly’s sermons, many of which had an essentially political content. And so they were interpreted. Hoadly had already antagonized the High Church lower house of Convocation in 1705 by arguing that the purpose of government was—despite its divine origin—to serve the people, a notion to which Sacheverell responded in his sermon. Questioning traditional theories of divine right, which were inscribed in the liturgy of the Church of England, Hoadly maintained that political power was, indeed, shared by the queen and parliament. The dispute between the two preachers became explicit when Hoadly participated in the Sacheverell controversy and published a political treatise in which he outspokenly defended Locke’s contractarian ideas. Furthermore, after Tory propaganda responded by depicting Hoadly as the very embodiment of Low Church Whiggism with its advocacy of moderation and heterodoxy, he became a major election pamphleteer on the Whig side. When this campaign failed in the face of a Tory landslide in 1710, Hoadly was effectively marginalized until 1714 (Rutherford 2000: 24; Gibson 2004: 14, 106; 2007: pp. ix–xi, xxvii, xxxii; Taylor 2004; Ihalainen 2005: 200, 345, 398, 457, 501, 505). Susan Rutherford (2000: 12–15) has argued that, as a Whig polemicist, for many High Church and Tory authors Hoadly had already during the first decade of the eighteenth century come to personify a dedication to deistic, Socinian, and downright atheistic beliefs in reason and a consequent readiness to question the established order in both church and state. He developed classical and Reformation traditions of thought rather than deistic ones, however, and remained critical of the reasoning of the deists. He emphasized the freedom of choice in Protestantism as opposed to popery, the centrality of the Bible, and the need for Christians to interpret scripture independently. Hoadly’s political conclusion was that Tory and High Church doctrines must be opposed, as government was indeed based on consent, and that resistance could hence be seen as both a lawful and a Christian act. Andrew Starkie (2007: 11, 189) has suggested, in contrast, that Hoadly was indeed intellectually connected to rather marginal heterodox thinking. For William Gibson (2004: 37–40, 198), Hoadly was progressive to the extent that he should be seen as a herald of future ideas that were enlightened, rational, and modern. The Hanoverian Succession would end Hoadly’s period in the wilderness caused by his propagation of radical ideas and bring him rewards for having been such a loyal Whig. Hoadly was made bishop of Bangor and appointed a royal chaplain in 1716. As soon as he took up his new post, he began to give further political sermons. The one that interests us here was given on 31 March 1717. The sermon was seemingly moderate but actually hid a number of implicit suggestions repeating Hoadly’s previous Low Church and Whiggish points and challenging High Church and Tory ways of thinking. As in the case of Sacheverell, the public prominence of the preacher together with the controversial theological and political content of the sermon, and not least the context of its presentation, turned The Nature of the Kingdom, or Church, of Christ into an object of extensive public debate. The sermon was given in the royal court, which had been

preaching in an age of party strife



highly regarded as a forum for preaching during the reigns of Mary and Anne and was also considered as such under George I. As the sermon was ‘Published by His Majesty’s Special Command’, despite not being delivered on one of the usual days of political preaching—30 January, 29 May, or 5 November—the sermon was interpreted as a propagation of the politico-religious principles of the Whig establishment, which had now been effectively imposed on the new Hanoverian king as well. Independently of its actual content, the timing and publication of the sermon provided the High Church clergy as well as some Whig opponents of the Sunderland and Stanhope ministry with an opportunity to protest against Low Church tendencies in the church government and against the political line of the current administration in general. Hoadly did have close connections with the Sunderland and Stanhope ministry and seems to have been acting on its initiative. The ministry, for its part, was known to be about to launch a new, much more tolerant religious policy towards the Protestant dissenters, its goal being to repeal the Occasional Conformity and Schism Acts, which the Tory administration had passed in the early 1710s. The Tories and the High Church were, naturally enough, opposed to any repeal of legislation that discriminated against the dissenters. Hoadly’s sermon provided them with an object to attack. Hoadly endorsed the repeal, and his sermon was by design interpreted as an expression of support for the measure. Many Whigs might in fact have harboured their doubts about the repeal, but this fact did not remove the stereotype of the Low Church that the sermon revived in the minds of the supporters of the High Church (Rutherford 2000: 123–4; Gibson 2004: 148–51; Taylor 2004; Starkie 2007: 3, 16). The controversy would have its own history; what interests us here is the actual content of the controversial sermon. The Nature of the Kingdom, or Church, of Christ was not such an outspoken declaration of principle as Sacheverell’s sermon had been, but it did contain a number of Low Church ideas, including the one that ecclesiastical and political government should be seen as distinct from each other. These views were opposed to the High Church ideal of a necessary union between the Crown and the church and the tradition of viewing religious and political questions as inseparable (Ihalainen 1999: 108–9). They also challenged orthodox Whig views on the character of the church and the nature of episcopacy (Gibson 2004: 151; Starkie 2007: 3). Unlike Sacheverell’s essentially seventeenth-century world view, Hoadly’s rather more eighteenth-century, non-dogmatic, and pragmatic approach to preaching did not recognize unchanging truths, apart from the teachings of the Bible and reason. Referring implicitly both to the Roman Catholic Church and to the Anglican High Church, Hoadly pointed out that religious observance had tended to focus on external rituals at the cost of virtue and charity (Hoadly 1717: 5). There was, undoubtedly, at this time a tendency among High Churchmen to emphasize the sacrosanct position of the clergy and to call for religious discrimination. When these basically religious views were combined with some sympathy towards the House of Stuart, they also became truly dangerous in a political sense, threatening the still fragile position of the Hanoverian dynasty (Taylor 2004). Hoadly, for his part, appeared to be remoulding the inherited organization of church government, despite his claims that he was defending authentic traditions as laid down



pasi ihalainen

in the New Testament. When he insisted that ‘the Kingdom of Christ’ was synonymous with ‘the Church of Christ’, he was saying that the church was a voluntary and even other-worldly religious society of believers and that secular authorities should not intervene in religious questions in the way that High Churchmen wished to see them doing. Using arguments derived directly from the Bible, he argued that the church should be organized in the way originally defined by Jesus. This was to be achieved by excluding all temporal elements that were not ‘true, pure, and uncorrupted’ (Hoadly 1717: 10–11; Gibson 2004: 150; Starkie 2007: 3). The exalted High Church notions of episcopacy, the authority of the clergy, and the centrality of tradition were also critically scrutinized, as Hoadly disputed the fact that Christ actively influenced the government of the church through the bishops: He himself never interposeth, since his first Promulgation of his Law, either to convey Infallibility to Such as pretend to handle it over again; or to assert the true Interpretation of it, amidst the various and contradictory Opinions of Men about it . . . if such an absolute Authority be once lodged with Men, under the Notion of Interpreters, They then become the Legislators, and not Christ; and They rule in their own Kingdom, and not in His. (Hoadly 1717: 13)

Hoadly was essentially accusing higher clergymen of attempting to hijack the government of the church and thereby infringe the principles of true Christianity. His interpretation recalled arguments put forward by dissenting defenders of the liberty of conscience. Hoadly’s sermon implied that the current church government was like the Catholic one that had been rejected in the Reformation. The practical consequence was that temporal interests crept into religious life, introducing into it an inappropriate ‘Kingdom of this world’ by the use of force, flattery, pleasure, or pain. The use of all such means was ‘contrary to the Interests of True Religion’ (p. 20). Hoadly’s implicit point was that the regulation of religious life by means of secular legislation was wrong and that the persecuting tendencies of the Church of England made it nothing more than a Protestant version of popery. The church organization that Hoadly sketched out was in many ways one that later thinkers would consider ‘enlightened’. In the spirit of the Reformation, everything inconsistent with the teachings of Christ should be excluded from the church, including all external political models. Hoadly’s conclusions became very controversial when he suggested that any authority in the church was mistaken in that it challenged that of Christ. Particularly pernicious was any attempt to force believers into religious unity independently of their consciences. Such popish attempts only destroyed honesty and the very principles of the Reformation. To many contemporaries, Hoadly’s church undeniably appeared disorganized if not outright anarchic. It was a church within which all members were equal subjects of Christ and in which religious strife had no place. In the spirit of what Hoadly understood as primitive Christianity, he concluded with the advice: ‘If Christ be our King; let us shew our selves Subjects to Him alone, in the great affair of Conscience and Eternal Salvation’ (pp. 24–5, 27–9, 31). As any church government of the traditional kind might become degenerated, new ways of organizing the church were needed.

preaching in an age of party strife



Taken as a whole, Hoadly’s sermon represented the kind of rethinking within the Protestant Enlightenment that was not only to change the content of the sermon throughout Western Christendom but also to reformulate Christian doctrine in important ways. It can be seen as an early instance of an Enlightenment sermon that retained only rational elements of revelation, dogma, traditions, and miracles, and emphasized education, ethics, and the practical dimensions of religion instead. Divinity was to be understood in benevolent terms, Jesus was presented as a teacher of virtue, and human beings were viewed more optimistically, as capable of constructing a better world by means of their reason (Edwards 2004: 404; Bitzel 2009: 75–9). Less dogmatically oriented clergymen were to accommodate the theological and political content of their sermons to the needs of the Enlightenment world, reconciling social and intellectual change with traditional religion. The use of reason, freedom of thought, toleration, and positive expectations for the future were some of the themes typical of later Enlightenment preaching (Ihalainen 2009: 219, 222, 225). In the context of 1717, Hoadly’s views appeared heterodox in relation not only to High Church traditionalism but also to many Low Church tenets, particularly as many of the points expressed in the sermon remained far from clear and hence could easily be misinterpreted. There were so many political and religious grievances present in the aftermath of the Whig victory over the Tories in connection with the Hanoverian succession that many welcomed the opportunity to air them in public in response to Hoadly’s overtly political sermon. A five-year dispute known as the Bangorian Controversy followed. During the controversy, Hoadly’s previous sermons in favour of the 1689 Revolution and the Protestant succession were also widely commented upon. These had contained the suggestion that the secular authorities should intervene if the extreme High Church clergy advocated principles pernicious to the state. Otherwise the controversy consisted of a battle between Hoadly, backed by the court, on the one hand, and High Churchmen and also some Low Churchmen, on the other. Much of the polemic concerned Hoadly’s questioning of the authority of any organized church and his alleged suggestion that religion of any sort could lead to salvation. Other controversial suggestions included the claims that the Church of England had distanced itself from the true principles of the Reformation, resembled the Church of Rome, and seemed to be opening the door for a Stuart restoration in allowing the propagation of the doctrine of passive obedience. The controversy did have a practical consequence as well: when the lower house of Convocation reacted actively by trying to prosecute Hoadly, the Whig ministry countered by no longer convening that institution, thus abolishing its political relevance (Rutherford 2000: 16–17, 19; Gibson 2001: 85; Taylor 2004; Starkie 2007: 4; cf. Gibson 2004: 197). Scholars have put forward highly differing interpretations of the significance of the Bangorian Controversy. According to Rutherford (2000: 126), for instance, it was essentially a controversy over the character of the church, with Hoadly’s opponents defending the visible church as a well-ordered community of believers, and his supporters underlining the personal nature of faith and the spiritual character of the church. Despite the



pasi ihalainen

fierce spirit of the conflict, the two parties continued to have many common ideas, although they understood them differently. Warner (1999: 15–17) has pointed out that the controversy also revealed the diversity of existing views within the two church parties. While some Low Churchmen supported Hoadly, others opposed his more controversial ideas. Gibson (2004: 198) has maintained that the controversy finally blocked High Church attempts to direct people’s consciences, invigorated the Low Church cause, and led to the recognition of the right to dissent from the Church of England. Starkie (2007: 9, 16–17, 188–90), by contrast, has emphasized the controversy’s role in dividing Whig churchmen into orthodox and heterodox, and has rejected claims of it having ended in a triumph of ‘Latitudinarianism’ and religious toleration. He has referred to the vindication, by different sides of the debate, of the competing concepts of popery, the Reformation, heresy, and piety, as well as to fundamental disagreements over the nature of the established church. The result of the debate was, according to Starkie, the strengthening of High Church rather than Low Church ecclesiology. We can conclude that both a progressive interpretation and one underlining the continuous political relevance of religious disagreements around 1720 are available, but that the latter has been more convincingly documented. Whatever the long-term consequences of the ensuing polemic may have been, a single political sermon had succeeded in sparking off a debate in which both the religious and political values of the nation were at stake. Although the debaters of 1717–20 were unaware of it, the Enlightenment modernization of both public discourse in general and of the sermon genre in particular would make it far less likely that a single sermon in the future could instigate politico-religious controversies on such a scale. At the same time, a continuing intellectual debate within the Church of England would remain a major driving force of the English Enlightenment (Young 1998). The Bangorian Controversy provided a milestone in this debate, revealing divergent opinions within the Church of England (Starkie 2007: 2). Gibson (2004: 15, 36–40) has gone as far as to depict Hoadly as a forerunner of the English Enlightenment, a champion of rationalism, individualism in religious judgement, modern notions of the relationship between church and state, and Lockean ideas about the origin of government. This may be an exaggeration, but Hoadly certainly contributed significantly to the transformation of the sermon as a medium of public discourse.

Conclusion The character of the political debate would change quite decisively after 1720. Religious concepts were no longer so frequently or violently used in political texts, and alternative secular vocabularies came into wider use in political debates. A gradual separation between religious and political discourses began (Ihalainen 1999: 325–6). This meant that political sermons were no longer quite so influential in setting the tone of public

preaching in an age of party strife



discourse. However, throughout the eighteenth century, the secular authorities in various European countries would continue to impose the duty on leading clergymen to popularize what they regarded as common values, and some of these preachers would use the occasions to put forward points that were political as well as religious. One theme of Enlightenment preaching was to define and construct a Protestant nation that would combine the interests of the state and the established church, and indeed those of the dissenters as well (Ihalainen 2005). At the same time, important changes of emphasis in sermons took place in the Age of Enlightenment, the overall trend being towards sermons that discussed either individual religion or general societal values that every proper citizen should share. In conclusion, the English sermon in the first age of party not only reflected party political divisions elsewhere in society but actually provided one of the leading genres through which some of the most intense party debate took place. This was unavoidable in an era when the separation between religion and politics remained far from selfevident and many of the key issues and concepts of the dispute were still religious rather than purely secular. Individual sermons contributed significantly to the conflict, giving perhaps the most outspoken and the most easily understood public utterance to what was at stake in the party division. At the same time, of course, many sermons also continued to teach traditional ideas of a unified, organic, and consensual politico-religious community, to reject diversity in religion and politics, and to define the political values of the community in highly confessional terms. It was not until later on in the eighteenth century that the politico-religious arguments put forward in sermons would be more substantially modernized.

Bibliography Bennett, G. V. (1969). ‘The Conflict in the Church’, in Geoffrey Holmes (ed.), Britain after the Glorious Revolution 1689–1714. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 155–75. Bitzel, Alexander (2009). ‘The Theology of the Sermon in the Eighteenth Century’, in Joris van Eijnatten (ed.), Preaching, Sermon and Cultural Change in the Long Eighteenth Century. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 57–94. Caudle, James (1996). ‘Measures of Allegiance: Sermon Culture and the Creation of a Public Discourse of Obedience and Resistance in Georgian Britain, 1714–1760’. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University. Claydon, Tony (1996). William III and the Godly Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (2000). ‘The Sermons, the “Public Sphere” and the Political Culture of Late SeventeenthCentury England’, in Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter McCullough (eds), The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History 1600–1750. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 208–35. Collections (1710). Collections of Passages Referr’d to by Dr Henry Sacheverell in his Answer to the Articles of his Impeachment.



pasi ihalainen

Cressy, David (1989). Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Edwards, O. C., Jr (2004). A History of Preaching. Nashville: Abingdon Press. —— (2009). ‘Varieties of Sermon: A Survey of Preaching in the Long Eighteenth Century’, in Joris van Eijnatten (ed.), Preaching, Sermon and Cultural Change in the Long Eighteenth Century. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 3–53. Gibson, William (2001). The Church of England 1688–1832: Unity and Accord. Routledge. —— (2004). Enlightenment Prelate: Benjamin Hoadly 1676–1761. Cambridge: James Clarke & Co. —— (2007). ‘Introduction’, in William Gibson (ed.), Benjamin Hoadly, The Original and Institution of Civil Government, Discuss’d. New York: AMS Press. Gregory, Jeremy (2000). Restoration, Reformation and Reform, 1660–1828: Archbishops of Canterbury and their Diocese. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hoadly, Benjamin (1717). The Nature of the Kingdom, or Church, of Christ. A Sermon Preach’d before the King, at the Royal Chapel at S. James’s, On Sunday March 31, 1717. Holmes, Geoffrey (1973). The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell. Eyre Methuen. —— (1975). Religion and Party in Late Stuart England. Historical Association. Holtz, Sabine (2009). ‘On Sermons and Daily Life’, in Joris van Eijnatten (ed.), Preaching, Sermon and Cultural Change in the Long Eighteenth Century. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 263–311. Ihalainen, Pasi (1999). The Discourse on Political Pluralism in Early Eighteenth-Century England: A Conceptual Study with Special Reference to Terminology of Religious Origin. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. —— (2005). Protestant Nations Redefined: Changing Perceptions of National Identity in the Rhetoric of the English, Dutch and Swedish Public Churches, 1685–1772. Leiden: Brill. —— (2009). ‘The Enlightenment Sermon: Towards Practical Religion and a Sacred National Community’, in Joris van Eijnatten (ed.), Preaching, Sermon and Cultural Change in the Long Eighteenth Century. Leiden: Brill, 219–60. Lacey, Andrew (2003). The Cult of King Charles the Martyr. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. Madan, Francis F. (1978). A Critical Bibliography of Dr Henry Sacheverell, ed. William A. Speck. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Libraries. McCullough, Peter E. (1998). Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rutherford, Susan L. (2000). ‘Reformation Principles: The Religious and Political Ideas of Benjamin Hoadly (1676–1761)’. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Northumbria at Newcastle. Sacheverell, Henry (1709). The Perils of False Brethren, both in Church, and State: Set forth in a Sermon Preach’d Before the Right Honourable the Lord-Mayor, Aldermen, and Citizens of London, at the Cathedral-Church of S. Paul, on the 5th of November, 1709. Schaich, Michael (2007). Monarchy and Religion: The Transformation of Royal Culture in Eighteenth-Century Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Speck, William (2004). ‘Henry Sacheverell’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online edn. Spellman, W. M. (1993). The Latitudinarians and the Church of England, 1660–1700. Athens, GA, and London: University of Georgia Press. Starkie, Andrew (2007). The Church of England and the Bangorian Controversy, 1716–1721. Woodbridge: Boydell Press.

preaching in an age of party strife



Taylor, Stephen (2004). ‘Benjamin Hoadly’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online edn. Warner, Rebecca Louise (1999). ‘Early Eighteenth Century Low Churchmanship: The Glorious Revolution to the Bangorian Controversy’. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Reading. Young, B. W. (1998). Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth Century England: Theological Debate from Locke to Burke. Oxford: Clarendon.

This page intentionally left blank

pa rt v

A PPE N DI X E S

This page intentionally left blank

appendix i Preachers on Preaching

Preachers are, of course, themselves a vital source for statements about the purpose and form of their calling and craft. In addition to preachers’ manuals and ministers’ conduct books, illuminating analysis of preaching by experienced preachers is found in sermons themselves, works of controversy and polemic, translations of others’ works into English, and letters.

I.1. from John Fisher, ‘A sermon had at Paulis . . . concernynge certayne heretickes’ (1521) Fisher (c. 1469–1539; see Fig. 27), one of England’s greatest early humanists, became, with Sir Thomas More, one of its greatest Roman Catholic martyrs. His Paul’s Cross sermon of May 1521 was the ‘first public assertion of orthodoxy’ against Lutheranism (Fisher 2002: 48), preached at the command of Cardinal Wolsey before the public burning of Luther’s books. His discussion of the parable of the sower (Luke 8:5–15) treats orthodox ministers and preachers as proper ‘sowers’ of the gospel, but associates them most with the fathers and doctors of the church, the substance of whose teaching it is the responsibility of latter-day preachers to uphold. Nowe than/ if this sede were thus truely sowen: than wolde I lerne/ who were the mynysters of this trewe sede? Who but the preachers of this worde: I say the holy doctours/ which taughte the people: and to whome by the holy spirite was commysedde the governaunce of the flocke of Christe/ as saynt Paul sayth in the Actes of the Apostles: . . . Take hede unto your selfe/ and to the holle flocke of his Christe/ where the spirite of God hath ordeyned you bishoppes/ to governe his churche: the whiche he so derely purchased by his owne moste precious bloode. Ye herde in the tellyng of the miracle/ howe the fyrste meane for the blynde man to come unto his sight was heryng. For as saynt Paule saythe: Fides ex auditu: Faith cometh by heryng: by the preaching of the holy doctours the people herde the worde of God/ and beleved it. For as saint Paule sayth . . . Howe shall the people beleve/ if they here nat? . . . And howe shall they here without it be preached unto them? This is than the ordre and the holle cheane: the blyndenes of our hertes can nat be put away/ but by true faith: true faith can nat be gotten/ but by herynge of this worde. The heryng of this worde shal nat be had/ but by the meanes of preachynge: prechynge can nat be ministred without the preacher: the preacher can nat profitte/ onles Christe Jesu (whiche is the veray sower) speke within hym: and also the spirite of Christe gyve his influence unto the same.



appendix

It is manifest than/ that these preachers were the true ministers of this sede. It is also nat to be douted/ but the true christen people alwayes hitherto hath gyven faithe to the doctrine of the catholicke preachers: and so dyd beleve the scriptures as they dyd expounde them/ that were in tymes paste. And it is farther more certeyne/ that these catholicke doctours ministred this sede/ in lyke maner as they have lefte writen unto us in theyr bokes. Wherfore if the preachers dyd erre in teachynge the scriptures of God: the people dyd erre in belevyng their doctryne. And if bothe the preachers and the people dyd erre: where was the true sowynge of this sede? Where was the doctryne of the faithe? where was bicome the promyse of our saviour Christ? O cursed Luther/ O mischevous Apostata/ O most execrable hereticke that denyest and dispisest all the fathers that ever were before us: For in so denyeng/ thou must nedes affirme/ that neither the doctrine of true faith/ nor any trewe sowyng of this sede was in the churche of Christe by so many yeres: and that our saviour Christe Jesu nothyng regarded his promyse all this long tyme . . . (Fisher 2002: 157–8)

I.2. from Hugh Latimer, ‘The Thyrde sermon of Mayster Hughe Latimer . . . before the Kynge’ (1549) After a religiously conventional early life, including ordination as a Roman Catholic priest, Latimer (c. 1485–1555) embraced Lutheran protestantism in 1530s Cambridge, and became one of the most zealous and admired preachers of the English reformation (see Fig. 19). In the pulpit he combined the extempore forcefulness of colloquial English with a convincing gravitas. His burning at the stake in Oxford, with fellow bishop Nicholas Ridley, was indelibly marked in the Protestant consciousness by John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (‘Book of Martyrs’). Ye shall have in remembraunce, most benigne and gracious audience, that a preacher hathe two offices, and the one to be used orderly after an other. The fyrste is Exhortari per sanam doctrinam. To teach true doctrine He shall have also occasyon oftentymes to use an other, and that is. Contradicentes convincere. To reprehend, to convince, to confute gainsayers and spurners against the truth. Why? you wil saye, wil anye bodye gaine say true doctrine, and sound doctrine? Wel, let a preacher be sure, that his doctrine be true, and it is not to be thought, that any body will gain say it. If S. Paule had not forsene that there shuld be gainsayers, he had not neade to have appoynted the confutation of gaine sayinge. *** In the popyshe masse tyme, ther was no gayn sayinge, al thynges semed to be in peace, in a concorde, in a quyet agremente. So longe as we had in adoration, in admiratyon, the Popyshe masse, we were then wythoute gaynsayinge. What was that? ***

preachers on preaching



Sainte Paule said: There shall be intractabiles, that wil whimpe and whine, ther shall be also be, Vani loqui, vayn speakers. For the whyche S. Paule appointeth the preacher to stop their mouthes and it is a preachers office to be a mouthe stopper. (Latimer 1562: sigs F4r–F5r)

I.3. from Thomas Watson, ‘Of the Sacrament of Order’ (1558) Watson (1513–84) was a noted Cambridge humanist, esteemed preacher, and leading defender of the papacy and Roman Catholic doctrine. Appointed bishop of Lincoln by Queen Mary, he was committed to the use of preaching for the re-establishment of Catholicism under her. He died after twenty-five years’ imprisonment under Elizabeth. Two thynges (good people) bee necessary by the salvation of man, bothe by grace of this worlde, and by glory of the next world. The inwarde giftes of faythe, charitie, and hope, and the outwarde Sacramentes of Baptisme, Penaunce, and the other lyke. *** The inward giftes be wrought in us that be of age, by the preachinge of Gods holy woorde, for faythe commeth by the hearing of the worde of God, whiche faith beyng tryed by pacience in tribulation, woorketh hope that never fayleth, because the charitie of God is poured into oure hartes by the holye ghoste which is geven unto us. And how shall men preache Gods worde except they be sent, for the office of preaching may not be of any man usurped by presumption, but oughte to bee faithfullye used and practised by Gods commission, of them that be for that purpose sent by God and his Churche to convert or instructe his people. For as in the bodye everye parte or member is not the mouthe: so in the churche everye man may not be a preacher, and to thintent that the Gospell of Christe and his holy woorde myghte be purely set forth without corruption, and that the ministers of the devyll, transformyng theim selves into the Apostles of Christ, as the devyll theyr father is wonte oftentimes to doo, should not deceive Gods people with everye wynde of untrue doctrine: Therefore hath Christe geven unto his churche, not everye man, but certeyne men to be Apostles, Prophetes and Preachers, who using as it were an embassage from Christe, shoulde by his true woorde edifye his Churche, and gather his people in unitie of faith. *** By this litle that I have nowe sayde, ye may learne (good people) that the publike ministration of the Gospell of Christe standeth in three pointes: in the preachyng of Gods worde, in the ministration of the holy Sacramentes, and in exercisyng of discipline and jurisdiction: whiche three shall (by Gods promise and the assistaunce of his holye spirite) continually bee observed in the catholike church to the worldes ende, for the edifienge and buildyng of the same Churche in grace and vertue, and for weedynge out and banyshing of all errour and ungodly living. (Watson 1558: fos cliiir–v, cliiiiv)



appendix

I.4. from Niels Hemmingsen, The Preacher, or Methode of Preachinge, trans. ‘J. H.’ (1574) Niels Hemmingsen (Nicolaus Hemmingius, 1513–1600) was a Danish Lutheran theologian. Many of his works appeared in England in Latin and English translation, including three editions of his preacher’s manual in the 1570s.

The kinds of Sermons There are generally two kyndes of preachinges, the one appertayneth to teaching: the other to exhortation. That whiche appertayneth to teaching, is of simple places, and those as well of persones as of thinges, and of places compounded, of generall sentences, and particuler argumentes. The other whiche appertayneth to exhortation, is divided into three partes, for either it persuadeth, or rebuketh, or comforteth. This difference or distinction of sermons may be proved. First of the diversitie of hearers, to whome the sermon shalbe applied. For either they are altogether rude, and must bee taughte, to whome the first kinde dothe appertayne, or els they are not rude, but rather feble and faint harted, and must be lifted up with consolations: or els slowe, and they must bee pricked forwarde: or els contemners, and are to be chastened with threatninges. To these foure kindes of hearers al the sermons of Christe are to be derected, for sometyme hee teacheth the ignoraunt whiche are desirous to learne, and sometime it comforteth, and styrreth up the faint harted: nowe hee exhorteth the slower sorte, and nowe with threatninges, he terrifieth suche as are prophane, and ungodly. Hereof we may everywhere easelye finde examples in the historie of the Gospell. Agayne, the same is proved by the use and custome of the holy Scripture: For Paule wryteth thus in his seconde epipistle to Timothe, and the thyrde chapter. All scripture geven by inspiration of God, is profitable to improve, to amende, and to instructe in righteousnes that the name of God may be perfecte and prepared unto all good workes. Here the foure folde use of the scripture is declared, and that with foure woordes whiche are in the Greeke tongue named Didascalia, Elenchos, Epanorthosis, and Paidia. Didascalia, is to be handled in the first kinde, that is to say, in that whiche appertaineth to teaching. Elenchos, hath chiding. Epanorthosis is when the fal is lifted up, and made stedfast, whiche manifestly appeareth to bee done with consolations and comfortes. Paidia, is the teaching of children, whose chiefest office is, to perswade to goodnes, and honestie, and to dissuade from wicked and filthie thynges. Our distinction therefore agreeth with the varietie of the hearers, with the ensample of Christe, and with the tradition of Paule. But because the hearers are mixed in publicke assemblies it commeth to passe, that the prophetes, Christ, the apostles, & all the godly ministers of the worde doe oftentimes builde & frame out of doctrine, consolations, perswasions, and chidings, all which the force of doctrine hathe as it were joyned with it: even as I have sayde before, is done in the wrytinges of the Prophetes and Apostles: whose examples it becommeth godlye ministers to folowe in makyng of Sermones. Neyther is our distinction to bee disallowed whiche doth appertayne to the nature of teachynge of thynges, and doth shewe what order and waye is to be observed in makyng of Sermones, although sometymes those thynges whiche I have named as

preachers on preaching



accessaries, and impertinent, are applied by the figure of digression, which thing who so ever doth not observe, can neyther make their owne sermons well, neyther judge of other mens, nor yet beare them awaye in mynde. Wherfore the kyndes of sermons must first be distinguished, and then those thinges whiche are added, maye verye well bee formed and framed. (Hemmingsen 1574: sigs D2r–D3v)

I.5. from Edmund Grindal, Letter to Queen Elizabeth (20 December 1576) The zealous commitment to a preaching ministry of Grindal (1516?–83), Elizabeth’s second archbishop of Canterbury, put him on a collision course with his monarch within months of appointment. Ordered by her in 1575 to suspend the ‘prophesyings’—meetings designed to train more preaching clergy, which the queen considered not only unnecessary but also a nursery for Puritanism—Grindal refused in terms even firmer than the queen’s own. He was sequestered from office, and admired for generations after by proponents of preaching-centred worship and critics of ‘prelatical’ episcopacy. (See Collinson 1979.) Public and continual preaching of God’s word is the ordinary mean and instrument of the salvation of mankind. St Paul calleth it the ministry of reconciliation of man unto God. By preaching of God’s word the glory of God is enlarged, faith is nourished, and charity increased. By it the ignorant is instructed, the negligent exhorted and incited, the stubborn rebuked, the weak conscience comforted, and to all those that sin of malicious wickedness the wrath of God is threatened. By preaching also due obedience to Christian princes and magistrates is planted in the hearts of subjects: for obedience proceedeth of conscience; conscience is grounded upon the word of God; the word of God worketh his effect by preaching. So as generally, where preaching wanteth, obedience faileth. No prince ever had more lively experience hereof than your Majesty hath had in your time, and may have daily. If your Majesty come to the city of London never so often, what gratulation, what joy, what concourse of people is there to be seen! Yea, what acclamations and prayers to God for your long life, and other manifest significations of inward and unfeigned love, joined with most humble and hearty obedience, are there to be heard! Whereof cometh this, Madam, but of the continual preaching of God’s word in that city, whereby that people hath been plentifully instructed in their duty towards God and your Majesty? (Grindal 1843: 379–80)

I.6. from Andreas Hyperius, The Practise of Preaching, trans. John Ludham (1577) Hyperius (Andreas Gherrardus, 1511–64), a Flemish Protestant, was resident in England 1536–40 and later professor of theology at Marburg. Ludham (d. 1613) was educated at the godly St John’s College in Cambridge, and translated many continental reformed works during his long career as an Essex vicar.



appendix

What the common and popular order of interpreting the Scriptures is: and howe excellent a function they have that teach the people in the Churche. Lib. 1, Cap. I But in very good season even in the firste entry (as ye woulde say) of this booke, shall we call to memory how excellent their function is, that declare unto the people the divine oracles. The prophet Malachy. Cap. 2. termeth him it teacheth in the Church, the angell of the Lorde of hostes. Which worde sithe it properly signifieth the office of hym that bringeth the commaundementes of God unto men, each mannes mynde hearing the same, maye forthwith of necessitie, conceyue some thinge then man more high and excelent, and approchinge more neere to the heavenly nature. Moreover, the prechers are called . . . of God himselfe as though God vouched safe to admytte them as hys fellowes and companions in the worke of buyldinge and establishing his church. ***

That many thinges are common to the Preacher with the Orator, and of the office of the Preacher Lib. 1, Cap. IIII That many thinges are common to the Preacher with the Orator, Sainct Augustine in his fourth Booke of Christian doctrine, doth copiously declare. Therefore, the partes of an Orator, whiche are accounted of some to be, Invention, Disposition, Elocution, Memory, and Pronounciation, may rightlye be called also the partes of a Preacher. Yea and these three: to Teache, to Delight, to Turne: Likewise againe the three kyndes of speaking, Loftye, Base, Meane: Moreover, the whole craft of varienge the Oration by Schemes and Tropes, pertaineth indifferently to the Preacher and Orator, as Sainct Augustine in the same booke doth wittily confesse and learnedly prove. To be short, whatsoever is necessarie to the Preacher in disposition, Elocution, and Memorye, the Rhetoritians have exactlye taught all that in their workhouses: wherefore (in my opinion) the Preachers may most conveniently learne those partes out of them. Certainly, he that hath beene somdeale exercised in the Scholes of the Rhetoritians before he be received into the order of Preachers, shall come much more apte and better furnished then many other, and may be bolde to hope, that he shall accomplish somwhat in the Church, worthy prayse and commendation. ***

That Sermons of everye kinde ought to be devided into certain parts, and how many those are: then of readinge of the sacred Scripture Lib. 1, Cap. VIII Now in what kinde soever a Sermon that be instituted, it is firste of all to be provyded, that, like as it is sayde, when we entreated of the forme of divine sermons, it be devided into certayn parts. The parts commonly received are in nu[m]ber seven, that is to say

preachers on preaching



treding of the sacred scripture, Invocation, Exordium, proposition or division, Confirmation, Confutation, conclusion. ***

Of Confirmation Lib. 1, Cap. XII Now what place soever thou takest in hand beware that thou so handle the same, as that for the present state of things, it may (in thy judgement) be most expedient. For undoubtedly, common custom and daily maners, the tranquilytie, or preturbation of the church, vices every where growing and increasing, the forme and state of the com[m]on wealth, the constitution of the whole citie, doe oftentimes require, that thou use a new forme and maner of speakinge. For of cities, thou shalt see one florishe with the Princes Courte, an other illustrated with the high Senate house and chiefe counsayle of the whole Region, in an other a noble and famous Schoole, an other notable thorowe some Marte or Market, in an other a companye of noble and ritche menne, an other to bee inhabited with a great number of artificers an other to nourysh and sustaine many souldiours (such as are placed for continuall garrisons in the borders of kingdomes and provinces) an other to be frequented of citizens wherof the greater part is given to husbandry, to be short, in an other, some other kinde of men to abounde and beare rule. Therefore, so farre forth as is possible, it is requisyte that thou accomodate the whole comming and experience in expounding of common places, to the maners and conditions of the people that are present, and to the state of the whole Citie: namely so, that examples, similitudes, comparisons, Item reprehensions of vices and enormities, be in such sorte prepared and handeled, as that is is most lykely, they shall best perceiue them. To thaccomplyshing of which thing we have neede of a certaine cyvill policye and prudence. ***

Of movinge of affections Lib. 1, Cap. XVI The preacher shall not employe his least care in movinge of affections, forsomuch as all the learned sorte doe confesse, that he sta[n]deth of no one thing more in neede, then he doth of this one onely faculty. They that teache no otherwyse in the temple, then professors are accustomed in the Scoles, it cannot be that they shoulde be the authors of any greate spirituall fruites, and very fewe or none are seene to bee induced with such Sermons to repentaunce and amendement of lyfe. Wherefore, whosoever he be that hath once taken upon him the office of teaching in the church, must with great industry apply himself unto this, that he may at the lengthe feele himselfe able to performe somewhat worthy of commendation in this behalfe. *** These thinges are furthered, yea, and increased also, if a man shall attentively reade and peruse some one place (especially) in the sacred Scriptures, wherein the affections are



appendix

judged to be most cunningely and artificially moved: in which it shall bee convenient so longe time to staye, as the mynde may fully conceyve those thinges that agree with the purpose. After which sorte certaine Emperours bee reported (& amonge these also Alexander of Macedony) as ofte as they entended to joyne battaile with their enimies, to have enflamed themselves by the readinge of certayne verses, wherein some horrible conflicte com[m]itted, was of some Poete described & set forth. *** It cannot bee dissembled, but that the moderate pronunciation of a lyvely voyce togither with a decent and comely gesture of the speaker, both adde greate force and importaunce to the movinge of affections. *** Most effectually of all doe they move the mindes of men, to whom is given of God that vertue or power of spirit in Teaching, which wee sayd, in the second Chapter of this present Booke, to be most requisite and neccessary to every Preacher. For all men must confesse that the power of movinge affections, both not in such wyse consist in exquisite termes, exacte of speech and apte pronounciatio[n], but that a much greater dignitie, brightnesse, yea, and majesty doeth rest in thys maner of speakinge, wherin we see some men to excel and shyne before others. For we know by experience that some commonly speake altogither without arte, and very simply and plainely, and yet in the meane tyme doe drawe their hearers whithersoeuer they lyst etc. (Hyperius 1577: sigs B2v, C1r, D6r, E6v–7r, G1r, G3v, G4r)

I.7. from Richard Hooker, The Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity, book V (1597) Hooker (1554–1600) was the author of the first comprehensive rationale of the Elizabethan Settlement of religion. Book V considered the public worship of the church, and in it Hooker directly addressed the godly’s (‘they’ in the extract below) demands for more frequent preaching, and their argument that merely reading appointed lessons from scripture in prayer-book services was inadequate. Hooker’s case not just for the equality, but even the superiority, of ‘reading’ over ‘preaching’ marked a profound departure from voices like that of Edmund Grindal (App. I.5 above), and found further voice in critics of the sermon’s popularity, like Lancelot Andrewes (App. I.11 below; see Fig. 30). Sermons they ever more understand to be that word of God, which alone hath vitall operation. The daungerous sequell of which construction I wish they did more attentively waigh. For sith speech is the verie image whereby the minde and soule of the speaker conveieth it selfe into the bosome of him which heareth, we cannot choose but see greate reason, wherefore the word that proceedeth from God, who is him selfe verie truth and life, should be (as thapostle to the Hebrues noteth) livelie and mightie in operation, sharper then anie two edged sworde. Now if in this and the like places we did conceave, that our owne sermons are that stronge and forcible worde, should we not hereby

preachers on preaching



imparte even the most peculiar glorie of the worde of God unto that which is not his worde? For touchinge our sermons, that which giveth them their verie beinge is the witt of man, and therefore they oftentimes accordinglie tast too much of that over corrupt fountaine from which they come. In our speech of most holie thinges, our most fraile affections manie tymes are bewrayed. Wherefore when we reade or recite scripture, we then deliver to the people properlie the worde of God. As for our sermons, be they never so sound and perfect, his worde they are not as the sermons of the prophetes were, no they are but ambiguouslie termed his worde, because his word is commonlie the subject whereof they treate, and must be the rule whereby they are framed. Notwithstandinge by these and the like shiftes they derive unto sermons alone whatsoever is generallie spoken concerninge the word. Againe what seemeth to have bene uttered concerninge sermons and theire efficacie or necessitie, in regard of divine matter, and must consequentlie be verified in sundrie other kindes of teachinge, if the matter be the same in all, theire use is to fasten everie such speech unto that one onlie maner of teaching which is by sermons, that still sermons may be all in all. (Hooker 1977: 98–9)

I.8. from William Perkins, The Arte of Prophecying, trans. Thomas Tuke (1607) Perkins (1558–1602) was perhaps the most influential Calvinist theologian of Elizabethan England. Both his systematic and his moral theology were classics of English Puritanism, as was his preacher’s handbook. It first appeared in Latin in 1592, then in a posthumous English translation (1607) and in several collected editions of his works through 1635. Tuke (1580/1–1657) was probably an associate of Perkins at Cambridge; a prolific author and London clergyman, he was sequestered in 1643 for his opposition to Parliament.

Chap. X In the Promulgation two things are required: the hiding of humane wisedome, and the demonstration (or shewing) of the spirit. Humane wisedome must bee concealed, whether it be in the matter of the sermon, or in the setting forth of the words: because the preaching of the word is the Testimonie of God, and the profession of the knowledge of Christ, and not of humane skill: and againe, because the hearers ought not to ascribe their faith to the gifts of men, but to the power of Gods word. 1. Cor. 2. 1. When I came unto you brethren, I came not with the eminencie of eloquence or of wisdome, declaring unto you the testimonie of God. 2 For I did not decree to know any thing among you but Jesus Christ, and him crucified. 5. That your faith should not consist in the wisedome of men, but in the power of God. If any man thinke that by this meanes barbarisme should bee brought into pulpits; hee must understand that the Minister may, yea and must priuatly use at his libertie the artes, philosophie, and varietie of reading, whilest he is in framing his sermon: but he ought in publike to conceale all these from the people, and not to make the least ostentation. Artis etiam est celare artem; it is also a point of Art to conceale Art.



appendix

The Demonstration of the spirit is, when as the Minister of the word doth in the time of preaching so behave himselfe, that all, even ignorant persons & unbeleevers may judge, that it is not so much hee that speaketh, as the Spirit of God in him and by him. 1. Cor. 2.4. Neither was my speech and my preaching in the perswasive words of mans wisedome, but in the demonstration of the spirit and of power. *** This demonstration is either in speech or in gesture. The speech must be spirtuall and gracious. That speech is spirituall which the holy Spirit doth teach. 1. Cor. 2. 13. Which things also we speake, not in the words, which mans wisedome teacheth, but which the holy Ghost teacheth, comparing spirituall things with spirituall things. And it is a speech both simple and perspicuous fit both for the peoples understanding and to express the maiestie of the spirit. *** Wherefore neither the words of arts, nor Greeke and Latin phrases and quirks must bee intermingled in the sermon. 1. They disturbe the mindes of the auditours, that they cannot fit those things which went afore with those that follow. 2. A strange word hindreth the understanding of those things that are spoken. 3. It drawes the mind away from the purpose to some other matter. Here also the telling of tales, and all profane and ridiculous speeches must be omitted. *** Gesture is either in the action of the voyce or of the bodie. (Perkins 1607: 132–3, 134–5, 136, 143)

I.9. from Richard Bernard, The Faithfull Shepheard (1607) Cambridge-educated, Bernard (1568–1641) was a moderate puritan who flirted with nonconformity, but spent most of his long career as a parish minister and prolific author of printed sermons and other tracts. The title page of The Faithfull Shepheard advertised it as ‘very profitable for yoong students, who intend the studie of Theologie’; the handbook was expanded in a second edition (1609).

Chap. VII. Of the Scholies and interpretation of the words After the division of the text, must follow an explanation of the simple words, or of words joined together, making evidently a sentence: yet this is not to be done at once thorow out the text, but orderly as the words are come unto, or the sentences in the severall parts of the division, which will prevent tediousnesse and tautologies.

preachers on preaching



If the words bee but two or three together, or but one briefe sentence, then as necessitie requireth, they may at once bee explained; and then a Paraphrase made thereon, briefe and plaine. Which thing is not to be done where the words are plaine without any obscuritie in them. For everie Scripture is either plainly set downe, and the words to be taken properly as they lie in the letter: (So is every doctrin of Faith and maners necessary to salvation set downe) which needs no explication of words, but inlarging of the matter: or else obscurely; and this needs an exposition. No Scripture is in itselfe obscure, but that wee want eie-sight to behold what is therein conteined. The Sunne is ever cleere, though wee through our blindnesse cannot see the shining; or for that some dark clouds hinder our sight, which are to be remooved, that we may looke upon it. ***

Chap. VIII. Of gathering doctrines from the Text After Interpretation Logicall, Grammaticall, and Rhetoricall, doubtful things being resolved, and obscure made plaine, followes the Collection of Lessons or Doctrines, which are propositions drawen from the Scripture, teaching somewhat to be beleeved, onely for informing of the judgement. Heere first a Teacher must begin to builde, that knowledge may goe before zeale to guide the same: this of some is called the Didascalike or Doctrinal part of a Sermon, wherein a trueth is delivered and confirmed; by this we onely learne to know and beleeve: But to effect and doe is another part of the Sermon, following upon this: As for example. ***

Chap. IX Of making use of the doctrine, shewing what to doe with it After the deliverie of the Doctrine, enforming the auditory that there is such a thing, and what it is, followes the use necessarilie; that the hearers may know what to doe with that which they so understand. These two cannot in nature be sundred; nothing can be taught but there is an use and end thereof; and these bee distinct in nature; the doctrine goes before, and the use comes after. A lesson without use, is as a devised thing idlie without end. And it is lesse cunning to give a precept, then to shew aptlie the use therof. Wee must therefore first in everie Scripture shew the doctrine; as laying a ground of our speech, and thereon build the use for further edification. ***

Chap. X Of Applications of the uses to the hearers The use being made aptly, next and immediately followes the application; which is not the using of doctrines to severall estates: for use and application so are made all one; which in nature are plainly distinct. But application is a neerer bringing of the use



appendix

delivered, after a more generall sort, in the third person, as spoken to persons absent; to the time, place, and persons then present; and uttered in the second person, or in the first, when the Minister, as often the Apostle doth, will enclude himselfe with them. This is lively set foorth unto us in the speech of Nathan and David together: Nathan comes with a parable and shewes thereby a thing done, which is the doctrine. David he makes an use thereof, and speakes in the third person: and Nathan makes application of that use made from the third person to the second, Thou art the man, 2. Sam. 12. 7. (Bernard 1607: 26, 42–3, 59–60, 70–1)

I.10. from John Donne, ‘A Lent-Sermon Preached at White-hall, February 12. 1618.’ [1618/19] Donne (1572–1631) was more widely famed in his later life as a preacher than as a poet. Ordained in 1615, he commanded elite London pulpits at Lincoln’s Inn, St Paul’s, St Dunstan’s-in-the-West, and the royal court. Although finer points of his theology and churchmanship continue to be debated by scholars, his commitment to preaching, and belief in the power, dignity, and responsibility of preachers, have never been in doubt. First then, God for his own glory promises here, that his Prophet, his Minister shall be Tuba, as is said in the beginning of this Chapter, a Trumpet, to awaken with terror. But then, he shall become Carmen musicum, a musical and harmonious charmer, to settle and compose the soul again in a reposed confidence, and in a delight in God: he shall be musicum carmen, musick, harmony to the soul in his matter; he shall preach harmonious peace to the conscience; and he shall be musicum carmen, musick and harmony in his manner; he shall not present the messages of God rudely, barbarously, extemporally; but with such meditation and preparation as appertains to so great an imployment, from such a King as God, to such a State as his Church: so he shall be musicum carmen, musicke, harmony, in re & modo, in matter and in manner: And then musicum so much farther (as the text adds) as that he shall have a pleasant voice, that is, to preach first sincerely (for a preaching to serve turns and humors, cannot, at least should not please any) but then it is to preach acceptably, seasonably, with a spiritual delight, to a discreet and rectified congregation, that by the way of such a holy delight, they may receive the more profit. And then he shall play well on an instrument; which we do not take here to be the working upon the understanding and affections of the Auditory, that the congregation shall be his instrument; but as S. Basil says, Corpus hominis, Organum Dei, when the person acts that which the song says; when the words become works, this is a song to an instrument . . . they shall confess, that thy labors work upon them, and move them, and affect them, and that that unpremeditated, and drowsie, and cold manner of preaching, agrees not with the dignity of Gods service: they shall acknowledge (says God to this Prophet) thy pleasant voice; confesse thy doctrine to be good, and confesse thy playing upon an Instrument, acknowledge thy life to be good to; for, in testimony of all this, Audient (saies the text) They shall hear this. (Donne 1953–62: 2.166–8)

preachers on preaching



I.11. from Lancelot Andrewes, ‘A Sermon Prepared to be Preached, on . . . Ash-Wednesday’ (1624) Like Donne, Andrewes (1555–1626) held a place at the pinnacle of elite preaching in early modern London. As lord almoner and later dean of the Chapel Royal to James VI & I, he preached at court on every major feast day during the reign. From at least the 1590s, he, like Richard Hooker (App. I.7 above), was a major critic of what he viewed as a growing cult of sermon-hearing that displaced liturgical worship and performing good works. In, at our eares, there goes I know not how many sermons: and every day more and more, if we might have our wills. Infers auribus, in the eares they goe; the eare and all filled, and even farced with them: but there, the eare is all. It puts me in mind of the great absurdity, as Saint Paul reckons it. What, is all hearing? (saith he) All hearing? Yes: all is hearing with us. But, that all should be hearing is as much as if all one’s body should be nothing but an eare, and that were a strange body. But, that absurdity are we fallen into. The corps, the whole body of some mens profession; all godlinesse with some, what is it, but hearing a sermon? The eare is all; the eare doth all that is done: and but by our eare-marke, no man should know us to be Christians. *** For, a wonderfull thing it is, how many Sermons, and Sermons upon Sermons (as it were, so many measures of seed) are throwen in daily; and what becomes of them, no man can tell . . . And those eares that have (I know not how many) Sermons and Lectures, and all in a manner sine fructu, without any fruit that can be seense, are not farr from it, from a curse. *** Now, if you marke, what it is our best Sermons bring forth, we shall easily observe, the most is a few good words of some point or other in the Sermon, handled (per-adventure) not amisse: and (heare you) well, if that: but, if that, looke for no more; ther’s all . . . As if we came hither to bring forth a leafe of praise; to preach art, and not Spirit: Art, to draw from men a vaine applause . . . The onely true praise of a Sermon is, some evill left, or some good done, upon the hearing of it. One such fruit, so brought forth, were a more ample commendation, then many mouthes full of good words spent, and copies taken, and printing, and I wote not what. And sure it is, On whom a Sermon workes aright, it leaves him not leysure to say much, to use many words, but makes him rather full of thoughts. (Andrewes 1629: 240–2)

I.12. from George Herbert, A Priest to the Temple or The Country Parson (1652) Educated at Westminster School under Andrewes (App. I.11 above), and then Cambridge, Herbert (1593–1633) retreated from likely court and university preferment when he took holy orders and a modest rural living near Salisbury. His minister’s conduct book reflects



appendix

that experience in its commendation of a simple, practical kind of preaching very different from the complexity of that practised by his elder friends Andrewes and Donne.

Chapter VII The Parson Preaching The Countrey Parson preacheth constantly, the pulpit is his joy and his throne: if he at any time intermit, it is either for want of health, or against some great Festivall, that he may the better celebrate it, or for the variety of the hearers, that he may be heard at his returne more attentively. When he intermits, he is ever very well supplyed by some able man who treads in his steps, and will not throw down what he hath built; whom also he intreats to press some point, that he himself hath often urged with no great success, that so in the mouth of two or three witnesses the truth may be more established. When he preacheth, he procures attention by all possible art, both by earnestnesse of speech, it being naturall to men to think, that where is much earnestness, there is somewhat worth hearing; and by a diligent, and busy cast of his eye on his auditors, with letting them know, that he observes who marks, and who not; and with particularizing of his speech now to the younger sort, then to the elder, now to the poor, and now to the rich. This is for you, and This is for you; for particulars ever touch, and awake more then generalls. *** Sometimes he tells them stories, and sayings of others, according as his text invites him; for them also men heed, and remember better then exhortations; which though earnest, yet often dy with the Sermon, especially with Countrey people; which are thick, and heavy, and hard to raise to a poynt of Zeal, and fervency, and need a mountaine of fire to kindle them; but stories and sayings they will well remember. He often tels them, that Sermons are dangerous things, that none goes out of Church as he came in, but either better, or worse; that none is careless before his Judg, and that the word of God shal Judge us. By these and other means the Parson procures attention; but the character of his Sermon is Holiness; he is not witty, or learned, or eloquent, but Holy. A Character, that Hermogenes never dream’d of, and therefore he could give no precepts thereof. But it is gained first, by choosing texts of Devotion, not Controversie, moving and ravishing texts, whereof the Scriptures are full. Secondly, by dipping, and seasoning all our words and sentences in our hearts, before they come into our mouths, truly affecting, and cordially expressing all that we say; so that the auditors may plainly perceive that every word is hart-deep. Thirdly, by turning often, and making many Apostrophes to God, as, Oh Lord blesse my people, and teach them this point; or, Oh my Master, on whose errand I come, let me hold my peace, and doe thou speak thy selfe; for thou art Love, and when thou teachest all are Scholers. Some such irradiations scatteringly in the Sermon, carry great holiness in them. *** Lastly, by an often urging of the presence, and majesty of God, by these, or such like speeches. Oh let us all take heed what we do, God sees us, he sees whether I speak as I ought, or you hear as you ought, he sees hearts, as we see faces: he is among us; for if we be here, hee must be here, since we are here by him, and without him could not be here.

preachers on preaching



Then turning the discourse to his Majesty, And he is a great God, and terrible, as great in mercy, so great in judgement: There are but two devouring elements, fire, and water, he hath both in him; His voyce is as the sound of many waters, Revelations 1. And he himselfe is a consuming fire, Hebrews 12. Such discourses shew very Holy. The Parsons Method in handling of a text consists of two parts; first, a plain and evident declaration of the meaning of the text; and secondly, some choyce Observations drawn out of the whole text, as it lyes entire, and unbroken in the Scripture it self. This he thinks naturall, and sweet, and grave. Whereas the other way of crumbling a text into small parts, as, the Person speaking, or spoken to, the subject, and the object, and the like, hath neither in it sweetnesse, nor gravity, nor variety, since the words apart are not Scripture, but a dictionary, and may be considered alike in all the Scripture. The Parson exceeds not an hour in preaching, because all ages have thought that a competency, and he that profits not in that time, will lesse afterwards, the same affection which made him not profit before, making him then weary, and so he grows from not relishing, to loathing. (Herbert 1652: 21–8)

I.13. from William Chappell, The Preacher, or the Art and Method of Preaching (1656) Chappell (1582–1629) is most remembered as John Milton’s first Cambridge tutor, and as the principal agent of Laudian reforms at Trinity College Dublin (for which he was awarded the Irish bishoprics of Cork and Ross). After expulsion in 1641, he retreated to private scholarly retirement in England. His preacher’s manual seems not to have been intended for publication, and first appeared posthumously and anonymously in its original Latin (1648).

Chap. I. The Method of Preaching is a discourse upon a Text of Scripture, disposing its parts according to the order of nature, whereby, the accord of them, one with the other may be judged of, and contained in memory. ***

Chap. II. Of the ingress or entrance into the Text of Scripture which is to be treated of The parts of the Method are of } Doctrine } Use. In the Doctrine there ought to be considered the } Preparation thereunto; } Handling of it. In the Preparation



appendix

the } Entrance to the place where it is, } Laying of the doctrine it self. 1. Of the Entrance. If the Preacher intendeth to treat upon some whole Book, Psalm, or Epistle, he must first briefly shew the chief scope of the whole, and the parts (wherein is the chief use of the distribution of the whole into parts) in their greatest extent. Then the parts of the first part, if it have any, and so proceed to the rest. 2. Likewise if he undertake the greatest part of some whole treaty: first let him shew the scope, then set down the parts, and shew how that part which he is to handle, hath its coherence with the rest, and tends to that scope: and let him consider that part, first in it self, secondly in its relation to the whole. 3. Lastly, if he takes any particular Text for a subject of a Sermon or two; if it be in the Context (as many in the Proverbs, &c. are not) let him first shew the connexion of it, or the relation to the principal part to which it belongs: Or if it begins a treaty, let him shew first whereto that, whereof this is a member tends, and how this conduceth thereunto. And let that particular Text be considered first in it self, next in the relation (if any) to that which precedes. (Chappell 1656: 1, 3–5)

I.14. from Richard Baxter, Gildas salvianus, the Reformed Pastor (1656) A minister of great seriousness and scruple, Baxter (1615–91) was at the Restoration perhaps the most respected voice among moderate Presbyterians willing to negotiate conformity within an established episcopal church, though he was ultimately forced into a highly principled non-conformity from 1662. Baxter’s Reformed Pastor was written out of his first-hand experience of committed preaching ministry, and has been judged ‘a permanent contribution to the literature of pastoral theology and perhaps the finest product of the practical concern of puritanism for the well-being of souls’ (Keeble 2004).

Chap. VIII Directions how to deal with self-conceited Opinionists, and to prevent or cure Errour and Schism in our People. And how to deal with those of whose condition we are between hope and fear.

Sect. 1 7. See that you preach to such auditors as these, some higher points, that stall their understandings, and feed them not all with milk, but sometime with stronger meat: For it exceedingly puffs them up with Pride, when they hear nothing from Ministers but what they know already, or can say themselves: This makes them think themselves as wise as you, and as fit to be Teachers; For they think you know no more then you preach: And this hath set so many of them on preaching, because they hear nothing from others but what they can say themselves; and Ministers do not set them such patterns as may humble them, and deter them from that work. Not that I would have you neglect the

preachers on preaching



great fundamental verities, or wrong the weak and ignorant people, while you are dealing with such as these; but only when the main part of your Sermon is as plain as you can speak, let some one small part, be such as shall puzzle these self-conceited men: Or else have one Sermon in four or five of purpose for them: Not by heaping up citations of Fathers, nor repeating words of Latine or Greek (unless when you are convincing them of the difficulty of a Text of Scripture) For they will but deride all this: But take up some profound questions (such as the Schools voluminously agitate) and let them see that it is edifying that you intend, and therefore desire to make it as plain as you can; that they may see that it is not your obscure manner of handling, but the matter it self that is too hard for them, and so may see that they are yet but children that have need of milk, and that you would be more upon such higher points, if it were not that their incapacity doth take you off. (Baxter 1656: 465–6)

I.15. from Vavasor Powell, [Tsofer Bepah] or the Bird in the Cage, Chirping Four distinct Notes to his Consorts abroad (1661) An outspoken opponent of royalists, Cromwell, and Quakers alike, Powell (1617–70; see Roberts, Chapter 15, this volume) preached with zeal and much popular success in London, the Marches, and north Wales. Imprisoned at the Restoration, his Bird in the Cage was a vindication of himself and his preaching, as well as an almost apostolic letter of encouragement to his ‘dear Country-men’ in Wales. My dear friends, If the publishing of this inoffencively intended little Book, be well or ill; Know my love to you chiefly was the motive to it: and that of all other things, if God did please, I would choose to be doing the work to which I was called amongst you, rather than any where, or any thing else; though I were to be fed with bread & water and to carry my chains & bonds with me. And I should not count my life dear to me, so that I might have the liberty to Preach Christ, for the Salvation of my dear Country-men, and for your further edification; if not the will of the Lord be done concerning me, and his work by whom else he pleaseth. I am perswaded he will take care of you, and the rest of his Flocks; and therefore to him again I commit you, who hath promised to be your God and guide until, yea, will be in and after death your salvation. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen. Powell 1661 (sigs A6v–7r)

I.16. from Gilbert Burnet, A Discourse of the Pastoral Care (1692) A Scot by birth and education, Burnet (1643–1715) became an English churchman and author of international significance. He was highly thought of by William and Mary, who appointed him bishop of Salisbury in 1689. He was author of over 140 works, and his Pastoral Care had as one of its aims the reconciliation of non-conformists with the established church, and was influential throughout the ‘long’ eighteenth century (Greig 2004).



appendix

Chap. IX: Concerning Preaching We have so vast a number of excellent Performances in Print, that if a Man has but a right understanding of Religion, and a true relish of good Sense, he may easily furnish himself this way. The impertinent Way of dividing Texts is laid aside, the needless setting out of the Originals, and the vulgar Version, is worn out. The trifling Shews of Learning in many Quotations of Passages, that very few could understand, do no more flat the Auditory. Pert Wit and luscious Eloquence have lost their relish. So that Sermons are reduced to the plain opening the Meaning of the Text, in a few short Illustrations of its Coherence with what goes before and after, and of the Parts of which it is composed; to that is joined the clear stating of such Propositions as arise out of it, in their Nature, Truth and Reasonableness: by which, the Hearers may form clear Notions of the several Parts of Religion; such as are best suted to their Capacities and Apprehensions: to all which Applications are aded, tending to the Reproving, Directing, Encouraging, or Comforting the Hearers, according to the several Occasions that are offered. *** . . . great regard is to be had to the Nature of the Auditory, that so the Point explained may be in some measure proportioned to them. Too close a Thread of Reason, too great an Abstraction of Thought, too sublime and too metaphisical a Strain, are sutable to very few Auditories, if to any at all. *** . . . The shorter Sermons are, they are generally both better heard, and better remembred. The custom of an Hour’s length, forces many Preachers to trifle away much of the Time, and to spin out their Matter, so as to hold out. So great a length does also flat the Hearers, and tempt them to sleep; especially when, as is usual, the first part of the Sermon is languid and heavy: In half an Hour a Man may lay open his Matter in its full extent, and cut off those Superfluities which come in only to lengthen the Discourse: and he may hope to keep up the Attention of his People all the while. As to the Stile, Sermons ought to be very plain; the Figures must be easy, not mean, but noble, and brought in upon design to make the Matter better understood. The Words in a Sermon must be simple, and in common use; not savouring of the Schools, nor above the understanding of the People. All long Periods, such as carry two or three different Thoughts in them, must be avoided; for few Hearers can follow or apprehend these: Niceties of Stile are lost before a common Auditory. But if an easy Simplicity of Stile should run through the whole Composition, it should take place most of all in the explanatory part; for the thing being there offered to be understood, it should be stript of all garnishing: Definitions should not be offered in the Terms, or Method, that Logick directs. In short, a Preacher is to fancy himself, as in the room of the most unlearned Man in his whole Parish; and therefore he must put such parts of his Discourse as he would have all understand, in so plain a form of Words, that it may not be beyond the meanest of them: This he will certainly study to do, if his desire is to edify them, rather than to make them admire himself as a learned and highspoken Man. (Burnet 1692: 216–19, 222–3)

preachers on preaching



I.17. from ‘A Sermon Preached by Mr John Butcher. At Grace-Church street, March 11. 1693[4]’ John Butcher (d. 1721) preached what has become recognized as a classic early statement of Quaker thought and ministry in the London meeting house, which in the previous year had held the funeral of the movement’s founder, George Fox. The Quakers or ‘Friends’ rejected the institutional mediation of ordained ministry, instead encouraging anyone (whether male or female) who was moved by the spirit or ‘Light’ of Christ to speak extempore to a gathered meeting. Here—in a text reconstructed after delivery, perhaps by a listener— Butcher expounded how Christ, the ‘Light of the World’, was to be found in all, and included a rejoinder to the common accusation that Quakers denied the ‘manifestation’ of the incarnate God in the historical Jesus. My Friends, The end of our Preaching to you the Principle of the Light within is, that you might come to the Knowledge of Christ as he doth appear nigh to you, he is come nigh to the Children of Men in our Age, that is, by his Light, Grace, Spirit, and Truth, whereby he doth appear in the hearts of Men and Women; Thus our Preaching of him doth agree with his own Testimony, I am the Light of the World, and he doth exhort all that they should so believe in him . . . And for this we do labour, according to our ability, which the Lord is pleased to give us, that People may be turned from darkness unto light . . . Now my Friends, the Mercy of God appears so great to all in and through Christ Jesus, who is the Light of the World, and who is the only Way, and (as my Friend observed that spake before me) we have not another way . . . Now the Labour of those Ministers that were in the days of old, who were the Preachers of the Gospel, and Glad Tidings of the Kingdom, they being such Ministers as were of Christ’s own making, their Labour was to turn People from Darkness to Light, and from the Power of Satan, to the Power of the Living God . . . Friends I would not be mistaken, I do not Preach Christ as the Light of the World, in opposition to his outward appearance, and being manifested in the Flesh in that prepared Body wherein he did his Fathers will when he was on Earth . . . If I esteem the Appearance of Christ in my own Heart, I shall be so far from having a light esteem of his Bodily Appearance, and his being manifest in the Flesh, that I shall admire and reverence that Great Mystery of Godliness, and bless God for the record given thereof in the Holy Scriptures, which the light of Christ is a Key to open . . . My Friends, walk in the Light more and more, that by the Spirit of the Lord, you may be acquainted with the divine operation of the Power of Christ, which will bring you from under the bondage of Sin and Corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God . . . (Anon. 1694: 150–1, 168, 172–3).

appendix ii Preaching Observed

Sermons were first and foremost works delivered viva voce to an audience, from which comment about them was committed to letters, diaries, autobiographical memoir, and printed polemic. The selections below illustrate just how varied were the contexts in which preaching was originally encountered, and how varied the responses and uses to which those original encounters were passed.

II.1. Sir Thomas More (1478–1535) More lived and died defending English Roman Catholicism against Lutheran Protestantism from its first appearance in England. His Dialogue Concerning Heresies was commissioned in 1526 and appeared in 1529. For this, his first work of controversy, he adopted the thinly fictionalized form of a humanist dialogue, where ‘More’ counsels an unnamed ‘Messenger’ influenced by the Lutheran views promulgated by Lutherans like Thomas Bilney, whose recent heresy trial More had attended. In this passage, though polemically couched, ‘More’ addresses what would become a perennial question for Protestants to answer: what is the purpose of preaching to an elect who are justified by predestined faith alone? Men speke of some that bere two facys in one hode. I never sawe any that more veryly play that pagaunt / than do this kynde of suche prechours. For in prechynge to the people they make a vysage as though they came strayght from heven to teche them a newe better way & more trew than the chyrche techeth / or hath taught this many hundred yere. And then to the chyrche in examynacyon they shewe them selfe as pore men of mydle erthe / & as though they taught none other wyse than the chyrche doth. But in conclusyon when they be well examyned / and with moche worke that falshode of theyr cloked collusion is pulled of / then appereth there all the malycyous trechery / and what poyson they put forth under the cloke of hony. As this man that I tell you of laborynge all that he myght by many meanes to make it seme / that in prechynge / that faythe alone was suffycyent for our salvacyon / and that good workys were nothhynge worthe / hadd nothynge entended but well and accordynge to the doctryne of the chyrche / and [that] he and his felowes never ment other wyse than the chyrch meaneth / yet in conclusyon he planly shewed hym selfe / that he and his felowes entende thereby to brynge people to this poynte at last / that all thynge hangeth onely uppon desteny / and that the lybertye of mannys wyll sholde serve of ryght noght / nor mennys dedys good or badde made no

preaching observed



dyfference afore god / but that in his chosen people nothynge myslyketh hym be it never so badde / and in the other sorte pleaseth hym be it never so good / the very worst and most myschevous heresye that ever was thought uppon / and thereto the moost madde. For as it was sayd unto hym / yf this were trewe / whereto preache they at all? (More 1981: pt 2, pp. 399–400).

II.2. John Foxe (1516/17–87) After early involvement in Protestant circles in Oxford, Foxe emerged as a well-connected reforming controversialist in the reign of Edward VI. After Marian exile in Germany, he returned to England and began the documentary history of the ‘true’ Protestant church that would occupy him for the rest of his life. Actes and Monuments or ‘Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’, which compiled eyewitness accounts and state documents relating to the persecution of Protestants under Mary Tudor, made an indelible mark on the nation’s consciousness. Vivid description combined with bespoke woodcuts (see Fig. 19) provided an ‘iconography’ of preaching as well as of Protestant martyrdom. Foxe’s account of the violent reception given at Paul’s Cross to the Catholic bishop Gilbert Bourne in 1553—which also emphasizes the allegedly charitable reaction by the later Protestant martyr John Bradford—was taken from An Epitome of Cronicles (1559) by Foxe’s Oxford friend Robert Crowley. About this tyme or not long before, Bonner B[ishop]. of L[ondon]. being restored, appointed M[aster]. Bourn a Canon of Paules, to preach at the crosse who afterward was B[ishop]. of Bathe, he takynge occasion of the Gospell of the daye to speake somewhat largely in justifiyng of Boner, the byshop then present, which Bonner upon the same text in that place that daye foure yeares had preached before, and was upon the same moste cruelly and unjustly, as he saide, caste in the mooste vyle Dongeon of the Martiall see, and there kept duryng the tyme of kynge Edward. His wordes sounded so evyll in the eares of the hearers, that they coulde not kepe sylence, but began to murmure, and to sturre in suche sorte, that the Mayer and Aldermen with other estates then present, feared muche an uproare. But the truth is that one hurled a dagger at the preacher, but who it was it coulde not be proved. In fine the sturre was suche, that the preacher withdrewe hym selfe from the place. And maister John Bradforde at the request of the preachers brother, and other, then being in the pu[l]pet, stoode forth and spake so myldely, Christianly, and effectuously, that with fewe wordes he appeased all. And afterwarde he and John Rogers conducted the preacher betwyxt them from the pu[l]pit to the Grammer schole doore, where they lefte hym saufe, as further in the story of John Bradford is declared. But shortly after they were bothe rewarded with long imprisonment, and last of al with fier in Smythfielde. The next sonday followyng, the Quenes garde were at the Crosse with their weapons to garde the preacher. And when quiet men withdrewe them selfes from the Sermon, order was taken by the Major, that thauncientes of all companies should bee present, lest the preacher shoulde bee discouraged by his small auditorie. (Foxe 2004: 904–5)



appendix

II.3. Thomas Nashe (1567–c.1601) Author of prose fiction, scathing satires, entertainments, and scurrilous verse, the mercurial Nashe was also a connoisseur of sermons, listening to them with a skilled writer’s ear for erudition and rhetorical accomplishment. His commendations of two great Cambridge preachers, Thomas Playfere and Lancelot Andrewes (App. I.11 above; see Fig. 30), appeared respectively in two of his satirical pamphlets against the Cambridge academic Gabriel Harvey: Four Letters Confuted (1592), and Have with you to Saffron-Walden (1596). Mellifluous Playfere, one of the chief props of our aged, & auntientest, & absolutest Universities present flourishing, Where doe thy supereminent gifts shine to themselves, that the Court cannot bee acquainted with them? Few such men speak out of Fames highest Pulpits, though out of her highest Pulpits speake the purest of all speakers. Let me adde one word, and let it not bee thought derogatorie to anie. I cannot bethinke mee of two in England in all things comparable to him for his time. Seldome have I beheld so pregnant a pleasaunt wit coupled with a memorie of such huge incomprehensible receipt, deepe reading and delight better mixt than in his Sermons. *** Here some little digression I must borrow, to revenge his [Harvey’s] base allusion of Sir Thomas Baskerville, even as I have done of Doctor Androwes; neither of them being men that ever saluted mee, or I rest bound unto in anie thing; otherwise than, by Doctor Androwes own desert and Master Lillies1 immoderate commending him, by little and little I was drawne on to bee an Auditor of his: since when, whensoever I heard him, I thought it was but hard and scant allowance that was giv’n him, in comparison of the incomparable gifts that were in him. (Nashe 1966: i. 314; iii. 106)

II.4. John Manningham (c.1575–1622) Manningham was a Cambridge-educated London lawyer, now known for the witty diary he kept over sixteen months in 1602–3. Long a source for anecdotes about life at the Inns of Court and literary gossip, it is also replete with evidence of assiduous sermon-hearing by a trenchant observer. [October 1602] In the after noone Mr Marbury at the Temple: text, 21. Isay. 5 v. &c. But I may not write what he said, for I could not heare him; he pronounces in manner of a common discourse. Wee may streache our eares to catch a word nowe and then, but he will not be at the paynes to strayne his voyce, that wee might gaine one sentence. 1

John Lyly, playwright (1554–1606).

preaching observed



I love not to heare the sound of the sermon, except the preacher will tell me what he says. I thinke many of those which are fayne to stand without dores at the sermon of a preacher whom the multitude throng after may come with as greate a devotion as some that are nearer, yet I beleeve the most come away as I did from this, scarse one word the wiser. (Manningham 1976: 115)

II.5. John Chamberlain (1553–1628) One of the greatest letter-writers of any age, Chamberlain was a Londoner of independent means whose correspondence with the ambassador Dudley Carleton written between 1597 and 1626 is one of the best original sources of social and political history of the period. He was particularly alert to sermons that touched political matters, and to the politics of seeing and being seen in elite London preaching venues. [5 March 1600] The earle of Essex hath ben lately troubled with his old disease of loosenes, but yet tarries still by yt where he was, as a man quite out of minde2: and yet Babington bishop of Worcester3 preaching at court on Sonday last, made many profers and glaunces in his behalfe, as he was understoode by the whole auditorie, and by the Quene herself, who presently calling him to a reckoning for yt, he flatly forswore that he had any such meaninge. [8 January 1608] We had plenty of preaching here this Christmas. The bishop and the Deane performed theyre parts very well, and Dr Pasfield was not much behind them, but your brother Dove swept the scriptures together upon heapes, as one told me in that very phrase.4 [29 March 1617] I had almost forgotten that on Monday the 24th of this moneth beeing the Kings day, the archbishop of Caunterburie, the Lord Keeper, Lord Privie-Seale, the earle of Arundell, the earle of Southampton, the Lord Hayes, the controller, Secretarie Winwood, the Master of the Rolles with divers other great men were at Paules Crosse and heard Dr Donne who made there a daintie sermon, upon the eleventh verse of the 22th of Proverbes5; and was exceedingly well liked generally, the rather for that he did Quene Elizabeth great right, and held himself close to the text without flattering the time too much. [17 April 1619] As I wrote the last weeke so yt fell out that the bishop of London6 preached on Sonday at Paule’s Crosse to geve thancks for the Kings recoverie, and made a very 2

Essex was in custody for his failed military campaign in Ireland. Gervase Babington (1550–1610). 4 Chamberlain reports here on preaching in St Paul’s Cathedral; the preachers were (respectively) bishop of London Thomas Ravis, dean of St Paul’s John Overall, canon Zacharias Pasfield, and John Dove (a London rector and Carleton’s brother-in-law). 5 Donne (1953–62: i. 183–222). 6 John King. His sermon was printed ‘by commandement’ as A Sermon of Publicke Thanks-giving (1619). 3



appendix

pleasing peece of worke upon the 17 verse of the 38th chapter of Esaye [Isaiah]. I did not conceive (before I heard him) that the extremetie of the daunger had ben such as he delivered yt, that there was litle or no hope left, and that the phisicians themselves were of that opinion. The audience was the greatest that I remember to have seene there, for besides the Lord Maior and Aldermen, with all the rest of the citie-companies in theyre best aray, there were almost all the counsaile and great men about this towne, as the archbishops of Canterburie and Spalato, with divers other bishops, the Lord PrivieSeale, the Duke of Lennox, the Lord Chamberlain, the earles of Arundell, Lecester, Devonshire, with many others that come not now to minde . . . [17 November 1621] On Wensday divers Lords, knights and burgesses met in the parliament house according to the first apointment . . . and there Sir Jerome Horsey made a motion they might have a sermon to begin withall, which for ought I heare was not much hearkened to: yt seemes we grow into a superstitious opinion of sermons as the papists do of the masse, that nothing can be don without them. (Chamberlain 1939: i. 92–3, 253; ii. 67, 229–30, 408)

II.6. Ben Jonson (1572–1637) The great poet and dramatist cast his satirical eye on preaching. According to William Drummond, Jonson imagined being ‘a churchman, and so he might have favour to make one sermon to the king, he careth not what thereafter should befall him: for he would not flatter though he saw death’ (Jonson 1975: 470). One of his greatest comic creations is the mockpuritan Zeal-of-the-Land-Busy from Bartholomew Fair (1614). The Jonsonian ‘stage puritan’ would later reappear on the Restoration stage, and no doubt informed the Caroline court’s taste for mock-sermons (App. III.11 below). Here, Busy’s hypocritical tirades against the fleshly—and fleshy—temptations of the fair parody not just godly moralism, but also the biblical diction and rhetorical figures common in the pulpit (see Lake and Questier 2002: ch. 14). Busy. Only pig was not comprehended in my admonition; the rest were. For long hair, it is an ensign of pride, a banner, and the world is full of those banners, very full of banners. And bottle-ale is a drink of Satan’s, a diet-drink of Satan’s, devised to puff us up and make us swell in this latter age of vanity, as the smoke of tobacco to keep us in mist and error; but the fleshy woman, which you call Urs’la, is above all to be avoided, having the marks upon her of the three enemies of man: the world, as being in the Fair; the devil, as being in the fire; and the flesh, as being herself . . . Thou art the seat of the Beast, of Smithfield, and I will leave thee. Idolatry peepeth out on every side of thee. *** Busy. I will remove Dagon there, I say, that idol, that heathenish idol, that remains, as I may say, a beam, a very beam, not a beam of the sun, nor a beam of the moon, nor a beam of a balance, neither a house-beam nor a weaver’s beam, but a beam in the eye, in the eye of the brethren; a very great beam, not a beam of the sun, nor a beam of the

preaching observed



moon, nor a beam of a balance, neither a house-beam nor a weaver’s beam, but a beam in the eye, in the eye of the brethren; a very great beam, an exceeding great beam; such as are your stage-players, rhymers, and morris-dancers, who have walked hand in hand in contempt of the brethren and the cause, and been borne out by instruments of no mean countenance. (Jonson 1963: 117, 178–9)

II.7. Sir Simonds D’Ewes (1602–50) D’Ewes was educated by country clergy, and became a serious Cambridge undergraduate who traded a promising legal career for antiquarian scholarship. He was a moderate member of the Long Parliament, served in the parliamentarian army, and supported Presbyterian reform of the church. Selections below from his autobiography (begun in 1637) illustrate the lively interaction between sermon-hearing and private study during his years at Cambridge and the Middle Temple (1618–23), and the political sensitivities of preachers and auditories during times of political crisis, here the controversial ‘Spanish Match’ for Prince Charles (1622–3). In the best things I most increased and profited, being first directed at this place to take notes in writing at sermons, and so to become a rational hearer; whereas before, I differed little from the brute creatures that were in the church with me, never regarding or observing any part of Divine service. By this means, and by often reading divers chapters, as also by committing to memory several verses of the Scriptures, I grew to a great measure of knowledge in the very body of divinity, and attained even at my fourteenth year to two or three forms of extemporary prayer, which I was able not only to make use of in secret being alone, but even in a family also before others. *** I constantly practised also my former course of noting and writing of sermons, by which means I had attained before my going to Cambridge a great insight into the very body of divinity; and was the means within a few years after my departure from Mr Dickenson, by my letters of advice sent to him, that he constantly afterwards caused all his scholars to take notes in writing of the sermons they heard, by which means the greater part of them (as I found by experience in my own brother, then with him) got more knowledge in the fundamental points of religion than many Bachelors of Arts had attained unto in the Universities. *** I was at this time convinced of the holiness of God’s Day being our Christian Sabbath, and it was the main groundwork upon which I built the practice of all other pious duties; and therefore, on March the 5th, being Sunday, having heard one sermon in our College chapel, and afterwards another in St. Mary’s in the forenoon, I went in the afternoon to another church in Cambridge, where my kind friend Mr Jeffray, Bachelor of Divinity and Fellow of Pembroke Hall, preached, being chosen by the town of Cambridge for their



appendix

lecturer there, and allowed by Docter Felton, Bishop of Ely, eminent both for learning and piety. Every sermon was orthodox and useful, and therefore after supper I busied myself enlarging and correcting such notes as I had taken at the afternoon sermon. *** On Sunday, the 25th day of this month, preached one Mr Claydon, (minister of Hackney, near London,) at St. Paul’s Cross; and cited a story out of our Chronicles, of a Spanish sheep, brought into England in Edward the First’s time, which infected most of the sheep of England with a murrain, and prayed God no more such sheep might be brought over from thence hither; at which many of his hearers cried out “Amen.” So much generally did all men fear that Prince Charles should marry the King of Spain’s sister, as they ever hated that nation. He lay awhile in prison for his sermon, but was soon after set at liberty by the mediation of Sir John Ramsey, Knt., a Scotchman, Earl of Holderness, whose chaplain he was. *** During Prince Charles his being in Spain, the English Papists began to triumph insolently and to boast of a toleration they should have shortly; yea, after his return, they purposed to set up a Popish lecture publicly at the French Ambassador’s house in Blackfriars in London. The first sermon was preached on Sunday, the 26th day of October, in the evening, by one Father Drury, an English Jesuit, and many were very unlawfully assembled to hear him; but God Almighty, by the fall of the room, gave a stop to that begun resolution, in which Father Drury himself, and divers others, were slain outright, and many wounded and maimed. (D’Ewes 1845: i. 95, 104, 137–8, 219–20, 238)

II.8. Lucy Hutchinson (1620–81) One of the leading female intellectuals of the mid-seventeenth century, poet and biographer Hutchinson had a fierce Calvinist piety that had its roots in assiduous childhood sermon-hearing. By the time I was four years old I read English perfectly, and having a great memory, I was carried to sermons; and while I was very young could remember and repeat them exactly, and being caressed, the love of praise tickled me and made me attend more heedfully. (Hutchinson 1995: 14).

II.9. Lady Anne Clifford (1590–1676) Lady Anne was one of the most cultured aristocrats of her age. Educated by learned female relations and the poet Samuel Daniel, she married the grandees Richard Sackville, earl of Dorset (d. 1624), and Philip Herbert, earl of Montgomery and earl of Pembroke (d. 1650). A great patron of preachers, poets, and musicians, she was an admirer of John Donne.

preaching observed



During the Civil War and Interregnum she retired to vast inherited estates, where she insisted on the use of the proscribed Book of Common Prayer and was a great builder of parish churches (see Fig. 18). Her diaries capture the sermon-centred piety that she espoused whether at court or in the country. [January 1617] Upon the 19th my Lord & I went to the Court in the Morning thinking the Queen would have gone to the Chapel, but she did not, so my Lady Ruthven & I and many others stood in the Closet to hear the Sermon. [July 1617] The 27th I went to Church, (being Sunday), forenoon & afternoon, Dr Donne Preaching, and he & other strangers dining with me in the Great Chamber. [January 1676] The 2nd day being Sunday, yet I went not out of the house nor out of my chamber today. But my 2 gentlewomen Mrs Pate and Mrs Susan (Machell) and Mr Tho. Gabetis my Shiriff and his wife, and 3 of my Laundry maids and most of my chiefe Servants went to Ninekirkes, where Mr Grasty the Parson preached a Sermon to them and the Congregation. And today there dined without with my folks in the Painted Room, and with the Sherriff and his wife, Mr Grasty the parson, my two farmers here – William Spedding and his wife, & Jeffrey Bleamire and his son, so after dinner I had them into my Room and kist the woman and took the Men by the hand. And a little after Mr Grasty the parson said Common Prayers and read a Chapter and sang a Psalm as usuall to mee and them and my family, and when prayers were done they went away. The 25th day […] And this morning about 8 a clock did Mr Samuel Grasty our Parson preach a good sermon in my Chamber to me and my family, and a little after he administered the Sacrament of bread & Wine to me & them. [February 1676] The 20th Day […] And tho’ today was Sunday yet I went not to church nor out of my chamber all this day. But my 2 gentlewomen & 3 of my Laundry Maids with most of my chiefe Menservants went to this church called Ninekirks, where he preached a good Sermon (viz: Mr Grasty, our parson) to them & the rest of the Congregation (tho’ one part thereof seemed to Reflect upon ye Writer – so that I thought he spoke to none but mee). (Clifford 1990: 45, 60, 231–2, 242, 254)

II.10. John Evelyn (1620–1706) Evelyn was, with Pepys, one of later Stuart England’s greatest diarists, and one of its leading gentleman scholars. A firm royalist and committed Anglican, his careful (and very partisan) observations on sermon-hearing chart the radically changing fortunes—in politics, prose style, and delivery—of the Protectorate and post-Restoration pulpit. [25 December 1652] Christmas day no sermon anywhere, so observd it at home, the next day we went to Lewsham, where was an honest divine preach’d on 21. Matt: 9. celebrating the Incarnation, for on the day before, no Churches were permitted to meete &c: to that horrid passe were they come.



appendix

[4 December 1653] Til now I had met with no phanatical Preachers, but going this day to our Church, I was suprizd to see a Trades-man, a Mechanic step up, I was resolv’d yet to stay, & see what he would make of it, his Text was 2. Sam. 23.20 ‘and Benaiah sonn of Jehoiada—went down also and slew a lion in the midst of a pit, in the time of Snow.’ That no danger was to be thought difficult, when God call’d for sheading of blood, inferring that now, the Saints were calld to destroy, temporal Governments, with such truculent, [anabaptisticall] stuff: so dangerous a Crisis were things growne to: [15 July 1683] A stranger7 preached on 6. Jer: 8: . . . The old man preached much after Bish: Andrews’s method, full of Logical divisions, in short, and broken periods, & latine sentences, now quite out of fashion in the pulpet; grown into a far more profitable way, of plaine & practical, of which sort this Nation nor any other ever had greater plenty, & more profitable (I am confident) since the Apostles time: so much has it to answer for thriving no better on it: [10 May 1702] A stranger preached at our Chapell on 63. Psal. 1. Concerning the necessity Of Early piety, & giving our youth & first youth to Religion; the great danger of deferring it to old Age: A Better Discourse could not be made on the subject, which he did with greate Earnestnesse, & without looking into any Notes, which was now very rare, most preachers of this Age, constantly reading their Sermons, which tooke much away from their operation. (Evelyn 1955: iii. 78–9, 91; iv. 330; v. 500)

II.11. Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) Naval administrator and legendary diarist, Pepys is most remembered by cultural historians for his diary’s wealth of detail about the Restoration stage and music. He was also an insightful observer of preaching in the years covered by the diary (1660–9). His account of the expulsion of Presbyterian ministers who refused to accept the 1662 Book of Common Prayer reflects both his curiosity (about preaching and about attractive women) and his generosity; his accounts of preachers at court and in the City are trenchant and witty. The last excerpt records a new feature of sermon culture after the Restoration—the mocksermon (see Jenkinson, Chapter 22, this volume). [17 August 1662] this being the last Sunday that the Presbyterians are to preach, unless they read the new Comon Prayer and renounce the Covenant, so I had a mind to hear Dr Bates’s farewell sermon, and walked to St Dunstans . . . and crowded in at a back door among others, the church being half-full almost before any doors were open publicly . . . and so got into the Gallry beside the pulpit and heard very well. His text was, ‘Now the God of Peace’— the last Hebrews and the 20 verse—he making a very good sermon and very little reflections in it to any thing of the times. Besides the sermon, I was very well pleased with the sight of a fine lady that I have often seen walk in Grays-Inn 7

A visitor.

preaching observed



walks . . . and pretty and sprightly she is . . . I hear most of the Presbyters took their leaves today. And the City is much dissatisfied with it. I pray God keep peace among us and make the Bishops careful of bringing in good men in their room, or else all will fly a-pieces; for bad ones will not go down with the City. [25 December 1662] . . . had a pleasant walk to White-hall . . . By and by down to the Chappell again, where Bishop Morly8 preached upon the Song of the Angels—‘Glory to God on high—on earth peace, and good will towards men.’ Methought he made but a poor sermon, but long and reprehending the mistaken jollity of the Court for the true joy that shall and ought to be on these days. Perticularized concerning their excess in playes and gameing, saying that he whose office it is to keep the Gamesters in order and within bounds serves but for a second rather in a Duell, meaning the Groome-porter. Upon which, it was well worth observing how far they are come from taking the reprehensions of a Bishop seriously, that they all laugh in the chapel when he reflected on their ill actions and courses. He did much press us to joy in these public days of joy and to Hospitality. But one that stood by whispered in my eare that the Bishop himself do not spend one groate to the poor himself. The sermon done, a good Anthem followed, with vialls; and the King come down to receive the Sacrament . . . [9 August 1663] . . . to church, and heard Mr Mills . . . preach upon the Authority of Ministers, upon these words: ‘We are therefore Embassadors of Christ.’ Wherein, among other high expressions, he said that such a learned man used to say that if a minister of the word and an angell should meet him together, he would salute the minister first—which methought was a little too high. This day I begun to make use of the Silver pen (Mr Coventry did give mee) in writing of this sermon, taking only the heads of it in Latin; which I shall I think continue to do. [14 May 1669] . . . I going [from Lambeth Palace], I heard by a gentleman of a sermon that was to be there; and so I staid to hear it, thinking it serious, till by and by the gentleman told me it was a mockery by one Cornet Bolton, a very gentleman-like man, that behind a chair did pray and preach like a presbyter Scot that ever I heard in my life, with all the possible imitation in grimaces and voice—and his text about the hanging up their harps upon the willows—and a serious good sermon too, exclaiming against Bishops and crying up of my good Lord Eglington—till it made us all burst; but I did wonder to have the Bishop9 . . . to make himself sport with things of this kind, but I perceive it was shown him as a rarity. And he took care to have the room-door shut, but there were about twenty gentlemen there—and myself infinitely pleased with the novelty. (Pepys 1970–83: iii. 166–8, 292–3; iv. 268; ix. 554–5) 8 9

George Morley (1598?–1684), bishop of Winchester. Archbishop of Canterbury, William Sancroft (1617–93).

appendix iii Preaching Regulated Articles, Injunctions, Canons, and ‘Directions Concerning Preachers’, 1536–1686

Below are the major state instruments promulgated to govern preaching in British churches between the Henrician Reformation and the Toleration Act of 1689 (the latter granted freedom of worship, including preaching, to all Protestant dissenters who subscribed to royal authority and the doctrine of the Trinity).

III.1. from Thomas Cromwell (for King Henry VIII), Royal Injunctions of 1536 Issued by Cromwell, the king’s vicar-general for matters ecclesiastical, these injunctions, with the ‘Ten Articles’ of the same year, fixed in statute the aims of a year-long preaching campaign to defend the 1534 Act of Supremacy. Cromwell’s minimum requirement of sermons on the fundamentals of faith in all parishes once per quarter was not in itself revolutionary, but based on a statutory ideal fixed since the thirteenth century (Wabuda 2002: 34–7). 1 The first is, that the dean, parsons, vicars, and others having cure of souls . . . shall to the uttermost of their wit, knowledge, and learning, purely, sincerely, and without any colour or dissimulation declare, manifest and open for the space of one quarter of a year now next ensuing, once every Sunday, and after that at leastwise twice every quarter, in their sermons and other collations, that the Bishop of Rome’s usurped power and jurisdiction, having no establishment nor ground by the law of God, was of most just causes taken away and abolished; and therefore they owe unto him no manner of obedience or subjection, and that the King’s power is within his dominion the highest power and potentate under God, to whom all men within the same dominion by God’s commandment owe most loyalty and obedience, afore and above all other powers and pontentates in earth. 2 Whereas certain Articles were lately devised and put forth by the King’s highness’ authority . . . the said dean, parsons, vicars, and other curates shall so open and declare in their said sermons and other collations the said articles unto them that be under their cure, that they may plainly show and discern which of them be necessary to be believed and observed for their salvation; and which of them be not necessary, but only do

preaching regulated



concern the decent and politic order of the said Church, according to such commandment and admonition as has been given unto them heretofore by authority of the King’s highness in that behalf.10 3 Moreover, that they shall declare unto all such as be under their cure, the Articles likewise devised, put forth, and authorized of late for and concerning the abrogation of certain superfluous holy-days11 . . . and persuade their parishioners to keep and observe the same inviolably, as things holily provided, decreed, and established, by common consent, and public authority, for the weal commodity and profit of all this realm. 4 Besides this, to the intent that all superstition and hypocrisy, crept into divers men’s hearts, may vanish away, they shall not set forth or extol any images, relics, or miracles for any superstition or lucre, nor allure the people by any enticements to the pilgrimage of any saint . . . as though it were proper or peculiar to that saint to give this commodity or that, seeing all goodness, health, and grace ought to be both asked and looked for only of God, as of the very Author of the same, and of none other, for without Him that cannot be given; but that they shall exhort as well their parishioners as other pilgrims, that they do rather apply themselves to the keeping of God’s commandments and fulfilling of His works of charity, persuading them that they shall please God more by the true exercising of their bodily labour, travail, or occupation, and providing for their families, than if they went about to the said pilgrimages; and that it shall profit more their soul’s health, if they do bestow that on the poor and needy, which they would have bestowed upon the said images or relics. 5 Also in the same their sermons, and other collations, the parsons, vicars, and other curates aforesaid shall diligently admonish the fathers and mothers, masters and governors of youth, being under their care, to teach, or cause to be taught, their children and servants, even from their infancy, their Pater Noster, the Articles of our Faith, and the Ten Commandments, in their mother tongue: and the same so taught, shall cause the said youth oft to repeat and understand. And, to the intent this may be more easily done, the said curates shall, in their sermons, deliberately and plainly recite of the said Pater Noster, the Articles of our Faith, and the Ten Commandments, one clause or article one day, and another another day, till the whole be taught and learned by little . . . as well in their said sermons and collations, as other ways persuading the said fathers, mothers, masters, and other governors being under their cure and charge, diligently to provide and foresee that the said youth be in no manner wise kept or

10 The ‘Ten Articles’ of 1536 enumerated five things necessary for belief—the grounds of faith (Bible, Creeds, Four Councils, and patristic tradition not contrary to scripture), baptism, penance, eucharist, justification—and five things to be retained but not necessary for salvation—images, honour of saints, intercession to saints, rites and ceremonies, and purgatory. 11 Promulgated by the king with the assent of convocation in July 1536, limiting the celebration of dedication and patronal festivals, and of holy days during legal terms and harvest time (July–September).



appendix

brought up in idleness, lest at any time afterward they be driven, for lack of some mystery or occupation to live by, to fall to begging, stealing, or some other unthriftiness . . . (Frere 1910: 1–11)

III.2. from Thomas Cromwell (for King Henry VIII), Royal Injunctions of 1538 Cromwell’s ‘Second Royal Injunctions’ of September 1538 were the high-watermark of his evangelical campaign. Aimed primarily at the eradication of the veneration of images and pilgrimages and the promulgation of the English Bible, they, like the ‘First Injunctions’ of 1536 (above), required a sermon in every parish four times per year (‘quarter sermons’). The Injunctions of 1538 were an important prototype for the later injunctions of Edward and Elizabeth (below). 6 Item, That ye shall make, or cause to be made, in the said church, and every other cure ye have, one sermon every quarter of a year at the least, wherein ye shall purely and sincerely declare the very Gospel of Christ, and in the same exhort your hearers to the works of charity, mercy, and faith, specially prescribed and commanded in Scripture, and not to repose their trust and affiance in any other works devised by men’s phantasies besides Scripture; as in wandering to pilgrimages, offering of money, candles, or tapers to images or relics, or kissing or licking the same, saying over a number of beads, not understood or minded on, or in such-like superstition; for the doing whereof, ye not only have no promise of reward in Scripture, but contrariwise, great threats and maledictions of God, as things tending to idolatry and superstition, which of all other offences God Almighty doth most detest and abhor, for that the same diminisheth most His honour and glory. 9 Item, That ye shall admit no man to preach within any your benefices or cures, but such as shall appear unto you to be sufficiently licensed thereunto by the King’s Highness, or his Grace’s authority, by the Archbishop of Canterbury, or the bishop of this diocese; and such as shall be so licensed, ye shall gladly receive to declare the word of God, without any resistance or contradiction. 10 Item, If ye have heretofore declared to your parishioners anything to the extolling or setting forth of pilgrimages, feigned relics, or images, or any such superstition, ye shall now openly afore the same recant and reprove the same, shewing them (as the truth is) that ye did the same upon no ground of Scripture, but as one being led and seduced by a common error and abuse crept into the church, through the sufferance and avarice of such as felt profit by the same. 11 Item, If ye do or shall know any man within your parish, or elsewhere, that is a letter12 of the word of God to be read in English or sincerely preached, or of the execution of these Injunctions, or a favourer of the Bishop of Rome’s pretended power, now by the 12

‘hinderer’.

preaching regulated



laws of this realm justly rejected and extirpated, ye shall detect and present the same to the King’s Highness, or his honourable Council or to his vice-regent aforesaid, or the justice of peace next adjoining. (Frere 1910: 37, 39)

III.3. from King Edward VI, Injunccions Geven by the moste excellent Prince, Edward the Sixte . . . of the Churche of Englande and of Ireland Supreme Hedde (1547) The injunctions provided for Edward’s first royal visitation furthered the reforming work of Cromwell’s of 1538, striking particular blows against the remnants of traditional religion such as roods, pilgrimages, and remaining images (MacCulloch 1999: 69–74; Duffy 1992: 449–53). The second article continued the medieval tradition of ‘quarter sermons’, but turned it now to the justification of iconoclasm. 2 Item, that they, the persones above rehersed [‘al Deanes, Archedeacons, Persones, Vicars, & other Ecclesiasticall persones’] shall make or cause to bee made in their Churches, and every other Cure thei have, one Sermon, every quarter of the yere at the least, wherin they shall purely and syncerely, declare the woorde of GOD: and in the same, exhorte their hearers to the woorkes of faythe, Mercye, and Charitie, specially prescribed and commaunded in scripture, and that woorkes devised by mannes phantasies, besides scripture: as wanderyng to pilgrimages, offeryng of money, candelles or tapers, to Reliques, or Images, or kissyng and lickyng the same, praiying upon Beades, or such lyke superstition, have not only no promise of reward in scripture, for doyng of them: but contrariwise, great threates & malediccions of god, for that they bee thynges, tendyng to Idolatry and supersticion, which, of al other offences, god almighty doth most detest and abhorre for that the same diminishe moste his honor and glory. (Edward VI 1547: sig. A3r–v)

III.4. from King Edward VI, A Proclamation set furth by the Kynges Majestie (1548) In April 1548 Edward’s regime severely limited preaching to sermons delivered by a small number of licensed ministers sympathetic to reform. But with debate raging, particularly over the nature of the Eucharist, in September the government banned all preaching in the proclamation below, though it was very much observed only in the breach by Privy Councilappointed evangelicals (MacCulloch 1999: 84–6). Whereas of late by reason of certain controversious and sedicious preachers, the kynges Majestie moved of tender zeale and love . . . hath made Proclamacion inhibited and commaunded, that no maner of person, except suche as was licensed by his highnes, the lorde Protector, or by the Archbishop of Canterbury should take upon hym to preache in any open audience . . . And that upon hope and esperaunce that those being chosen and



appendix

electe men should preache and set furthe only to the people suche thinges as should be to gods honor . . . Yet nevertheles his highnes is advertised that certeigne of the said preachers so licensed, not regardyng suche good admonitions . . . on his majesties behalfe . . . hath abused the saied aucthoritie of preachyng, and behaved them selie irreverently and without good order in the said preachynges . . . whereby muche contencion and disordre might rise & ensue . . . Wherfore hys hyghnes, myndyng to see very shortly one uniforme order throughout this his Realme, & to put an ende of al controversies in Religion so far as God shall geve grace . . . Although certayne & many of the said prechers so before licenced have behaved them self veri discreteli & wisely . . . the said ordre shalbe set furth generally through out this his Maiesties realme, to inhibite, & by these presentz doth inhibit, generally, aswell the said preachers so before licensed as all manner of persones whosoever they bee, to preache in open audience in the pulpit or otherwise by any sought coloure or fraude to the disobeiyng of this commaundement: to the intent that the whole clergie in this meane space might apply theim self to prayer to almightie God for the better achevyng of the same most godly entent and purpose: Not doubtyng but that also all his lovyng subjectes in the meane tyme will occupie them selfe to Gods honor, with dew prayer in the churche, and pacient hearyng of the Godly Homelies heretofore set furth by hys highnes Injunccions unto them, and so endevour theim selfe that they may bee then most ready with thankfull obedience to receive a most quiet, godly, and uniforme order to be had throughout all his said Realmes and dominions. (Edward VI 1548)

III.5. from Queen Mary, Articles sent from the Queenes Majestie unto the Ordinarie (1553/4) Queen Mary’s articles, and the constitutions promulgated by Cardinal Reginald Pole (below), emphasized preaching as a means to effect more reconciliation with Rome. (cf. Apps I.1, 3; for the Marian homilies, see Null, Chapter 17, this volume; for Pole and preaching, see Duffy 2006). 6 Item that every Bisshop, and al the other persons aforesaid, do likewise travayle for the condemning and repressing of corrupt and naughtye opinions, unlawfull bookes, ballades, and other pernicious and hurtful devises, engendring hatred amonges the people, and discorde amonges the same. And that Scholemaysters, Preachers, and teachers do exercise and use their offices and dueties without teaching, preaching, or setting furth any evil corrupt doctrine. And that doing the contrarye, they may be by the Bisshop and hys sayd officers punished and removed. 16 Item that by the Bishoppe of the Diocesse a uniforme doctrine be set furth by Homilyes, or otherwise for the good instruction and teachynge of all people. And that the sayde Bysshope and other personnes aforesayde do compell the parishioners to come to their severall churches, and there devoutly to heare divine service, as of reason they ought. (Mary I 1553 [i.e. 1554]: unfoliated)

preaching regulated



III.6. from Cardinal Reginald Pole, The Legatine Constitutions (1556) Pole, papal legate to England and archbishop of Canterbury, officially granted absolution and reconciliation to the kingdom on 30 November 1555. His proposed new ‘Constitutions’ were never enacted, but are further evidence of the Marian Counter-Reformation’s commitment to preaching as an instrument of conversion from Protestantism.

4. Concerning the preaching of the Word of God. Of the fourth decree Since the residence of bishops and others of lower order having the cure of souls in their churches is required so that they discharge the pastoral office, it is decreed that the archbishops and bishops and others having the cure of souls undertake personally the duty of preaching the Word of God according to the command of Christ and the apostles, and the rule of the holy canons. And if any legitimate impediment shall occur, they shall choose fit persons to do it, so that the people may not be cheated of the food of their souls. But those who neglect to do this shall be compelled to do it by their superiors; but they shall fulfil this duty not only publicly, but also privately by teaching, admonishing, exhorting, intimidating and consoling (docendo, admonendo, adhortando, deterrando, consolando) them as need shall require. No-one shall presume to exercise the office of preaching unless he has a license from the apostolic see, or his bishop; whoever does otherwise shall suffer the canonical penalties and censures. The bishop shall admonish those whom he sends forth to preach, respecting both the matter and manner which they ought to maintain in preaching, in order to avoid the abuses which have crept into this sacred ministry of the Divine Word, and exhort the people to repentance, from which the beginning of our salvation arises, against those corruptions and abuses, both in doctrine and practice, which greatly prevailed here in the time of that schism according to the command of the Lord to Isaiah the prophet: ‘They may cry and not cease to announce to the people their wickednesses.’ Where there are no rectors or vicars skilled in preaching, they shall be required to read homilies composed under the direction of this synod, on Sundays and other feast-days. The bishops shall also see that those who are set over the cure of souls shall on all Sundays and other feast-days, at a set time, invite the children of their parish to the church, and there diligently instruct them in the basic elements of the faith, and in Christian piety; and those who neglect this shall be punished at their discretion. (Bray 1998: 147–9)

III.7. from Queen Elizabeth, Injunctions Geven by the Quenes Majestie (1559) These injunctions (promulgated less than a year after her accession), together with the Royal Supremacy and the new Book of Common Prayer, formed ‘the threefold legal foundation’ of the Elizabethan Settlement (Haugaard 1970: 135). The first injunction



appendix

governing preaching (3) was based on that of Edward VI (see App. III.3 above), but increased its frequency from a quarterly to a monthly minimum. A new injunction (4), stipulating that ministers preach quarterly sermons, produced an ambiguity not resolved until James VI & I’s canons of 1604 (App. III.9 below). 3 Item that they . . . shall preach in theyr Churches, and every other cure they have, one Sermon every moneth of the yere at the least, wherein they shall purelye and sincerely declare the worde of God: and in the same exhort theyr hearers to the woorkes of Fayth, as mercye and charitie, specially prescrybed and commaunded in scripture, and that workes devysed by mans phantasies besydes scripture: As wandryng of Pylgrymages, settynge up of Candels, praying upon bedes, or such lyke superstition, have not onely no promyse of rewarde in scripture for doynge of them: but contrarywyse great threatenynges and maledictions of God, for that they be thynges tendyng to Idolatry and superstition, whiche of al other offences, God almyghtie doth most deteste and abhorre, for that the same diminishe moste his honor and glory. 4 Item that they the persones above rehearsed shall preache in theyr owne persons once in every quarter of the yeare at the leaste one Sermon, being licensed specially thereunto, as is specified hereafter, or els shall rede some Homely prescrybed to be used by the Quenes aucthoritie everye Sundaye at the leaste, unlesse some other preacher sufficiently licensed as hereafter chaunce to come to the paryshe for the same purpose of preachyng. 5 Item that every holy day through the yeare when they have no Sermon, they shall immediatly after the Gospell, openly and playnely recite to theyr parishioners in the Pulpitte, the Pater noster, the Crede, and the ten commaundementes in Englyshe to thintent the people may learne the same by hearte, exhortynge all parentes and householders, to teach theyr children and servauntes the same, as they are bound by the lawe of God and conscience to do. (Elizabeth I 1559: sigs A2v–3r)

III.8. from Queen Elizabeth, ‘To the Bishops for the Purpose of Suppressing the Exercise Called Prophesying . . .’ (8 May 1577) This letter to all bishops in England and Wales was the final result of Elizabeth’s confrontation with Archbishop of Canterbury Edmund Grindal over the preaching exercises known as ‘prophesyings’ (App. I.5 above). It marked a turning-point from previous encouragement of preaching, to official anxiety to control it. It anticipates the successive Stuart ‘Directions’ (see Apps III.10–11, 15–16 below) and the views of Hooker and Andrewes (Apps I.7, 11 above). Right reverend father in God, we greet you well. We hear, to our great grief, that in sundry parts of our realm there are no small numbers of persons presuming to be teachers and preachers of the church (though neither lawfully thereunto called, nor yet fit for the same) which, contrary to our laws established for the public divine

preaching regulated



service of Almighty God . . . do daily devise, imagine, propound, and put in execution, sundry new rites and forms in the church, as well by their preaching, readings, and ministering the sacraments, as well by procuring unlawful assemblies of a great number of our people out of their ordinary parishes, and from place far distant, and that also of some good calling, (though therein not well advised,) to be hearers of their disputations, and new devised opinions, upon points of divinity, far and unmeet of unlearned people: which manner of invasions they in some places term prophesyings, and in some other places exercises. By which manner of assemblies great numbers of our people, especially of the vulgar sort, meet to be otherwise occupied with honest labour for their living, are brought to idleness, and seduced; and in manner schismatically divided among themselves into variety of dangerous opinions, not only in towns and parishes, but even in some families, and manifestly thereby encouraged to the violation of our laws, and to the breach of common order, and finally to the offence of all our quiet subjects, that desire to serve God according to the uniform orders established in our church: whereof the sequel cannot be but over dangerous to be suffered. Wherefore . . . according to the authority we have, do charge and command you, as the bishop of that diocese, with all manner of diligence, to take order through your diocese, as well in places exempt as otherwise, that no manner of public and divine service, nor other form of administration of the holy sacraments, nor any other rites and ceremonies be in any sort used in the church, but directly according to the orders established by our laws. Neither that any manner of person be suffered within your diocese to preach, teach, read, or anywise excercise any function in the church, but such as shall be lawfully approved and licensed, as persons able for their knowledge, and conformable to the ministry in the rites and ceremonies of the church of England. And where there shall not be sufficient able persons for learning in any cures, to preach or instruct their cures, as were requisite, there shall you limit the curates to read the public homilies, according to the injunctions heretofore by us given for like causes. And furthermore, considering for the great abuses that have been in sundry places of our realm, by reason of our foresaid assemblies, called exercises, and for that the same are not, nor have not been appointed nor warranted by us, or by our laws; We will and straightly charge you, that you do cause the same forthwith to cease, and not to be used: but if any shall attempt, or continue, or renew the same, we will you not only to commit them into prison, as maintainers of disorders, but also to advertise us, or our council, of the names and qualities of them, and of their maintainers and abettors; that thereupon, for better example, their punishment may be more sharp for their reformation. And in these things we charge you to be so careful and vigilant, as by your negligence, if we should hear of any person attempting to offend in the premises without your correction or information to us, we be not forced to make some example in reformation of you according to your deserts. Given under our signet at our manor of Greenwich, the 7th of May 1577. (Grindal 1843: 467–9)



appendix

III.9. from Church of England, Constitutions and Canons Ecclesiastical (1604) Largely the work of bishop of London Richard Bancroft, the 141 Canons of 1604 ‘were the most serious attempt the post-reformation church ever made to reduce its canon law to order’ (Bray 1998: 258). They remained in force until 1969, excepting only the hiatus of the Commonwealth and Protectorate. The canons governing preaching established the minimum norm of weekly Sunday sermons for resident clergy who were licensed to preach (no. 45), and monthly sermons for congregations without a licensed preacher, and confirmed the reading of the official homilies as the only lawful substitute for licensed preaching (no. 46). 43 Deanes and Prebendaries to Preach during their Residence. The Deane, Master, Warden, or chiefe Governour, Prebendaries and Canons in every Cathedral & Collegiat Church, shal not onely preach there in their owne persons so often as they are bound by Law, Statute, Ordinance, or Custome; but shall likewise Preach in other Churches of the same Diocesse where they are resident, and especially in those places whence they or their Church receive any yeerely Rents or profits. And in case they themselves bee sicke, or lawfully absent, they shall substitute such licensed Preachers to supplie their turnes, as by the Bishop of the Diocesse shal be thought meete to Preach in Cathedrall Churches. And if any otherwise neglect or omit or supply his course . . . the offendor shall be punished by the Bishop . . . according to the qualitie of the offence. 45 Beneficed Preachers being resident upon their livings to preach every Sunday. Every Beneficed man allowed to bee a preacher, and residing on his Benefice, having no lawfull impediment, shall in his owne Cure, or in some other Church or Chappell where he may conveniently neere adjoyning, (where no Preacher is) preach one Sermon every Sunday of the yeere, wherein hee shall soberly and sincerely divide the word of trueth to the glory of God, and to the best edification of the people. 46 Beneficed men not Preachers to procure monethly Sermons. Every Beneficed man not allowed to be a Preacher, shall procure Sermons to bee preached in his Cure once in every moneth at the least, by Preachers lawfully licensed, if his living in the judgement of the Ordinary, will be able to beare it. And upon every Sunday when there shall not bee a Sermon preached in his Cure, hee or his Curate shall reade some one of the Homilies prescribed, or to be prescribed by authoritie to the intents aforesaid. 47 Absence of Beneficed men to be supplied by Curates that are allowed Preachers. Every Beneficed man licensed by the Lawes of this Realme, upon urgent occasions of other service not to reside upon his Benefice, shall cause his Cure to be supplied by a Curate that is a sufficient and licensed Preacher, if the worth of the Benefice wil beare it. But whosoever hath two Benefices, shall maintaine a Preacher licensed, in the Benefice where he doth not reside, except hee preach himselfe at both of them usually. 49 Ministers not allowed Preachers, may not expound. No person whatsoever not examined and approved by the Bishop of the Diocesse, or not licensed as is aforesaid for a

preaching regulated



sufficient or convenient Preacher, shal take upon him to expound in his owne Cure or elsewhere, any Scripture or matter of doctrine, but shal onely study to reade plainly and aptly (without glozing or adding) the Homilies already set foorth or hereafter to be published by lawfull Authoritie, for the confirmation of the true Faith, and for the good instruction and edification of the people. 50 Strangers not admitted to Preach without shewing their Licence. Neither the Minister, Churchwardens, nor any other Officers of the Church, shall suffer any man to preach within their Churches or Chappels, but such as by shewing their Licence to preach, shal appeare unto them to be sufficiently authorized thereunto, as is aforesaid. 51 Strangers not admitted to Preach in Cathedrall Churches without sufficient authoritie. The Deanes, Presidents, & Residentiaries of any Cathedrall or Collegiate Church, shal suffer no stranger to preach unto the people in their Churches, except they be allowed by the Archbishop of the Province, or by the Bishop of the same Diocesse, or by either of the Universities. And if any in his Sermon shall publish any doctrine, either strange or disagreeing from the word of God, or from any of the Articles of Religion agreed upon in the Convocation house Anno 1562, or from the booke of Common prayers: the Deane or the Residents shall by their Letters subscribed with some of their hands that heard him, so soone as may be, give notice of the same to the Bishop of the Diocesse, that he may determine the matter, and take such order therein as he shall thinke convenient. 52 The names of strange Preachers to bee noted in a Booke. That the Bishop may understand . . . what Sermons are made in every Church of his Diocesse, and who presume to preach without Licence: the Churchwardens & Sidemen shall see that the names of al Preachers which come to their Church from any other place, be noted in a booke, which they shall have ready for that purpose: wherein every Preacher shall subscribe his name, the day when he preached, and the name of the Bishop of whom hee had Licence to preach. 53 No publike opposition betweene Preachers. If any Preacher shall in the Pulpit particularly, or namely of purpose, impugne or confute any doctrine delivered by any other Preacher in the same Church, or in any church neere adjoyning, before hee hath acquainted the Bishop of the Diocesse therewith, and received order from him what to do in that case, because upon such publike dissenting and contradicting, there may grow much offence and disquietnesse unto the people: the Churchwardens or party grieved shall forthwith signifie the same to the said Bishop, and not suffer the said Preacher any more to occupy that place which hee hath once abused, except hee faithfully promise to forbeare all such matter of contention in the Church, untill the Bishop hath taken further order therein: who shall with all convenient speed so proceed therein, that publike satisfaction may bee made in the Congregation where the offence was given. Provided, that if either of the parties offending doe appeale, hee shall not be suffered to preache pendenti lite.13 13

‘while the case is pending’.



appendix

54 The Licences of Preachers refusing Conformitie to be voyd. If any man licenced heretofore to preach, by any Archbishop, Bishop, or by either of the Universities, shall at any time from henceforth refuse to conforme himselfe to the Lawes, Ordinances, and Rites Ecclesiasticall established in the Church of England, he shal be admonished by the Bishop of the Diocesse, or Ordinarie of the place, to submit himselfe to the use and due exercise of the same. And if after such admonition, he do not conforme himselfe within the space of one moneth, We determine and decree, That the licence of every such Preacher shal thereupon be utterly voide and of none effect. 55 The forme of a Prayer to bee used by Preachers before their Sermons. Before all Sermons, Lectures, and Homilies, the Preachers & Ministers shall move the people to joine with them in prayer in this forme, or to this effect, as briefly as convenienently they may. Ye shall pray for Christs holy Catholike Church, that is, for the whole Congregation of Christian people dispersed throughout the whole world, and especially for the Churches of England, Scotland, and Ireland. And herein I require you most especially to pray for the Kings most excellent Majestie, our Sovereigne Lord James, King of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, Defendour of the Faith, & Supreme Governour in these his Realmes, and all other his Dominions and Countries, over all persons, in all causes, aswell Ecclesiasticall as Temporall. Ye shall also pray for our gracious Queene Anne, the Noble Prince Henry, and the rest of the King and Queenes Royall Issue. Ye shall also pray for the Ministers of Gods holy word & Sacraments, aswell Archbishops and Bishops, as other Pastours and Curats. Ye shall also pray for the Kings most honourable Counsell, and for all the Nobilitie and Magistrates of this Realme, that all & every of these in their severall Callings, may serve truely and painefully to the glory of God, and the edifying and well governing of his people, remembring the accompt that they must make. Also yee shall pray for the whole Commons of this Realme, that they may live in true Faith and feare of God, in humble obedience to the King, and brotherly charitie one to another. Finally, let us praise God for all those which are departed out of this life in the Faith of Christ, and pray unto God that wee may have grace to direct our lives after their good example: that this life ended, wee may be made partakers with them of the glorious Resurrection in the life Everlasting, alwayes concluding with the Lords prayer.

71 Ministers not to Preach or administer the Communion in private houses. No Minister shall Preach or administer the holy Communion in any private house, except it bee in times of necessitie, when any being either so impotent, as hee cannot goe to the Church, or very dangerously sicke, are desirous to bee partakers of that holy Sacrament . . . Provided that houses are here reputed for Private houses, wherein are no Chappels dedicated and allowed by the Ecclesiasticall Lawes of this Realme. And provided also under the paines before expressed, that no Chapleins do Preach or administer the Communion in any other places, but in the Chappels of the said houses, and that also they do the same very seldome upon Sundayes and holy dayes. So that both the Lords and Masters of the said houses and their families shall at other times resort to their owne Parish Churches, and there receive the holy Communion at the least once every yeere.

preaching regulated



83 A pulpit to be provided in every Church. The Churchwardens or Questmen at the common charge of the Parishioners in every Church, shall provide a comely and decent Pulpit to bee set in a convenient place within the same by the discretion of the Ordinarie of the place, if any question doe arise, and to be there seemely kept for the preaching of Gods word. (Church of England 1604: sigs I2v-K3v, M3v-4r, O1v-2r)

III.10. James VI & I, Directions for Preachers (1622) James’s ‘Directions’ were prompted by the confluence of both political and doctrinal debates that were, to James, both too public and too divisive for the pulpit: opposition to the proposed Spanish Match for Prince Charles, the plight of Protestants in the Palatinate, and increasingly fierce disagreements over predestination, works, and free will associated with Dutch anti-Calvinism (‘Arminianism’). The ‘Directions’ discouraged preaching on such matters, and flatly forbad it for rank-and-file clergy below the status of dean. The ‘Directions’ were widely viewed as an endorsement of anti-Calvinist preachers, and deeply resented by conformist Calvinists as a betrayal of traditional English Protestantism. James commissioned John Donne to preach an official apology for the ‘Directions’ at Paul’s Cross in September (Donne 1953–62: iv. 178–211). They were promulgated through the archbishops of Canterbury and York; both the king’s covering letter, and that of archbishop of Canterbury George Abbot sent to bishops in his own province, are reproduced below, as well as the ‘Directions’ themselves. The ‘Directions’ were influential in every successive Stuart reign, being reissued by Charles I in 1627, and again, with revisions, by both Charles II and James II (Apps III.15, 16, below).

The Kings Majesties Letter to the Lords Grace of Canterbury, touching Preaching, and Preachers Most Reverend Father in God, Right trustie and right intirely beloved Councellor, We greet yee well. Forasmuch as the abuse and extravagancies of Preachers in the Pulpit, have been at all times repressed in this Land, by some Act of Councell or State, with the advise and resolution of Grave and Reverend Preachers, insomuch as the very licensing of Preachers, had beginning by order in the Star-Chamber, the eighth of July, in the nineteenth yeare of King Henry the Eight, Our Noble Predecessor: And whereas at this present diverse young Students, by reading of late Writers and ungrounded Divines, doe preach many times unprofitable, unseasonable, seditious and dangerous doctrine, to the scandall of the Church, and disquieting of the State and present Government: Wee, upon humble presentation unto Us of these ill inconveniencies by your Selfe, and sundrie other Grave and Reverend Prelates of this Church; as of our Princely care and desire, for the extirpation of Schisme and Dissention growing from these seedes; and for the setling of a Religious and Peaceable Governement both of Church and State: Doe by these Our speciall Letters straightly charge and command you, to use all possible care and diligence, that these limitations and cautions herewith sent you



appendix

concerning Preachers, be duely and strictly from henceforth observed, and put in practise by the severall Bishops in their severall Diocesses within your Jurisdiction. And to this end Our Pleasure is, that you send them forth severall Copies of these Directions, to be by them speedily sent and communicated to every Parson, Vicar and Curate, Lecturer and Minister, in every Cathedrall and Parish Church within their severall Diocesses; and that ye earnestly require them, to employ their utmost endeavours for the performance of this so important a businesse: Letting them know, We have an especiall eye to their proceedings, and expect a strict accompt thereof both from you and every one of them, and this Our Letter shall be your sufficient warrant and discharge in this behalfe. Given under Our Signet at Our Castle of Windsor, the fourth day of August, in the twentieth yeare of Our Reigne of England, France, and Ireland, and of Scotland the sixe and fiftieth [i.e., 1621].

Directions concerning Preachers 1 That no Preacher, under the degree and calling of a Bishop, or Deane of a Cathedrall or Collegiate Church, and they upon the Kings dayes, and set Festivals, doe take occasion by the expounding of any text of Scripture whatsoever, to fall into any set discourse or Common-place (otherwise then by opening the coherence and division of his Text) which shall not be comprehended and warranted, in essence, substance and effect, or naturall inference, within some one of the Articles of Religion set forth 1562. or in some of the Homelies set forth by authoritie in the Church of England, not onely for a helpe for the Non-preaching, but withall for a patterne and a bundarie (as it were) for the preaching Ministers, and for their further instructions: for the performance hereof, that they forthwith peruse over, and read diligently the said Articles, or the two bookes of Homilies. 2 That no Parson, Vicar, Curate, or Lecturer, shall preach any Sermon or Collation upon Sunday and Holy-dayes in the afternoone in any Cathedrall or Parish Church throughout the Kingdome, but upon some part of the Catechisme, or some text taken out of the Creed, tenne Commandements, or Lords Prayer, (funerall Sermons onely excepted) and that those Preachers be most encouraged and approoved of, who spend these afternoone Exercises in examining the children in their Catechisme, and in expounding of the severall points and heads of the Catechisme, which is the most auncient and laudable custome of teaching in the Church of England. 3 That no Preacher of what title soever, under the degree of a Bishop or Deane at the least, do from henceforth presume to preach in any populous auditorie, the deepe points of Predestination, Election, Reprobation; of the Universalitie, Efficacie, Resistabilitie, or Irresistabilitie of Gods grace, but leave those Theames to be handled by the learned men, and that moderately, and modestly, by way of use and application, rather then by way of positive doctrine, as beeing fitter for the Schooles and Universities, then for simple auditories.

preaching regulated



4 That no Preacher of what title or denomination14 soever, shall presume from hence forth in any auditorie in this Kingdome, to declare, limit, or bound out by positive doctrine, in any Lecture or Sermon, the Power, Prerogative, Jurisdiction, Authoritie, or Duty of Soveraigne Princes; or otherwise meddle with these matters of State, and the references betweene Princes and the People, then as they are instructed and presidented in the Homilie of obedience, and in the rest of the Homilies and Articles of Religion, set forth as is before mentioned by publike authoritie; but rather confine themselues for those two heads, Faith and good Life, which are the subject of auncient Sermons and Homilies. 5 That no Preacher of what title or denomination soever, shall causlesly, and without invitation from the Text, fall into bitter invectives, and undecent rayling speeches, against the persons of either Papist or Puritan, but modestly, and gravely when they are invited or occasioned thereunto by their text of Scripture, free both the Doctrine and Discipline of the Church of England, from the aspersion of either Adversarie, especially where the auditorie is suspected to be tainted with the one or the other infection. 6 Lastly, the Archbishops and Bishops of this kingdome (whom his Majestie hath good cause to blame for their former remisnes) be more warie and choice in licensing Preachers, and revoke all grants made to any Chancellor, Officiall, or Commissary to licence in this kind. And that all the Lecturers throughout the kingdome (a new body severed from the auncient Clergie of England, as beeing neither Parson, Vicar, nor Curate) be licensed henceforth in the Court of faculties, onely upon recommendation of the party from the Bishop of the Diocesse, under his hand and seale with a Fiat from the L. Archbish. of Canterbury, and a confirmation of the great seale of England and that such as transgresse any of these directions, bee suspended by the L. Bish. of the Diocesse; in his default by the L. Archbish. of the province, ab Officio & Beneficio, for a yeare and a day, untill his Majestie by advice of the next Convocation shall prescribe some further punishment. (Abbot 1622: 1–3)

III.11. George Abbot, The Lord Archbishop of Canterburie his Letters to the Bishop of the Diocesse of Norwich. (1622) Abbot’s covering letter for the king’s ‘Directions’ (App. III.10 above) was sent to all bishops in the southern province of Canterbury; the archbishop of York wrote similarly to those in the northern province. My very good L. I doubt not but before this time, you have received from me the Directions of His most excellent Majesty concerning Preaching and Preachers, which are so graciously set downe, that no godly or discreet man, can otherwise then acknowledge, that they doe much tend to edification, if he doe not take them upon report, but do punctually consider 14

I.e., rank.



appendix

the tenor of the words as they lie; and doe not give an ill construction to that, which may receive a fairer interpretation. Notwithstanding, because some fewe Churchmen, and many of the People have sinisterly conceived (as we doe here find) that those Instructions doe tend to the restraint of the Exercise of Preaching, and doe in some sort abate the number of Sermons, and so consequently by degrees, doe make a breach to let in Ignorance and Superstition: His Majestie in his Princely wisdome hath thought fit, that I should advertise your Lordship of the grave and waighty reasons which induce His Highnesse to prescribe that which is done. You are therefore to know, That His Majestie being much troubled, and grieved at the heart, to heare every day of so many defections from our Religion, both to Poperie and Anabaptisme, or other points of Separation in some parts of this Kingdome, and considering with much admiration, what might be the cause thereof, especially in the Reigne of such a King, who doth so constantly professe himselfe an open Adversary to the superstition of the one, and madnesse of the other: His Princely wisdome could fall upon no one greater probabilitie, then the lightnes, affectednes, and unprofitablenesse of that kind of Preaching, which hath been of late yeares too much taken up in Court, Universitie, Citie, and Countrey. The usuall scope of very many Preachers, is noted to bee a soaring up in points of Divinitie, too high for the capacities of the people, or a mustering of much reading, or displaying of their wit, or an ignorant medling with Civill matters, aswell in the private of severall Parishes & Corporations, as in the publike of the Kingdome: or a venting of their owne distastes, or a smoothing up of those idle fancies, which in this blessed time of so long a peace, doe boyle in the braines of unadvised people. And lastly, by an evill and undecent rayling, not onely against the Doctrine (which when the Text shall occasion the same, is not onely approoved, but much commended by his Majestie) but against the persons of Papists and Puritanes. Now the people bred up with this kind of teaching, and never instructed in the Catechisme and Fundamentall points of Religion, are for all this aiery nourishment, no better then abrasae tabulae, new Table-books, ready to be filled up either with the Manuals or Catechismes of Popish Priests, or papers and pamphlets of Anabaptists, Brownists, and Puritanes. His Majestie ever calling to mind that saying of Tertullian, Id verum quod primum, and remembring with what doctrine the Church of England in her first and most happy reformation, did drive out the one, and kept out the other from poisoning and infecting the people of this Kingdome, did find that the whole scope of this Doctrine is contained in the Articles of Religion, the two Bookes of Homilies, the lesse and the greater Catechisme, which his Majestie doth therefore recommend againe in these Directions, as the proper subject of all sound and edifying Preaching. And so farre are these Directions from abating, that his Majestie doth expect from our hands, that it should encrease the number of Sermons, by renewing upon every Sunday in the afternoone in all Parish Churches throughout the Kingdome, the primitive and most profitable exposition of the Catechisme, wherewith the people, yea very children may be timely seasoned & instructed in all the heads of Christian Religion. Which kind of teaching (to our amendment be it spoken) is more diligently observed in all the reformed Churches of Europe, then of late it hath bin here in England. I find his Majesty much moved with this neglect; & resolved, that if wee which are his Bishops do not see a reformation hereof

preaching regulated



(which I trust wee shall) to recommend it to the care of the Civill Magistrate, so far is he from giving the least discouragement to solid Preaching, and Religious Preachers. To all these I am to adde, that it is his Majesties Princely pleasure, that both the former Directions, and these reasons of the same, bee fairely written in every Registers Office. To that ende, that every Preacher of what denomination soever, may if he be pleased take out Copies of either of them with his owne hand gratis, paying nothing in the name of Fee, or Expedition. But if he doe use the paines of the Register his Clerks, then to pay some moderate Fees, to be pronounced in open Court by the Chancellor and Commissaries of the place, taking the direction and approbation of any the Lords the Bishops. Lastly, that from henceforth a course may be taken, that every Parson, Vicar, or Curate, or Lecturer, doe make exhibite of these his Majesties directions and reasons of the same, at the next ensuing Visitation of the Bishops and Archdeacons, paying to the Register by way of Fee two pence onely at the time of the exhibite. And so wishing, and in his Majesties Name requiring your Lordsh. to have a speciall and extraordinarie care of the premisses: I leave you to the Almightie. From Croidon, Sept. 4. 1622. (Abbot 1622: 4–6)

III.12. from Church of Ireland, Constitutions and Canons Ecclesiastical (1635) The Irish Canons were based on those of 1604 for England, though in final form were a delicate compromise between the determination of the Irish primate (James Ussher, archbishop of Armagh) to preserve the independence and Calvinism of the Irish church, and archbishop of Canterbury William Laud’s desire—pursued in Dublin through lord deputy Wentworth and his chaplain John Bramhall—to steer the Irish towards greater conformity with England. The Irish Canons pertaining to preaching were identical to those of the 1604 English canons (App. III.9 above), with the exception of the three below. These unique Irish Canons allowed for the use of Irish for central parts of the service (but not for preaching), and added special instructions for preachers to condemn Roman Catholic and other ‘supertitious’ practices. 8 Of the ordering of certaine parts of the service . . . And every Beneficiary and Curate, shall endeavor, that the confession of sinnes & absolution, & all the second service, (at or before the communion, to the Homily or Sermon) where the people all, or most, are Irish, shalbe used in English first, and after in Irish, if the Ordinary of the place, shall so thinke meete. 9 Beneficed Preachers being resident upon their Livings, to preach every Sunday. Every beneficed man, allowed to bee a Preacher, and residing on his Benefice, having no lawfull impediment, shall in his owne cure, preach one Sermon every Sunday of the yeare: And therein hee shall teach no vaine opinions, no Heresies, nor Popish errors, disagreeing from the Articles of Religion, generally received in the Churches of England and Ireland;



appendix

nor any thing at all, whereby the people may be stirred up to the desire of novelties or contention: but shall soberly & sincerely divide the Word of truth, to the glory of God, and to the best edification of the people. 12 The people to be informed in the body of Christian religion and reformed in their conversation. . . . The Ministers also in all their preachings, and catechizings, and private conferences, when neede requireth, shall teach the people to place their whole trust and confidence in God, and not in Creatures, neither in the Habite or Scapular of any Fryer, or in hallowed Beads, Medals, Reliques, or such like trumperyes. They shall doe their endeavour likewise to roote out all ungodly, superstitious, and barbarous customes; as using of charmes, sorcery, inchantments, witchcraft, or soothsaying; and generally to reforme the manners of the people committed to their charge, unto a Christian, sober, and civill conversation. (Church of Ireland 1635: 17–19, 22–3)

III.13. from Church of Scotland, Canons and Constitutions Ecclesiasticall (1636) Promulgated by Charles I in May 1636, the Scottish Canons were drawn up by the royally appointed bishops of Scotland under the advice of William Laud. As archbishop of Canterbury, Laud had no legal jurisdiction over the Scottish church, but these Canons were integral to his and Charles’s steps to strengthen the episcopal church there, and paved the way for the Scottish Prayer Book of 1637. The Canons pertaining to preaching repeated only two of the 1604 English canons (nos 50, 53, in App. III.9 above; nos. 2 and 7 in the Scottish Canons). The new Scottish Canons governing preaching articulated the Laudian policy of tying sermons as closely as possible to liturgy and catechising, and limiting their length and polemical content.

CHAP. III. Of Residence and Preaching 3. Everie Presbyter shall eyther by himselfe, or by another person lawfullie called, reade, or cause Divine Service to be done, according to the forme of the Book of Common Prayer, before all Sermons. 4. Albeit the whole tyme of our lyfe bee but short, to bee bestowed in the service of God; yet seeing HEE tempereth that worke to our weaknesse, It is ordayned, That Preachers in their Sermons and Prayers, eschew tediousnesse; and by a succinct doing, leave the people an appetite for farther instruction, and a newe desire to devotion. 5. No person of the Laicie, whatsoever gifts hee hath of Learning, Knowledge, or Holinesse, shall præsume to exercyse the Office of a Presbyter or Deacon, eyther in part, or whole, unlesse hee have receaved Ordination, and bee licenced by his Ordinarie; under the payne of Exommunication. 6. It is the duetie of Presbyters, not onelie to stirre up the affections of people by exhortation; but lykewyse to informe their judgement, by solide instruction, that they may bee

preaching regulated



acquaynted with the groundes of their Profession: THEREFORE It is ordayned, That there bee catechizing everie Sunday in the afternoone . . . 8. No Presbyter or Preacher shall presume in Sermons, to speak against his Majesties Lawes, Statutes, Acts or Ordinances: But if hee conceave anie scruple or doubt, let him goe to his Ordinarie, and receave instruction. 9. No man’s name shall be expressed in Pulpit, to his reproach, except the fault bee notorious; which notoriotie is defined, if the person bee fugitive, convict by an Assise, excommunicate, or contumacious after citation. Nor yet shall anie man bee descrybed by anie other circumstances, than publicke vyces, alwayes damnable. 10. It is manifest, that the superstition of former ages, is turned unto great prophanenesse; and, that people, for the most part, are growne colde in doing anie good; esteeming, that good workes are not necessarie: Therefore shall all Presbyters as their Text giveth occasion, urge the necessitie of good works to their hearers. 12. That every Presbyter may bee the better enabled to performe his duetie, and bee furnished throughlie with knowledge, hee shall bee carefull to get himselfe good Books; especiallie, and above the rest, the Bookes of holie Scriptures, and the Wrytinges of the Ancient Fathers, and Doctors of the Church: and hee shall studie diligentlie; not taking delight in wandering through the Countrey, nor medling in matters not pertinent to his Calling. Or, if anie doe otherwyse, and after admonition amende not, hee shall bee suspended from the Ministerie. And if hee continue in that evill course, hee shall bee deposed. 13. All Presbyters and Preachers shall move the people to joyne with them in prayer, using some fewe convenient wordes; and shall alwayes conclude with the LORD’S PRAYER. (Church of Scotland 1636: 12–16)

III.14. from Westminster Assembly, Concerning Church Government and Ordination of Ministers (1647) The Westminster Assembly—the synod appointed by the Long Parliament for reform of the Church of England—was composed of over 100 divines and laity, and met from 1643 to 1653. After the ‘Solemn League and Covenant’ was ratified by the English and Scottish parliaments (August–September 1643), the Assembly was supplemented by Scottish representatives and promulgated the foundational documents of British Presbyterianism. Although only sporadically enforced in England—especially under the growing strength of Cromwell and the Independents—and revoked there in 1660, the work of the Assembly remained in force in the Scottish (Presbyterian) Kirk thereafter. The document issued as Concerning Church Government (sometimes called ‘the Directory of Worship’) was a translation of a Latin tract (c.1587) by the eminent Elizabethan puritan Walter Travers. Its articles pertaining to ministers’ duties and the ordination of new ministers capture the centrality of preaching to the ideals of advanced reform held by Elizabethan nonconformists, Commonwealth



appendix

Presbyterians, the Scottish Kirk, and later nonconformist traditions. The heavy citation of scripture in these articles followed a parliamentary directive to do so, and epitomizes the intense bibliocentrism integral to so much Reformation churchmanship.

Teacher or Doctor The Scripture doth hold out the name and title of Teacher, as well as of the Pastor, 1 Cor. 12:28. Ephes. 4:11. Who is also a Minister of the Word as well as the Pastor, and hath power of administration of the Sacraments. The Lord having given different gifts, and divers exercises according to these gifts in the Ministery of the Word, Rom. 12:6, 7, 8; 1 Cor. 12:1, 4, 5, 6, 7. Though these different gifts may meet in and accordingly be exercised by one and the same Minister, 1 Cor. 14:3; 2 Tim. 4:2; Tit.1:9. yet where be severall Ministers in the same Congregation, they may be designed to severall imployments, according to the different gifts in which each of them doth most excell, Rom. 12:6, 7, 8; 1 Pet. 4:10, 11. and hee that doth more excell in exposition of Scripture, in teaching sound Doctrine, and in convincing gain-sayers, than he doth in application and is accordingly imployed therein, may be called a Teacher, or Doctor ( the places alledged by the Notation of the Word doth prove the Proposition ) Neverthelesse, where is but one Minister in a particular Congregation, he is to performe so far as he is able the whole work of the Ministery as appeareth in the 2 Tim. 4:2; Tit. 1:9. before alleadged, 1 Tim.6:2. A Teacher or Doctor is of most excellent use in Schooles, and Universities, as of old in the Schooles of the Prophets, and at Jerusalem, where Gamaliel and others taught as Doctors.

The Directory for Ordination of Ministers It being manifest by the Word of God, that no man ought to take upon him the Office of a Minister of the Gospel, untill he be lawfully called and ordained thereunto: And that the work of Ordination is to be performed with all due care, wisdome, gravity, and solemnity, wee humbly tender these Directions as requisite to bee observed. 1. First, He that is to be ordained being either nominated by the People, or otherwise commended to the Presbytery for any place, must addresse himself to the Presbytery, and bring with him a Testimoniall of his taking the Covenant of the three Kingdomes, of his diligence and proficiency in his Studies; What degrees he hath taken in the University, and what hath beene the time of his abode there; and withall of his age, which is to be twentie four years, but especially of his life and conversation. 2. Which being considered by the Presbytery, they are to proceed, to enquire touching the Grace of God in him, and whether he be of such holinesse of life as is requisite in a Minister of the Gospel, and to examine him touching his learning and sufficiency, and touching the evidences of his calling to the holy Ministery, and in particular, his fair and direct calling to that place.

preaching regulated



The Rules for examination are these 1. That the party examined be dealt withall in a Brotherly way, with mildnesse of spirit, and with speciall respect to the gravitie, modesty, and quality of every one. 2. He shall be examined touching his skill in the Originall tongues, and his tryall to be made by reading the Hebrew and Greek Testaments, and rendring some portion of some into Latine; And if he be defective in them, enquiry shall bee made the more strictly after his other learning, And whether he hath skill in Logick and Phylosophie. 3. What Authors in Divinity he hath read and is best acquainted with; And tryall shall be made in his knowledge of the grounds of Religion, and of his ability to defend the Orthodox Doctrine contained in them, against all unsound and erronious opinions, especially these of the present age: of his skill in the sense and meaning of such places of Scripture, as shall be proposed unto him, in cases of Conscience; and in the Chronologie of the Scripture, and the Ecclesiasticall History. 4. If he hath not before preached in publick, with approbation of such as are able to judge, he shall at a competent time assigned him, expound before the Presbytery such a place of Scripture as shall be given him. 5. He shall also within a competent time, frame a discourse in Latine upon such a Common place or Controversie in Divinity as shall be assigned him, and exhibite to the Presbyterie such Theses as expresse the summe thereof, and maintaine a Dispute upon them. 6. He shall Preach before the People, the Presbyterie, or some of the Ministers of the Word appointed by them, being present. 7. The proportion of his gifts in relation to the place unto which he is called, shall be considered. 8. Beside the triall of his gifts in Preaching, he shall undergoe an examination in the premisses two severall dayes, and more if the Presbyterie shall judge it necessary. 9. And as for him that hath formerly beene ordained aMinister, and is to bee removed to another charge, hee shall bring a Testimoniall of his Ordination, and of his Abilities and Conversation, whereupon his fitnesse for that place shall be tryed by his Preaching there, (if it shall bee judged necessary) by a further examination of him. 3. In all which he being approved, he is to be sent to the Church where he is to serve, there to Preach three severall dayes, and to converse with the People, that they may have triall of his Gifts for their edification, and may have time and occasion to enquire into, and the better to know his life and conversation. 4. In the last of these three dayes appointed for the tryall of his gifts in Preaching, there shall be sent from the Presbyterie to the Congregation, a publike intimation in writing, which shall be publikely read before the People; And after affixed to the Church doore, to signifie that such a day, a competent number of the Members of that Congregation nominated by themselves, shall appeare before the Presbyterie, to give their consent and approbation to such a man to be their Minister, or otherwise, to put in with all Christian discretion and meeknes, what exceptions they have against him, and if upon the day appointed there bee no just exception against him, but the People give their consent, then the Presbytery shall proceed to Ordination.



appendix

5. Upon the day appointed for Ordination, which is to be performed in that Church, where he that is to be ordained is to serve, a solemne Fast shall bee kept by the Congregation, that they may the more earnestly joyne in Prayer, for a blessing upon the Ordinance of Christ, and the labours of his Servant for their good. The Presbyterie shall come to the place, or at least three or four Ministers of the Word shall be sent thither from the Presbytery; Of which one appointed by the Presbyterie, shall Preach to the People concerning the office and duty of Ministers of Christ, and how the People ought to receive them for their work sake. 6. After the Sermon, the Minister who hath Preached shall in the face of the Congregation; demand of him who is now to be ordained concerning his faith in Christ Jesus, and his perswasion of the truth of the Reformed Religion according to the Scripture; His sincere intentions and ends in desiring to enter into this Calling; His diligence in Praying, Reading, Meditation, Preaching, Ministring the Sacraments, Discipline, and doing all Ministeriall Duties towards his Charge; His Zeal and Faithfulnesse in maintaining the Truth of the Gospel, and Unity of the Church against Errour and Schisme; His care that himself and his Family may bee unblameable and examples to the Flock; His willingnes and humility in meeknesse of Spirit, to submit unto the admonitions of his Brethren and Discipline of the Church; And his resolution to continue in his duety against all trouble and persecution. (Westminster Assembly 1647: 5–6, 19–22)

III.15. Charles II, Directions Concerning Preachers (1662) Following the reinstitution of the episcopal Church of England with the Act of Uniformity in July 1662, and the deadline for clerical conformity in August of the same year, Charles and his advisers moved to control pulpit opposition with ‘Directions’ for preachers, based upon those of his grandfather (App. III.11 above).

To the Most Reverend Father in God, william, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury. Charles R. Most Reverend Father in God, We greet you well. Whereas the bold abuses & extravagancies of Preachers in the Pulpit, have not onely by the experience of former Ages been found to tend to the dishonour of God, the scandal of Religion, and disturbance of the peace both of Church and State, but have also (through the licentiousness of the late times) much increased, to the inflaming, fomenting, and heightning of the sad distempers and confusions that were among us. And whereas even at this present (notwithstanding the merciful providence of God, so signally manifested in restoring Us to Our Crown, and Our pious care and endeavours to govern Our Realms in peace and tranquillity) the said Abuses do yet continue in a very high measure in sundry parts of this

preaching regulated



Realm, through the busie diligence of some unquiet and factious Spirits, who instead of preaching the pure Word of God, and building up the People in Faith and Holiness, have made it a great part of their business to beget in the minds of their Hearers an evil opinion of their Governours, by insinuating fears and jealousies to dispose them to discontent, and to season them with such unsound and dangerous Principles, as may lead them into Disobedience, Schism and Rebellion. And whereas also sundry young Divines and Ministers, either out of a spirit of contention and contradiction, or in a vain ostentation of their Learning, take upon them in their popular Sermons to handle the deep Points of Gods Eternal Counsels and Decrees, or to meddle with the affairs of State and Government, or to wrangle about Forms and Gestures, & other fruitless Disputes and Controversies, serving rather to amuse than profit the Hearers; which is done for the most part, and with the greatest confidence, by such persons as least understand them: We, out of Our Princely Care & Zele for the honour of God, the advancement of Piety, Peace, and true Religion, and for the preventing for the future, as much as lieth in Us, the many and great Inconveniences and Mischiefs that will unavoidably ensue, if a timely stop be not given to these and the like growing Abuses, Do, according to the Examples of several of Our Predecessours of blessed memory, by these Our special Letters straitly charge and command you, to use your utmost care and diligence that these Directions, which upon long and serious consideration We have thought good to give concerning Preachers, and which We have caused to be Printed, heerewith sent unto you, be from henceforth duly and strictly observed by all the Bishops within Your Province. And to this end Our Will and Pleasure is, That you forthwith send them Copies of these Our Directions, to be by them speedily communicated to every Parson, Vicar, Curate, Lecturer and Minister, in every Cathedral, Collegiate & Parish-Church within their several Dioceses: And that you earnestly require them to imploy their utmost endeavour for the due observation of the same, whereof We shall expect a strict accompt both of you and every one of them: And these Our Letters shall be your sufficient Warrant and Discharge in that behalf.

Directions concerning Preachers I. That no Preachers in their Sermons presume to meddle with matters of State, to model new Governments, or take upon them to declare, limit or bound out the Power and Authority of Soveraigne Princes, or to state and determine the differences between Princes and the People; but that upon all good occasions they faithfully instruct the People in their bounden duty of Subjection and Obedience to their Governours Superiour and Subordinate of all sorts, and to the established Laws, according to the Word of God, and the Doctrine of the Church of England, as it is contained in the Homilies of Obedience, and the Articles of Religion set forth by publick Authority. II. That they be admonished not to spend their time and study in the search of abstruse and speculative Notions, especially in and about the deep points of Election and Reprobation, together with the incomprehensible manner of the concurrence of Gods Free Grace and Mans Free Will, and such other controversies as depend thereupon: but



appendix

howsoever, that they presume not positively and doctrinally to determine any thing concerning the same. III. That they forbear in their Sermons ordinarily and causlesly to enter upon the handling of any other controversies of less moment and difficulty: but whensoever they are occasioned by invitation from the Text they preach upon, or that in regard of the Auditory they preach unto, it may seem requisite or expedient so to do; That in such cases they do it with all modesty, gravity and candor, from the cavils and objections of such as are Adversaries to either, without bitterness, railing, jeering, or other unnecessary or unseemly provocation. IV. That for the more edifying of the People in Faith and Godlines (the aforesaid Abuses laid aside) all Ministers and Preachers in their several respective Cures shall not onely diligently apply themselves to Catechize the younger sort, according as in the Book of Common Prayer is appointed: but also shall in their ordinary Sermons insist chiefly upon Catechetical Doctrines, (wherein are contained all the necessary and undoubted Verities of Christian Religion) declaring withall unto their Congregations what influences such Doctrines ought to have into their lives and conversations, and stirring them up effectually, as well by their Examples as their Doctrines, to the practice of such Religious and Moral Duties as are the proper results of the said Doctrines, as Self-denial, Contempt of the World, Humility, Patience, Meekness, Temperance, Justice, Mercy, Obedience, and the like; and to a detestation and shunning of sin, especially such sins as are so rife among us, and common to the Age we live in; such are those usually styled the Seven Deadly ones; in short, all kind of Debauchery, Sensuality, Rebellion, Profaneness, Atheism, and the like. And because these licentious times have corrupted Religion even in the very roots and foundations, That where there is an Afternoons Exercise, it be especially spent either in explaining some part of the Church-catechism, or in preaching upon some such Text of Scripture as will properly and naturally lead to the handling of something contained in it, or may conduce to the exposition of the Liturgy and Prayers of the Church, (as occasion shall be offered) the onely cause they grew into contempt amongst the People being this, That they were not understood. That also the Minister, as often as conveniently he can, read the Prayers himself; and when he cannot do so, he procure or provide some fit person in Holy Orders, who may do it with that gravity, distinctness, devotion and reverence, as becomes so holy an action: And whensoever by reason of his infirmity, or the concurrence of other Offices, the time may seem too short, or he unable to perform the office of both Prayers and Sermon at length, he rather shorten his Discourse or Sermon, than omit any thing of the Prayers, lest he incur the penalty of the Act for Uniformity, requiring them to be read according as the Book directs. V. And further Our Will and Pleasure is, That all Ministers within their several Cures be enjoyned publickly to read over unto the People such Canons as are or shall be in force, at least once, and the Thirty nine Articles twice every year, to the end they may the better understand, and be more throughly acquainted with the Doctrine and Discipline of the Church of England, and not so easily drawn away from it as formerly they have been.

preaching regulated



VI. Since Preaching was not anciently the work of every Priest, but was restrained to the choicest persons for gravity, prudence and learning; the Archbishops and Bishops of this Kingdom are to take great care whom they License to Preach, and that all Grants and Licences of this kind heretofore made by any Chancellour, Official, Commissary, or other Secular person, (who are presumed not to be so competent Judges in matters of this nature) be accounted void and null, unless the same shall likewise be allowed by the Archbishop, or the Bishop of the Diocese, and that all Licences of Preachers hereafter to be made or granted by any Archbishop or Bishop, shall be only during pleasure, otherwise to be void to all intents and purposes, as if the same had never been made nor granted. VII. Lastly, That for the better observing of the Lords-day, too much neglected of late, they shall, as by often and serious admonitions, and sharp reproofs, endeavour to draw off people from such idle, debauched, and profane courses, as dishonour God, bring a scandal on Religion, and contempt on the Laws and Authority Ecclesiastical and Civil, so shall they very earnestly persuade them to frequent Divine Service on the Lords-day, and other Festivals appointed by the Church to be kept solemn. And in case any person shall resort unto any Tavern, Ale-houses, or use any unlawful Sports and Exercises on such days, the Minister shall exhort those which are in Authority in their several Parishes and Congregations, carefully to look after all such Offenders in any kind whatsoever, together with all those that abet, receive or entertain them, that they may be proceeded against according to the Laws, and quality of their Offences, that all such Disorders may for the time to come be prevented. Given at Our Court at Whitehall, October the 14. in the 14. year of Our Reign, 1662. By His Majesties Command. Ed. Nicholas15 (Seppens 1664: sigs B2r–4r)

III.16. James II, Directions Concerning Preachers (1686) At the suggestion of the bishop of Winchester Peter Mews, archbishop of Canterbury William Sancroft convinced James II to issue ‘Directions’ as a less confrontational way to control oppositional preaching than the outright suppression of afternoon lectures (Colby 2004). The ‘Directions’ themselves (Timmings 1964: 57–8) were a verbatim reissue of those of Charles II from 1662 (App. III.15 above). The king’s covering letter to the archbishops of Canterbury and York also repeated that of Charles II (App. III.15 above), adding only that the ‘extravagancies of preachers’ continued in spite of God’s providence ‘in restoring our royal family and the lawful government of these realms, and putting an end to the great rebellion, and notwithstanding the pious care and endeavours of our late dear brother, and our self ever since’, and describing the ‘Directions’ as what ‘our late dear brother thought good concerning preachers, and which we upon like consideration have approved’ (Timmings 1964: 56–7).

15

Edward Nicholas, privy counsellor and secretary of state.

This page intentionally left blank

Select Bibliography

This bibliography extracts from all preceding chapters those works of the most general usefulness for study of the early modern sermon and some useful sources not cited elsewhere in the volume. Also included are all works cited in the Appendices. For separately published sermons, and more specialist sources, readers should consult the lists of works cited at the end of individual chapters, and the index. Place of publication is London, unless otherwise specified. Abbot, G. (1622). The Coppie of a Letter Sent from My Lords Grace of Canterburie Shewing the Reasons which Induced the Kings Majestie to Prescribe Directions for Preachers. Andrewes, L. (1629). XCVI Sermons, ed. William Laud and John Buckeridge. Anon. (1694). The Concurrence and Unanimity of the People Called Quakers. Anselment, R. (1979). ‘Betwixt Jest and Earnest’: Marprelate, Milton, Marvell, Swift and the Decorum of Religious Ridicule. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Appleby, D. (2007). Black Bartholomew’s Day: Preaching, Polemic and Restoration Nonconformity. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Aughterson, K. (1995) (ed.). Renaissance Women: A Sourcebook. Routledge. Augustine (1995). De doctrina christiana, trans. R. P. H. Green. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Barlow, T. (1699). Autoschediasmata, de studio theologiae: or, Directions for the Choice of Books in the Study of Divinity. Oxford. Barnard, J., and McKenzie, D. F. (2004) (eds). The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iv. 1557–1695. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baxter, R. (1656). Gildas Salvianus, the Reformed Pastor Shewing the Nature of the Pastoral Work, Especially in Private Instruction and Catechizing. Bellany, A. (2002). The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bernard, R. (1607). The Faithfull Shepheard. Bitzel, A. (2008). ‘The Theology of the Sermon in the Eighteenth Century’, in Joris van Eijnatten (ed.), Preaching, Sermon and Cultural Change in the Long Eighteenth Century. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 57–94. Black, J. (2008). The Martin Marprelate Tracts, ed. Joseph L. Black. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blench, J. (1964). Preaching in England in the Late Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries. Oxford: Blackwell. Block, J. (1977). ‘Thomas Cromwell’s Patronage of Preaching’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 8: 37–50. Bond, R. (1987). Certain Sermons or Homilies (1547) and a Homily against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion (1570). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Bonner, E. (1555). Homelies Sette Forth by the Righte Reverend Father in God, Edmunde Byshop of London. John Cawood.



select bibliography

Boys, J. (1610). An Exposition of all the Principal Scriptures Used in our English Liturgie. Bray, G. (1998) (ed.). The Anglican Canons 1529–1947. Church of England Record Society, 6. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. Brayman Hackel, H. (2005). Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender and Literacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Briggs, J. H. Y. (1986). ‘She-Preachers, Widows, and Other Women: The Feminine Dimension in Baptist Life since 1600’, Baptist Quarterly, 31/7: 337–52. Bullinger, H. (1577). Fiftye Godly and Learned Sermons. Burnet, G. (1692). A Discourse of the Pastoral Care. Caplan, H., and King, H. (1949). ‘Latin Tractates on Preaching: A Book-List’, Harvard Theological Review, 42/3: 185–206. Carlson, E. (2000). ‘English Funeral Sermons as Sources: The Example of Female Piety in Pre-1640 Sermons’, Albion, 32/4: 567–97. —— (2001). ‘The Boring of the Ear: Shaping the Pastoral Vision of Preaching in England, 1540– 1640’, in L. Taylor (ed.), Preachers and People in the Reformations and Early Modern Period. Leiden: Brill, 249–96. Chamberlain, J. (1939). The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. Norman Egbert McClure. 2 vols. Philadephia: American Philosophical Society. Champion, J. A. I. (1993). ‘Religion after the Restoration’, Historical Journal, 36: 423–30. Chappell, W. (1656). The Preacher, or the Art and Method of Preaching. Charlton, K. (1999). Women, Religion and Education in Early Modern England. Routledge. Church of England (1604). Constitutions and Canons Ecclesiasticall Treated upon by the Bishop of London . . . and the Rest of the Bishops and Clergie . . . and Agreed upon with the Kings Majesties Licence . . . 1603. Church of Ireland (1635). Constitutions and Canons Ecclesiasticall, Treated upon by the Archbishops, and Bishops, and the Rest of the Cleargie of Ireland. Dublin. Church of Scotland (1636). Constitutions and Canons Ecclesiasticall Gathered and Put in Forme, for the Governament of the Church of Scotland. Aberdeen. Churton, R. (1809). The Life of Alexander Nowell, Dean of St Paul’s. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Cicero] (1942). De oratore, trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; Heinemann. —— (1968). Rhetorica ad Herennium, trans. Harry Caplan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Clavell, R. (1680). A Catalogue of all the Books Printed in England since the Dreadful Fire of London. Claydon, T. (1996a). William III and the Godly Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (1996b). ‘William III’s Declaration of Reasons and the Glorious Revolution’, Historical Journal, 39: 87–108. Clifford, A. (1990). The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford, ed. D. J. H. Clifford. Stroud: Alan Sutton. Colby, A. (2004). ‘Mews, Peter (1619–1706)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online edn. Colclough, D. (2003) (ed.). John Donne’s Professional Lives. Woodbridge, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer. Collinson, P. (1977). ‘ “A Magazine of Religious Patterns”: An Erasmian Topic Transposed in English Protestantism’, in Derek Baker (ed.), Renaissance and Renewal in Christian History. Studies in Church History, 14: 223–49.

select bibliography



—— (1979). Archbishop Grindal 1519–1583: The Struggle for a Reformed Church. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. —— (1982). The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559–1625. Oxford: Clarendon Press. —— (1995). ‘The Coherence of the Text; How it Hangeth Together: The Bible in Reformation England’, in W. P. Stephens (ed.), The Bible, The Reformation and the Church. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 84–108. ——, Hunt, A., and Walsham, A. (2002). ‘Religious Publishing in England, 1557–1640’, in J. Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (eds), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iv. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 29–66. Cranfield, N. W. S. (1996). ‘Chaplains in Ordinary at the Early Stuart Court: The Purple Road’, in C. Cross (ed.), Patronage and Recruitment in the Tudor and Early Stuart Church. York: Borthwick Institute, 120–47. Cressy, D. (1989). Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. [Crowe, W.]. An Exact Collection or Catalogue of our English Writers on the Old and New Testament (1663). Davies, J. (1992). The Caroline Captivity of the Church: Charles I and the Remoulding of Anglicanism, 1625–1641. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Davies, W. L. (1921). ‘Welsh Books Entered in the Stationers’ Registers, 1554–1708. Part 1, 1554–1660’, Journal of the Welsh Bibliographical Society, 2: 167–74. D’Ewes, S. (1845). The Autobiography and Correspondence of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, ed. James Orchard Halliwell. 2 vols. Richard Bentley. Dillon, P. (2006). The Last Revolution: 1688 and the Creation of the Modern World. Jonathan Cape. Donne, J. (1953–62). Sermons, ed. G. R. Potter and E. M. Simpson. 10 vols. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Duffy, E. (1992). The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580. New Haven: Yale University Press. —— (2006). ‘Cardinal Pole Preaching: St Andrew’s Day 1557’, in E. Duffy and D. Loades (eds), The Church of Mary Tudor. Aldershot: Ashgate. —— (2009). Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. ——, and Loades, D. (2006) (eds). The Church of Mary Tudor. Aldershot: Ashgate. Eales, J. (2002). ‘Provincial Preaching and Allegiance in the First English Civil War, 1640–6’, in T. Cogswell, R. Cust, and P. Lake (eds), Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 185–207. Edward VI (1547). Injunccions geve[n] by the Moste Excellent Prince, Edward the Sixte. —— (1548). A Proclamation Set Furth by the Kynges Majestie. Edwards, J. (1705). The Preacher. Edwards, O. C., Jr. (2004). A History of Preaching. Nashville: Abingdon Press. Elizabeth I (1559). Injunctions Geve[n] by the Quenes Majestie. Evelyn, J. (1955). The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. De Beer. 6 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ferrell, L. (1998). Government by Polemic: James I, the King’s Preachers, and the Rhetorics of Conformity, 1603–1625. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ——, and McCullough, P. (2000) (eds). The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History 1600–1750. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Fincham, K. (1990). Prelate as Pastor: The Episcopate of James I. Oxford: Clarendon Press.



select bibliography

Fincham, K. (1994) (ed.). Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Early Stuart Church, i. Church of England Record Society, 1. Woodbridge: Boydell. ——, and Tyacke, N. (2007). Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Religious Worship, 1547–c.1700. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Firth, C. H., and Rait, R. S. (1911). Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660. 3 vols. HMSO. Fisher, J. (2002). English Works of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester: Sermons and Other Writings 1520 to 1535, ed. Cecilia A. Hatt. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fletcher, A., and Gillespie, R. (2001) (eds). Irish Preaching, 700–1700. Dublin: Four Courts Press. Foxe, J. (2004). Acts and Monuments . . . [1563 edn]. Sheffield: Humanities Research Institute, hriOnline. www.hrionline.shef.ac.uk/foxe Frere, W. (1910). Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Period of the Reformation, ii. 1536–1558. Longmans, Green & Co. Gataker, T. (1637). Certaine Sermons, First Preached, and After Published. Gibson, W. (2001). The Church of England 1688–1832: Unity and Accord. Routledge. Gillespie, R. (1997). Devoted People: Belief and Religion in Early Modern Ireland. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Grafton, A., and Jardine, L. (1986) (eds). From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century Europe. Duckworth. Greaves, R. L. (1985). ‘Foundation Builders: The Role of Women in Early English Nonconformity’, in R. Greaves (ed.), Triumph over Silence: Women in Protestant History. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 75–92. Green, I. (1994). ‘The Christian’s ABC’: Catechism and Catechizing in England c.1530–1740. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— (2000). Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— (2009). Continuity and Change in Protestant Preaching in Early Modern England. Dr Williams’s Library. ——, and Peters, K. (2002). ‘Religious Publishing in England, 1640–1695’, in J. Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (eds), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iv. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Greig, M. (2004). ‘Burnet, Gilbert (1643–1715)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online edn. Gribben, C. (2007). God’s Irishmen: Theological Debate in Cromwellian Ireland. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Griffith, W. P. (1996). Learning, Law and Religion: Higher Education and Welsh Society, 1540–1640. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Grindal, E. (1843). The Remains of Edmund Grindal, D.D., ed. William Nicholson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hatt, C. A. (2002). English Works of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester: Sermons and Other Writings 1520 to 1535. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Haugaard, W. (1970). Elizabeth and the English Reformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haugaard, W. P. (1979). ‘Renaissance Patristic Scholarship and Theology in Sixteenth-Century England’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 10/3: 37–60. Hemmingsen, N. (1574). The Preacher, or Methode of Preachinge, trans. I. H.

select bibliography



Herbert, G. (1652). A Priest to the Temple or The Country Parson. Herr, A. (1940). The Elizabethan Sermon: A Survey and a Bibliography. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hill, C. ([1972] 1991). The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin. —— (1993). The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution. Penguin. Hinds, H. (1996). God’s Englishwomen: Seventeenth-Century Radical Sectarian Writing and Feminist Criticism. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hooker, R. (1977). The Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity Book V, ed. W. Speed Hill. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Houlbrooke, R. (1998). Death, Religion and the Family in England 1480–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hughes, A. (1990). ‘The Pulpit Guarded: Confrontations between Orthodox and Radicals in Revolutionary England’, in A. Laurence, W. R. Owens, and S. Sim (eds.), John Bunyan and his England 1628–88. Hambledon Press. Hunt, A. (2010). The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and their Audiences, 1590–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hutchinson, L. (1995). Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. N. H. Keeble. J. M. Dent. Hyperius, A. (1577). The Practise of Preaching, trans. John Ludham. Ihalainen, P. (2005). Protestant Nations Redefined . . . 1685–1772. Leiden: Brill. Jenkins, G. H. (1978). Literature, Religion and Society in Wales, 1660–1730. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Jenkinson, M. (2007). ‘The Politics of Court Culture in the Reign of Charles II, 1660–1685’. Unpublished D.Phil. thesis. Oxford. Jones, R. F. (1951). ‘The Attack on Pulpit Eloquence in the Restoration: An Episode in the Development of the Neo-Classical Standard for Prose’, in R. F. Jones, and others writing in his honor, The Seventeenth Century: Studies in the History of English Thought and Literature from Bacon to Pope. Stanford and London: Stanford University Press. Jonson, B. (1963). Bartholomew Fair, ed. E. M. Waith. New Haven: Yale University Press. —— (1975). Ben Jonson: the Complete Poems, ed. G. Parfitt. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Keay, A. (2008). The Magnificent Monarch: Charles II and the Ceremonies of Power. London and New York: Continuum. Keeble, N. (1987). The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England. Leicester: Leicester University Press. —— (2004). ‘Baxter, Richard (1615–1691)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online edn. Key, N. E. (1994).‘The Political Culture and Political Rhetoric of County Feasts and Feast Sermons, 1654–1714’, Journal of British Studies, 33: 223–56. Kienzle, B. M., and Walker, P. J. (1998) (eds). Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millennia of Christianity. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Kilroy, P. (1994). Protestant Dissent and Controversy in Ireland, 1660–1714. Cork: Cork University Press. Lacey, A. (2003). The Cult of King Charles the Martyr. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. Lake, P. (1991). ‘Lancelot Andrewes, John Buckeridge and Avant-Garde Conformity at the Court of James I’, in Linda Levy Peck (ed.), The Mental World of the Jacobean Court. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 113–33. ——, and Questier, M. (2002). The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists & Players in PostReformation England. New Haven: Yale University Press.



select bibliography

Lander, J. (2006). Religion, Print and Literary Culture in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lanham, R. (1976). The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance. New Haven: Yale University Press. Latimer, H. (1562). 27 Sermons Preached by the Ryght Reverende . . . Maister Hugh Latimer. McCabe, R. (1982). Joseph Hall: A Study in Satire and Meditation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. MacCulloch, D. (1999). Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation. Allen Lane. The Penguin Press. McCullough, P. (1998a). ‘Making Dead Men Speak: Laudianism, Print, and the Works of Lancelot Andrewes, 1626–1642’, Historical Journal, 41: 401–24. —— (1998b). Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (2006). ‘Donne as Preacher’, in A. Guibbory (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to John Donne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 167–81. —— (2008). ‘Print, Publication, and Religious Politics in Caroline England’, Historical Journal, 51/2: 285–313. McDowell, N. (2003). The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630–1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McGinness, F. (1995). Right Thinking and Sacred Oratory in Counter-Reformation Rome. Princeton: Princeton University Press. McGrath, A. E. ([1988]; 1999). Reformation Thought: An Introduction. 3rd edn. Oxford: Blackwell. —— ([1987] 2004). The Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation. 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell. Mack, P. (1992). Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. —— (2002). Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacLure, M. (1958). The Paul’s Cross Sermons 1534–1642. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ——, rev. P. Pauls and J. Campbell Boswell (1989). Register of Sermons Preached at Paul’s Cross 1534–1642. Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions. Maltby, J. (1998). Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Manningham, J. (1976). The Diary of John Manningham, ed. R. P. Sorlein. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Marshall, P. (1994). The Catholic Priesthood and the English Reformation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mary I (1553 [i.e. 1554]). A Copie of a Letter wyth Articles Sente from the Queenes Majestie unto the Bysshope of London. Milton, A. (1995). Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mitchell, W. Fraser (1932). English Pulpit Oratory from Andrewes to Tillotson: A Study of its Literary Aspects. SPCK. More, T. (1981). A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, ed. T. M. C. Lawler, G. Marc’Hadour, and R. C. Marius, in The Complete Works of St Thomas More, vol. 6, pts I & II. New Haven: Yale University Press.

select bibliography



Morrissey, M. (1999). ‘Interdisciplinarity and the Study of Early Modern Sermons’, Historical Journal, 42: 1111–23. —— (2002). ‘Scripture, Style and Persuasion in Seventeenth-Century English Theories of Preaching’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 53/4: 686–706. —— (2006). ‘Presenting James VI and I to the Public: Preaching on Political Anniversaries at Paul’s Cross’, in R. Houlbrooke (ed.), James VI and I: Ideas, Authority, and Government. Aldershot: Ashgate. —— (2011). Politics and the Paul’s Cross Sermons, 1558–1642. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moss, A. (1996). Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Nashe, T. (1966). The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow. 5 vols. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), ed. Lawrence Goldman. Online edn. Parkin, J. (2007). Taming the Leviathan: The Reception of the Political and Religious Ideas of Thomas Hobbes in England, 1640–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Partee, C. (2005). Calvin and Classical Philosophy. 2nd edn. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Pepys, S. (1970–83). The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews. 11 vols. G. Bell and Sons. Perkins, W. (1607). The Arte of Prophecying, trans. Thomas Tuke. Peters, C. (2003). Patterns of Piety: Women, Gender and Religion in Late Medieval and Reformation England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peters, K. (2005). Print Culture and the Early Quakers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pincombe, M. (2001). Elizabethan Humanism: Literature and Learning in the Later Sixteenth Century. Harlow: Longman. Powell, V. (1661). [Tsofer Bepah] or the Bird in the Cage, Chirping Four Distinct Notes to his Consorts Abroad. Quantin, J.-L. (2009). The Church of England and Christian Antiquity: The Construction of a Confessional Identity in the 17th Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Quintilian (1993–6). Institutio oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler. 4 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rivers, I. (1991). Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study in the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780, i. Whichcote to Wesley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seppens, R. (1664). Rex Theologicus: The Preachers Guard and Guide. Shagan, E. (2003). Popular Politics and the English Reformation. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Shami, J. (1995). ‘John Donne and the Absolutist Politics of Quotation’, in Raymond-Jean Frontain and Frances M. Malpezzi (eds), Donne’s Religious Imagination: Essays in Honor of John T. Shawcross. Conway, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 380–412. Shami, J. (2003). John Donne and Conformity in Crisis. Cambridge: Brewer. Sharp, T. (1825) (comp.). The Life of John Sharp. Sharpe, K. (2000). Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Sheils, W. J. (1994). ‘Provincial Preaching on the Eve of the Civil War: Some West Riding Fast Sermons’, in A. Fletcher and P. Roberts (eds), Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 290–312.



select bibliography

Shuger, D. (1988). Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press. —— (1990). Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance. Berkeley and Los Angeles, and Oxford: University of California Press. Sommerville, C. J. (1977). Popular Religion in Restoration England. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. Spellman, W. M. (1993). The Latitudinarians and the Church of England, 1660–1700. Athens, GA, and London: University of Georgia Press. Spencer, H. (1994). English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Spurr, J. (1988a). ‘ “Latitudinarianism” and the Restoration Church’, Historical Journal, 31/1: 61–82. —— (1988b). ‘ “Rational Religion” in Restoration England’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 49/4: 563–85. —— (1991). The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Strype, J. (1822). Ecclesiastical Memorials, Relating Chiefly to Religion, and the Reformation of it, and the Emergencies of the Church of England, under King Henry VIII, King Edward VI and Queen Mary I. Oxford: Clarendon Press. —— (1824). Annals of the Reformation and Establishment of Religion, and Other Various Occurrences in the Church of England, during Queen Elizabeth’s Happy Reign. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sykes, N. (1955). ‘The Sermons of Archbishop Tillotson’, Theology, 58/422: 297–302. Taylor, L. (2001) (ed.). Preachers and People in the Reformations and Early Modern Period. Leiden: Brill. Thurley, S. (1998). The Lost Palace of Whitehall. RIBA. Timmings, E. (1964) (ed.). Calendar of State Papers Domestic James II, Volume II, January, 1686– May, 1687. HMSO. Todd, M. (2002). The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland. New Haven: Yale. Trevett, C. (2000). Quaker Women Prophets in England and Wales, 1650–1700. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen. Tromly, F. B. (1983). ‘ “Accordinge to sounde religion”: The Elizabethan Controversy over the Funeral Sermon’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 13: 293–312. Tyacke, N. (1987). Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c.1590–1640. Oxford: Clarendon Press. van Eijnatten, J. (2009) (ed.). Preaching, Sermon and Cultural Change in the Long Eighteenth Century. Leiden and Boston: Brill. [Verneuil, John] (1637). A Nomenclator of Such Tracts and Sermons. Oxford. Wabuda, S. (2002). Preaching during the English Reformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walsham, A. (2004). ‘Preaching without Speaking? Script, Print and Religious Dissent’, in J. Crick and A. Walsham (eds), The Uses of Script and Print, 1300–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Watson, T. (1558). Holsome and Catholyke Doctryne concerninge the Seven Sacramentes of Chrystes Church . . . Set Forth in Maner of Shorte Sermons to bee Made to the People. Watt, T. (1991). Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

select bibliography



Webber, J. (1963). Contrary Music: The Prose Style of John Donne. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Westminster Assembly (1647). Concerning Church Government and Ordination of Ministers. Edinburgh. Transcr. J. Best, The Westminster Assembly Transcription Project, www. westminsterassembly.org/digital-library (accessed 27 Nov. 2009). Wilkins, J. (1646). Ecclesiastes, or, a Discourse concerning the Gift of Preaching. Williams, G. (2007). ‘The Early Stuart Church’, in G. Williams, W. Jacob, N. Yates, and F. Knight, The Welsh Church from Reformation to Disestablishment 1603–1920. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 3–32. Williamson, G. (1951). The Senecan Amble: Prose Form from Bacon to Collier. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wilson, J. F. (1969). Pulpit in Parliament: Puritanism during the English Civil Wars, 1640–1649. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wilson, T. (1553). The Arte of Rhetorique. Wizeman, W. (2006). The Theology and Spirituality of Mary Tudor’s Church. Burlington: Ashgate. Wooding, L. (2000). Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Young, B. W. (1998). Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth Century England: Theological Debate from Locke to Burke. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

This page intentionally left blank

Index The primary subject and thematic finding-aid for this volume is its chapter titles and their subheadings. This index does not attempt to duplicate those, but rather to assist navigation through the volume by names, places and major historical events, as well as entries for major sermon-related topics. For all these headings, the index is exhaustive, not selective, though entries are given only for items mentioned in each chapter’s main text and footnotes (not parenthetical references or bibliographies), and the appendices. For individuals whose life dates fall within the period covered by the volume, a parenthetical death or ‘flourished’ (‘fl.’) date from ODNB is the preferred identifying discriminator; for subjects not in ODNB, dates have been taken from the The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (3rd ed., 1997), the Short Title Catalogue, The Clergy of the Church of England Database (www.theclergydatabase.org.uk), The British Book Trade Index (bbti.bham.ac.uk), or inferred from context. Smaller towns and villages in the British Isles are discriminated parenthetically by county. Abarbanel, Yitshak ben Yehudah (d. 1508) 433 Abbot, George (d. 1633) 73, 74, 79, 80, 146, 557, 559–61 Abbot, Robert (d. 1618) The Old Waye 202 Aberdour (Fife) 90 Abernethy, Thomas (fl. 1640) 275–6 Act of Uniformity (1559) 359, 366, 377 (1662) 50, 57, 423, 424, 430, 432, 434, 437, 448, 470, 473, 566, 568 Adams, Thomas (d. 1652) 81, 124, 424, 425 Admonition Controversy (1572–5) 39–40, 45 affections (emotions) in sermons 249, 297, 353–4, 356, 523–4, 528 Ainsworth, Henry (d. 1622) 391 Ainsworth, Samuel (d. 1664?) 159 Alcock, John (d. 1500) 335, 336 Sermon on Luke VIII 332, 339, 340 Alexander of Hales 435 Alkerton (Oxfordshire) 140–2 allegory 389, 449 Allen, alderman (1626) 219 Allestree, James (d. 1676) 444 Allestree, Richard (d. 1681) 444, 470 Forty Sermons 467, 468 The Whole Duty of Man 198, 453

Alleyn, Edward (d. 1626) 218, 259 Almer (Dorset) 484 Ambler, Mr (ca. 1630) 193 Ambrose 37, 38, 40, 42, 158, 341 Anabaptists 45, 82, 357, 560; see also Baptists Anderson, David (fl. 1580) 186 Andrewes, Lancelot (d. 1626) xiv, 47, 120, 277, 449, 453, 468, 530, 538 and avant-garde conformity 97–8, 150, 225, 448 and Bibles 26, 28, 30 and church architecture 93, 106–7, 115 funeral 218, 247 funeral sermon for 240, 243, 247–8, 256, 257 n19 Gowrie and Gunpowder plot sermons 389, 500 on sermons 124, 524, 529, 552 posthumous use and influence 500, 504, 466, 469, 470, 544; see also Andrewes, XCVI Sermons Spital sermon (1588) 105 use of classical sources 72, 78–9, 81–2, 83, 85 use of patristic and medieval sources 56, 66, 67 XCVI Sermons 50, 466, 470 Andrews, Bartimaeus (d. 1616) 186



index

Angier, John (d. 1677) 181 Anglesey (North Wales) 310 Anglicans (during Interregnum) 413–14 Anne of Denmark (d. 1619) 106, 161–2, 167–8, 222, 556 Anne, queen (d. 1714) 480, 498, 501, 504, 505; see also parliaments anon., An Answer to the Scottish Presbyterian Eloquence 282 Cura clericalis 330 De templis 227 Dives and Pauper 332 La fortune des gens de qualité 455 The Institution of the Christian Man 199 The Whore’s Rhetorick 198 Threnoikos, or The House of Mourning 156 anti-Calvinism 145, 150, 262, 448, 557 and classical sources 73–4, 78–9 and patristics 47–50 anti-Catholicism 168, 292 in Ireland 294 in Restoration sermons 445–7, 463–4; see also Jewel, John; Latimer, Hugh; Palatinate crisis; Spanish Match Antwerp 224, 372, 382 Appleby, David 388, 425 Aquinas, Thomas 39, 55, 58–9, 65, 68, 446 Aratus 78 Archer, Sir John (d. 1682) 436 Archer, Thomas (d. 1743) 102 Arius 55 Armagh (County Armagh) 292 Arminius, Jacobus (d. 1609) 65 Arnobius 38 Arrowsmith, John (d. 1659) 406 Ascham, Roger (d. 1568) 125, 134 Ashby-de-la-Zouche (Leicestershire) 140 Ashbourne (Derbyshire) 218 Ashe, Simeon (d. 1662) 200, 410 Ashenden, Thomas (d. 1723) 425 Askew, Anne (d. 1546) 160, 169 assize sermons 143, 186, 193, 213, 392 biblical texts for 427 bibliography 427–8 case studies 429–36 defined 423, 426–7, 428 in Ireland 300 in Wales 312, 314; see also assizes

assizes 428, 437 Athanasius 37, 38, 56 Atkyns, Sir Edward (d. 1669) 434 Attaway, Mrs (fl. –) 170 Atterbury, Francis (d. 1732) 500 audience response to sermons 367, 383–4, 529, 533, 538–9 at court 382, 453, 539, 545 in parish churches 188, 373, 377, 387, 396, 414, 416–17, 544–5 at Paul’s Cross 369, 372, 537, 539–40 in print 504; see also affections (emotions) in sermons Augustine 37, 38, 40, 42, 47, 50, 55, 56, 67, 74–5, 76, 145, 254, 336, 360 City of God 75 De baptismo 79 On Christian Doctrine 3–8, 12, 75, 78, 522 Aylmer, Brabazon (d. in or aft. 1719) 465, 466, 471 Aylmer, John (d. 1594) 157 Aylward, William (d. 1575) 380 Ayraut, Pierre (d. 1601) 68 Ayre, John 379 Babington, Gervase (d. 1610) 539 Bacon, Anne (née Cooke), lady Bacon (d. 1610) 110, 163 Bacon, Sir Francis (d. 1626) On the Advancement of Learning 132 Badger, Richard (d. 1641) 50 Baillie, Robert (d. 1662) 280, 410 Baker, Thomas (fl. 1650) 311–12 Baldwin, Thomas W. 125 Baldwin, William? (d. in or bef. 1563) 372 Bale, John (d. 1563) 290, 332 Ball, Thomas (d. 1659) 109 Banbury (Oxfordshire) 142, 183, 203 Bancroft, Richard (d. 1610) 31, 189, 504, 554 Bangor (Gwnydd) diocese 305, 306 Bangorian Controversy (1717–25) 509–10 Bangor-on-Dee (Flintshire) 305 Bankes, Richard (fl. 1625) 224 Baptists chapels 101, 150 in England 168, 410, 411, 412, 414–18, 425, 434, 474 in Ireland 295

index in Massachusetts 169 in Netherlands 169 in Wales 311, 313–14 preaching by women 169, 170; see also Hazzard, Dorothy Bargrave, Isaac (d. 1643) 111 Barker, Matthew (d. 1698) 202 Barker, Robert (d. 1646) 30 Barlow, Thomas (d. 1691) 59–60 Barlow, William (d. 1613) 161 Barlow, William (d. 1568) 303–5 Barnes, Robert (d. 1540) 34, 56, 343 Barnett, Dene 126 Baro, Peter (d. 1599) 63, 65, 145 Barret, Margaret (d. ca. 1630) 165–6 Barrow, Isaac (d. 1680) 424, 449 Works 466, 467, 468, 469, 470, 471 Barton, John (d. 1675) 124 Basil 37, 38, 167, 528 Baskerville, Sir Thomas (d. 1597) 538 Bastwick, John (d. 1654) 45, 50 Bates, William (d. 1699) 468, 471, 544 Battle Abbey (Sussex) 163 Baxter, Richard (d. 1691) 65, 139, 410, 412, 425, 435, 532–3 Call to the Unconverted 316, 472, 474 Faithful Souls 472 library 60 Life of Faith 444 Memorables of the Life of Faith 472 Now or Never 475 on sermon publication 200, 203, 208, 470–3 Saints Everlasting Rest 472 sermons by 475 Sermon at the Funeral of John Corbet 472 Sermon of Repentance 471 True Believer’s Choice 472 theology of 413 Bayly, Lewis (d. 1631) The Practice of Piety 196; Welsh trans. 316 Beaufort, Lady Margaret (d. 1509) 336–7, 341; see also Fisher, John Becket, Thomas à (d. 1170) 340 Becon, Thomas (d. 1567) 145, 333, 354 Bedale (Yorkshire) 185 Bedford 473 Bedford, Thomas (d. 1653) 413



Bedfordshire 416 Bell, Henry (d. 1711) 99 Bell, Maureen 164 Bellarmine, Robert (d. 1621) 61, 65, 66, 446 Liber de scriptoribus ecclesiasticis 39 Bennett, G. V. 504 Bennett, H. English Books and their Readers 204 Bennett, Sir Thomas (d. 1627) 223 n4, 225, 227 n8 Bentham, Thomas (d. 1579) 369 Bernard of Clairvaux 6, 36, 59, 254 Bernard, George 160 Bernard, Richard (d. 1642) The Faithfull Shepheard 13, 17–18, 122, 129–31, 134, 138, 139, 207, 239, 526–8 Berthelet, Thomas (d. 1555) 448 Bertie, Montagu, earl of Lindsey (d. 1666) 233 n11 Beveridge, William (d. 1708) 424, 491 Beverley (Yorkshire) 205 Bibles as pulpit prop 297 lay use, at sermons 113, 166, 166–7, 185, 186–7, 272, 297 lay use, devotional 190 versions Authorized (‘King James’) Version (1611) 13, 30–3 ‘Bishops’ (1568) 29, 31, 93 Chaldee paraphrase 26, 433 ‘Complutensian’ Polyglot (1514–17) 25–6, 29 Coverdale ‘Great’ Bible (1535–9) 22–5, 166, 343, 345, 350, 548 ‘Douai-Rheims’ 29, 31 ‘Geneva’ (1560) 26–8, 30, 31, 63 Septuagint 26 Tyndale New Testament (1534) 22–3, 27 Vulgate 21, 22, 23, 24, 29, 30, 59, 67, 81, 82 Walton’s Polyglot (1653–7) 63 Welsh (1588) 303, 305, 319 Wycliffe 22 Bickley, Thomas (d. 1596) 375 Bigne, Marguerin de la (d. ca. 1595) 38 Bilney, Thomas (d. 1531) 183, 536 Bingham, William (d. 1451) 337 Binning, Hugh (d. 1653) 280



index

Birch, Thomas (d. 1766) 462 Bisbie, Nathaniel (d. 1695) 425 Bishops Waltham (Hampshire), St Peter 93, 98 Black, Joseph 383 Blaikie, William G. The Preachers of Scotland 272–3, 278, 280, 282, 283 Blair, Robert (d. 1666) 276 Blount, Thomas (d. 1679) Glossographia 390 Blount, William, baron Mountjoy (d. 1534) 337 Bodius, Hermann (fl. 1540) 39 Bodley, Sir Thomas (d. 1613) 38 Bodmin (Cornwall) 194 Boethius 336 Boileau, Nicolas (d. 1711), see Juvenal Boleyn, Anne, queen (d. 1536) 24, 157, 160, 342, 349 Bolton, Cornet (fl. 1669) 545 Bolton, Robert (d. 1631) 140 Bolton, Samuel (d. 1654) The Dead Saint Speaking 200 Bonar, A. A. Quaint Sermons of Samuel Rutherford 277 Bond, John (d. 1676) 203 Boniface III, pope 446 Boniface VIII, pope 37 Bonner, Edmund (d. 1569) 354, 356–7, 359, 537 A Profitable and Necessarye Doctryne 358 ‘Homily on Charity’ 358 Book of Common Prayer 32, 142, 305, 309, 543, 568 1549 26, 352 1552 29, 89, 369, 370 1559 29, 90, 150, 224, 225, 359, 366, 370, 413, 524, 551 1662 99, 434, 544 Irish 292, 294, 296 Scottish 562 Welsh 305, 308; see also lectionaries and kalendars; liturgy and sermons Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne (d. 1704) 425 Bossy, John 384 Boston (Lincolnshire) 432, 434

Boteler, Sir Philip (d. 1607) 232 Bourdaloue, Louis (d. 1704) 425 Bourne, Gilbert (d. 1569) 183, 537 Bowes, Isabel (née Wray), lady Bowes (d. 1622) 163 Box, Henry (d. 1662) 219 Boyne, battle of the (1690) 298, 489 Boys, John (d. 1625) 124, 138, 139, 144, 150 Boyse, Joseph (d. 1728) 299 Boyle, Marjorie O’Rourke 5 Bradford, John (d. 1555) 537 Bradley, Thomas (d. 1673) 424, 429–32, 436, 437 Appello caesarem 430 Cesars Due 429–30, 431 A Present for Caesar 430 Bramhall, John (d. 1663) 292, 561 Brathwaite, Richard (d. 1673) 169 Bray, Mr (ca. 1630) 192 Brecon (Breconshire) 305, 311 Breconshire (‘Brecknockshire’) 311, 315, 316 Breton, Nicholas (d. 1626) A Merrie Dialogue 180 Brettergh, Katherine (d. 1601) 158 Brewster, Anna (fl. 1650) 318 Brewster, Edward (fl. 1660) 318 Bridge, William (d. 1671) 406–7, 470 n2 Bridges, John (d. 1618) 375–6 Brinsley, John (d. 1624) 121, 125, 126 Brinsley, John the younger (d. 1665) The Preachers Charge 200 Bristol (Somerset) 189–90, 342 Kalendars Guild 335, 337, 338 Broad, Alice (fl. 1670) 430, 431 Broad, Thomas (d. 1660) 430 Broad Campden (Gloucestershire) 101 Brocke, Mr (ca. 1630) 193 Brome, Henry (d. 1681) 444 Brooks, Thomas (d. 1680) 417 Broughton, Hugh (d. 1612) 62 Brown, Peter 6 Browne, Magdalen (née Dacre) , viscountess Montague (d. 1608) 163 Browne, Sir Richard (d. 1683) 107 Brownrig, Ralph (d. 1659) 466, 470 Fourty Sermons 466 Twenty-Five Sermons 466

index Buchan, John Witch Wood 271, 283 Buckeridge, John (d. 1631) 50, 97, 98 funeral sermon for Andrewes 240, 243, 247, 256 Buckingham, dukes of, see Villiers, George Buggs, Samuel (d. ca. 1633) 398 Bullinger, Heinrich (d. 1575) 63, 350, 367 Decades 139, 144, 146 De origine erroris 360 Bullingham, John (d. 1598) 372, 384 Bulstrode, William (fl. 1625) 111 Bunyan, John (d. 1688) 425 A Few Sighs from Hell 473–4 Come and Welcome 473, 474 Good News 473, 474 Pilgrim’s Progress 412, 473 Works 468, 474 Burges, Cornelius (d. 1665) 111, 405 Burges, John (d. 1635) 163 Burnet, Gilbert (d. 1715) 276, 462, 463–4, 533–4 Discourse of Pastoral Care 18 mock sermon ‘by’ 489–90 Williamite preaching 481–2, 483, 484–5, 486, 491 Burroughes, Jeremiah (d. 1646) 406, 409, 410 et al., An Apologeticall Narration 410 Burton, Henry (d. 1647/8) 50 Burton, John (fl. 1480) 336 Burton, William (d. 1616) 189–90 Bury St Edmunds (Suffolk) 181, 188, 189, 427 Butler, James, duke of Ormond (d. 1688) 299 Buxtorf, Johannes (d. 1629) 60, 62 Buxtorf, Johannes, the younger (d. 1664) De nominibus dei hebraicis 432–3 Byfield, Nicholas (d. 1622) Cajetan, Thomas de Vio (d. 1534) 59, 63 Calamy, Edmund (d. 1666) 406, 407, 425, 435 Calder, Robert (d. 1723) 282 Calfhill, James (d. 1570) 376, 377, 382–3 Aunswere to the Treatise of the Crosse 378 Callimachus 72, 78 Callistus, pope 446 Calvin, John (d. 1564) 59, 75, 140, 145, 146, 167, 168; see also Calvinism



sermons 279 Calvinism 27, 28, 30, 75, 113–14, 137, 142, 144, 148, 149–50, 167, 245, 247, 412, 466, 525, 542 and chapel architecture 113–14, and classical sources 73–8, 79, 83 and patristics 46–7 and scholarly sources 64–8 in Irish preaching 292, 561 in Scottish preaching 275, 278–80 in Welsh preaching 303, 312, 313, 315, 319; see also anti-Calvinism Camborn (Cornwall) 194 Cambridge 444 St Edward 56 sermons in 182, 418, 541–2 see also Cambridge University Cambridge University 34, 63, 112, 144, 249, 313, 336, 518, 519, 525, 526, 529, 531, 538, 541 curriculum 57–61, 72, 104, 112, 190 Lady Margaret Readership in Divinity 336 Regius Professor of Hebrew 61 Colleges Christ’s 337 Clare 452 Corpus Christi, chapel 115 Emmanuel 147–8, 183, 333 n2 Jesus 336; chapel 115 King’s 77; chapel 113, 115 Pembroke, chapel 115, 116 Peterhouse 450 St John’s 132, 336–7, 521 Sidney Sussex 112 Trinity 470 Camden, William (d. 1623) 107, 123 Canterbury archdiocese 330 cathedral, sermons in 123, 140, 148, 150, 393 cathedral, Six Preachers 92, 148 convocation (1542–3) 350, 351 province 559 Carbone, Ludovico (d. 1485) 12 Cardell, John (fl. 1650) 409 Cardigan (Cardiganshire) 305 Cardiganshire 311



index

Cardiff (Glamorgan) 309 Carew, Thomas (d. 1616) 189 Carey, Henry, earl of Dover (d. 1666) 233 n11 Carleton, Dudley, viscount Dorchester (d. 1632) 120–2, 539, 539 n4 Carmarthen (North Wales) 304, 306, 314 district 311 Carpenter, John (d. 1476) 335, 337 Carr, Robert, earl of Somerset (d. 1645) 134 Carranza, Bartolomé (d. 1577) 368 Cartwright, Thomas (d. 1603) 39–40, 45, 182 Cartwright, Thomas (d. 1689) 425, 445, 448 Cary, Mary (d. after 1653) 170 Caryl, Joseph (d. 1673) 408 Case, Thomas (d. 1682) 413 Cashel (County Tipperary) 292 Castillion, John (d. 1689) 107 Catherine of Braganza, queen (d. 1705) 161, 162, 445 Catullus Carmina 253–5 Caussin, Nicholas (d. 1651) 12 Cave, William (d. 1713) 454 Cawdrey, Robert (d. in or aft. 1604) A Table Alphabeticall 167 Cecil, Sir Edward (d. 1638) 110 Cecil, Mildred (née Cooke) (d. 1589) 110 Cecil, William, lord Burghley (d. 1598) 374, 377 Chaderton, Laurence (d. 1640) 108, 183 Chadwick, Owen 280 Chamberlain, John (d. 1628) on preaching 120–1, 127, 131, 135, 399, 400, 539–40 on Sir William Cokayne 216, 217, 243, 249, 260 Chambers, Elizabeth (fl. 1650) 295 Chambers, Robert (ca. 1660?) 287, 288 chapels, collegiate furnishings and fittings 112–16, 113, 114 Chapman, Arthur (ca. 1540) 205 Charke, William (d. 1617) 108 Charles I (d. 1649) 219, 249, 310, 409, 411, 442, 444, 562 prince of Wales 106, 111, 216, 220, 222, 541, 542, 557 sermons before 48–50, 104, 111

subject in sermons 192, 289, 294, 406–7, 435–6 martyrdom anniversary sermons (30 January) 83–5, 289, 443, 463, 483–4, 485, 503–4; see also Spanish Match Charles II (d. 1685) chapel royal personnel 443 chaplains 442–3 character of court 442, 443, 445, 453–5 court Lent sermons 443 Declaration on Ecclesiastical Affairs (1660) 433–4 Declaration of Indulgence (1672) 463, 464 printed court sermons 444–5, 446, 455 Restoration anniversary sermons 463 sermons before 444; see also parliaments Charlton, Tom 427 Charnock, Stephen (d. 1680) 67–8 Chelmsford (Essex) 193 Chester cathedral 98 Chetwind, Philip (fl. 1660) 318 Chillingworth, William (d. 1644) 50 Chipping Norton (Oxfordshire) 142 Chiswell, Richard (d. 1711) 465–6 Christopherson, John (d. 1558) 369 Chrysostom, see John Chrysostom Church, Joseph (fl. 1650) 200 church furnishings and fittings 185 altars 88–9, 96, 98, 99, 142 communion tables 89–90, 98, 99, 101, 102, 110, 164 galleries 98, 100, 103, 186 hourglasses 93–5, 95, 187–8, 475 pews 95–6, 102, 100, 164 pulpits 90, 91, 92–3, 93, 94, 95, 98, 99, 101, 100, 103, 110, 113, 114, 164, 186, 331, 331, 334, 557; see also outdoor pulpits medieval 88, 88, 89 in Scotland 90 testers (sounding boards) 93, 94, 186–7 ‘triple-decker’ 91, 92 reading pews 91, 92 sermon bells 185 wall paintings 331; see also courts, royal; chapels, collegiate

index Church of England canons (1571) 366 canons (1604) 139, 552, 554–7 convocation (1563) 360 convocation (1705) 506 Thirty-Nine Articles (1563) 359, 360, 361, 366 Forty-Two Articles (1553) 352; see also Book of Common Prayer Church of Ireland 290, 291–2, 295, 296, 297 canons (1635) 561–2 Church of Scotland 272 canons (1636) 562–3 General Assembly 272 synod of Aberdeen (1675) 281 see also Free Church of Scotland; Westminster Assembly Cicero 4, 5, 12, 18, 73, 75, 78, 79, 123, 126, 129, 135, 145, 257, 335 [attr.] Rhetorica ad Herennium 3 Brutus 127–8, 131 De officiis 121 De oratore 127, 128, 129, 133 Orator 127 Rhetorica 3; see also rhetoric, parts of Cisneros, Francisco Ximenes de (d. 1517) 25–6 Clarendon, see Hyde, Edward, earl of Clarendon Clarke, John (d. 1658) 205 Clarke, John (fl. 1690) 475 Clavell, Robert (d. 1711) 444 Claydon, Mr (John?, fl. 1620) 542 Claydon, Tony 394, 425, 463 Cleaver, Robert (d. ca. 1625) 142 Clement of Alexandria 74 Clewer, William (ca. 1670) 205 Clifford, Anne, countess of Pembroke, Dorset, and Montgomery (d. 1676) 542–3 funeral sermon 156, 159 patronage of clergy 163 patronage of church building 163, 164 reading 165 Cocceius, Johannes (d. 1669) 68 Cockburn, J. S. 426, 428 Cokayn, George (d. 1691) 408, 417 Cokayne, Anne (of Ashbourne) (d. 1664) 218–19



Cokayne, Anne, lady Fermor (d. 1668) 216, 217, 227–8 Cokayne, Charles (d. viscount Cullen 1661) 216–17, 226, 229–30, 237, 252–3, 258 Cokayne, Martha, dowager countess of Holderness (d. 1641) 216, 217, 224, 227–8, 232, 233, 237, 246–7, 252 Cokayne, Mary (lady Cokayne) (d. countess of Dover 1649) 216, 217, 227–8, 233, 235, 252 Cokayne, Mary, countess of Nottingham (d. 1651) 216, 217, 224, 227–8, 232, 237, 246–7, 252 Cokayne, Thomas (of Ashbourne) (d. 1638) 218 Cokayne, William (father of Sir William) (d. 1599) 237, 262 sons of 237–8, 262 Cokayne, Sir William (d. 1626) 215 business and trade 216, 224, 252, 258–9, 260 captain of artillery 223 civic pageants, see Middleton, Thomas 216, 219–20, 223 commissioner for restoring St Paul’s 220–22 death 219, 260–1, 262 funeral obsequies 229–31, 262–4 funeral procession 222–9 family correspondence 217–18 as rhetorician 133–4, 259–60 will and estate 217, 226, 227, 236–7, 240, 242–3, 246; see also Donne, John Cokayne, William ‘Sr’ (cousin of Sir William) 224, 225 Cokayne, William ‘Jr’ (son of prev.) 224, 252 Coke, Sir Edward (d. 1634) 423, 425 Reports 436 Colchester (Essex) 416 Cole, Henry (d. 1579/80) 368 Cole, Thomas (d. 1571) 374 Coleman, Thomas (d. 1646) 64, 407–8 Colet, John (d. 1519) 338, 344 convocation sermon 329–30, 336 College, Stephen (d. 1681) 447–8 Collier, Thomas (d. 1691) 414, 415 Collinges, John (d. 1691) 169, 199



index

Collinson, Patrick 125, 148, 165, 189, 199, 201, 389 Columb Major (Cornwall) 194 Columba 278 Combe (Surrey) 217, 243 Congregationalists 406, 410, 411, 413, 416 Constantine 373 Constantius 373 Cope, Sir Anthony (d. 1614) 142 Corbet, John (d. 1680) 205, 472 Corbet, Margaret (fl. 1640) 159 Cork (County Cork) 294, 295 diocese 290 Cosin, John (d. 1672) 98, 107, 115 councils, church 41, 329, 547 n10 Fourth Lateran (1215) 9, 359, 446, 448 Nicaea (325) 36 Trent (1545–63) 46, 59, 161, 446 courts, royal; see also Charles II chaplains 106, 107, 442, 453–4, 487; see also Andrewes, Lancelot; Barnes, Robert; Baxter, Richard; Bradley, Thomas; Donne, John; Fotherby, Martin; Hakewill, George; Hoadley, Benjamin chapels royal 106; see also individual palaces clerk of the closet 106, 443 sermons at, architectural settings 106–7 sermons at, frequency 106–7 Coverdale, Miles (d. 1569) 23–4; see also Bible, versions. psalms 26 Coventry 398 Cowper, William (d. 1619) 280 Cowbridge (Glamorgan) 313 Cox, Richard (d. 1581) 360, 369 Coxe, Mary (d. 1680) 472 Coychurch (Glamorgan) 307 Craddock, Matthew (fl. 1625) 226 Cradock, Walter (d. 1659) 308, 315–16, 317 Craghead, Robert (d. 1711) 296–7 Cranfield, Nicholas 73 Cranmer, Thomas (d. 1556) 26, 57, 342, 362–3 and Book of Homilies 349–57 Crashawe, William (d. 1625/6 ) 108 Creech, Thomas (d. 1700) 206

Cressy, Serenus (Hugh Paulinus) (d. 1674) 446–7 Crockat, Gilbert (fl. 1690) 282 Croft-on-Tees (Yorkshire), St Peter 96 Cromwell, Thomas (d. 1540) 24, 349–50, 359, 546–9 Cromwell, Oliver (d. 1658) 67, 303–4, 389, 408, 409, 417, 430, 490, 533, 563 as ecclesiastical patron 411–12 as subject in sermons 415 Crooke, Richard (fl. 1620) 180 Crooke, Samuel (d. 1649) The Ministerial Husbandrie and Building 199 Crowe, William (d. 1675) Exact Collection or Catalogue 469, 470 Crowley, Robert (d. 1588) 377, 377–8, 537 Croydon (Surrey) 205, 335 Crichley, Joseph (d. 1674) 312–13 Cruso, Timothy (d. 1697) 484 Cummings, Brian 273 ‘Curate, Jacob’ (fl. 1690) The Scotch Presbyterian Eloquence 282, 283 Curteys, Richard (d. 1582) 161 Cyprian 37, 38, 42, 338, 378 De opere et eleemosynis 360 Dafydd, ‘Sir’ Hugh (fl. 1520) 306 Damascene, see John of Damascus Danford, Mr (ca. 1630) 193 Danson, Mr (1602) 194 Danvers, Magdalen (née Newport, m. Herbert), lady Danvers (d. 1627) 158, 264 Dargan, E. C. 424, 425 Davies, Julian 48 Davies, Richard (d. 1581) A Funerall Sermon [for the] Earle of Essex 306 Davies, Richard (d. 1708) 312 Davis, Richard (d. bef. 1698) 444 Day, Angel (d. 1595) The English Secretorie 123 Day, John (d. 1628) 380 Dedham (Essex) 182; see also Rogers, John (d. 1636) Defoe, Daniel (d. 1731) 272

index Dell, William (d. 1669) 202, 408, 418 Demosthenes 18, 72, 78, 128–9 Dent, Arthur (d. 1603) 166 A Godly Sermon 316 Plain Mans Path-Way 145 Sermon of Repentance (Welsh trans.) 306, 320 Deptford (Surrey) 413 D’Ewes, Sir Simonds (d. 1650) 109, 167, 541–2 Dering, Edward (d. 1576) 140, 148, 161, 183–4 diaries lay men’s and women’s 165, 167, 191, 276, 372, 384–5, 538–9, 541–5, 542–3, 543–5 preachers’ 138, 142, 143, 148–9, 377 Dickson, David (d. 1662) 276 Diodati, Giovanni (d. 1649) 60, 62 Diodorus Siculus 73 Diogenes Laërtius 435 Dionysius (of Alexandria) 48 Dittisham (Devon), St George 331 Dod, John (d. 1645) 142 Doe, Charles (fl. 1690) 474 Dolben, John (d. 1686) 453 Donegal (Galway) 289 Donne, John (d. 1631) xiv, 95, 96, 218, 529, 530, 539 as dean of St Paul’s 218, 222, 223–4 Directions for Preachers sermon 399–400, 557 funeral sermon for Sir William Cokayne 232–64 division 239–42 imagery and metaphor 233, 235–6, 236–8, 250–5 scriptural text 232–3, 256 syntax 234, 235; see also funeral sermons and heraldic ceremony 230–1 Holy Sonnet xvi (xii) 236 n12 Lincoln’s Inn sermons 108, 109 LXXX Sermons 470 posthumous reputation and influence 424, 449, 469 on preaching 97, 131, 133–4, 188, 528



use of sources 30, 40, 46–7, 62 and women 158, 163, 165, 232, 542, 543 Doolittle, Thomas (d. 1707) 100 Dorchester (Dorset) 424, 430, 436 Dorman, Thomas (d. 1577) 372, 373, 374, 376, 378, 382 Douglas, Robert (d. 1674) 280 Dove, John (d. 1618) 539 n4 Downes, Kerry 102 Downham, John (d. 1652) 416 The Christian Warfare 187 Dowsing, William (d. 1668) 115 Drake, Sir William (d. 1669) 445 Drant, Thomas (d. 1578) 161 Drury, ‘Father’ Robert (d. ) 542 Dryden, John (d. 1700) 453 Dublin 287, 291, 294, 332, 489 Christ Church cathedral 291, 294, 295, 299 preaching 169, 291, 294–5, 299 print trade 288–9, 298 Societies for the Reformation of Manners 298 Trinity College 292, 293, 294, 531, 561 Duddingston (Midlothian) 90 Dugdale, Sir William (d. 1686) History of St Paul’s Cathedral 215, 228, 229 Duncon, Eleazar (d. 1660) 107 Duns Scotus 65 Dunton, John (d. 1732) 461, 466 Bungey: or, The False Brother 461 Frank Scammony 461 The Hereditary Bastard 461 Duppa, Brian (d. 1662) 163 Durand, Guillaume Rationale divinorum 332, 333 D’Urfey, Thomas (d. 1723) 453 Durham cathedral 98 Dusterville, Edward (fl. 1640) 294 Dymocke, Sir Edward (fl. 1665) 432 Eales, Jacqueline 427 Earle, John (d. 1665) 436 Micro-Cosmographie 128, 130, 206 Earle, Thomas (fl. 1560) 377 Easter Day sermons 92, 106, 145, 148, 338, 342, 359, 443 Eck, John (Johann Maier von Eck) (d. ) 64



index

Edgeworth, Roger (d. 1559/60) 336, 342 Edinburgh Holyrood Abbey 275 New College 273 University 281 Edward VI (d. 1553) 26, 89, 107, 143, 166, 352 Proclamation (1548) 550 Royal Injunctions (1547) 549, 552, 537, 549–50 Edwards, John (d. 1716) 469 Edwards, Thomas (d. 1648) 170, 414, 416 Egerton, Frances (née Stanley), countess of Bridgewater (d. 1636) 165 Egerton, Stephen (d. 1622) 167, 187 The Boring of the Eare 180, 181, 200 Eggrave, Mr (1566) 379 Eisenberg, Evan 209 Elgin (Moray) 281 Elizabeth I (d. 1603) 27 accession day 111, 367, 405 preaching ban (1558–9) 367–8 religion of 28–9, 348, 361, 363, 521 Injunctions (1559) 366, 551–2 sermons before 104, 106, 107, 110, 134, 160–1, 183–4 and sermons in parliament 110 subject in sermons 156–7, 342, 343, 539 suppression of prophesyings 552–3 see also parliaments Ellis, John (d. 1681) 406 Elyot, Sir Thomas (d. 1546) 338 Epicurus 451 Epimenides 78 Erasmus, Desiderius (d. 1536) 12, 38, 59, 61, 76 De immensa dei misericordia 338 Ecclesiastes de ratio conconiandi 12, 335, 353, 354, 355 influence on early Tudor preaching 330, 332, 333–4, 335, 336, 337, 342, 343, 344, 345 Paraclesis 360 Erbury, William (d. 1654) 308, 311, 313–14, 317 The Great Mystery of Godliness 315 Erskine, John, of Dun (d. 1590) 279 Estella, Diego de (d. 1578) 12

eucharist 56, 247, 370; see also Roman Catholic church, mass Eusebius 373, 435 Evelyn, John (d. 1706) 107, 413–14, 543–4 Everard, John (d. 1640/1) 399 Exeter (Devon) 417, 427 assize sermon 427 Blackfriars 338 cathedral sermons 481–2, 489–90 Greyfriars 338 Eyre, John (ca. 1730) 206 Fairclough, Samuel (d. 1677) 411 Fairfax, Dr (Henry?) (d. ) 163 Farley, Henry (d. after 1621) 222 Farrow, Kenneth D. 274 fast sermons 293, 485 before parliament 405–9 Favour, John (d. 1624) Feake, Christopher (d. 1682/3) 415, 417 Featley, Daniel (d. 1645) 156, 466 The Dippers Dipt 202 Feckenham, John (d. 1584) 336 Fell, John (d. 1686) 38, 467 Fell, Margaret (née Askew) (d. 1702) 170 Womens Speaking Justified 171 Felton, Nicholas (d. 1626) 542 Fenner, Dudley (d. 1587) The Artes of Logike and Rethorike 122 Fenton, Roger (d. 1616) 108 Fergusson, Adam (d. 1754) 281 Fermor, Sir Hatton (d. 1640) 216, 217–18, 226 Ferrell, Lori Anne Government by Polemic 273 Field, Richard (d. 1616) 108 Fincham, Kenneth 73, 90, 99, 112, 115 Fisher, John (d. 1535) 331 funeral sermon for Henry VII 335, 339, 340–1 funeral sermon for Lady Margaret Beaufort 335 Good Friday sermon (‘on the crucifix’) 335 Sermon against Luther (1521) 10–11, 55–6, 334 Sermon concerning Heretics (1526) 34–5, 517–18 Two Fruytfull Sermons 339

index Fisher, Mary (d. 1698) 170 Flacius, Matthias (‘Illyricus’) 39 Flavell, John (d. 1691) 468, 484 Flavius Phocas Augustus 446 Flintshire 310 Florus of Lyons 40 Foremark (Derbyshire), St Saviour 91 Foster, Thomas (fl. 1630) 427 Fotherby, Martin (d. 1620) 123 Fox, George (d. 1691) 171, 535 Foxall, Mr (ca. 1630) 193 Foxe, John (d. 1587) 145, 383 Actes and Monuments (‘Book of Martyrs’) 107, 156, 166, 166–7, 183, 329, 518, 537 A Sermon of Christ Crucified 380–1, 384 Fox, Richard (d. 1528) 335 Frankfurt am Main 27, 57, 369 Frederick V, count Palatine (d. 1632) 392 Free Church of Scotland 272–3 Frewen, Accepted (d. 1664) 431 Frewen family (Sussex) 151 Fulke, William (d. 1589) 29–30 Fuller, Isaac (d. 1672) 115 Fullwood, Francis (d. 1693) 414 funeral sermons 73, 91, 138, 139, 145, 151, 190, 202, 294, 306, 309, 339, 369, 471–2, 473, 486, 491; see also Buckeridge, John; Donne, John; Cokayne, William and biography 156, 257, 464 conventional texts for 231–2 for women 147, 155–60, 169 formal conventions 11, 133, 558 in John Donne 236, 239–40, 243, 251, 256, 257, 260 in John Fisher 335, 340–1 popularity 147, 149 funeral ceremonies, heraldic 219, 222–3, 228–31, 238, 263 Gale, Theophilus (d. 1679) 65 Gants, David 207 Garbrand, John (d. 1589) 44 Gardiner, Stephen (d. 1555) 350, 354, 358, 381 on sermon reception 351–2 Garthwaite, Timothy (d. 1669) 205, 444 Gasley, Thomas (ca. 1690) 205



Gassendi, Pierre (d. 1655) 68 Gataker, Thomas (d. 1654) Inns of Court sermons 108, 112 A Sparke toward the Kindling of Sorrow 395–6 scholarship of 63, 66, 81, 433 Gatland, Mr (ca. 1630) 193 Gatliff, William (1602) 194 Gawler, Francis (fl. 1660) 317 Geery, Mr (1602) 194 Gellibrand, Samuel (d. 1675) 444 Gelligaer (Glamorgan) 306 Gellilyfdy (Flintshire) 307 Geneva 27, 57, 109, 363, 369 George I (d. 1727) 507 Gesta romanorum 332, 333 Gibbs, James (d. 1754) 102 Gibson, William 506, 510 Gillespie, George (d. 1648) 63–4, 227, 280, 407 Gilpin, Bernard (d. 1584) 138 Gipkyn, John (d. ca. 1629) St Paul’s diptych (1616) 167, 221, 221–2 Glendinning, James (fl. 1625) 293 Glibery, William (fl. 1580) 178–9 Gloucester 413 St Michael 194 Glover, Henry (fl. 1660) 430, 436 Glover, Mary (fl. 1550) 162 Glossa ordinaria 39 Godwin, Francis (d. 1633) 309 Golding, Arthur (d. 1606) trans., Hemmingsen, Postill 143 Goldschmidt, E. P. 204–5 Good Friday sermons 104, 105, 338, 339, 359, 380, 443 Goodwin, John (d. 1665) 65, 409, 413, 417 Redemption Redeemed 201 Goodwin, Thomas (d. 1680) 410, 425 Gouge, William (d. 1653) 93, 166, 182, 189, 192, 193, 203, 433 Of Domesticall Duties 155 Gough, Richard (d. 1723) 311 Gower, Sir Thomas (d. 1672) 430–1, 432 Gowrie Plot (1600) anniversary sermons 389 Grabe, John Ernest (d. 1711) 38–9



index

grammar school curriculum 72, 80, 121, 125–7, 190, 254, 337 Granada, Luis de (d. 1588) 12 Granger, Thomas (fl. 1620) Manner how to Hear the Word 387 Grascombe, Samuel (d. 1708?) 491 Gray, Andrew (d. 1656) 280 Great Yarmouth (Norfolk) 186 Greek 137, 140, 334, 337, 520; see also Plato, platonism Classical texts 18, 80 New Testament 22, 31, 63, 565 patristic texts 36, 37–8, 44, 48, 55–6, 74, 371, 435 quoting or citing in sermons 49, 66–7, 73, 76–7, 526, 533 Green, Hugh (d. 1642) 436 Green, Ian Print and Protestantism 207 Greengrass, Mark 199 Greenham, Richard (d. 1594) 167, 198 Greenhill, William (d. 1671) 409, 410 Greenwich (Surrey) palace 106, 338, 342 St Alphege 102, 103 Gregory of Nazianzen 37, 38, 48 Gregory of Nyssa 37 Gregory the Great 37, 254, 446 Book of Pastoral Rule 4, 8, 17, 38 Grey, Mr (ca. 1630) 193 Griffith, Alexander (d. 1676) Strena Vavasoriensis 316 Griffith, George (d. 1699x1702) 313 Griffiths, John 360 Grindal, Edmund (d. 1583) 178, 307, 360, 376, 377, 383, 521 and prophesyings 363, 524, 552 sermons 369–70, 373 Grotius, Hugo (d. 1645) 435 Gualther, Rudolf (d. 1586) 63 Gunpowder Plot (1605) anniversary sermons 104, 106, 120, 298, 389, 443, 445, 463, 485, 498, 499; see also William III Gyles, Henry (d. 1709) 116 Hackel, Heidi Brayman 165 Haddon, Walter (d. 1571) 382–3

Hadrian 379 Hakewill, George (d. 1649) 113, 392, 399 King Davids Vow 397 Hale, Sir Matthew (d. 1676) 436 Halifax (Yorkshire) 200 Hall, Joseph (d. 1656) 81, 165, 205, 424, 427 Pharisaisme and Christianitie 206 Hall, Thomas (d. 1665) 416 Beauty of Magistracy 433 Halley, George (d. 1708) 483 Halyburton, Thomas (d. 1712) 278 Hamilton, John (d. 1571) 275 Hamilton, Patrick (d. 1528) 279 Hammond, Henry (d. 1660) 450 Sermons 467, 468, 470 Hampton Court palace 30–1, 106, 161, 483 Hanbury, Dorothy (d. 1642) 159 Harcourt, Anne, lady Harcourt (d. 1661) 158 Harding, John (fl. 1640) 294 Harding, Thomas (d. 1572) 41 n1, 44, 372, 373, 374–5, 382, 383 Hardy, Nathaniel (d. 1670) 81, 83–5, 204, 410–11, 453–4 Harley, Sir Robert (d. 1656) 308 Harpesfield, John (d. 1578) 354 ‘Homily on the Misery of All Mankind’ 355, 358 Harris, Robert (d. 1658) 138 ‘Hart, John DD’ (ca. 1690) 475–6 Christ’s First Sermon 475–6 Godly Sermon of Repentance 475 Harvey, Gabriel (d. 1631) 538 Hassall, Thomas (fl. 1645) 159–60 Haverfordwest (Pembrokeshire) 303, 314 Hawksmoor, Nicholas (d. 1736) 102, 103 Hay, James, earl of Carlisle (d. ) 539 Hayes, John (d. 1705) 444 Hayes, lord, see Hay, James, earl of Carlisle Hazzard, Dorothy (d. 1674) 162 Heale, William (d. 1628) 169 Heath, Sir Robert (d. 1649) 226, 234 Hebrew scholarship 5, 55, 57, 60, 61–4, 72, 432–3, 435 Hemmingsen, Niels (d. 1600) Postill 143, 144 The Preacher 13, 520–1 Henchman, Edward (fl. 1625) 224

index Henchman, Humphrey (d. 1675) 99, 224, 248, 436 Henchman, Maurice (fl. 1625) 224 Henchman, Thomas (fl. 1625) 224, 226, 243 Henderson, Alexander (d. 1646) 407 Henderson, G. D. ‘The Scottish Pulpit’ 274 Henri III (of France) (d. ) 448 Henrietta Maria, queen (d. 1669) 294 religious patronage 161, 162, 445, 446, 447 Henry, prince of Wales (d. 1612) 106, 140, 556 Henry VII (d. 1509), see Fisher, John Henry VIII (d. 1547) Act of Six Articles 350 anti-clericalism 229–30 Bishops’ Book (1537) 199, 349, 351, 352–3 English Bibles 22, 24–5, 25, 31, 448 King’s Book (A Necessary Doctrine, 1543) 351, 352–3, 358 Royal Supremacy 341–5, 349, 546–9 Royal Injunctions (1536) 342–3, 546–8 Royal Injunctions (1538) 548–9 Ten Articles (1536) 344, 349, 546, 547 n10; see also parliaments Henry, Katherine (d. 1707) 162 Henry, Philip (d. 1696) 162, 310, 313 Herbert, Sir Edward (d. 1648) 252 Herbert, George (d. 1633) 92, 224 The Country Parson 8–9, 529–31 Herbert, Philip, earl of Montgomery and earl of Pembroke (d. 1650) 542 Hereford 103 Herefordshire 311 Herodotus 73 Herolt, Johannes Sermones discipuli 333 Herr, Alan F. 204 Hertford (Hertfordshire) 436 Hertfordshire 201 Hesketh, Henry (d. 1710?) 454, 488 Heylyn, Peter (d. 1662) 112 Heywood, Oliver (d. 1702) 169 Hickeringill, Edmund (d. 1708) 460–1, 476 Horrid Sin of Man-Catching 460 Hickes, George (d. 1715) 50, 489 Hieron, Samuel (d. 1617) 199, 203 The Dignitie of Preaching 77–8, 396 A Remedie for Securitie 15–17



Higgin, Anthony (d. 1624) 140, 144, 146 ‘High Churchmen’ 497; see also Sacheverell, Henry Hilary of Poitiers 38 Hildersham, Arthur (d. 1632) 140, 143 Hill, Abraham (d. 1722) 467 Hill, Christopher 387–8 Hill, Thomas (d. 1677) 407 Hilsey, John (d. 1539) 342 Hitch, Mr (1602) 194 Hoadly, Benjamin (d. 1761) 505–6 Nature of the Kingdom 499, 506–10 Hobbes, Thomas (d. 1679) 451 Leviathan 452 Hoby, Margaret (née Dakins), lady Hoby (d. 1633) 163, 167 Hodgson, Elizabeth 156 Hogarth, William (d. 1764) 93 Holdsworth, Richard (d. 1649) 111, 188 Holland, Henry (d. in or aft. ) 220 Holland, Philemon (d. 1637) 398 Hollar, Wenceslaus (d. 1677) 215, 228, 229 Holme, John (fl. 1600) The Burthen of Ministerie 199 Holmes, Geoffrey 500 Homer 5, 72 Iliad 73, 77, 79 Hooker, Richard (d. 1600) 45, 109, 253, 263, 504, 524–5, 529, 552 Hooker, Thomas (d. 1647) 140, 410, 413 Hooper, John (d. 1555) 57, 65 Homilies 7, 93, 138–9, 144, 145, 150, 152, 158, 163, 194, 345, 504, 554, 555, 556, 558, 559, 560, 567 Certayne Sermons or Homilies (‘Book of Homilies’, ‘Edwardian’, 1547) 7, 333, 348, 351–57 Homilies (‘Marian’, 1555) 161, 357–9, 550, 551 Seconde Tome of Homilies (‘Elizabethan’, 1571) 7, 333, 348, 359–63, 553 Welsh 305; see also sermon, types of; Taverner, Richard Hoole, Charles (d. 1667) 126 Horace 4, 72, 80, 145 Epistles 73 Odes 73, 80 Horne, Robert (d. 1579) 370, 378



index

Houlbrooke, Ralph 157, 264 House of Commons 110, 308, 309, 314–15, 504 sermons before 83–5, 111–12, 201, 463, 471, 483, 486, 504 House of Lords, sermons before 63–4, 83, 463, 483 Howard, Charles, earl of Nottingham (d. 1642) 216, 217, 220, 226 Howard, Thomas, earl of Suffolk (d. 1626) 132, 134 Howe, John (d. 1705) 471 Howe, Obadiah (d. 1683) 424, 435, 436, 437 God and the Magistrate 430–4 Howson, John (d. 1632) 73, 145 Hubberdyne, William (fl. 1530) 342 Hughes, Stephen (d. 1688) 317, 318, 319, 320 Hull, Suzanne 164 Hull (Lincolnshire), Holy Trinity 336 Humphrey, Laurence (d. 1589) 97, 377 Hunt, Arnold 165, 179, 207, 222 n3, 426–7 Hunt, Richard (d. 1638) 98 Hurst (Berkshire) 94 Hussey, Anthony (d. 1560) 350–1 Hutchinson, Lucy (née Apsley) (d. ) 169, 542 Hutton, Thomas (fl. 1670) 476 Hyde, Edward, earl of Clarendon (d. ) 405 Hyperius, Andreas (d. 1564) The Practise of Preaching 13, 76, 122, 128, 521–4 Ignatius of Antioch 48 images, religious 88–9, 201, 330–1, 340, 360, 378, 380, 381 official injunctions against 547, 548, 549 Independents 414, 417, 424, 425, 434, 563; see also Owen, John (d. 1683) Ingestre (Staffordshire) 99 Ingram, Juliet 427 Inns of Court 87, 104, 105, 108–9, 112, 538 Gray’s Inn 108, 109 Inner Temple 108–9 Lincoln’s Inn 108, 109, 112, 218, 220 n1, 414, 463, 483, 528 chapel 109–10, 113 Middle Temple 108–9, 541 Serjeant’s Inn 395 Temple Church 108–9, 110, 193, 486, 538

Ipswich, St Mary at the Tower 187, 194 Ireland, preaching in medieval and early reformation 289–91 Elizabethan and Jacobean 291–3 Crowellian 294–6 Restoration 297–8 Williamite 298–9 see also Roman Catholic church; Presbyterians; printed sermons Irenaeus 37, 38 Irvine (Ayrshire) 276 Isidore of Seville 49 Ives, Eric 160 Jackson, Mr (ca. 1630) 193 Jackson, Thomas (d. 1646) 66, 388 Canterbury sermons 92, 140, 147–50, 393, Christs Answer 397–8 Jago family 151 Jacobitism 480, 487–92, 499 James VI & I (d. 1625) 216, 219, 220, 556 and Authorized Version 30, 31 Directions for Preachers 112, 194, 399–400, 557–61 international policy in sermons 392–400 religion of 73, 106, 120, 161 as rhetorician 131–4 sermons before 104, 107, 112, 121, 123, 124, 448, 529 as subject in sermons 92, 192, 202, 221–2, 249, 259, 389 James VII & II (d. 1701) 116, 162, 480 chaplains and chapel royal 487–8 duke of York 445, 453 Declaration of Indulgence (1687) 101, 465 Directions Concerning Preachers 569 as subject in sermons 481, 484, 487–92 James, Edward (d. 1610?) 305 James, John (d. 1746) 102 James, Thomas (d. 1629) 38, 45 Jane, Mr (ca. 1630) 193 Jansenists 65 Jeffray, ‘Mr’ (William, fl. 1620) 541 Jerome 22, 36, 37, 38, 42, 50, 56, 64, 84 n4, 254, 332, 341, 336 Jerome, Stephen (d. 1650) 294 Jewel, John (d. 1571) 35, 161, 360, 368, 369, 370, 378, 383, 504

index ‘Challenge’ sermon 35, 36, 40–4, 45, 48, 51, 366–7, 370–2, 375, 380–1 Replie unto M. Hardinges Answeare 374 Sermon on Joshua 8, 379–80 John ap John (d. 1697) 317 John Chrysostom 6, 37, 38, 42, 48, 50, 341, 360 On the Priesthood 3–4, 5 John of Damascus 36, 48 Johnson, Robert (fl. 1602) 194 J[ohnson], R[obert] Dives and Lazarus 475 ‘Jones, Andrew’ (sometimes William, fl. 1680) 475–6 Black Book of Conscience 475, 476 Morbus Satanicus 475, 476 Jones, Evan (fl. 1650) 310 Jones, Henry (d. 1682) 299 Jones, Inigo (d. 1652) 99 Jones, John (d. in or bef. 1658) 307 Jones, William (fl. 1650) 317 Jonson, Ben (d. 1637) 540 Bartholomew Fair 540–1 Jordan’s (Buckinghamshire) 101, 101 Joseph, Robert (d. 1569) 336 Jugge, Richard (d. 1577) 29 Justin Martyr 37, 74 Justinian 435, 446 Juvenal Satire XV 451 Juxon, Elizabeth (d. 1620) 167 Juxon, William (d. 1663) 443 Karlstadt, Andreas Bodenstein von (d. 1541) 64 Katherine of Aragon, queen (d. 1536) 343 Katherine, countess of Devon, princess (d. 1527) 338 Keach, Benjamin (d. 1704) 425 Keckermann, Bartholomeus (d. 1609) 13, 202 Kedington (Suffolk) 93 Keith, George (d. 1716) 171 Kempe, William (d. 1601) 121, 126 Ken, Thomas (d. 1711) 424, 491 Kéroualle, Louise, duchess of Portsmouth (d. 1734) 442 Kilkenny 290 Catholic Confederation 294 Killigrew, Henry (d. 1700) 454 Killiray, Matthew (fl. 1670) 476



Afflicted Souls Preparation 476 Godly Mans Gain 476 Sinners Sobs 476 Kimchi, David 63, 64 King, Henry (d. 1669) 135, 163, 165, 193 Paul’s Cross sermon by 120–1, 127, 131 King, John (d. 1621) 79, 120, 140, 220, 222, 539 n6 King, Thomas (fl. 1535) 343 Knight, John (MA of Oxford 1622) 112 Knox, John (d. 1572) 272 in England 277 History of the Reformation 279 preaching 274, 276, 278, 279 Korshin, Paul 390 Lactantius 74 Lake, Arthur (d. 1626) 92 Sermons 470 Lake, Peter 157 Lambe, John (d. 1708) 445 Lambeth Palace (Surrey) 545 library 372, 489 Lander, Jesse 207 Laney, Benjamin (d. 1675) 444, 445, 448 Lanham, Richard Handbook of Rhetorical Terms 121 Lapide, Cornelius à (d. 1637) 60 Larne (County Antrim) 296 Latimer, Hugh (d. 1555) 146, 160, 162,198, 342, 344, 350 sermon style and delivery 179, 182, 188, 189 sermons before Edward VI 107, 166, 518–19 sermons in print 143, 167 Latin quoted in English sermons 67, 73, 76–7, 83, 234–5, 253–5, 313, 335, 435, 526, 533 sermons in 9, 144, 278, 329, 330, 333, 339, 350; see also grammar school curriculum Latitudinarians 51 n3, 425, 510 preaching style 449, 462, 496 and reason 449–50, 451 Laud, William (d. 1645) 98, 226, 247, 443, 562 and church fabrics 98, 114 and scholarship 48, 50, 56 sermons 111, 398–9 trial 114, 407



index

Laudianism 411, 466, 531 and ceremonialism 261–2 and church fabrics 98, 99, 107–8, 115, 226–7 and patristics 37, 47–50 and preaching 296, 562–3 and sacraments 48–50, 247–8 Lavington Forham (Wiltshire) 187 Lawrence, Thomas (d. 1657) 36, 47–50 Lawson, Dorothy (d. 1632) 163 Lawson, Joseph (d. ca. 1693) 444 lectionaries and kalendars 143–5, 349–50, 148–9 Leigh, Edward (d. 1671) 59, 467 Leighton, Robert (d. 1684) 276, 280–1 Leipzig Disputation (1519) 64 Leinster 295 Lefèvre D’Étaples, Jacques (d. 1536) 336 Legenda aurea (The Golden Legend) 335, 350 length of sermons 93, 214, 280, 352, 534, 562, 568 Lent sermons 134, 151, 183, 290, 373, 429 at court 95, 107, 160, 183–4, 338, 369–70, 443, 487, 528 Leo X, pope 34 Leslie, Charles (d. 1722) 489, 491, 492 Leslie, Henry (d. 1661) 293 L’Estrange, Sir Roger (d. 1704) 455, 473 Levellers 415 Lever, Thomas (d. 1577) 368 Lewisham (Kent) 414 Ley, John (d. 1662) 409 Lightfoot, John (d. 1675) 62, 390, 391, 430, 435, 436 Lily, William (d. 1522/3) 336 Lincoln (Lincolnshire) 436 cathedral 432 Quakers 433–4 Lindsay, Sir David (d. 1555) 279 Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estatis 279 Lingard, Richard (d. 1670) 448 Little, Robert (1602) 194 liturgy and sermons 90, 92, 97–8, 110, 111, 142, 143–7, 413–14 Livy 72, 73, 435 Llandaff diocese 305, 309 Llandyfodwg (Glamorgan) 307 Llandovery (Carmarthenshire) 317 Llanfaches (Monmouthsire) 308, 318

Llanfihangel Den Silwy (Anglesey), St Michael 304 Llantrisant (Glamorgan) 313 Lloyd, Jenkin (fl. 1650) 311 Lloyd, William (d. 1717) 445, 449, 485 Llwyd, Morgan (d. 1659) 308, 311, 319 Llyfr y Tri Aderyn 315 Llŷn peninsula (Gwynedd) 311 Locke, John (d. 1704) 505, 506, 510 Lockyer, Nicholas (d. 1685) 202 Loe, William (d. 1645) The Kings Shoe 396–7 Sermon Preached at Lambeth 202 Lollards 168, 275 in Scotland 278, 279 London 382; see also Greenwich; Inns of Court; Lambeth; St Paul’s cathedral; Paul’s Cross; Southwark; Westminster; Whitehall palace Artillery (Trained Bands) 223 Blackfriars 415, 417, 542; see also St Anne Blackfriars Broad Street 219, 235, 243, 249 College of Heralds 219, 231 Charterhouse, chapel 113, 113, 114, 218 Cheapside 219, 220 Christ’s Hospital 105, 223, 229, 246 Exchange 193 Dr Williams’s Library 469 Durham House 225 East India Company 225 Eastland Company 216, 225, 226, 252 Fleet Street 220 Great Fire (1666) 99, 100, 221, 224, 445, 453–4 Guildhall 220, 337 Haberdashers Company 384 Haberdashers Hall 100 Joiners Hall 100 London Gazette 443 lord mayor & aldermen 100, 104, 105, 219, 221, 223 nn 4 and, 5, 225, 248, 314, 377, 463, 499, 500, 504; see also Cokayne, Sir William lord mayor’s shows 216 Merchant Adventurers Company 216, 225–6 Merchant Taylors school 72

index Muscovy Company 225, 226 Paul’s Chain 220, 231 Poplar 484 Poultry 219 Royal Exchange 219 Royal Society 425 St Mary’s hospital (the ‘Spital’) 87, 104–5, 108, 110 St Paul’s school 72 Skinners’ Company 216, 222, 224, 225, 232, 237, 238 Smithfield 372 Society of Antiquaries 221 Stepney 409 Temple Bar 220 Threadneedle Street 219 Tower of London 372 Whittington College 337 Churches, Chapels and meeting houses All Hallows Bread Street 146 All Hallows Thames Street 377 All Hallows the Great 315 Bunhill Fields 100 Christ Church Newgate Street 99, 414 Christ Church Spitalfields 415 City (‘Wren’) Churches 99, 100, 102 Exeter Chapel 414 Fifty (‘Queen Anne’) Churches 102 Greyfriars 337 Holy Trinity the Less 372 Mercers’ Chapel 188 Monkwell Street 100 St Anne Blackfriars 93, 109, 167, 182, 192, 193, 311, 472 St Anne & St Agnes 380 St Antholin 193 St Bartholomew the Great 191, 193 St Botolph Aldgate 182, 186, 194 St Botolph without Bishopsgate 182 St Clement Danes 93 St Dunstan in the West 97, 192, 528, 544 St Giles Cripplegate 78 St Giles in the Fields 484 ‘St Gregories’ 414 St Gregory by Paul’s 226 St Katherine Cree (‘Aldgate’) 187 St Margaret Old Fish Street 373



St Margaret Pattens 373 St Martin in the Fields 208 St Martin Ludgate 99, 100 St Mildred Bread Street 377 St Michael Cornhill (Exchange) 193 St Paul Covent Garden 99, 482, 483 St Peter le Poer 220 St Sepulchre 191, 192 Longland, John (d. 1547) 335, 338, 339, 340, 343–4 Loose (Kent) 343 Loughborough (Leicestershire) 187 Louis XIV 442, 443, 445, 485 Louvain 372, 376, 382 Love, Christopher (d. 1651) 408 ‘Low Churchmen’ 497–8; see also Bangorian Controversy; Hoadly, Benjamin Lucan 73 Lucian 72 Lucretius 72, 451 Ludham, John (d. 1613) trans. Hyperius 128, 521–24; see also Hyperius, Andreas Luoma, John K. 45 Luther, Martin (d. 1546) 12, 57, 64, 76, 345 attacks against 10, 11, 34–5, 55–6, 342–3, 517–18 defenses and uses of 56, 144 German Bible 23 on women 168 sermons by 66, 138, 353 Lutheranism, Lutherans 60, 137, 330, 499, 520 and preaching 75–76, 143–4, in England 54, 55–6, 64, 68, 342, 345, 353, 356, 517–18, 536–7 in Germany 64, 360 in Scotland 275, 279 Lydiat, Thomas (d. 1646) 140–2 Lyly, John (d. 1606) 538 McCrie, Thomas (d. 1835) 282 McCullough, Peter 50, 87, 105, 106, 112, 131, 134, 135, 161–2, 273, 370, 392 McDowell, Nicholas 74 Machyn, Henry (d. 1563) 384 Mack, Peter 125 Mack, Phyllis 170 McKitterick, David 165



index

Magna Carta 340 Maitlane, lady Jane (d. 1633) 231 Mallory, William (d. 1667) 432 Mammotractatus (‘Mammotrectus’); see Marchesinus, Johannes Manaccan (Cornwall) 194 Manichaeism 74 Manningham, John (d. 1622) 538–9 Mantuan 145 manuscript sermons circulation 152, 167–8, 306–8, 307, 461 early Elizabethan London sermons 372 medieval collections 332 preachers’ notes and copies 138, 140, 144, 145–7, 150, 151, 201, 427–8 see also preachers’ diaries; note-taking of sermons Marchesinus, Johannes Mammotrectus super Bibliam 333 Markham, Gervase (d. 1637) 168 Marprelate Tracts 383 Hay Worke for any Cooper 179 Marsh, John (fl. 1688) 484 Marshall, Stephen (d. 1655) 111, 404, 405–8, 409, 410, 417, 418 Meroz Cursed 406 Marshall, William (d. 1725) 474 Marston Moor, battle of 407 Marten, Sir Henry (d. 1641) 226, 227, 234 Martiall, John (d. 1597) 376 Treatyse of the Crosse 382 Martin, John (d. 1693) 424, 434–6, 437 Martyr, Peter, see Vermigli, Pietro Martire Marvell, Andrew (d. 1678) 453 Mary I, queen (Mary Tudor, d. 1558) xv, 26–7, 161, 183, 358, 369, 375, 381, 450, 537 Articles (1554) 550 Mary II, queen (d. 1694) 298, 463, 491 sermon patronage 485–6, 487 see also William and Mary Mary of Modena, queen (d. 1718) 161 Masillon, Jean Baptiste (d. 1742) 424 Mason, Henry (d. 1647) Hearing and Doing 200 Massie, William (d. 1610) 198 Matthew, Simon (d. 1541) 341 Matthew, Tobie (d. 1628) 138, 143, 144, 200

Mauritius 446 Maxwell, Anne (d. ca. 1684) 444 Mayer, John 207 Mayne, Jasper (d. 1672) 453 Sermon against Schism (Welsh trans.) 316, 318 Mazzeo, Joseph 4–5, 6 n 1, 7 Mead, Joseph (d. 1638) 399 meeting houses, nonconformist 100–2, 101; see also London Melanchthon, Philipp (d. 1560) 343, 354, 356 De modo et arte concionandi 353–4 Loci communes theologici 353 on preaching 12–13, 14, 18, 353–4, 355 Melcombe Horsey (Dorset) 434 Melton, William (d. 1528) Sermo exhortatorius 336 Melville, Andrew (d. 1622) 272, 279 Menander 78 Mercerus (Jean Mercier) (d. ) 63 Merritt, Julia 95–6 Merthyr Tydfil (Glamorgan) 311 Middleton, Marmaduke (d. 1593) 305 Middleton, Thomas (d. 1627) entertainments for Sir William Cokayne 216, 223 Gods Parliament House 390 Honourable Entertainments 220, 238, 258 Triumphs of Love and Antiquity 219–20, 232 Migne, Jacques Paul 38 millenarians 142 in Wales 308, 311, 314 Milton, Anthony 45, 142, 156 n1, Milton, John (d. 1674) 7, 531 Mirk, John (d. ca. 1414) De oracione Dominica 339 Festial 289, 349, 350 manuscript circulation 332–3 on images 340 Mitchell, W. Fraser 424 Molina, Luis de (d. 1600) 65 Monmouth Rebellion (1685) 427, 488 Monmouthshire 305, 308, 315, 316, 318, 428 Montagu, Richard (d. 1641) 38, 47 Appello Caesarem 225 Montague, Lady, see Browne, Magdalen

index Montanus 446 More, John (d. 1592) 182, 186 More, Sir Thomas (d. 1535) 38, 332, 336, 517, 536–7 Morebath (Devon) 361, 363 Morgan, Paul 165 Morgan, Robert (fl. 1650) 310 Morgan, William (d. 1604) 305 Morley, George (d. 1684) 163, 453, 545 Morrissey, Mary xv, 104, 105, 222 n3, 390 Mortlock, Henry (d. 1714) 444 Morton, John (d. 1500) 337 Morton, Thomas (d. 1659) 337 Morys, Huw (d. 1709) 320 Mostyn, Ambrose (fl. 1640) 308 Moulsworth, Bevill (d. 1631) 159 Moulsworth, Martha (d. 1646) 159–60 Mountain, George (d. 1628) 225, 226, 247–8, 251 Mountjoy, lord, see Blount, William, baron Mountjoy Mukherji, Subha 426 Mulcaster, Richard (d. 1611) 72, 247 n17 Mullan, David Scottish Puritanism 274, 280 Mullins, John (d. 1591) 372, 379, 380 Mungo 278 Murcot, John (fl. 1650) 288 Murphy, James J. 9–10 Musculus, Andreas (d. 1581) 39 Musculus, Wolfgang (d. 1563) 38 Myddle (Shropshire) 311–12 Nalton, James (d. 1662) 200 Nashe, Thomas (d. ca. 1601) 538 Neale, J. M. 333 Neile, Richard (d. 1640) 225, 247 Netherlands (Holland) 62, 169, 277, 481, 486 The Hague 230 Newark (Nottinghamshire) 342 St Mary 187 Newcastle Bridgend (Glamorgan) 311, 313 Newcastle upon Tyne (County Durham) 484 Newchapel (Montgomeryshire) 313 Newcome, Henry (d. 1695) 203–4 Newmarket (Cambridgeshire) 112, 443, 444, 452



Niccols, Henry (fl. 1650) 311, 313 Nicholas of Lyra 39, 55 Ninekirks (Westmoreland), St Ninian 164, 543 Ninian 278 Nonjurors 51, 464, 488–9; see also Hickes, George; Martin, John North Cerney (Gloucestershire), All Saints 88, 89 Northampton 436 All Saints 99 Northamptonshire 216, 224, 226 Rushton 224 Norwich assize sermon 392 Green Yard pulpit 103–4 St George Tombland 98 Northern Rebellion (1569) 360 note-taking of sermons 150, 189–93, 277, 297, 299, 312–13, 427–8, 461, 541–2, 545 Nottingham 483 Nowell, Alexander (d. 1602) 183, 374–5 Nye, Philip (d. 1672) 410 Oecolampadius, Johannes (d. 1531) 38 Ogle, Sir Charles (d. 1702) 452 Oldstone (County Antrim) 293 Olmstead, Richard (fl. 1630) 287, 295 O’Malley, Walter 11 orders, religious Benedictine 38, 336, 445; see also Joseph, Robert Brigittine 352, 337 Dominican 9–10, 65, 103, 289 Franciscan 7, 9–10, 59, 289, 333, 337, 342, 445 Jesuit 60, 65, 68, 163, 275, 446, 448, 488, 542 Origen 4, 37, 74, 371 Osborne, Dorothy (d. 1695) 417 outdoor pulpits 103–5; see also Paul’s Cross; London, St Mary’s Hospital Overall, John (d. 1619) 47, 124, 144, 504, 539 n4 Ovid 72, 80, 81, 145, 336 Amores 75 Fasti 83–4 Metamorphoses 81–2, 84–5



index

Owen, George (d. 1613) 305 Owen, John (d. 1683) 65, 67, 277, 315, 424, 425, 474 library 60 parliamentary sermons 408, 409, 410, 412–13 Owen, John (d. 1651) 308 Owen, Katherine (fl. 1655) 317 Owen, Sir Hugh (fl. 1655) 317 Owen, Matthew (fl. 1658) Carol o Gyngor 317 Owen, Morgan (d. 1645) 115 Owen, Richard (d. 1683) 414 Oxford 518 assize circuit 427, 428 St Giles 315 St Peter le Bailey 187 Oxford University 336, 376, 382, 399, 500, 537 curriculum 57–61, 72, 190 Bodleian Library 372, 469, 489 Chancellor 412 Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity 376 patristic scholarship in 38–9, 48, 51 Regius Professor of Divinity 337 Regius Professor of Hebrew 61 Readership in rhetoric 43 Sheldonian theatre 116 St Mary’s (University church) 114 sermons at 50, 73, 112, 143, 337, 500 Colleges: All Souls, chapel 115, 116 Balliol 202 Christ Church 127, 376 Corpus Christi, chapel 116 Exeter, chapel 113–14, 116 Lincoln, chapel 115 Magdalen, chapel 97, 115 Merton, chapel 116 New 140 Oriel, chapel 116 St John’s, chapel 114, 116 Sheldonian Theatre 116 University, chapel 115–16 Wadham, chapel 115, 116 Pace, Richard (d. 1536) 336, 337 Pady, Mr (1566) 378–9

Palatinate crisis (ca. 1620) 388–9 addressed in sermons 391–401 Palmer, William (d. 1605) 167 Parker, Matthew (d. 1575) 29, 93, 360, 369, 373, 374, 375, 377, 384–5 parish and cathedral churches behaviour in 187–8, 261–2, 362 employment of preachers by 186 records of visiting preachers 193–4; see also church furnishings and fittings parliaments (English) Henry VIII (1515) sermon before 337 Elizabeth (1559) Act of Uniformity (1559) 359 Long Parliament (1641–48) sermons before 405–8 Rump Parliament (1648–53) and preaching ministry 310, 411 Printing Act (1649) 411 sermons before 314–15, 408–9 Convention Parliament (1660) 423 ‘Cavalier’ Parliament (1661–78) Act of Uniformity (1662) 50, 57, 423, 424, 432, 434, 473, 566, 568 Conventicle Act (1664) 435 Printing Act (1662) 423, 430, 471 Second Conventicle Act (1670) 448 William & Mary (1689) Toleration Act 100, 480, 502, 546 Anne (1711) Occasional Conformity Act 507 Anne (1714) Schism Act 507; see also House of Lords; House of Commons Parr, Katherine, queen (d. 1548) 160, 360 Parsons (Persons), Robert (d. 1610) A Conference 448 Pasfield, Zacharias (d. 1616) 539 n4 Passinger (Passenger), Thomas (fl. 1690) 475 Patrick, Simon (d. 1707) 449, 450, 482, 483, 485 printing of sermons by 462, 469, 470 n2 Pattenson, Harry (fl. 1530) 383 Paul, St. 5, 6, 7–8, 8–9, 13, 42, 43, 60, 78, 79, 141, 169, 171, 181, 206, 245, 279, 362, 368, 391, 518, 519, 520, 521, 529

index Paul’s Cross 87, 104–5, 108, 109, 162, 167, 185, 220, 221, 229, 340, 342, 388 penance at 34, 384 psalm-singing at 370 sermons at 40, 120, 161, 183, 188, 191, 193, 222, 367, 369, 370–85, 399–400, 475, 517–18, 537, 542, 557 Peacham, Henry (d. ca. 1644) 105 Peckham, John (d. 1292) 349, 352, 358 Pellicanus, Conrad (d. 1556) 38 Pembrokeshire 305, 309, 310, 317 Penry, John (d. 1593) 305 Pepys, Samuel (d. 1703) 445, 452, 453, 544–5 Percy, Dorothy (née Devereux), countess of Northumberland (d. 1619) 232 Perkins, William (d. 1602) 26, 135, 137, 145, 148, 167 Arte of Prophesying 8, 13–15, 17–18, 59, 66, 76–7, 78, 122, 129, 130, 131, 525–6 Of the Calling of the Ministerie 199 Problema 45 Perrott, Sir James (d. 1637) 110 Peter Lombard 39, 40, 60 Peters, Hugh (d. 1660) 311, 408 Peto, William (d. 1558) 342 Philo Judaeus 68, 254 Philips, Edward (ca. 1630) 193 Pickering, Theophilus (d. 1711) 469 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni (d. 1494) 335 Pierce, Thomas (d. 1691) 445, 449 Primitive Rule of Reformation 445–7 Pilkington, James (d. 1576) 360, 368 Pilton (Devon), St Mary 93–4, 95 Pincus, Steven 488 Pindar, Sir Paul (d. 1650) 226, 227, 229, 247, 248, 251 Piscator, Johannes (d. 1625) 39 Pius V, pope (d. 1572) Regnans in excelsis 360–1 ‘plain’ prose style 151–2, 417, 425, 437, 534, 544 Plato, platonism 5, 66, 72, 74, 75, 79, 452 Timaeus 77 Plautus 80, 126 Playfere, Thomas (d. 1609) 81, 161, 389, 538 Pliny the elder 72, 73 Plotinus 74



Plutarch 73 Lives 427 Pole, Margaret, countess of Salisbury (d. 1541) 338 Pole, Reginald (d. 1558) 343, 357, 359, 368, 381, 550 Legatine Constitutions 551 Popham, Sir John (d. 1607) 383 Popish Plot (1678–81) 445, 463 Poole, Matthew 59 Porphyry 74 Portsmouth, duchess of, see Kéroualle, Louise Poultney, Sir John 220 Powell, Richard (fl. 1650) 311 Powell, Thomas (fl. 1650) Cerbyd Iechydwriaeth 316–17, 318 Powell, Vavasor (d. 1670) 201, 308, 315, 317, 412, 425 preaching in Wales 311–12, 313, 319 London preaching 314, 415 Saving Faith (Canwyll Crist) 316 Spirituall Experiences 312 Tsofer Bepah 533 prayer before sermon 556 preachers’ manuals 137, 144, 199–200, 281, 289; see also rhetoric; Bernard, Richard; Burnet, Gilbert; anon., Cura clericalis; Erasmus, Desiderius; Hemmingsen, Niels; Hyperius, Andreas; Mirk, John Presbyterianism, presbyterians in England 63, 64, 101, 150, 151, 203, 310, 404–16, 424, 425, 433, 435, 448, 484, 492, 501, 532, 541, 544, 563 in Ireland 287, 288 n1, 292, 293, 295–8, 299 in Wales 311–13, 319; see also Church of Scotland Prest, William 108 Preston, John (d. 1628) 94, 108, 109, 111, 112, 140, 150, 413 Price, Jacob (fl. 1625) 217, 219, 224, 246 Price, Sir John (d. 1555) 305 Price, Sampson (d. 1630) 399 Prichard, Rhys (d. 1644/5) Rhan o Waith (Canwyll y Cymry) 317–18 Prideaux, John (d. 1650) 113 Prime, John (d. 1596) 157



index

printed sermons bibliographical features 463, 467–8, 474, 475 chapbooks 474–6 by command 341, 444, 471 censorship 463, 496 collected editions 465–70 in Ireland 287–9, 299 licensing 430, 471 medieval collections 332–3 motives for 200–2, 208–9, 380, 410, 430, 432, 436, 473–4, 484, 487, 504 popularity of 204–7, 460, 463, 496 prefaces and dedications 202–4, 287, 299, 317, 428, 430–1, 436, 460, 464, 474 prices 468, 475, 472, 474 relation to spoken versions 208–9, 214–15, 277, 287–9, 299, 315–16, 380, 406, 461, 496 uses of 460, 469–70 Welsh 306, 316, 317–321; see also Charles II prophesyings 91, 363, 521, 552–3 Prynne, William (d. 1669) 50, 124 Pryor, Timothy (d. 1629) 96–7 Prys, Edmund (d. 1623) 305 Puckering, Elizabeth (d. 1652) 165 Putney (Surrey) 415 Pwllheli (Gwynedd) 311 Quakers 205 in England 415–18, 424, 433–4 in Ireland 295 in Wales 317, 318, 533 meeting houses 101, 101, 150, preaching by women 168–171 sermons in print 471, 535 Quantin, Jean-Louis 50 quarterly (‘quarter’) sermons 305, 330, 349, 352, 546, 548, 549, 552 Quintilian 18, 126 Institutio oratoria 43, 127, 129, 130 Rabbi Ben Ezra 64 Radnor (Radnorshire) 311 Rainbow, Edward (d. 1684) 156, 159 Rainolds, John (d. 1607) 145

Ramsay, John, earl of Holderness (d. 1626) 216, 217, 218, 231 n10, 542 Ramsey, John (fl. 1650) 199 Ramus, Peter (d. 1572) 13, 17, 18 Ratcliffe, Jane (d. 1662) 157 Ravis, Thomas (d. 1609) 539 n4 Reeves, William (d. 1726) 51 Reggio, Carlo (fl. 1600) 12 Resburie, Richard (d. 1674) Some Stop to … Arminianism 201 Renwick, James (d. 1688) A Choice Collection of … Sermons 277 Reresby, William (d. 1670) 436 Restoration preaching trends in scholarship on 424–5, 436–7 Rex, Richard 55, 335 Reynolds, Edward (d. 1676) 108 rhetoric, parts of composition; 6 n1, 121–4, 522 inventio (invention) 3, 6 n1, 12, 121, 122, 123, 133, 469, 522 dispositio (disposition) 3–20, 121, 122, 123, 242, 522 elocutio (elocution) 3, 6 n1, 12, 121, 122–5, 132–3, 522 memoria (memory) 3, 6 n1, 17, 121, 141, 522 actio (delivery) 3, 6 n1, 120–35, 297, 522 see also Cicero rhetoric, parts of oration 12, 522; see also sermon, parts of rhetoric, tropes and figures 11, 18, 121, 133, 449, 522, 534 amplificatio 234, 239, 244 antanaclasis 244 concessio 356 epanados (regressio) 43 gradatio 248, 251 illatio (illation) 49 see also affections; typology Rice family (South Wales) 151 Richards, Thomas 311 Richardson, Charles (fl. 1615) The Workeman … A Sermon 199–200 Richmond palace 106 Ridley, Nicholas (d. 1555) 57, 89, 518 Riland, John (d. 1673) 430 Rivet, Andre (d. 1651) 39, 46

index Roberts, lady Frances (d. 1626) 158 Roberts, Francis (d. 1675) Clavis Bibliorum 390, 391 Robinson, Nicholas (d. 1585) 373, 379 Rochester (Kent) cathedral 331 Rocheni, Guido de Monte Manipulus curatorum 332, 333 Rogers, John (d. 1555) 537 Rogers, John (d. 1636) 92, 182 Rogers, John (d. 1680) 145–7, 295 Rogers, Nehemiah (d. 1660) 393 Rogers, William (fl. 1700) 465 Roman Catholic church Bibles 12, 29–30 Fourth Lateran Council (1215) 359 Legatine Synod (1555–6) 357, 359 mass 26, 41, 48, 88, 289, 247, 344, 359, 370, 445 on tradition and authority 34–5, 36–7, 42 preaching manuals 12 purgatory 156 ritual worship 290, 507–8, 562 sermons xv, 161–3, 257, 289–90, 293, 294, 368, 337–45, 368–9, 371, 445, 487, 517–18, 519, 536–7, 542 see also anti-Catholicism; Dorman, Thomas; Harding, John; Homilies (1555); Scotland Rotherhithe (Surrey) 395 Rowe, Sir Henry (d. 1612) 223 n4, 227 n8 Rowe, Thomas (d. 1705) 469 Royston, Richard (d. 1686) 202, 436, 444 Royston (Cambridgeshire) 112 Rubens, Peter Paul (d. 1640) 115 Rudd, Anthony (d. 1615) 106 Rudd, Edward (d. 1727) 470 Russell, Lucy (née Harington), countess of Bedford (d. 1627) 163 Rutherford, Samuel (d. 1661) 274, 282; see also Bonar, A. A. Rutherford, Susan 506, 509 Sacheverell, Henry (d. 1724) Perils of False Brethren 499, 500–5 Political Union 500



Sackville, Charles, lord Buckhurst (d. 1706) 442, 452 Sackville, Richard, earl of Dorset (d. 1624) 542 Sacra bibliotheca sanctorum patrum 38 Sadleir, Anne (née Coke) (d. /) 165 St Alban’s (Hertfordshire) 343 St Andrews (Fife) 276 University 281 St Antony’s (Northumberland) 163 St Asaph (Denbighshire) 308 diocese 305, 306 St Clemens (Cornwall) 194 St David’s (Pembrokeshire) 304, 306, 309, 317 diocese 319 St German (St Germain), Christopher (d. 1540/1) 425 St Maur, Congregation of 38 St Paul’s cathedral burials and funerals 220, 229, 231 choir and chancel 228, 229 churchyard 444 dean and chapter 229 monuments 215, 218, 220, 227 restoration of Old St Paul’s 98, 105, 220–2, 226–7 sermons in 34–5, 46–7, 109, 179, 188, 190, 193, 213–64, 337–8, 409, 500–5, 539 see also Paul’s Cross Salisbury, countess of, see Pole, Margaret Salisbury (Wiltshire) 224, 427, 435, 529 cathedral 185 Sampson, Thomas (d. 1589) 377 Sancroft, William (d. 1693) 99, 453, 545 n9, 569 Sanderson, Robert (d. 1663) xv, 139, 434, 469 XX Sermons 205 XXXV Sermons 467 Sandys, Edwin (d. 1588) 367 Savile, Sir Henry (d. 1622) 38 Savoy Conference (1661) 434 Saxby, Robert (fl. 1630) 190–3 Scarisbrike, Edward (d. 1709) 488 Scattergood, Antony (d. 1687) 436 Scattergood, Samuel (d. 1696) 448 Scotland National Covenant (1638) 63 Scots Confession (1560) 272



index

Scotland, preaching in Episcopalian 276 historiography of 272–4 literary criticism of 273–5 outside Scotland 277–8, 281 Presbyterian 276, 277, 283 ‘Puritan’ style 280 Roman Catholic 275, 278 sources for study of 276–8 thematic sermons 280–1 training for 281–2 Scott, Thomas (of Ipswich) 392 n1 Scott, Thomas (of Norwich) 392–3, 399 Scott, Sir Walter Old Mortality 282 Scudder, Henry (d. 1652) 407 Scultetus, Abraham (d. 1625) 39, 46 Seaman, Lazarus (d. 1675) 62 Seaver, Paul 116, 190 Sedgwick, Obadiah (d. 1658) 407, 408, 418 Sedley, Sir Charles (d. 1701) 442, 452 Selden, John (d. 1654) 425 Seller, John (d. 1648) Sermon against Halting 208 Seneca 72, 73, 76, 79 Sergeant, John (d. 1707) 51 sermon, parts of exordium 12, 233–6, 239, 241, 243, 523 sum 236–9, 241 divisio 10–11, 12, 16, 109, 239–42, 243, 245, 246, 248, 250, 251, 253, 256, 260, 280, 526, 544, 558 sermon, types of 520–1 catechetical 146–7, 413 classical oration 11–12 doctrine-and-use 3, 13–18, 141, 142, 145, 151, 280, 306, 472, 527, 531–2 ‘farewell’ 473, 544–5 homily 6, 7, 46, 147, 281 metrical; see Wales mock 279, 452–3, 461, 489–90 occasional 462–3 sequential 140–2, 148, 279 thematic 3, 9–11, 17, 18 see also assize sermons; fast sermons; funeral sermons; Homilies, official; Lent sermons; parliaments; prophesyings; university sermons

Seton, Alexander (d. 1542) 279 Seymour, Sir Edward (d. 1612) 231 Shakespeare, William (d. 1616) 87 Love’s Labour’s Lost 127 Shapiro, Barbara 426 Sharp, John (d. 1714) 484 Shaxton, Nicholas (d. 1556) 160 Sheldon, Gilbert (d. 1677) 99, 224, 432, 445, 453, 455 Shelford, Robert (d. 1638/9) Five Pious and Learned Discourses 199, 200 Sherlock, William (d. 1707) 424, 469, 470, 486, 491 Shepard, Thomas (d. 1649) The Sincere Convert (Welsh trans.) 316 Shute, Josias (d. 1643) 111 Sibbes, Richard (d. 1635) 108, 140, 150, 200, 466 Sidney, Sir Philip (d. 1586) 229 Simon, Irene 242 Simons, Joseph (Emmanuel Lobb) (d. 1671) 447 Simpson, John (d. 1662) 409 Simpson, Mary (d. ca. 1649) 169 Simpson, Sydrach (d. 1655) 418 Smith, Henry (d. 1591) 93, 166, 181 Prayer or Petition of Moses 191 Smith, Mr (ca. 1600) 167 Smith, Peter (fl. 1640) 201 Smith, Richard (d. 1653) 337 Smith, Samuel (d. 1665) 190 David’s Blessed Man 165–6 Smith, William (d. 1615) The Black-Smith 124 Socinianism 51, 54, 247, 450, 451, 502, 503, 506 Soissons, Basile Dubois de (d. 1698) 445 Solemn League and Covenant (1643) 295, 309, 435, 544, 563, 564 Somers, John (d. 1716) Brief History of the Succession 448 Sommers, William (d. 1559) 383 Soto, Domingo de (d. 1560) De justitia et jure 435-6 South, Robert (d. 1716) xv, 51, 424 South Newington (Oxfordshire) 194 Southwark 193, 218 Spanish Armada (1588) 104, 445

index Spanish Match (ca. 1620) 388, 542 South Weald (Essex) 193 Spelman, Sir Henry (d. 1641) 435 Spenser, Edmund (d. 1599) 72 Sprat, Thomas (d. 1713) 449 History of the Royal Society 449 Spratt, Devereaux (fl. 1630) 300 Spurlock, R. Scott Cromwell and Scotland 274 Standish, John (d. 1686) 445, 450–1 Starkey, Thomas (d. 1538) 349, 354 Starkie, Andrew 506, 510 Stafford, Edward, duke of Buckingham (d. 1521) 338 Stanmore (Middlesex) 227 Stathern (Leicestershire) 187 Staunton, Edmund (d. 1671) 407 Steeple Ashton (Wiltshire) 187 Sterry, Peter (d. 1672) 417 Steward, Richard (d. 1651) 107 Stewart, Andrew (d. 1671) 293 Stillingfleet, Edward (d. 1699) 424, 454, 462, 463, 469, 482 Stock, Richard (d. 1626) 146 Stokesley, John (d. 1539) 342 Stone, Nicholas (d. 1647) 113, 113, 114, 227 Stow, John (d. 1605) 372–3, 377, 382 Summarie of Englyshe Chronicles 375 Stow (Midlothian) 90 Strier, Richard 273 Strype, John (d. 1737) 360 Stuart, Esmé, duke of Lennox (d. 1624) 134 Stubbes, Katherine (d. 1590) 158 Stuteville, Sir Martin (fl. 1620) 399 Suarez, Francisco (d. 1617) 65 De legibus 435 Suetonius 72 Summerhill (County Meath) 296 Sutton, Thomas (d. 1611) 113, 113, 114 Sutton, Thomas (d. 1623) Englands Second Summons 191 Swift, Jonathan (d. 1745) 102, 449, 502 Sydenham, Humphrey (d. ca. 1650) 202, 208–9 Symonds, Richard (d. in or after 1658) 308 Tacitus 72, 132 Tapley, Mr (ca. 1630) 191, 193



Tapsell, Mr (1632) 191, 193 Taverner, Richard (d. 1575) Epistles and Gospelles with a Brief Postyl 349–50, 353, 360 Taylor, Jeremy (d. 1667) xiv, 424, 450, 467, 470 Eniautos 466 Taylor, John (d. 1653) The Brownists Conventicle 171 Taylor, Thomas (d. 1632) 191–2 Teate, Faithful (d. ) 294 Temple, Sir Richard (d. 1697) 445 Tenison, Thomas (d. 1715) 486, 491 Terence 72, 80, 126, 145 Tertullian 37, 41, 48, 74, 371, 390, 446, 560 Tewkesbury (Gloucestershire) 101 Thackeray, William (fl. 1690) 475 theatre and plays 22, 124, 125–7, 134, 259, 358, 383, 453; see also Alleyn, Edward; Shakespeare, William; Middleton, Thomas Theocritus 72 Theodoret 67, 68 Thirty Years’ War, see Palatinate crisis Threlkeld, Mr (1587) 182 Thomas, William (d. 1689) 314 Tillotson, John (d. 1694) xv, 108, 299, 424, 444, 445, 449 library of 61 printing of sermons by 462, 463–66, 469, 470, 471, 472, 474 A Seasonable New-Years Gift 464 A Sermon Lately Preached 463, 463 Sermons Concerning the Divinity 464 Six Sermons 464 Williamite preaching 482, 483, 485, 491 Works 465 Todd, Margo The Culture of Protestantism 274, 277 Tombes, John (d. 1676) 417 Tomos ap Ieuan (fl. 1670) 307 Tooke, Benjamin (d. 1716) 444 Torbay (Devon) 481, 485 Tory religious policy 498 Tossanus (Toussaint), Daniel (d. 1602) 46 Traheron, Bartholomew (d. 1558?) 65 Tralee (County Kerry) 300 Trapnel, Anna (d. 1660) 409–10



index

Travers, Walter (d. 1635) 108, 109, 563 Tremellius, John Immanuel (d. 1580) 26, 61 Trill, Suzanne 167–8 tropology 49 Trychay, Sir Christopher (fl. 1570) 361 Tuke, Thomas (d. 1657) 45, 525 Tunbridge Wells (Surrey), Charles the Martyr 99 Tunstall, Cuthbert (d. 1559) 343, 350 De veritate 39 Turner, Francis (d. 1700) 444, 445 Twisden, Sir Thomas (d. 1683) 431 Twisse, William (d. 1646) 66 Tyndale, William (d. 1536) 22–4, 56, 343; see also Bible, versions typology defined 389–91 Tyrrell, Sir Thomas (d. 1672) 434 Ulster 290, 292, 294, 296 mass communions 297–8 Synod of (1697) 297 university sermons 112–16; see also Cambridge University, Oxford University Urban IV, pope 59, 343 Ursinus, Zacharias (d. 1583) 146 Ussher, James (d. 1656) 108, 110, 140, 288, 399, 414, 561 Valier, Agostino (d. 1606) 12 Vaughan, Edward (fl. 1600) 198 Vaughan, Rowland (d. 1667) 316, 317, 318 Vermigli, Pietro Martire (d. 1562) 360, 369, 370 Verneuil, John (d. 1647) Nomenclator 469 Véron, Jean (d. 1563) 384 Veylit, Alain 204 Vicars, Thomas (d. 1638) 184 Villiers, George, duke of Buckingham (d. 1628) 134 Villiers, George, duke of Buckingham (d. 1687) 442, 448, 452, 453, 455 Vincent, Nathaniel (d. 1722) 452 Vines, Richard (d. 1656) 203 Virgil 5, 72, 79, 336

Vives, Juan Luis (d. 1540) 344 Voetius, Gisbertus (d. 1676) 68 Vorstius, Conrad (d. 1622) 60 Wabuda, Susan 103, 162, 273, 330 Wade, John (d. 1555) 184 Wake, William (d. 1737) 470, 482, 483, 485 Wales, preaching in 1530–1640 303–8 1640–1660 308–18 1660–1720 319–21 and print 306, 316 in Welsh 305, 333 metrical sermons (cwndidau) 306–8, 307, 317–18; see also printed sermons Walker, Anna (fl. 1606) 167–8 Walkington, Thomas (d. 1621) 123, 135 Salomons Sweete Harpe 132 Wall, John 354 Waller, Edmund (d. 1687) 453 Wallington, Nehemiah (d. 1658) 190, 192 Walsham, Alexandra 165 Walter, Henry (d. 1678?) 308 Walton, Brian (d. 1661) 26, 62, 63, 140, 146–7 Walton, Izaak (d. 1683) 467 Ward, Nathaniel (d. 1652) 408 Ward, Samuel (d. 1643) 124–5, 194, 399, 427 Ward, Seth (d. 1689) 444 Warner, Rebecca 497, 510 Warwick (Warwickshire) 430 St Nicholas 187 Waterford 291 Watson, Foster 125 Watson, Thomas (d. 1584) Holesome and Catholyke Doctryne 161, 359, 519 Watson, Thomas (d. 1686) 408 The Doctrine of Repentance 470 n2 Watt, Tessa Cheap Print and Popular Piety 207 Watts, Isaac (d. 1748) 207, 469 Watts, Thomas (d. 1739) 483 Webster, John (d. 1638?) The Duchess of Malfi 128 Webster, John (d. 1682) Academiorum examen 202 The Saints Guide 201

index Weem (Pethshire) 90 Wells cathedral 92 Welsh Trust 319–20 Welwood, James (d. 1727) 484 Wentworth, Thomas, earl of Strafford (d. 1641) 292, 561 Wesley, John (d. 1791) 413 Westfield, Thomas (d. 1644) 191, 193 Westminster 102 judges 219, 220, 431, 437 St James’s palace 106, 445, 482, 483, 488 St Margaret 110, 111 Westminster Abbey 231, 443, 486 Westminster School 79, 127, 429 see also London; Whitehall palace; House of Lords; House of Commons Westminster Annotations 62, 63 Westminster Assembly 60 n2, 63, 64, 66, 277, 280, 409 Directory for Publique Worship 272, 309, 310, 563–6 Shorter Catechism 272 Westminster Disputation (1559) 36 Whately, William (d. 1639) A Bride-Bush 155, 183, 203 Whichcote, Benjamin (d. 1683) 451 Whig religious policy 498 Whitaker, William (d. 1595) 59, 61, 66 White, Francis (d. 1638) 225, 226, 245, 247–8, 251 White, John (d. 1615) 45 White, John (d. 1560) 369 Whitehall palace 406, 442, 569 Chapel Royal 106, 108 Preaching Place 107, 166, 183 sermons preached at 46, 81–2, 106–7, 109, 134, 183–4, 398–9, 442–55, 463, 488 Whitelock, Sir James (d. 1632) 226, 234 Whitford, Richard (d. 1543?) A Werke for Housholders 332 Whitgift, John (d. 1604) 39–40, 45, 109, 144, 169, 179, 263 Whittingham, William (d. 1579) 26–7, 28 Whittington, Richard (d. 1423) 337 Whittington, Robert (d. 1553?) 126–7 Wilbraham, Elizabeth (fl. 1620) 168 Wilbraham, Sir Roger (d. 1616) 132



Wilkins, John (d. 1672) 444, 445, 448, 449, 454, 462 Ecclesiastes 14, 15, 16, 18, 137, 469 Willan, Edward (fl. 1650) 201 Willet, Andrew (d. 1621) 161 William and Mary coronation sermon 484–5 Jacobite attacks on 489–92 Oath of allegiance 51, 435, 488–9; see also Nonjurors patronage of preachers 462, 480–2, 533 sermons before 463, 482–3 thanksgiving sermons for (31 January) 483–4 see also William III; Mary II; parliaments William III (d. 1702) invasion anniversary (5 November) 463, 485, 498–9 Williams, John (d. 1650) 112, 115 Great Britain’s Solomon 133, 202 Sermon of Apparel 202 Williams, John (of Cornwall, ca. 1602) 111 Williams, John (of Wales, fl. 1650) 311 Williams, John (d. 1709) 469 Williamson, Elizabeth (ca. 1690) 205 Wilmot, John, earl of Rochester (d. 1680) 442, 453, 455 Satire against Mankind 451–2 Wilson, Thomas (d. 1581) Arte of Rhetorique 122, 128, 129, 130, 367 Wilson, William (fl. 1688) 483 Winchelsea, Thomas (fl. 1430) 337 Winchester (Hampshire) 444 Windsor, Graham 45, 47 Winniffe, Thomas (d. 1654) 222 Wishart, George (d. 1546) 279 Wiveliscombe (Somerset) 414 Wizeman, William xv Wodrow, James (d. 1707) A Compend of … Homiletics 281 Wodrow, Robert (d. 1734) 276 Wolfreston, Frances (d. 1677) 165, 476 Wolfreston, Francis (d. 1666) 476 Wolley, Edward (d. 1684) 107 Wolsey, Thomas (d. 1530) 34, 337, 517 Wolsingham (County Durham) 205 Wolstenholme, Sir John (d. 1639) 226, 227



index

women as sermon hearers 166–7, 166 as preachers 167–72 as religious patrons 160–4 as sermon readers 164–6, 476 as sermon subjects 155–60 Wood, Anthony à (d. 1695) 141 Woodcock, Francis (d. 1651) 201, 202 Worship, William (fl. 1610) The Christians Mourning Garment 165 Worth, Edward (d. 1669) 295 Wotton, Sir Henry (d. 1639) 132 Wren, Christopher (d. 1723) 99, 100, 102, 116 Wren, Matthew (d. 1667) 102, 115, 116 Wrexham (Denbighshire) 311, 312 Wright, John (fl. 1690) 475 Wroth, William (d. 1638x1641) 308, 318 Wye (Kent) 148–9 Wyclif, John 55

Xenophon 72, 73 Yale University library 489 Yaxley (Suffolk) 92 York archdiocese 330 All Saints Pavement 94 province 330, 557, 559, 569 sermons at 79, 140, 424, 429–32, 437 Minster 98, 483 York House Conference (1626) 225, 245 Yorkshire Farnley Wood plot 431 Youghal (Cork) 289 Zaller, Robert 425–6 Zurich 57, 350