James Ussher: Theology, History, and Politics in Early-Modern Ireland and England

JAMES USSHER

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James Ussher Theology, History, and Politics in Early–Modern Ireland and England ALAN FORD

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp 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 © Alan Ford 2007

The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2007 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 Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–927444–4 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Acknowledgements The Dutch scholar Franciscus Junius (1591–1677) ‘dedicated his life to the Muses, reportedly rising each day at four to work at several lecterns simultaneously until eight at night, only interrupted by a break for lunch and walking exercises from noon until three’.¹ Lacking both his discipline and his miraculous ability to multitask, this work has taken me considerably longer. What Junius might have polished off in a couple of years has taken me ten. During that time the patience and encouragement of family and friends has been invaluable. Johanna Langheld and Christopher, Stephen, and Nicholas Ford have uncomplainingly accepted Ussher as the sixth member of our family. My mother, Phyllis, and brother David have been (literally and metaphorically) accommodating throughout. And our friends Phil Mackie and Paula Chadwick have, over numerous bottles of wine, demonstrated a blind faith against all the evidence (precisely what Ussher accused Roman Catholics of possessing, as it happens) that I would actually finish the book. My writing and research was further supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and by the University of Nottingham. I am especially grateful for the University of Nottingham generally for providing such a stimulating research environment and more specifically for granting me study leave at the end of my time as Head of School, and for having the vision (and money) to invest in Early English Books Online before other English universities: without EEBO, quite simply, this book could not have been written. And I also owe a special debt to Diane Flatley, the administrator of the Department of Theology, who, at a crucial stage, took off my shoulders a considerable burden of bureaucracy to enable me to finish the book. This work brings together many of the themes and arguments which I have tried out in various forms over the past decade. I am grateful to the following for permission to draw on already published work: Cambridge University Press, Ashgate Press, and Irish Academic Press. Librarians are a funny lot: some exceptionally helpful, most neutral, a few downright obstructive. You will understand if I only list those who have fallen into the first category. As a grubby-fingered undergraduate, with leaky fountain pen, I was first introduced to Ussher, his manuscripts, and palaeography, by that paragon of archivists and Ussher-scholars, the late Billy O’Sullivan; subsequent access has been greatly facilitated by Bernard Meehan, Stuart Ó Seanóir, and everyone in the Manuscripts Department of Trinity College Library. Charles Benson and Áine Keegan have, respectively, helped and cheered me up during my ¹ Sophie van Romburgh, ‘Junius [Du Jon], Franciscus (1591–1677)’, ODNB.

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long hours in the Early Printed Books Department in Trinity. Dorothy Johnston, Deborah Bragan-Turner, Mary Dawson, Alison Stevens, and Stephen Pinfield, in the Hallward Library and Information Services in Nottingham, were never short of helpful and friendly despite my repeated requests and demands. During my time in Durham I was also blessed with that wonderfully old fashioned combination, scholar–librarians, most especially Ian Doyle and Beth Rainey of the University Library and Jan Rhodes of the University and Ushaw College Library. Another such cross-breed, Muriel McCarthy, that nonpareil of Irish librarians in Marsh’s Library Dublin, was always positive and encouraging; whilst Ray Refaussé, of the Representative Church Body Library in Dublin provided his typical sustaining combination of sardonic shrewdness and straightforward helpfulness. Fellow scholars have without fail been friendly and forthright. Pride of place goes to those Ussher experts who have been so generous with their time and advice: Elizabethanne Boran, Amanda Capern, and Crawford Gribbin, with particular thanks to Amanda for supplying me with her chronology of Ussher’s life and Elizabethanne for answering my queries about Ussher’s letters. Amongst the many other historians to whom I am in debt for conversation, criticism, references, and the willingness to read chapters of the book are John Adamson, John Beckett, Edel Bhreathnach, Ciaran Brady, Fintan Cullen, Bernie Cunningham, Jack Cunningham, Jane Dawson, Kenneth Fincham, David Finnegan, Ray Gillespie, Keith Lindley, John McCafferty, Jason McElligott, Michael McGiffert, James McGuire, Kenneth Milne, Anthony Milton, Hiram Morgan, James Murray, Jane Ohlmeyer, David Scott, David Smith, and Inga Vollmer. Robin Miller, my old (as in ‘former’) classics master, very kindly checked my translations from Latin. A special word of thanks to the Oxford University Press reader, who not only read the massive typescript with astonishing speed, but came up with a series of penetrating and helpful suggestions for improving it. My final debts are to Ronnie Wallace, Aidan Clarke, Helga RobinsonHammerstein, and Brendan Bradshaw, without whose teaching and example I would never have got this far.

Contents Abbreviations

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Introduction

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I. USSHER IN IRELAND 1. Controversy and Religious Identity in Sixteenth-Century Ireland

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2. Intellectual Formation: Trinity College, Dublin

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3. Ussher and the Shaping of Irish Protestant Theology

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4. Ussher and the Irish Articles of 1615

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5. Theology and Politics: 1615–25

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6. Religion, History, and Protestant National Identity

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7. Defending Calvinism: 1626–33

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8. Internal Exile: Ussher and Laudianism: 1633–40

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9. Ussher and Irish History: Britannicarum ecclesiarum antiquitates

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II. USSHER IN ENGLAND 10. Ussher and the Defence of Episcopacy

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11. ‘No Man Can Serve Two Masters’: The Civil War and After

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12. Conclusion: History, Theology, and Politics in Ireland and Britain

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Bibliography Index

286 307

Abbreviations Al. Cantab. Al. Dub.

Al. Oxon. Baillie, Letters and Journals Bernard, Life

Bernard, Clavi Bernard, Judgement (1658)

Bernard, Judgement (1659)

BL Bodl. BW Capern, ‘Caroline Church’ CJ Corresp. Ussher–Laud CRO CSPD

J. Venn and J. A. Venn (ed.), Alumni Cantabrigienses, Part I: From the Earliest Times to 1751, 4 vols. (Cambridge, 1922–7) G. D. Burtchaell and T. U. Sadleir (ed.), Alumni Dublinenses. A Register of the Students, Graduates, Professors, and Provosts of Trinity College, in the University of Dublin (London: Williams and Norgate, 1924) Joseph Foster (ed.), Alumni Oxonienses: The Members of the University of Oxford 1500–1714, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1891–2) David Laing (ed.), The Letters and Journals of Robert Baillie (Edinburgh, 1841) Nicholas Bernard, The life and death of the most reverend and learned father of the church Dr James Usher late Archbishop of Armagh, and Primate of all Ireland (London, 1656) Nicholas Bernard, Clavi trabales (London, 1661) Nicholas Bernard, The judgement of the late Arch-bishop of Armagh, and Primate of Ireland, 1. Of the extent of Christs death and satisfaction, &c., 2. Of the Sabbath, and observation of the Lords day. 3. Of the ordination in other reformed churches, 2nd edn (London, 1658) Nicholas Bernard, The judgement of the late Archbishop of Armagh, and primate of Ireland: of Babylon (Rev. 18.4) being the present see of Rome . . . of laying on of hands (Heb. 6.2) to be an ordained ministery, of the old form of words in ordination, of a set form of prayer (London, 1659) British Library, London Bodleian Library, Oxford A. W. Haddan (ed.), The Works of . . . John Bramhall, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1842–5) Amanda Capern, ‘The Caroline Church: James Ussher and the Irish Dimension’, HJ 39 (1996), 57–85 Journals of the House of Commons, 23 vols. (London, 1742–62) Alan Ford (ed.), ‘Correspondence between Archbishops Ussher and Laud’, Archivium Hibernicum 46 (1991–2), 5–21 County Record Office Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series . . . Charles I, 23 vols. (London, 1858–97)

Abbreviations CSPI CUL EA EHR Ford (ed.), As by Law Established Ford, Protestant Reformation Ford, ‘Ussher and Irish Identity’ HJ HMC, Egmont HMC, Hastings HMC, Salisbury IA

IHS JEH Knox, Ussher LJ LW Milton, Catholic and Reformed NHI NHI Comp

Calendar of State Papers Relating to Ireland (London: Public Record Office, 1860–1912) Cambridge University Library English article: Thirty-Nine Articles of 1571 English Historical Review Alan Ford, James McGuire and Kenneth Milne (ed.), As by Law Established: The Church of Ireland since the Reformation (Dublin: Lilliput, 1995) Alan Ford, The Protestant Reformation in Ireland, 2nd edn (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997) Alan Ford, ‘James Ussher and the Creation of an Irish Protestant Identity’, in B. I. Bradshaw and Peter Roberts (eds.), British Consciousness and Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 185–212 Historical Journal Report on the Manuscripts of the Earl of Egmont, 2 vols. (London: Historical Manuscripts Commission, 1905–9) Report on the Manuscripts of the Late Reginald Rawdon Hastings, 4 vols. (London: Historical Manuscripts Commission, 1947) Calendar of the Manuscripts of the . . . Marquess of Salisbury, 24 vols. (London: Historical Manuscripts Commission, 1883–1976) Irish articles of 1615: Articles of religion agreed upon . . . in the convocation holden at Dublin in the yeare of our Lord God 1615 (Dublin, 1615); modern edn: Gerald Bray (ed.), Documents of the English Reformation (Edinburgh: James Clarke and Co, 1994), 437–52 Irish Historical Studies Journal of Ecclesiastical History R. B. Knox, James Ussher Archbishop of Armagh (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1967) Journals of the House of Lords (London, 1509–) William Laud, The works of . . . William Laud, ed. James Bliss and William Scott, 7 vols. (Oxford, 1847–60) Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) T. W. Moody, F. X. Martin, and F. J. Byrne (eds.), A New History of Ireland: III. Early Modern Ireland 1534–1691 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976) T. W. Moody, F. X. Martin, and F. J. Byrne (eds.), A New History of Ireland: IX. Maps, Genealogies, Lists: A Companion to Irish History, Part II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984)

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x NLI ODNB Parr, Life PB PRONI Russell, Monarchies Shuckburgh, Bedell SL SP TCD TCD Mun. Trevor-Roper, Ussher Ussher, De successione

UW Wood, Athenae WW WWM

Abbreviations National Library of Ireland Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 60 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) Richard Parr, The Life of the Most Reverend Father in God, James Usher (London, 1686) J. P. Mahaffy (ed.), The Particular Book of Trinity College, Dublin (London, 1904) Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Belfast Conrad Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies 1637–1642 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) E. S. Shuckburgh (ed.), Two Biographies of William Bedell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1902) William Knowler (ed.), The Earl of Strafforde’s Letters and Despatches, 2 vols. (Dublin, 1739–40) The National Archives, Kew, State Papers Trinity College, Dublin, Library Trinity College, Dublin, Muniments Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh’, in Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans (London: Fontana, 1989), 120–65 James Ussher, Gravissimae quaestionis, de Christianarum ecclesiarum in Occidentis praesertim partibus, ab apostolicis temporibus, ad nostram usq, aetatem, continua successione & statu, historica explicatio (London, 1613) C. R. Elrington and J. H. Todd (eds.), The Whole Works of the Most Rev. James Ussher, 17 vols. (Dublin, London, 1829–64) Anthony a Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, 3rd edn, 4 vols. (London, 1813–20) James Ware, The Whole Works of Sir James Ware, 3 vols. in 2 (Dublin, 1739–46) Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments, Sheffield City Libraries

N OT E Original spelling is retained in quotations wherever possible, but, where appropriate, spelling (‘v’ to ‘u’ and ‘j’ to ‘i’), punctuation, and capitalization have been silently modernized. Terminology and capitalization in Irish history are fraught. I have used the term ‘Catholic’ to refer to the Roman Catholic Church, and ‘protestant’ to any of the reformed churches. I have used the term Anglo-Irish to refer to the old Hiberno-Norman community in Ireland in its religiously undifferentiated form, or without making any distinction between protestant and Catholic; Old English

Abbreviations

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I have reserved for the Catholic Anglo-Irish community, capitalized since it was the term they used themselves. As an historian’s coinage, I have not capitalized the adjective in ‘new English’. Dates of appointment of bishops are taken from F. M. Powicke and E. B. Fryde (eds.), Handbook of British Chronology 2nd edn (London: Royal Historical Society, 1961).

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Introduction Ussher’s scholarly gifts astonished his contemporaries. As his friend John Selden put it, the Primate of Armagh was ‘a man of the highest piety, singular judgement, and learned almost to a miracle’.¹ Selden was, of course, exaggerating; but only slightly. Another English man of letters, Sir Roger Twysden, praised ‘the most worthy archbishop of Armagh, in whom with incredible learning and rare knowledge of the purer antiquity’.² In 1644 Oxford University’s Convocation recognized Ussher as ‘the most expert in early antiquity, the unanswerable defender of orthodox religion, the hammer of errors, frequent, eloquent and very powerful in preaching, a rare example of a blameless life’.³ In the dark days of 1646, the earl of Ormond described him as Ireland’s ‘greatest ornament of learning and example of piety’.⁴ Members of the international republic of letters amply confirmed his standing. The Franco-Scot Calvinist Alexander Morus, or Moir, characterized Ussher as ‘the Athanasius of our century’.⁵ Vossius, the great Dutch scholar, thought that it was impossible to extol Ussher, since his genius was beyond praise.⁶ Friedrich Spanheim, the distinguished Calvinist Professor of Theology at the Genevan Academy, dedicated a part of his monumental Dubia evangelica to Ussher as ‘the incomparable Lord Primate of Ireland’: ‘The judgement of your piety and scholarship here is such that to us the name of Ussher is a name of piety and virtue, whose fame constantly rings in our ears, so great are the gifts which God has given you.’⁷ The redoubtable anti-episcopalian was even acknowledged that he could consider living under a bishop such as Ussher.⁸ Another presbyterian, Pierre du Moulin, was prepared to make a similar concession: ‘I except from this multitude of Romanizing bishops Ussher archbishop of Armagh, a rare ornament non only to Great Britain and Ireland, but also to the whole Christian world.’⁹ ¹ John Selden, Marmora Arundelliana (London, 1628), Preface; a large number of encomia are collected by Bernard, Life, 7–14; and in Cambridge University Library, MS MM.6.55, fol. iir. ² Roger Twysden, Historiae anglicanae scriptores X (London, 1652), sig. A3v–[A4r]. ³ Quoted in Bernard, Life, 11. ⁴ Bodl. MS Carte 16, fol. 441r. ⁵ Quoted in Bernard, Life, 8. ⁶ Ibid. ⁷ Quoted in Joseph Hall, An humble remonstrance to the high court of parliament (London, 1641), 33; Bernard, Life, 7. ⁸ Richard Watson, Akolouthos (London, 1651), 50. ⁹ Lewis du Moulin, Irenæi Philadelphi Epistola ([London], 1641), sig. 1r–v.

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Or, as a Scots presbyterian minister put it more grudgingly, Ussher was ‘ane godly man, although ane bishop’.¹⁰ Even those diametrically opposed to each other, such as Lord Deputy Wentworth and the puritan William Prynne, were united in one thing—their respect for the saintly primate.¹¹ After the devastation wrought by the 1641 rising on his see, he again united natural enemies, as the king and parliament competed to provide him an income. His ultimate endorsement came when he died in 1656, when Cromwell ordered that the funeral expenses of this firm royalist be met from public funds and allowed the banned Church of England funeral service to be used when he was buried in Westminster Abbey.¹² Ussher’s fame even transcended the sharp early modern divide between protestant and Catholic. When he was still not yet forty years old, the Irish privy council recommended Ussher to its English counterpart as ‘an excellent and painful preacher, a modest man, abounding in goodness, and his life and doctrine so agreeable, as those who agree not with him are yet constrained to love and admire him’.¹³ It was true—even Ussher’s staunchest opponents, such as the Irish Jesuit Henry Fitzsimon, who engaged in public disputation with him, conceded that he was ‘acatholicorum doctissimus’—the most learned of the non-Catholics—whilst an anonymous Irish Jesuit lamented that such was Ussher’s ‘eminent talent and most civilized behaviour’ that he wished he had not been born a protestant.¹⁴ Ussher was a figure, it was noted after his appointment to the see of Meath in 1622 , ‘with whose advancement the Papistes themselves are well pleased’.¹⁵ And in a final endorsement of his international and trans-confessional appeal, Cardinal Richelieu was said during the 1640s to have offered Ussher a pension so that he could retire to France. ¹⁶ After his death, his reputation if anything increased. The puritan preacher John Brinsley wrote of Ussher in 1659 as one ‘upon whose memories I shall write nothing but blessed’.¹⁷ The stout anti-puritan Peter Heylyn, though he detested Ussher’s Calvinism, acknowledged that he was ‘the master of as great a treasury, both of divine and human learning, as any man living in this last age could pretend unto’.¹⁸ John Gauden, the moderate episcopalian, referred to ‘the ¹⁰ W. K. Tweedie (ed.), Select Biographies (Edinburgh, 1847), i. 143. ¹¹ See below, pp. 204, 229. ¹² Parr, Life, 78–9. ¹³ Ibid. 15–16. ¹⁴ Henry Fitzsimon, Britannomachia ministrorum in plerisque et fidei fundamentis et fidei articulis dissidentium (Douai, 1614), preface; G. F. Veridicus Hibernus, Hiberniae sive antiquioris Scotiae vindiciae adversus immodestam parecbasim Thomae Dempsteri moderni Scoti nuper editam (Antwerp, 1621), quoted in Bernard, Life, 14. ¹⁵ BL MS Add., 4765, fol. 64r. ¹⁶ Bernard, Life, 98; d’Alembert’s claim that Usher, instead of accepting the Cardinal’s offer, sent him a present of greyhounds, and that ‘this spirited and pleasant reply indisposed the minister against making similar offers to others, under the hazard of receiving similar thanks’ conflates Bernard’s account with Parr’s rather different story: J. L. d’Alembert, Select Eulogies of Members of the French Academy, 2 vols (London, 1799), ii. 182–3; Parr, Life, 47–8. ¹⁷ John Brinsley, Gospel marrow (London, 1659), 36. ¹⁸ Peter Heylyn, Respondet Petrus (London, 1658), 4.

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late invincible Usher, who deserved to be Primate, not onely of Ireland, but of all the Protestant forces in the world’.¹⁹ The provost of Trinity College Dublin, Robert Huntington, in 1685 claimed Ussher was ‘one of the greatest scholars, which the reformed churches or the Irish nation ever bred’.²⁰ The Whig bishop Gilbert Burnet extolled ‘the great Primate of Ireland, the never enough admired Usher’.²¹ As if to contradict Burnet, both Dryden and Dr Johnson added to the eulogies.²² The latter judged him ‘the great luminary of the Irish church; and a greater’, he added, ‘no church could boast of; at least in modern times’.²³ As time progressed Ussher continued to attract praise and endorsements from the most diverse sources. The early nineteenth century saw him exhumed and extolled as a high Anglican.²⁴ That Irish precursor of the Oxford Movement, Bishop John Jebb, called him ‘the most profoundly learned offspring of the reformation’.²⁵ Within the Oxford Movement the evidence of Ussher’s support for ‘Catholic’ doctrinal traditions such as saintly intercession was seen as all the more valuable given his reputation for puritanism.²⁶ Newman, in his novel Loss and Gain, included Ussher in his Anglican apostolic succession: You bade me read the Anglican divines; I have given a great deal of time to them, and I am embracing that creed which alone is the scope to which they converge in their separate teaching; the creed which upholds the divinity of tradition with Laud, consent of fathers with Beveridge, a visible church with Bramhall, a tribunal of dogmatic decisions with Bull, the authority of the pope with Thorndike, penance with Taylor, prayers for the dead with Ussher, celibacy, asceticism, ecclesiastical discipline with Bingham.²⁷

At the same time, however, Ussher’s persistent popular reputation as an antiCatholic prophet was resuscitated by a Church of Ireland curate, Henry Disney, precisely to counteract what he saw as the dangerous Romanizing tendencies of the Oxford Movement.²⁸ ¹⁹ John Gauden, Hiera dakrya (London, 1660), cited by Richard Baxter, Fair warning (London, 1663), 8. ²⁰ Bodl., MS Rawlinson B 497, fol. 17v. ²¹ Gilbert Burnet, A sermon preached at the funeral of the honourable Robert Boyle (London, 1692), 23. ²² John Dryden, S’too him Bayes (London, 1673), 18–19. ²³ G. B. Hill and L. F. Powell (eds.), Boswell’s Life of Johnson, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), ii. 132; see also G. B. Hill, Johnsonian Miscellanies, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1897), ii. 48. ²⁴ William Gibson, Church of England, 1688–1832: Unity and Accord (London: Routledge, 2000), 182. ²⁵ Alexander Leeper, Historical Handbook of St Patrick’s Cathedral (Dublin, 1891), 47. ²⁶ E. B. Pusey, The Articles Treated on in Tract 90 Reconsidered (Oxford, 1841); Nicholas Wiseman, Lectures on the Principal Doctrines and Practices of the Catholic Church (London, 1836), 381. ²⁷ J. H. Newman, Loss and Gain (London, 1848), 325. ²⁸ H. P. Disney (ed.), Opinions Concerning the Return of Popery into England, Scotland and Ireland (Armagh, London, 1843); Ute Lotz-Heumann, ‘ ‘‘The Spirit of Prophecy Has Not Wholly Left the World’’: The Stylization of Archbishop Ussher as Prophet’, in Helen Parish and W. G. Naphy (eds.), Religion and Superstition in Reformation Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 119–32.

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Most obviously, Ussher’s vigorous and varied afterlife continued into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through his adoption by American creationists as their founding father.²⁹ Some 270 years after its publication, Ussher’s calculation in The annals that the world was founded in 4004 bc lay at the heart of the cross-examination of William Jennings Bryan by Clarence Darrow at the Scopes trial in Tennessee in 1925, when the teaching of evolution was condemned.³⁰ The annals, indeed, remain one of the essential texts of creationism—a modern edition was welcomed by one online enthusiast as ‘the most significant Christian publishing event of 2003’.³¹ It is a neat irony that one of Ussher’s greatest works of scholarship, the summation of a lifetime’s investigation of biblical chronology, which combined the latest scientific and astronomical discoveries of his day with the profoundest scriptural and historical research, should now be upheld by those who reject the consensus of contemporary biblical and scientific studies. Behind these elaborate encomia and startlingly different endorsements, three essential truths lurk. First, people liked and respected Ussher. It is true, of course, that with him, as with his contemporary Lancelot Andrewes, assessments of character have a seemingly inevitable tendency to merge into hagiography.³² But even allowing for hyperbole, Ussher inspired a genuine affection: enemies and allies alike spoke of his modesty, humility, gentleness. Lord Deputy Wentworth, with whom he had major policy disagreements, nevertheless remained a staunch friend, even down to his death on the scaffold. A second, inescapable reason for the universal respect was the depth and range of his learning. The number of disciplines that he mastered—biblical textual scholarship; systematic theology; dogmatics; ancient history, patristics, church history; chronology, astronomy, ancient languages—enabled him to tackle a series of major academic problems: the text of the letters of Ignatius, one of the earliest church fathers; the age of the world; the origin of the creeds; the authority of the Hebrew and the septuagint texts of the Bible; episcopal government in the Church; the origins of Christianity in Britain and Ireland; the history of Pelagianism and the nature of predestination. Whatever the subsequent vagaries of scholarship, the seriousness of Ussher’s intent and the depth and judiciousness of his learning are undeniable. These two by themselves were reason enough for his fame, but there was another factor which contributed significantly to his popularity—his flexibility. Not that he did not have strong opinions—he did, and, for all his mildness and gentleness, was quite prepared to berate kings when he felt strongly. But rather, his method ²⁹ A Google search on 16 May 2005 for ‘Ussher’ and ‘ 4004
produced 61,600 hits. ³⁰ ‘Tenessee vs John Scopes: The ‘‘Monkey Trial’’ ’. accessed 16 May 2005. ³¹ Larry Pierce and Marion Pierce (eds.), The Annals of the World: James Ussher’s Classic Survey of World History (Green Forest, Master Books, 2003); reviewed at accessed 16 May 2005. ³² P. E. McCullough, ‘Andrewes, Lancelot (1555–1626)’, ODNB; idem, ‘Making Dead Men Speak: Laudianism, Print, and the Works of Lancelot Andrewes, 1626–1642’, HJ 41 (1998), 401–24.

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of academic expression was often indirect and cautious, piling up quotations and citations with minimal comment, and thereby enabling a wide range of subsequent scholars and propagandists (and charlatans) to claim endorsement from Ussher for their own startlingly diverse views. All this poses a double problem for biographers. First, even before they begin writing, they suffer from an immediate and crippling defect: their subject is more learned than they are. The result is that it is difficult for any one writer to encompass, explain, and judge Ussher. Equally serious, his caution, his apparent slipperiness, his Janus-like ability to face both ways creates an enormous subconscious temptation for biographers to mould him to fit their own preferences or prejudices. The Ussher who appears in the pages of later works is, therefore, as varied as the writers themselves. Indeed even the same biographer could change his mind about where to place his subject. Ussher’s chaplain, Nicholas Bernard (d. 1661), who in 1656 produced the first account of the Primate’s life, initially, in the days of the Cromwellian commonwealth, saw him as a godly Calvinist.³³ Soon after, however, with the restoration of Charles II, he was identifying Ussher as a model of divine-right Anglicanism.³⁴ Another chaplain-biographer, Richard Parr (1616/17–91), published The life of the most reverend father in God, James Usher in 1686, just after the accession of the Catholic James II. As a good Anglican, Parr played down Ussher’s Calvinism and puritan connections, but as a firm opponent of James, he emphasized Ussher’s anti-Catholic credentials to such an extent that the work was censored.³⁵ Through the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century, most of the subsequent accounts of Ussher were largely derived from Bernard and/or Parr.³⁶ That pattern was broken by one of Ussher’s successors as professor of divinity in Trinity, Charles Elrington (1787–1850), the founder of modern critical Ussher scholarship. In 1829 he began publishing a seventeen-volume edition of the Primate’s works, a lengthy task, which was completed by another Trinity academic, J. H. Todd.³⁷ As the first volume of this series, Elrington published a ³³ Bernard, Life. ³⁴ Bernard, Clavi. ³⁵ Alan Ford, ‘Parr, Richard (1616/17–1691)’, ODNB. ³⁶ William Dillingham, Vita Laurentii Chadertoni . . . una cum vita Jacobi Usserii archiepiscopi Armachani (Cambridge, 1700); Thomas Smith, Vitae quorundam eruditissimorum et illustrium virorum (London, 1707); Henry Curzon, The universal library: or, compleat summary of science (London, 1722), 299–300; Thomas Mortimer, The British Plutarch (London, 1776), 297–319; Richard Burnham, Pious memorials (Paisley, 1788), 220–2; John Aikin, The lives of John Selden, Esq. and Archbishop Ussher; with notices of the principal English men of letters with whom they were connected (London, 1812); [J.D’A. Sirr], The life of Dr James Usher (Dublin, 1815); James Ussher, A discourse of the religion anciently professed by the Irish and Brittish. To which is prefixed, an ample biographical sketch of the most reverend author (Dublin, 1815); Richard Ryan, Biographica Hibernica. A biographical dictionary of the worthies of Ireland from the earliest period to the present time (London, 1821); R. B. Hone, The lives of James Usher, Henry Hammond, Thomas Wilson, and John Evelyn (London, 1834). ³⁷ For the publishing history, see UW, xvii, p. xii; though an immense achievement, the Whole Works are not without their difficulties: Elrington relied on amanuenses to copy his sources, which

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322-page life of Ussher, an entirely original work based upon extensive primary research, still one of the most thorough biographies of the Primate. Even here, though, judgement was shaped by authorial standpoint. Elrington was a high churchman, determined to show that, whatever his youthful indiscretions, Ussher had died a sound ‘Anglican’. Elrington’s work was followed by a series of often learned but still largely derivative Victorian biographies.³⁸ In contrast, scholarly interest in Ussher for the first half of the twentieth century was muted. Only after the four-hundredth anniversary of his death in 1956 did he return to the public eye, with a flurry of articles appearing in the Trinity periodical Hermathena and other journals.³⁹ At the same time, R. B. Knox was preparing the most important scholarly examination of Ussher since Elrington, with twin doctoral theses and numerous articles culminating in his 1967 book.⁴⁰ Though Knox himself was a presbyterian minister, he showed little sign of any obvious partisanship. Indeed, quite the reverse—his portrait of Ussher laid great stress upon the Primate’s moderate ‘Anglican’ credentials. Much more elegant, confident, and sweeping, Hugh Trevor-Roper’s 1987 essay saw Ussher as an antediluvian Calvinist, a sad relic of reformed obscurantism stranded by the rising tide of renaissance humanism.⁴¹ At the opposite extreme, the author of the most recent life of Ussher, Crawford are, as a result, often riddled with minor errors. Elizabethanne Boran of Trinity College is currently preparing a major new revised and expanded edition of Ussher’s letters. ³⁸ J. A. Carr, The Life and Times of James Ussher Archbishop of Armagh (London, 1895); M. F. Day, Archbishop Ussher, His Life and Character (Dublin, 1861); John Dowden, ‘Archbishop Ussher’, in J. H. Bernard (ed.), Peplographia Dublinensis (London: Macmillan, 1902), 3–29; James Macaulay, Archbishop Ussher ([London], 1891); J. W. Murray, Sketches of the Lives and Times of Eminent Irish Churchmen: From the Reformation Downwards (Dublin, 1874); E. W. Watson, ‘James Ussher’, in W. E. Collins (ed.), Typical English Churchmen (London: SPCK, 1902), 59–77. ³⁹ Cathaldus Giblin, ‘Aegidius Chaissy, O.F.M., and James Ussher, Protestant Archbishop of Armagh’, Irish Ecclesiastical Record, 5th ser., 85 (1956), 393–405; Paul Grosjean, ‘Notes sur quelques sources des Antiquitates de Jacques Ussher’, Analecta Bollandiana 63 (1959), 154–87; Aubrey Gwynn, ‘Archbishop Ussher and Fr Brendan O’Connor’, in Franciscan Fathers (ed.), Father Luke Wadding (Dublin: Clonmore and Reynolds, 1957), 263–83; William O’Sullivan, ‘Ussher as a Collector of Manuscripts’, Hermathena 87 (1956), 34–58; J. E. L. Oulton, ‘Ussher’s Work as a Patristic Scholar and Church Historian’, Hermathena 87 (1956), 3–11; Philip Styles, ‘James Ussher and His Times’, Hermathena, 88 (1956), 12–33; Norman Sykes, ‘James Ussher as Churchman’, Hermathena, 88 (1956), 59–80 (and also Theology, 60 (1957), 102–10). ⁴⁰ R. B. Knox, ‘The Doctrine of the Church as Exemplified in the Life and Works of James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh’, PhD thesis, Queen’s University Belfast, 1948; idem, ‘The Ecclesiastical Policy of James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh’, PhD thesis, London University, 1956; idem, ‘Archbishop Ussher and English Presbyterianism’, Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society of England, 13 (1964), 26–32; idem, ‘Archbishop Ussher and Richard Baxter’, The Ecumenical Review, 12 (1959); idem, ‘Ussher and the Church of Ireland’, Church Quarterly Review (1960); idem, ‘The English Civil War: Archbishop Ussher and His Circle’, London Quarterly and Holborn Review (1962); idem, ‘A Caroline Trio : Ussher, Laud, and Williams’, Church Quarterly Review, 164 (1963), 442–57; idem, ‘Archbishop Ussher and English Presbyterianism’, Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society of England, 13 (1964), 26–32; idem, James Ussher Archbishop of Armagh (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1967). ⁴¹ Trevor-Roper, Ussher; Dan Steere, ‘ ‘‘For the Peace of Both, for the Honour of Neither’’: Bishop Joseph Hall Defends the via Media in an Age of Extremes, 1601–1656’, The Sixteenth

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Gribben, whilst also placing Ussher in his Calvinist and puritan context, saw him much more positively as a model for modern evangelical protestants.⁴² The variety of Usshers that appear in these biographies and studies, and the multiplicity of contexts into which he is placed, together with the range and depth of his scholarly achievements, mean that writing about him is a major intellectual challenge. Rather than seeking, and failing, to cover the full range of Ussher’s interests, I intend to concentrate instead upon one broad but manageable theme—the way in which history, theology, and politics interacted in Ussher’s career and thought. This will enable us to navigate a path through the complexities of Ussher’s life and works and place him more clearly and firmly in his historical and theological context. This approach springs from the desire—fuelled perhaps by my own position as an historian in a theology department—to recapture some of the richness of the interconnection between these various disciplines, so close in the early modern period, but often conceived in modern universities as separate. It also reflects Ussher’s own multifaceted career: he was, at one and the same time, an academic, an ecclesiastical leader, and a political figure. Even when he was engaged in what appeared at first sight to be utterly recondite historical or theological researches, they nevertheless on closer examination often turn out to have subtle but significant political implications. Thus his interest in apocalyptic passages of the Bible—the mysterious prophetic imagery of the book of Revelation, for example—translated directly into his attitude towards the papacy and his rather unyielding policy towards Catholics in Ireland. Similarly, his study of early Irish Christianity had a surprisingly direct relevance to the way in which he viewed the position of protestants in early-seventeenth-century Ireland. Chronologically, the focus will be on the three earliest stages of Ussher’s life: first, his time at Trinity, initially as a student (1594–1600), and then as fellow and professor (1600–17); second, his role as an ecclesiastical leader, first (1621) as Bishop of Meath, and then (from 1625) as Archbishop of Armagh; and finally, (1640–9), on his involvement in the events leading up to the civil war during his long exile in England in the 1640s. With the execution of the king in 1649, Ussher’s involvement in scholarly and ecclesiastical politics grew less, as he concentrated his energies on the date of creation, the creeds, and the septuagint. Though of major scholarly importance in themselves, we will be paying less attention to these late works, given Ussher’s virtual withdrawal from public life. During these three stages of his career, though a scholar of impressive erudition and painstaking attention to textual detail, Ussher never lost sight of the wider Century, 27 (1996), 752; Margo Todd, ‘The Godly and the Church: New Views of Protestantism in Early Modern Britain’, Journal of British Studies, 28 (1989), 425. ⁴² Crawford Gribben, The Irish Puritans: James Ussher and the Reformation of the Church (Darlington: Evangelical Press, 2003).

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ideological and political purpose of his researches. His academic reputation, his mildness and gentleness of manner, the often oblique style of his writings, and his lack of overt political ambition helped create the image of the scholarly saint, and enabled him to say things in public which other ecclesiastics would have been afraid to utter. The purpose of this book is, therefore, to unpick and explore the various ways in which Ussher contributed to academic, ecclesiastical, and political debates, how he applied his considerable scholarship to particular problems, and, in so doing, how he influenced contemporary developments in Ireland and England, and, in the longer term, decisively shaped the way in which Irish protestants viewed themselves and their history.

PART I USSHER IN IRELAND

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1 Controversy and Religious Identity in Sixteenth-Century Ireland THREE ENCOUNTERS On 18 November 1581, four Anglo-Irishmen were led through Dublin to be executed for their part in the Baltinglass and Nugent risings. George Netterville, John and Robert Scurlock, and Christopher Eustace were accompanied on their journey by an unwelcome fifth, Thomas Jones, the protestant, English-born, Bishop of Meath. Jones’s task was to ensure that the prisoners died a ‘good death’ by acknowledging their treason and renouncing their Catholicism. The condemned men, however, contemptuously rejected his ministrations: They saw themselves, not as traitors, but as loyal Catholics. As they progressed through the streets, Netterville and Robert Scurlock joined together in saying the Ave Maria antiphonally. According to Jones’s account, When they came to their Sancta Maria, mater Dei, ora pro nobis, etc. I interrupted their prayers and exhorted them to pray only unto God . . . but Mr Netterville answered me saying: ‘You lose your labour Mr Parson, for it is not possible to bring us from our religion’. When yet I urged them, Netterville gnashing his teeth against me, and punching me with his elbows said ‘Vade Satana, vade Satana, vade post me Satana’.¹

At the place of execution, when Jones pressed them to pray according to the Book of Common Prayer Netterville tried to wrestle the protestant prayer book from his hand. Told to ask for the Queen’s forgiveness ‘they spat for anger’. Their last words as they ascended the ladder were ‘ ‘‘Now all good Catholics pray for us’’ ’. Christopher Eustace was equally determined and religiously aware, shouting over to Netterville and Scurlock when Jones was haranguing them ‘ ‘‘answer him nothing, take heed, non licet disputare cum heretico’’ ’—you are not allowed to argue with heretics. When asked to pray for the Queen just before his execution, ‘ ‘‘I will’’, said he, and therewith he said, ‘‘God amend her’’ ’.² On 27 June 1600 a student from Trinity College, James Ussher, engaged in a debate with Henry Fitzsimon, a Jesuit missionary then imprisoned in Dublin ¹ PRO SP 63/86/69; Matthew 16:23: ‘Get thee behind me, Satan’. ² PRO SP 63/86/69.

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Castle. Fitzsimon was a thirty-four-year-old Counter-Reformation veteran, a philosophy professor from the Jesuit college at Douai who had taken the brave decision in 1596 to return to his homeland to launch what turned out to be the first permanent Jesuit mission. Working amidst the turmoil of the Nine Years War (1594–1603), Fitzsimon, ‘the greatest defender of their religion in his time’, confirmed Catholics in their faith, introduced them to Tridentine norms, and tried wherever he could to confront protestants, ‘triumphing over the few who ventured to oppose him’.³ Confident in the strength of the Catholic position, he repeatedly but unsuccessfully tried to find protestants willing to engage him in debate. In the end, he claimed, he allowed himself to be captured and imprisoned in Dublin Castle in the hope that this would bring him face to face with his opponents. It did, though perhaps not quite in the way he had intended. For he met in prison Meredith Hanmer, prebendary of St Michan’s church in Dublin, and one of the leading Dublin protestant intellectuals, who had, Fitzsimon said, been thrown into jail following a drunken binge. He called on him, and another leading figure amongst the Dublin clergy, Luke Challoner, prebendary of Mulhuddert and Vice Provost of Trinity College Dublin, to debate with him. Both refused. Frustrated, he was reduced to shouting challenges at passers-by from his window. Finally, James Ussher stepped into the breach. Ussher, like Fitzsimon, was a university-educated product of the Dublin aldermanic elite—indeed, the two were cousins—who was to go on to become a learned professor and play a leading role in the Irish church.⁴ But in 1600 their differences were more important than their similarities—they were divided by religion, age, and experience. Ussher was attending the firmly protestant Trinity College, he was only 19, and he had not yet completed his MA, nor been ordained. He tried to make up for his youth by his precocious learning, agreeing with Fitzsimon an elaborate agenda: to debate in person and in print, using the standard rules of scholastic university disputations, and taking their topics from the work of the great Jesuit controversialist, Robert Bellarmine, Disputationes de controversiis Christianae fidei adversus hujus temporis haereticos.⁵ The first subject they chose, at Ussher’s urging, was whether the pope was Antichrist. The young student took the standard protestant line of arguing that the evidence pointed to the pope as that man of sin foretold in the Bible. Fitzsimon, unsurprisingly, rejected this identification.⁶ Though Ussher insisted on his continued willingness to ‘go plainly forward, in examining the matters ³ Wood, Athenae, iii. 96–7; Edmund Hogan, Distinguished Irishmen of the Sixteenth Century (London, 1894), 212. ⁴ The most thorough account of Ussher’s genealogy is given in W. B. Wright, The Ussher Memoirs (Dublin, 1889). ⁵ 3 vols. (Ingolstadt, 1586–90). ⁶ For Ussher’s account: Bodl., MS Barlow 13, fol. 80r–83r; for Fitzsimon’s argument on Antichrist, see Henry Fitzsimon, The justification and exposition of the divine sacrifice of the masse ([Douai], 1611), 252–73; for his account of the debate, see Hogan, Distinguished Irishmen, 232–3.

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that rest in controversie between us’, after a few meetings Fitzsimon broke off the discussions, unhappy about dealing with a mere ‘boye’.⁷ The third encounter took place on 29 September 1600 when John Rider, the protestant Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, had a dinner party to which he invited William Nugent, a member of a prominent Anglo-Irish family.⁸ Rider was a graduate of Oxford, the author of what became the standard Latin-English dictionary, who went on in 1611 to become Bishop of Killaloe.⁹ He and Nugent fell to arguing about the question of whether the beliefs of the early church were closer to those of the Catholics or the protestants: the sayd Mr Nugent, maintayning, no diversitie of beleefe, or religion, to be betwixt the Catholicks of these tymes, and the primative Catholicks of the tymes of the apostles. Contrarie to which assertion, the forsayd M. Rider affirmed, that the difference was as great, as betwixt protestancye, and papistrie; because the first Catholicks, by his saying, had beene protestants. Upon these two several affirmations, they both agreed to abyde a lawfull resolution of the learned: whiche yf it should justifie M. Nugents perswasion, then M. Rider would recant. Yf it could not; then M. Nugent would become a protestant.¹⁰

Delighted at finally finding a willing opponent, Fitzsimon took up the challenge, and on 2 January 1602 he delivered his response to Rider, who in turn published a partial reply on 28 September, the first work of controversial theology printed in Ireland. Fitzsimon then offered Rider a public disputation, and was granted access to a clerk and to books from Trinity College library. But, according to Fitzsimon, Rider then got cold feet. Fitzsimon offered to submit their disputation to the fellows of Trinity College as judges, but Rider prevaricated, preferring Oxford University.¹¹ In the end Fitzsimon was released in 1604 and banished from Ireland before he could force Rider to confront him. Back in Douai, Fitzsimon had access to a printing press and was finally able to publish his replies to Rider.¹² Viewed against the backdrop of what was happening elsewhere in Ireland, these encounters seem like a mere footnote to history. The defeat of O’Neill ⁷ Parr, Life, 7; Bodl., Barlow MS 13, fol. 83v; Ussher’s reference on fol. 83r to ‘our first meeting’ suggests that there might have been two or more. ⁸ The son of Sir Christopher Nugent, fifth baron Delvin, who had died in prison suspected of involvement in Hugh O’Neill’s rising, and the brother of Richard, created the first earl of Westmeath in 1621: Brian Jackson, ‘The Construction of Argument: Henry Fitzsimon, John Rider and Religious Controversy in Dublin, 1599–1614’, in Ciaran Brady and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds.), British Interventions in Early-Modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 100; Colm Lennon, ‘Nugent, Christopher, Fifth Baron Delvin (1544–1602)’, ODNB. ⁹ N. J. A. Williams, ‘Rider, John (1562–1632)’, ODNB. ¹⁰ Henry Fitzsimon, A Catholike confutation of M. John Riders clayme of antiquitie (Rouen [= Douai], 1608), An advertisment to the reader, sig. o2r. ¹¹ It is not clear why Rider objected to Trinity as an arbiter, as both of his sons seem to have attended the College; TCD Mun. P/1/54. ¹² Fitzsimon, Catholike confutation; idem, A replie to M. Riders rescript (Rouen [= Douai], 1608); Hogan, Distinguished Irishmen, 240–64.

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at Kinsale in 1601, and the eventual end of the Nine Years War in 1603 were such an obvious watershed, a military and political turning point which marked the completion of the English conquest of Ireland, that, in comparison, the abortive debates and the brave defiance of Netterville, Eustace, and the Scurlocks pale into insignificance. But the mutual incomprehension of Jones and Netterville and his companions, like the inconclusiveness of the arguments in the debates, should not mislead us. Formal religious controversy in the Reformation era was rarely about clear conclusions or winning over opponents. Rather, such encounters were significant for the way in which they exposed and symbolized the underlying dynamics of religious change and allegiance. Thus the execution of Netterville and his companions was only an apparent defeat: for they reappeared after their deaths as martyrs in the Catholic cause.¹³ Their steadfastness and religious awareness, the confidence of Fitzsimon in his prison cell, the support he gained from the Dublin populace, and the protestant difficulty in finding opponents, all pointed to a fundamental shift in religious power, a realignment which was markedly out of step with the political and military realities evident at Kinsale. The result was a stark divergence. At the very time when the English secular sword had triumphed in Ireland, it was apparent that English religious power most decidedly had not. As Bishop Jones and the protestant Archbishop of Dublin put it in 1600, when complaining about Fitzsimon’s mission, there had been over the past decade a ‘general defection of this people from the service of God and his true religion into idolatry and superstition’.¹⁴ What these encounters symbolized, then, was the emergence of two distinct and distinctive Irish churches. The meeting between Fitzsimon and Ussher was in fact the first time that Irish-born protestant and Catholic protagonists had engaged in formal theological argument, an indication that the disagreements, which had for so long been a regular feature of religious life elsewhere in Europe, had finally arrived in Ireland: proof, if you like, that the Irish Reformation and Counter-Reformation had grown up intellectually. Equally significant, we are not talking here of just one or two isolated confrontations, but of the beginning of a series of arguments and disputations, in person and in print, which followed over the next forty years, and helped to spread and institutionalize this consciousness of difference throughout Irish society.¹⁵ In the process, they helped to define not just the theological identity of Irish Catholics and protestants, but also their view of history and even their communal sense of belonging. More than that, they also helped to create the sectarian hostility which became so prominent a part of Ireland’s subsequent history.¹⁶ ¹³ Denis Murphy, Our Martyrs (Dublin, 1896), 118. ¹⁴ CSPI, 1600, 78. ¹⁵ See below, pp. 59–84. ¹⁶ Alan Ford and John McCafferty (eds.), The Origins of Sectarianism in Early-Modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

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T H E R E F O R M AT I O N A N D T H E A N G LO - I R I S H The fact that Fitzsimon was the senior partner in the debate points to perhaps the most notable feature of sixteenth-century Irish protestantism—its late appearance. In most countries where the Reformation made progress, there was a small but always vocal minority of committed natives who pressed for the rapid adoption of protestant theology, sometimes at the cost of their own lives. Ireland, though was different. There were no equivalents to Jean Calvin in France, William Tyndale in England, or George Wishart in Scotland. Where it was possible to identify an unequivocal protestant, such as John Bale (Bishop of Ossory, 1552–3), he was almost inevitably an English émigré. The contrast is most apparent during the reign of Mary: in England, despite the efflux of refugees to Geneva and Frankfurt, there was a ready supply of committed martyrs to consign to the flames; in Ireland a shortage of protestants to burn left the faggots unlit. Explanations for this phenomenon vary. On the one hand there is an historiographical tradition exemplified by the seventeenth-century Catholic bishop and historian David Rothe, which sees Ireland as innately predisposed to Catholicism and therefore from an early stage immune to protestant heresy. Once the inevitability of Catholic success is established, it simply remains to chronicle and catalogue the difficulties and disasters which the Reformation encountered in Ireland, as it ran aground on the rock of imiplacable native hostility.¹⁷ On the other hand, it is also possible to see the failure of protestantism to take hold as more contingent—a product of circumstance rather than conviction—and therefore something that remained to be fought over. Hence we have Nicholas Canny’s provocative suggestion that the outcome of the battle between the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation was not finally decided until the nineteenth century.¹⁸ ¹⁷ Alan Ford, ‘Living Together, Living Apart: Sectarianism in Early-Modern Ireland’, in Ford and McCafferty (eds.), Origins of Sectarianism, 5; idem, ‘Martyrdom, History and Memory in Early Modern Ireland’, in Ian McBride (ed.), History and Memory in Modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 64–5; H. A. Jefferies, ‘The Irish Parliament of 1560: The Anglican Reforms Authorised’, IHS 26 (1988), 128–41; Aidan Clarke, ‘Varieties of Uniformity: The First Century of the Church of Ireland’, in W. J. Shiels and Diana Wood (eds.), The Churches, Ireland and the Irish (Studies in Church History, 25 (1989)), 105; B. I. Bradshaw, ‘The Wild and Woolly West: Early Irish Christianity and Latin Orthodoxy’, in Shiels and Wood (eds.), The Churches, Ireland and the Irish, 1–24; Edwards, Church and State, p. vii; Colm Lennon, ‘Political Thought of Irish Counter-Reformation Churchmen: The Testimony of the ‘‘Analecta’’ of Bishop David Rothe’, in Hiram Morgan (ed.), Political Ideology in Ireland, 1541–1641 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999), 199–200. ¹⁸ N. P. Canny, ‘Why the Reformation Failed in Ireland: une question mal posée’, JEH, 30 (1979), 423–50, is a response to B. I. Bradshaw, ‘Sword, Word and Strategy in the Reformation in Ireland’, HJ, 21 (1978), 475–502; for judicious mediation, see K. S. Bottigheimer, ‘The Failure of the Reformation in Ireland: une question bien posée’, JEH, 36 (1985), 196–207; Ford, Protestant Reformation, 7–12.

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There was certainly no shortage of difficulties facing those who sought to impose a protestant reformation in Ireland. Political power was fractured. The legacy of the incomplete Anglo-Norman conquest was a government in Dublin, centred on the Pale and the main towns of the south and east, which controlled only a part of the country. Large areas of the island were under the sway of native Irish chieftains, many of whom only had passing dealings with the Crown. Even the great magnates descended from the original Anglo-Norman invaders, like the earls of Desmond and Kildare, operated semi-independent fiefdoms and often had ambiguous relations with the Dublin authorities. Political tensions were exacerbated by ethnic divisions, as three different groupings vied for power. There were, first, the island’s oldest inhabitants, the native Irish, heirs of an ancient civilization; then the new English, the most recent wave of soldiers, settlers, and officials sent over by Engish monarchs anxious to secure their hold on Ireland; and, caught in the middle, the Anglo-Irish, the descendants of the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman invaders. Each group had a definite sense of its own cultural and historical roots: the native Irish, suspicious of the imposition of English government and mores, were characterized by their distinctive language and legal, intellectual, political, and religious traditions; the new English saw themselves as representatives of a superior civilization, entrusted by right of conquest with the anglicization of a backward island; while the Anglo-Irish were convinced that they too were superior—to the native Irish in their espousal of English manners and loyalty to the English monarch, and to the new English in their knowledge of, and skill in ruling Ireland. Because of these obvious differences, each group posed distinct challenges for the reformers. Thus, for example, while it was widely acknowledged elsewhere in Europe that the Reformation was a vernacular movement seeking to bring Bible and liturgy to the people in their own language, in Ireland this immediately posed the question: which language, Irish or English? To the new English and Anglo-Irish, committed to what they saw as a superior civilization, it should be English; but to the native Irish, a vernacular reformation in English was an oxymoron. Given the limits of the Dublin government’s power, and the predominantly anglicizing thrust of the Reformation in Ireland, it was inevitable in the sixteenth century that the main focus of the reformers should be on the Pale and the new English and Anglo-Irish communities. The crucial group were not the new English, whose support could, by and large, be taken for granted,¹⁹ nor the native Irish, beyond the reach of the Reformation in terms of both civil and ecclesiastical power and language and culture, but the Anglo-Irish, whose loyalty to the Crown could, and it was hoped would, be translated into allegiance, first ¹⁹ Though note the important caveat about the presence of English Catholics amongst the new English emigrants to Ireland in D. L. Edwards, ‘A Haven of Popery: English Catholic Migration to Ireland in the Age of Plantations’, Ford and McCafferty (eds.), Origins of Sectarianism, 95–126.

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to the royal supremacy, and thence to protestantism. The first part of the plan worked reasonably well, as royal supremacy was accepted, especially in those areas where the power of the government was strongest. Thus in Dublin, the majority of the clergy remained loyal to the reformed Church of Ireland during the reign of Henry VIII and Edward VI. The shallow nature of this loyalty was, however, exposed by the relative ease of the transition back to Catholicism under Mary.²⁰ This flexibility was confirmed when the reformation resumed in 1558 under Elizabeth. Two bishops refused the oath of supremacy and were deprived; others, however, took it, a marked contrast to England, where nearly all the Marian bishops were, for various reasons, replaced.²¹ In England, this change of personnel enabled the authorities to begin the process of creating a reformed church: the Act of Uniformity of 1559 imposed the English prayer book and required people to attend church; the universities turned their energies to training a new generation of clergy in anti-Catholic polemic; and the Church in 1563 drew up the Thirty-Nine Articles, a clearly protestant confession of faith. But in Ireland the pace of change was far slower, with the emphasis being placed on the need to preserve continuity so as not to drive away loyal but traditionally minded clergy: thus permission was given to continue to use the Latin prayer book and the only confession of faith which the Church possessed was a pale imitation of the Thirty-Nine Articles, the 12 articles of 1567.²² Perhaps most critical of all for the success of the reformation, there was no Irish university to secure the next generation for protestantism. The Church of Ireland at the start of Elizabeth’s reign was, as a result, not a Roman Catholic church, but, equally, neither was it, with the exception of a few senior imported clerics, protestant; nor was it clear how it would become so. In such an equivocal environment, identifying the religious stance and ideological assumptions of even the most prominent lay people is deeply problematic. Lord Deputy St Leger oversaw the imposition of the Reformation under Edward VI, and the restoration of Catholicism under Mary. Lord Deputy Sidney reversed that process under Mary and Elizabeth. Anglo-Irish laymen such as Sir Thomas Cusack or Sir James Stanihurst could thus continue to play central roles in public life regardless of monarch and religion. Cusack has been neatly described as ‘orthodox under every regime’, and when he died in 1571, in his will he both pledged his loyalty to the royal supremacy and left money for a priest to pray for his soul; Stanihurst was the speaker of both the Marian and the first

²⁰ The best general treatment of religious change in the sixteenth century is Colm Lennon, Sixteenth-Century Ireland: The Incomplete Conquest (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1994), ch. 11. ²¹ Walsh (Meath), Leverous (Kildare): The Irish Fiants of the Tudor Sovereigns during the Reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Philip & Mary, and Elizabeth (Dublin: Edmund Burke, 1994), no. 199. ²² A brefe declaration of certein principall articles of religion (Dublin, 1567); UW, i, app. III; Brian Ó Cuív (ed.), Aibidil gaoidheilge & caiticiosma (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1994), 185–9.

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two Elizabethan parliaments, and took the oath of supremacy in 1560.²³ The Anglo-Irish clergy were similarly disengaged, continuing to serve the cathedral of St Patrick and respond to the myriad twists and tergiversations of politicoreligious policy by doing exactly what they had done before.²⁴ Take the career of Thomas Creef: he became a vicar choral in St Patrick’s in the mid-1520s, and steward to Archbishop Browne, charged by Henry VIII with introducing the Reformation. Despite Creef ’s conservative outlook (he continued to go on pilgrimage to Canterbury and Walsingham), and the fact that Browne sacked him as steward ‘for his popishness’, he nevertheless still had sufficient influence to secure his appointment as prebendary of Tassagard in the mid-1530s. Under Mary, Creef became precentor, but he retained this post after the accession of Elizabeth up to his death in 1579.²⁵ The mental world of these early-Elizabethan Anglo-Irish is difficult to pin down. What to one historian is a deeply conservative community appears to another to be one imbued with the optimistic reformist ideals of humanism.²⁶ There was, undoubtedly, an ingrained loyalty to the English monarchs, not only as a symbol of their English civility but also as ‘always kings of this land of Ireland’ and the guarantors of the distinctive position of the Anglo-Irish.²⁷ But this did not mean that they were prepared to follow Elizabeth’s religious reforms. Their secular allegiance to the Crown was intertwined with an equally strong sense of religious allegiance to the papacy, symbolized for the Anglo-Irish by the fact that Ireland had originally been granted to the English king by Pope Adrian VII in the bull Laudabiliter. ²⁸ The challenge for the leaders of the Irish Reformation, then, was to turn the casual conformity of the Anglo-Irish—they ‘come to divine service as to a May game’, as Lord Deputy Sussex had put it—into a more committed protestantism.²⁹ In the first decades of Elizabeth’s reign, the authorities in Dublin pursued a ‘gradualist and conciliatory reform programme’, hoping that the careful ²³ Ciaran Brady, ‘Cusack, Sir Thomas (1505?–1571)’, ODNB; Colm Lennon, Richard Stanihurst the Dubliner 1547–1618 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1981), 22. ²⁴ James Murray, ‘The Tudor Diocese of Dublin: Episcopal Government, Ecclesiastical Politics and the Enforcement of the Reformation, c. 1534–1590’, PhD thesis, Dublin University, 1997, chs. 8 and 9; Raymond Gillespie, ‘The Shaping of Reform, 1558–1625’, in Kenneth Milne (ed.), Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin: A History (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), 174–94. ²⁵ H. J. Lawlor, The Fasti of St Patrick’s, Dublin (Dundalk: W. Tempest, 1930), 56, 164, 212; J. B. Leslie, Ossory Clergy and Parishes (Enniskillen: Fermanagh Times, 1933), 144; the archbishop of Dublin attempted unsuccessfully to sack him on a probably spurious—he was in his 70s at the time—charge of adultery: Murray, ‘Tudor Diocese of Dublin’, 137–8, 238–40, 345–6. ²⁶ Murray, ‘Tudor Diocese of Dublin’, 75 ff.; B. I. Bradshaw, The Irish Constitutional Revolution of the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). ²⁷ 33 Henry VIII, c. 1. ²⁸ See the important discussion of the ‘Laudabiliter mentality’ in Murray, ‘Tudor Diocese of Dublin’, 75 ff. ²⁹ E. P. Shirley, Original Letters and Papers (London, 1851), 44; H. H. W. RobinsonHammerstein. ‘Erzbischof Adam Loftus und die Elizabethanische Reformationspolitik in Irland’, Doctoral thesis, Philipps-Universität Marburg/Lahn, 1976, 61.

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exercise of the authority of state and church through ecclesiastical commissions and church courts, would, together with protestant preaching, slowly deepen religious commitment.³⁰ But there is very little evidence of success. Even with the most loyal officials, such as James Stanihurst, Thomas Cusack, or Sir Lucas Dillon, it is difficult to identify commitment to clearly protestant ideas.³¹ There was, it is true, one exception in the prominent merchant and mayor of Dublin, John Ussher (1524–c.1585), sponsor of the first protestant book in Irish, supporter of the idea of a protestant university.³² As early as 1572, Lord Chancellor Weston alluded to his ‘soundness’ in religious matters. But Ussher’s protestantism was the exception that proved the rule: as Weston put it, such commitment was ‘a rare gift in men of his vocation here’.³³ The willingness on the part of the authorities to temper the rigour with which protestantism was imposed in order to maintain conformity depended, of course, on an absolutely crucial assumption: that time was on their side—that nominal conformity would in due course be transformed into committed protestantism. This generally proved to be the case in England, but even there, as recent historians have stressed, the progress of protestantism was often slow.³⁴ In Ireland, where the power of the central government and the established church was far weaker, time was not the friend of the Reformation. This became abundantly clear in the 1580s, when relations between the government and the Anglo-Irish deteriorated dramatically. The breakdown was the product of a complex interplay between religious and secular developments. The papal bull of 1570, Regnans in excelsis, introduced a new tension into relations between the Anglo-Irish and the English authorities by excommunicating Elizabeth and absolving Catholics from their responsibility to obey an heretical queen. Though the vast majority of the Anglo-Irish continued to serve their monarch, doubt had now been cast on their loyalty. Critically, a few Anglo-Irish leaders took up the challenge of the papal bull. James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald rose in Munster in 1569, complaining that Elizabeth was trying to make them ³⁰ Murray, ‘Tudor Diocese of Dublin’, 284. ³¹ Nicholas Canny claims that Rowland White (d. 1572) was identifiably protestant, but the evidence for his views on the atonement or the status of the early Irish church is slender and hardly amount to proof of protestantism: N. P. Canny (ed.), ‘Rowland White’s ‘‘Discors touching Ireland’’, c. 1569’, IHS, 20 (1977), 439–65; idem (ed.), ‘Rowland White’s ‘‘The dysorders of the Irisshery’’, 1571’, Studia Hibernica, 30 (1979), 151, 156–7; Ford, ‘Ussher and Irish Identity’, 193 n. 37. ³² John Kearney, Aibidil gaoidheilge, agus caiticiosma ([Dublin], 1571); Ó Cuív (ed.), Aibidil gaoidheilge & caiticiosma; his son, William Ussher, later supported the publication of the first Irish version of the New Testament: ibid. 8–9. ³³ Mary O’Dowd (ed.), Calendar of the State Papers Ireland: Tudor Period 1571–1575 (London: Public Record Office & Irish Manuscript Commission, 2000), nos. 273, 294–5; SP 63/80/51; Colm Lennon, The Lords of Dublin in the Age of Reformation (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1989), 109–11, 274; Ó Cuív (ed.), Aibidil gaoidheilge & caiticiosma, 6–7. ³⁴ Christopher Haigh, English Reformations. Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993); Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400–c.1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Christopher Haigh, ‘Success and Failure in the English Reformation’, Past & Present, 173 (2001), 28–49.

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give up their Catholic faith, and returned in 1579 under the papal banner to launch the Desmond revolt, an even more serious threat to the authority of the government.³⁵ The Baltinglass and Nugent risings of 1580 and 1581 were similarly linked to an assertive Counter-Reformation hostility to protestant heresy.³⁶ The actions of the rebellious minority increasingly coloured official attitudes towards the Anglo-Irish majority, as all Catholics were seen as potential traitors. These fears led the Dublin authorities to take increasingly harsh and brutal measures to suppress resistance—thousands were summarily executed under martial law during the 1580s and 1590s, and the Desmond rising ended with particular savagery.³⁷ Ordinary Catholics, men such as George Netterville, the Scurlocks, and Christopher Eustace, who were seen by the government as arrant traitors, came to be revered by the Catholic community as holy martyrs.³⁸ As Catholics came under suspicion, the government came to rely instead upon new English protestants to staff central government, squeezing the Anglo-Irish out of offices which they had long considered to be theirs as of right.³⁹ Their discomfiture was only made worse by the financial burden of the hated cess, a tax imposed to support the army.⁴⁰ Even more disturbing for the government, their shared religious commitment opened up the prospect of Anglo-Irish and native Irish putting aside their long-standing antipathy and uniting together as ‘Irish Catholics’. Changes in the patterns of education both reflected and underpinned the new-found religious commitment of Ireland’s Catholic population. During the 1580s the Anglo-Irish began to abandon the increasingly protestant colleges of Oxford, where they were required to take the oath of supremacy, and move instead, like Fitzsimon, to the Catholic universities in mainland Europe.⁴¹ John Ussher trenchantly described the impact on the younger generation from the protestant point of view: ‘they are sent to Lovan, Dowa and other universities, wherin being misled in papistry and rooted therin, returning home agayne, they ³⁵ NHI, iii. 90; J. B. Wainewright (ed.), ‘Some Letters and Papers of Nicholas Sanders, 1562–1580’, Catholic Record Society, 26 (1926), 20–5. ³⁶ Lennon, Sixteenth-Century Ireland, 202–7; Christopher Maginn, ‘The Baltinglass Rebellion, 1580: English Dissent or Gaelic Uprising?’ HJ, 47 (2004), 205–32. ³⁷ David Edwards, ‘Beyond Reform: Martial Law and the Tudor Reconquest of Ireland’, History Ireland, 5 (1997), 16–21; idem, ‘Ideology and Experience: Spenser’s View and Martial Law in Ireland’, in Morgan (ed.), Political Ideology in Ireland, 127–57. ³⁸ P. J. Corish and Benignus Millett, The Irish Martyrs (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005); Ford, ‘Martyrdom, History and Memory’, 43–66; Salvador Ryan, ‘Steadfast Saints or Malleable Models? Seventeenth-Century Hagiography Revisited’, Catholic Historical Review, 91 (2005), 251–77; Clodagh Tait, ‘Adored for Saints: Catholic Martyrdom in Ireland c.1560–1655’, Journal of Early Modern History, 5 (2001), 128–59. ³⁹ J. G. Crawford, Anglicizing the Government of Ireland (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1993). ⁴⁰ Ciaran Brady, The Chief Governors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). ⁴¹ Penry Williams, ‘Elizabethan Oxford: State, Church and University’, in James McConica (ed.), The History of the University of Oxfor: vol iii, The Collegiate University (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 413; H. H. W. Hammerstein, ‘Aspects of the Continental Education of Irish Students in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth’, Historical Studies, 8 (1971), 137–54.

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infect the ignorant with their damnable religion’.⁴² Vague paternal conformity was being replaced by a much more vigorous filial recusancy, as the new generation refused to conform and come to church. James Stanihurst’s son Richard failed to secure an official position in the Dublin administration and ended up a priest and Counter-Reformation exile in the Spanish Netherlands.⁴³ In 1594 Thomas Cusack’s grandson founded that bastion of the Irish Counter-Reformation, the Irish College at Douai; his great-grandson rose against the English in 1641.⁴⁴ Even worse, those officials whom the government had thought of as loyal were now suspected of having Catholic sympathyies. The earl of Ormond had claimed in 1580 that Lucas Dillon would ‘remain constant in the true faith, whosoever follow the pope and do the contrary’.⁴⁵ But in 1590 Archbishop Loftus of Dublin claimed that Dillon had for the past three or four years been a Catholic, being drawn to recusancy by his son-in-law.⁴⁶ Amongst the first families in Dublin ‘to take the radical step of supporting military action in defence of Catholicism’ were two members of the Fitzsimon clan: William Fitzsimon, a merchant, supplied Baltinglass with gunpowder, whilst Michael Fitzsimon, schoolteacher and possibly also a priest, travelled to the papal court on behalf of the viscount, and was arrested on his return and executed in 1591.⁴⁷ The fusion of past and present in Catholic history is evident in the way Henry Fitzsimon included his kinsman Michael as one of eleven contemporary martyrs in an otherwise mediaeval list of notable Irish saints.⁴⁸ Confirmation of this radical rejection of the established church by the Anglo-Irish comes from the Creef family. The next member we encounter in the state papers is Roger Creef, who in 1606 complained, along with other priminent Dublin recusants, at the measures taken by the government to force them to come to church.⁴⁹ In other words, where earlier in Elizabeth’s reign the Anglo-Irish had served the established church as ⁴² SP 63/90/14. ⁴³ Lennon, Richard Stanihurst, 35–67. ⁴⁴ John Brady, ‘Father Christopher Cusack and the Irish College of Douai, 1594–1624’, in Sylvester O’Brien (ed.), Measgra i gcuimhne Mhichíl Uí Chléirigh (Dublin, 1944), 99–100; Hubert Gallwey, ‘The Cusack Family of Counties Meath and Dublin’, The Irish Genealogist, 5 (1974–9), 597–8, 678. ⁴⁵ SP 63/74/64., quoted in Canny, ‘Why the Reformation Failed’, 431. ⁴⁶ W. M. Brady (ed.), State Papers Concerning the Irish Church in the Time of Elizabeth (London, 1868), 126–7; Helen Coburn Walsh, ‘Enforcing the Elizabethan Settlement: The Vicissitudes of Hugh Brady, Bishop of Meath, 1563–84’, IHS, 26 (1989), 374; Loftus was, it is true, Dillon’s rival for the post of lord chancellor; J. G. Crawford, ‘Dillon, Sir Lucas (d.1592)’, ODNB. ⁴⁷ Lennon, Lords of Dublin, 154–5, 163–4. ⁴⁸ TCD MS 568, p. 107; Henry Fitzsimon, Catalogus praecipuorum sanctorum Hiberniae (Liege, 1619); Veridicus, Hiberniae sive antiquioris Scotiae vindiciae, 85–121: the imprints of the Catalogus are difficult to disentangle: Richard Sharpe, ‘The Origin and Elaboration of the Catalogus Praecipuorum Sanctorum Hiberniae Attributed to Fr Henry Fitzsimon, S.J.’ Bodleian Library Record, 13 (1989), 202–30; William O’Sullivan, ‘A Waterford Origin for the Codex Salmanticensis’, Decies, 54 (1998), 23; Pádraig Ó Riain, ‘The Catalogus praecipuorum sanctorum Hiberniae, Sixty Years On’, in A. P. Smyth (ed.), Seanchas (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), 396–430. ⁴⁹ SP 63/210/10 (CSPI, 1603–6, 398).

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ministers, the new generation was refusing to go to church at all. The religiously undifferentiated Anglo-Irish were becoming the Catholic Old English. As the most authoritative study of the archdiocese of Dublin concludes: by the early 1590s ‘the reformation had failed’.⁵⁰

C R E AT I N G A P ROT E S TA N T C H U RC H The loss of the Anglo-Irish was a shock for the established church. In 1590 Loftus noted that the moderate enforcement of conformity had prior to 1584 ensured that ‘however they were affected inwardly in their consciences’, people in the Pale had nevertheless ‘outwardly . . . showed great duty and obedience, in resorting to service, sermons and in receiving the communion’.⁵¹ He reiterated the point the following year in a letter to Archbishop Whitgift of Canterbury, when he complained about ‘the generall defection of this cuntrie people, in causes of religion, without regard of lawe or authority: which within these seven yeares in mine owne remembrance . . . are growen into such obstinacy and disobediance that we nowe find it a matter almost impossible, either to reclayme them, or to drawe them to anie good conformity.’⁵² In Munster the shift from conformity to Counter-Reformation was somewhat later: William Lyon, the English-born Bishop of Cork and Ross, lamented in 1595 that ‘within these two years . . . where I have had a thousand or more at church or sermon, I now have not five.’⁵³ The suddenness of the change, and the stark antipathy of this new face of Anglo-Irish Counter-Reformation Catholicism, whether on the way to the gallows or in theological disputation, both simplified and made more urgent the choices facing the established church. The defection of the Anglo-Irish meant that there was no longer any need to downplay doctrinal protestantism, or tread softly in enforcing attendance at church by statutory means for fear of driving away occasional conformists—they had already departed of their own accord. But the new intellectual awareness of the Roman Catholic Church had left the Church of Ireland trailing theologically in its wake, only able to provide an eighteen-year-old student to argue with an experienced Jesuit professor. The established church had now to formulate a clear reformation policy which both supplied the parishes with committed protestant clergy and provided those clergy with parishioners willing to hear their sermons. Both proved to be intractable problems. The difficulty in resolving the first was that the Church of Ireland lacked either the financial resources that would attract such ministers from England, or the basic educational infrastructure with which to train indigenous replacements in Ireland. In default of rich benefices ⁵⁰ Murray, ‘Diocese of Dublin’, 296. ⁵¹ SP 63/154/37 (CSPI, 1588–92, 365). ⁵² SP 63/157/35. ⁵³ SP 63/183/47 (CSPI, 1592–6, 396); Ford, Protestant Reformation, 38–9.

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or an Irish university, the Church of Ireland had to make do with what they could get—a trickle of émigré English ministers and Irish clergy educated in protestant colleges in Oxford and Cambridge. Initially, the protestant leadership came from the former, a pattern which had important implications for the way in which the Church of Ireland developed. The two dominant figures in the Irish Reformation in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were thus a Yokshireman and a Lancastrian, Adam Loftus and Thomas Jones. The former had first arrived in Ireland with the Lord Lieutenant, the earl of Sussex in 1560. He became Archbishop of Armagh in 1563, and then succeeded to the much more important see of Dublin in 1567, to which he added the pivotal civil position of Lord Chancellor from 1581. After Loftus’s death in 1605, both his posts were taken over by Jones, another Cambridge graduate, who had come to Dublin 1574, soon after ordination, to serve in Loftus’s household. In 1577 he became Chancellor of St Patrick’s Cathedral, and in 1584 he was promoted to the see of Meath and made a member of the Irish privy council.⁵⁴ The protestantism of Loftus was of an interesting kind. Early in his career, he aligned himself with the puritans—those godly English religious radicals who felt that the Elizabethan church settlement had not gone far or fast enough.⁵⁵ The puritans targetted a series of practices, such as the use of the sign of the cross in baptism, organs and elaborate church music, and kneeling at communion, all of which they saw as remnants of ‘popish superstition’, invented by the Catholic Church rather than prescribed by scripture.⁵⁶ As Loftus saw it, thanks to the wiles of Satan the church in England had failed to rid itself of these accretions, leaving it but half-reformed, a ‘mixid and minglid religion, neyther playnly against, nor wholy with God’s word’. Where the Bible commanded, protestants had to obey, compromise was ruled out: Remembre the sainge of Elias the prophet, how longe . . . will you halte on bothe sydes, yf the lord be God followe hime, yf Baal go after hime . . . Chryst cannot abyde to have the leven of the phariseys myngled with his swete flowre, with him or against him must we nedes be; yf we be luke warme he will spewe us owt of his mowthe.⁵⁷

Loftus had especially exercised the move by the authorities in London in the 1560s to force clergy to wear the surplice, lamenting in a letter to Sir William Cecil the latter’s willingness ‘to thrust owt of ther livings and ministery so many godly and learnid preacheres, only for this, that they will not be lyke the papistes, ⁵⁴ Helen Coburn Walshe, ‘Jones, Thomas (c.1550–1619)’, ODNB. ⁵⁵ Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London: Methuen, 1967); John Spurr, English Puritanism 1603–1689 (London: Macmillan, 1998). ⁵⁶ For a classic contemporary statement, see the Admonition to parliament: W. H. Frere and C. E. Douglas (eds.), Puritan Manifestoes (London: SPCK, 1907). ⁵⁷ Shirley, Original Letters and Papers, 217; the reference is to 1 Kings 18:21 ‘And Elijah came unto all the people, and said, How long halt ye between two opinions? If the lord be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him.’

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the professid ministers of Sathan and Antichrist, in supersticious and wickid order of apparrell and owtward sheawe’.⁵⁸ Puritan clergy, with their strong commitment to Calvinism and fierce hostility to anything that smacked of ‘popery’, provided just what the leaders of the Church of Ireland were looking for—a firm protestant backbone for the ministry. And Ireland, with its desperate need for clergy, and sympathetic bishops, attracted several leading English puritans. Loftus employed his ‘deare frend’, Thomas Cartwright, who later became the head of the English presbyterian movement, as his domestic chaplain in 1566, whilst Christopher Goodman, famous for his untimely assault on female rulers just before Elizabeth’s accession, also found refuge in Ireland, where he sought to further the Reformation by bringing over from Scotland his good friend, John Knox. Indeed, such was the inclusiveness (or desperation) of the Church of Ireland, that Cartwright and Goodman were even, incongruously, proposed by Loftus and the Dublin authorities for archbishoprics.⁵⁹ The logical result of such a policy was an institution staffed largely by new English émigrés, closely linked to the policy of plantation—in short, a wholly colonial church which saw itself as an offshoot, or even a part of, the Church of England. And indeed, as we shall see, elements of a colonial ideology can easily be identified in the later sixteenth century in both the secular and religious spheres.⁶⁰ Certainly, until well into the next century, the majority of the preaching clergy in the Church of Ireland came from England, Scotland, and Wales, especially in Ulster and other areas of the country where plantations had been established.⁶¹ But there was an indigenous alternative to colonial protestantism. Though the vast majority of the Anglo-Irish rejected protestantism, there was a small number who did not. These heirs (literally and metaphorically) of John Ussher emerged in the 1590s as a distinct group, who were to play a disproportionately large role in defining Irish protestantism. They can be identified by the ways in which their beliefs shaped their lives, not just in terms of worship, but also in relation to education, charity, politics, and social networks. To take but one example, family alliances were increasingly determined by religion, as the small Anglo-Irish protestant community chose their partners from amongst themselves and the new English.⁶² ⁵⁸ Shirley, Original Letters and Papers, 218; Bishop Robert Daly of Kildare joined Loftus in voicing concerns over the issue of vestments: ibid. 203–5. ⁵⁹ Robinson-Hammerstein, ‘Erzbischof Loftus’, 85, 91–2; eadem, ‘Adam Loftus and the Elizabethan Reformation in Ireland: Uniformity and Dissent’, Search, 28 (2005), 53–67; Patrick Collinson, ‘Cartwright, Thomas (1534/5–1603)’, ODNB; J. E. A. Dawson, ‘Goodman, Christopher (1521/2–1603)’, ODNB; A. F. S. Pearson, Thomas Cartwright and Elizabethan Puritanism 1535–1603 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925), 20 ff. ⁶⁰ N. P. Canny, ‘The Ideology of English Colonisation from Ireland to America’, William & Mary Quarterly, 30 (1973), 578–98; Alan Ford, ‘Dependent or Independent: The Church of Ireland and Its Colonial Context, 1536–1647’, The Seventeenth Century, 10 (1995), 163–87. ⁶¹ Ford, Protestant Reformation, 78–9. ⁶² Lennon, Lords of Dublin, 160–1; Donald Jackson, Intermarriage in Ireland 1550–1650 (Montreal: Cultural and Educational Productions, 1970).

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Similarly, in a mirror image of the Catholic flight to the Counter-Reformation centres on the Continent, the Dublin community recognized the significance of an unequivocally protestant education. Initially this meant colleges at Oxford and, more commonly, Cambridge: Lancelot Money, the son of a Dublin merchant, gained his BA in Cambridge in 1585–6, and returned to serve in both Christ Church and St Patrick’s Cathedrals;⁶³ while Luke Challoner, the son of another prominent though more recently arrived family, apparently had a late vocation, entering Trinity College Cambridge in 1582 at the age of 32, before coming back to Ireland and entering the protestant ministry, serving at Mulhuddert from 1597;⁶⁴ Henry Ussher, nephew of John, and a protégé of Archbishop Loftus, attended both English universities, first Cambridge under the godly master of Magdalen, Roger Kelke, before going on to an MA at Oxford where he studied theology with the puritan leader Laurence Humphrey.⁶⁵ By the 1590s, a trickle of Irish-born clergy were beginning to return from the puritan seminary of Emmanuel in Cambridge.⁶⁶ When these Dublin clergy came home from English universities they, along with the Dublin protestant community, embarked on the crucial next step—the creation of a local protestant educational infrastructure. Dublin had long had a free school, supported by the city, and in 1583 it was rebuilt with the help of Nicholas Ball, a Catholic merchant.⁶⁷ Its early religious orientation is unclear, but in 1588 it took a decisively protestant turn, with the appointment of two Scottish graduates, James Fullerton and James Hamilton, as master and usher.⁶⁸ These were rather a superior species of schoolteacher, who also served as unofficial agents for the Scottish king, James VI. Educated at Glasgow University, Fullerton had been a special friend of the principal, the Scottish presbyterian leader Andrew Melville, and ended his life as Sir James Fullerton, royal ambassador. Hamilton was a noted scholar who went on to become first Viscount Clandeboye, a major Irish landowner and political figure.⁶⁹ ⁶³ Lawlor, Fasti, 181. ⁶⁴ Lennon, Lords of Dublin, 237–8; N. J. D. White, Four Good Men (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis, 1927). ⁶⁵ Wright, Ussher Memoirs, 43 ff.; Wood, Athenae, ii. 852; Colm Lennon, ‘Ussher, Henry (c.1550–1613)’, ODNB; F. J. Bremer, John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 46. ⁶⁶ Ford, Protestant Reformation, 94, 106. ⁶⁷ Lennon, Lords of Dublin, 226–7. ⁶⁸ Hamilton was supported by Walter Ball, another protestant merchant who served as mayor in 1580–1: ibid. 228; Michael Quane, ‘City of Dublin Free School’, Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, 90 (1960), 173; see also William Reeves’ notes in TCD MS 1072, opposite p. 324. ⁶⁹ Michael Perceval-Maxwell, The Scottish Migration to Ulster in the Reign of James I, 2nd edn (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1990), 1; R. J. Hunter, ‘Hamilton, James, First Viscount Claneboye (c.1560–1644)’, ODNB; though on Hamilton’s education, note John Durkan and James Kirk, The University of Glasgow 1451–1577 (Glasgow: University of Glasgow Press, 1977), 304.

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The major challenge for the Irish Reformation, though, remained the lack of an Irish university. Sixteenth-century Ireland was awash with paper universities— plots, propositions, plans, proposals—all with grandiose ambitions to establish an institution which would instil in the youth of Ireland piety, civility, and obedience, or, as one proposal put it, serve as a ‘well of all virtue from whence all goodness shall flow’.⁷⁰ Lord Deputy Sidney and James Stanihurst combined to try to get the university project off the ground in the 1560s, as bishops and churchmen did subsequently. But though all were agreed on the need, none could provide the necessary combination of site, money, and staff. Not, at least, till these various elements finally came together in the granting of a charter for Trinity in 1591. The long delay was important. Though the proposals for Trinity embraced the broad aims of the earlier university schemes, and, indeed, the new college succeeded in its early years in attracting students from a wide variety of backgrounds, behind the inclusive fac¸ade can be detected a firmly protestant thrust. This was evident in its backers, the reaction of Catholic clergy, and, as we shall see, in the College’s staffing and curriculum.⁷¹ Some of the supporters of the early university plans, such as James Stanihurst, represented the vague conformity of the early part of Elizabeth’s reign. But the drive behind the eventual foundation of Trinity came from a group of Dublin clergy and businessmen who were firmly protestant, ministers like Luke Challoner and Henry Ussher, aldermen such as James Tirrell, William Ussher, and Walter Ball, all carefully orchestrated by Archbishop Loftus. Walter Travers, appointed provost in 1594, saw universities primarily as seminaries, providing the ‘seede and frye off the holie ministerie thorowghe out the realme’.⁷² The underlying religious purpose of the College was spotted more quickly by the Catholic clergy than by Catholic parents—a surprising number of Trinity’s early students came from prominent Gaelic and Anglo-Irish families.⁷³ Henry Fitzsimon in 1603 had to explain to a parent the grave dangers of sending children to Trinity.⁷⁴ Another leading Catholic, Peter Lombard, was also aware of the attractions of Trinity—‘a most spacious and splendid college’ in which ‘all the liberal arts were taught’—and the essential drawback—the teachers were ‘heretical masters.’⁷⁵ The foundation of Trinity marked an important step for the Reformation. First, it provided the Church of Ireland with an additional supply of ⁷⁰ The Manuscripts of Charles Halliday (London: Historical Manuscripts Commission, 1897), 246–7; printed in J. W. Stubbs, The History of the University of Dublin (Dublin, 1889), 349–50. ⁷¹ See ch. 2. ⁷² Walter Travers, A full and plaine declaration of ecclesiasticall discipline owt off the word off God and off the declininge off the churche off England from the same ([Heidelberg], 1574), 144. ⁷³ Alan Ford, ‘Who Went to Trinity? The Early Students of Dublin University’, in Helga Robinson-Hammerstein (ed.), European Universities in the Age of Reformation and Counter Reformation (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1998), 64. ⁷⁴ Henry Fitzsimon, Words of Comfort, ed. Edmund Hogan (Dublin, 1881). ⁷⁵ Peter Lombard, De regno Hiberniae, sanctorum insula, commentarius, ed. P. F. Moran (Dublin, 1868), 117.

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much-needed preaching ministers. The scale of its contribution was, initially, small—established at the start of the Nine Years War, Trinity struggled financially until its endowment was enlarged by James I in the early seventeenth century. Not until the 1620s and 1630s did Trinity begin to make a significant contribution, and then mainly to the Pale dioceses.⁷⁶ But even though in numerical terms its impact was limited, intellectually, Trinity played a second, crucial role: it provided these clergy, and the Church of Ireland as a whole, with the resources for theological research and discussion which made it possible, by the early seventeenth century, to begin to speak of an indigenous Reformation. The obvious question, though, was how, and indeed whether, the native differed from the imported variety of protestantism. Given that Trinity was described by its own fellows as ‘a graft of the famous university of Cambridge’, and that most of its early staff had, as Lombard accurately pointed out, to be ‘sent from England since Ireland couldn’t supply them’, it could be argued that the training received there differed little from that which English graduate clergy in Ireland had received at Oxford and Cambridge.⁷⁷ This was true, up to a point. The first four provosts (Walter Travers (1594–8), Henry Alvey (1601–9), William Temple (1609–27), and William Bedell (1627–9)) were from England, indeed from Cambridge—it was not until 1629 that the first Irishman, Robert Ussher, was appointed.⁷⁸ But by the first decade of the seventeenth century, as the early Irish-born students began to graduate, the more gifted stayed on, replacing the Scots and English fellows. Amongst those making this transition from student to fellow was the Irish-speaking William Daniell, translator of the Book of Common Prayer; the distinguished legist, Charles Dunn, or Ó Duinn, son of the Chief of Hy Regan; Abel Walsh, the son of the pioneering bishop of Ossory, Nicholas Walsh, who had begun the translation of the New Testament into Irish; Isaac Lally, or O’Mullally, son of the Archbishop of Tuam; not to mention James and his talented brother Ambrose Ussher.⁷⁹ These fellows and graduates were faced with the task of negotiating between the anglicizing thrust of the Reformation and its Irish context, a delicate challenge involving the construction of a history, theology, and practical reformation policy for the Church of Ireland.

E N F O RC I N G C O N F O R M I T Y The most immediately pressing issue was the policy that the Church of Ireland was to take towards the Old English who now refused to come to church. ⁷⁶ Ford, Protestant Reformation, 78–9. ⁷⁷ HMC, Salisbury MSS, xi. 258. ⁷⁸ William Urwick, The Early History of Trinity College, Dublin 1591–1660 (Dublin, 1892), 15–35. ⁷⁹ See the list of early fellows, in order of their appointment, PB, 197; Kenneth Nicholls (ed.), The O’Doyne (Ó Duinn) Manuscript (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1983); N. J. A. Williams, ‘Walsh, Nicholas (d. 1585)’, ODNB; Al. Dub.

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The natural response of the English leaders of the Irish Reformation was to look to the law and, most particularly, to the legislation which had established the Elizabethan religious settlement. The acts of uniformity and supremacy required that all the queen’s subjects in Ireland should attend the established church and worship according to the Book of Common Prayer. Those who refused to come were to be fined 12d. Whilst the hope of turning Anglo-Irish conformity into protestant commitment had remained, leaders of the Church had had to maintain a cautious, gradualist approach in implementing this legislation—maintaining sufficient pressure to ensure that people attended church, without alienating and driving them away by excessive coercion, in short, a delicate balancing act between compulsion and persuasion.⁸⁰ But by the 1580s, as far as Loftus and Jones were concerned, the open disaffection of the Anglo-Irish and their refusal to come to church had made preaching irrelevant unless the government forced them to attend. Coercion had to come first, persuasion followed. Politically, such a policy was controversial. Anglo-Irish councillors in Ireland naturally pressed the government to adopt a gentle approach towards their Catholic relatives. The authorities in England were equally reluctant to use the full rigour of the law to impose conformity, fearing that it would alienate the previously loyal Anglo-Irish and drive them into opposition, even rebellion. But for protestants such as Loftus and Jones, once the Anglo-Irish embraced Counter-Reformation Catholicism, compromise was impossible. Matters came to a head as early as 1586, when Sir Nicholas White, the Anglo-Irish Master of the Rolls, proposed at the council table that, in an effort to secure their cooperation in Parliament, Lord Deputy Perrot should ‘use tolerance in matter of oath and religion’. Bishop Jones responded with a public attack on toleration from the pulpit. According to a disapproving Archbishop Long of Armagh, Jones asked Whether the magistrate may tolerate with papists? For so he thinketh of them, as appeareth by his words: idolaters, papists and infidels. In which opinion he flatly affirmeth they cannot but rather root them out, for they will be prickes in their eyes, thorns in their sides, and whips to their backs, and privately digressed to tax the governor of carelessness in the execution thereof, and, as by inference appeareth, for having too much familiarity or trust with councillors not well affected in religion

After twenty-six years preaching, Jones urged, the inhabitants of Ireland ‘were not to be counted children but to be dealt withal sharply and punished severely’.⁸¹ As the ‘councillors not well affected in religion’—the Anglo-Irish—were driven out of the privy council and government office, they were replaced by new English protestants who, by and large, shared Jones’ views. This in turn ⁸⁰ Ciaran Brady and James Murray, ‘Sir Henry Sidney and the Reformation in Ireland’, in Elizabethanne Boran and Crawford Gribben (eds.), Enforcing Reformation in Ireland and Scotland, 1550–1700 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 31. ⁸¹ SP 63/125/12 and 12/1; partly transcribed in Brady (ed.), State Papers, 113–15; the reference is to Numbers 33.55.

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increased the tension between the leaders of the Church of Ireland and the more aggressively protestant members of the Dublin administration, on the one hand, who repeatedly pressed for firm government action to suppress recusancy, and the authorities in England who, even if they were not hostile to the principle of religious coercion, were certainly acutely conscious of the practical dangers (and cost) of Irish rebellion. The friction over this issue came to a head as a result of the Nine Years War. After its outbreak in 1594, the government, terrified at the possibility of the Anglo-Irish community joining with Hugh O’Neill, suspended all measures against Catholics. Given the scale of the threat, one might have imagined that all Irish protestants would have understood the necessity for such a concession. But they didn’t. Some argued toleration in any form was an evil: Trust them not: they will not they can not be good. The contention begunne betwene Edome and Israell in the wombe is never to be pacified: religion and heresie never to be agreed: heaven and hell never to be joyned: God and the divell never to be reconciled. If yee profess the truth of Godds religion, the sinceritie of his word, let it appeare, halte no more with idolaters: they doe not halte with you, neither in their profession, neither yet in the effectes thereof.⁸²

As Bishop Lyon put it to Lord Deputy Russell in 1595, when protesting at the suspension of recusancy proceedings in Munster: There is no time unfit . . . to set forth Gods truth and to maintain the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ, and to suppress Antichrist and his adherents. God will and can defend his own cause, let man do his duty, men’s policy is not to be joined with God’s truth. He hath set down a rule which must not be altered by man, but man must obey the same. I know your Honour’s zeal in the truth, therefore I am the bolder to discharge my conscience.⁸³

Loftus and Jones echoed this complaint, even asking Archbishop Whitgift to intercede directly with the Queen to overthrow the policy of toleration.⁸⁴ Most interesting of all is the reaction of the native protestants. It might be expected that they would sympathize with the Anglo-Irish councillors who had pressed for tolerance: after all, they were talking, in some cases, of their own flesh and blood. But what evidence we have suggests that the Irish protestants associated with Trinity were enthusiastic proponents of the use of coercion against Catholics. Thus the leading fellow, Luke Challoner, according to notes of a sermon he preached in college in 1594, warned that ‘if idolaters can not have ther idols allowed quietly to them, they will go to open warre’. Compromise with such idolatry was not permissible: ‘no pollicie is to be allowed against ⁸² Willy Maley (ed.), ‘The Supplication of the Blood of the English, Most Lamentably Murdred in Ireland, Cryeng out of the Yearth for Revenge (1598)’, Analecta Hibernica, 36 (1993), p. 21 (quotation mistranscribed—needs to be compared to original, BL Add MS 34,313, fol. 96r). ⁸³ SP 63/183/47/I. ⁸⁴ CSPI, 1600, 78–80.

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Gods pietie. 22 Exodus. Aron did cause a calf to be made and a plague was sent unto the people . . . The generall doctrine is that idolatrie is never without craftinesse . . . None could see their idolatrie but God. So the papists’.⁸⁵ Another fellow, William Daniel, was also singularly uncompromising when it came to his fellow-Irish Catholics, lamenting the carelessness of the magistrates in enforcing the Reformation and calling for the banishment of Catholic priests from Ireland.⁸⁶

U S S H E R I N S T K AT H A R I N E ’ S The ultimate test of Irish protestant policy towards Catholics came once the military threat was removed, when, late in 1601, Lord Deputy Mountjoy defeated Tyrone at the Battle of Kinsale. Mountjoy himself was convinced of the need for a conciliatory, gentle policy towards recusany, persuading rather than forcing them to conform. But the Irish protestant establishment was utterly opposed to this—for them, Catholic defeat was protestant opportunity, a chance finally to impose the full rigour of the law and make Catholics listen to the word of God preached by protestant ministers. And whilst Mountjoy was away in Connacht in late 1602, the remaining members of the Irish administration, led by Loftus, took action. Using all the preachers at their disposal, they distributed them around the Dublin churches and sought to provide them with an audience by threatening with the 12d. fine those who did not attend. Ussher was assigned to St Katharine’s where he combined preaching with catechizing. On his return to Dublin Mountjoy angrily criticized the privy council for acting ‘so hotly’ behind his back and suspended the enforcement of the recusancy laws. He pointedly reminded them of their all-too-recent experience of the rigours of war and the dangers posed by religious extremism: ‘If you did but walk up and down in the cold with us you would not be so warm in your religion’.⁸⁷ This faced the young Ussher with an interesting choice between allegiance to traditional Anglo-Irish values, and to those of the new protestantism—in effect, whether to tolerate or persecute his Catholic relatives. He opted clearly and decisively for the latter. Indeed so strong were his feelings that he felt impelled to make a public protest at Mountjoy’s reversal of policy. Preaching before the state at Christ Church he gave them his sense of that their toleration of idolatry. And made a full and bold application of that passage in the vision of Ezekiel, cap. 4.6 where the prophet ‘by lying on his side’, was to ‘beare the the iniquity of Judah forty dayes, I have appointed thee a day for a yeere, even a day for a year’ (as the old translation of the bible he then used, reads it, which I have, printed 1601 and hath a note by him in the margent). This, by ⁸⁵ TCD MS 1210, fols. 129v–130r; the reference should be to Exodus 32. ⁸⁶ Tiomna nuadh, transl. William Daniel, fol. 1v; SP 63/193/38 (CSPI, 1596–7, 121). ⁸⁷ CSPI, 1601–3, 562; Jones, Mountjoy, 169.

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consent of interpreters, signifies the time of forty years to the destruction of Jerusalem, and that nation for their idolatry. He made then this direct application in relation to that connivance of popery viz. ‘From this year will I reckon the sin of Ireland, that those whom you now imbrace shall be your ruine, and you shall beare this iniquity.’⁸⁸

This is an unusually forceful and confident intervention in public affairs for a twenty-one year old, so much so that one immediately turns to the sources to check its authenticity. Here again we are left with Bernard, supported by Parr, as the sole source for a story about the young Ussher. For Bernard, this story was proof of Ussher’s prophetic status: for forty years after the publication date of the Bible from which he took his text, in 1641, the Irish Catholics rose against the English, fulfilling the young Ussher’s warning. Given that he was writing after the rising, this smacks of Ussher’s biographer engaging in vaticinium ex eventu. But the clumsiness of the dating, does at least confirm that the basic event—the sermon—really happened.⁸⁹And, whatever the truth about its prophetic intent, there is no doubt that this sermon fits perfectly with Ussher’s views—he was to speak out again about government policy on this issue in 1622 and in 1627.⁹⁰

C O N C LU S I O N The Irish Reformation at the turn of the century was delicately poised. The success of Henry Fitzsimon in his mission amongst the Anglo-Irish, and the steadfastness of ordinary Catholics such as George Netterville, John and Robert Scurlock, and Christopher Eustace, pointed clearly to the growing strength of the separate Counter-Reformation Catholic Church. The state church struggled to respond. Not only did it face the major practical problems of restructuring the ministry, securing committed protestant clergy, and training their replacements,⁹¹there was also the intellectual challenges of creating a theological reply to the claims of the Catholic side, and placing the new protestant Irish church in a clearly defined ideological and historical context. But the foundation of Trinity and the efforts of fellows such as Ussher suggested that an Irish protestant response—of a rather uncompromising variety—was beginning to emerge. It is to the role of Trinity, and Ussher, in shaping that reponse that we now turn. ⁸⁸ Bernard, Life, 38–9. ⁸⁹ The process of reshaping the story to confirm Ussher’s prophetic status was completed by Parr in 1686, who antedated the sermon by a year to make the correspondence with Ezekiel more straightforward and also added some details to point up the parallel with the position in James II’s reign, when Catholics were again seeking toleration: Parr, Life, 8–9. ⁹⁰ See below, pp. 115–16, 146–8. ⁹¹ For a detailed treatment of these processes, see Ford, Protestant Reformation, chs. 2–6.

2 Intellectual Formation: Trinity College, Dublin James Ussher was born into a prosperous and well-established Dublin family on 4 January 1581. His father was Arland Ussher, a middle-ranking government official, his mother Margaret, née Stanihurst, the daughter of Sir James Stanihurst. He entered the newly opened Trinity College, Dublin in 1594, as one of its first scholars.¹ He obtained his BA by 1599, probably in 1598, was apparently a fellow and MA by 1600, was awarded a BD in 1607 and a DD in 1613.² In 1607 he became Professor of Sacred Theology (as Ussher described his position) or Professor of Theological Controversies (as the College termed him), a post he held until 1621, when he left Trinity to become a bishop.³ Fellows at Trinity were allowed to serve both the College and the local church, and Ussher pursued a clerical career in tandem with his academic one.⁴ In May 1602, he was ordained deacon in Trinity chapel by his uncle the Archbishop of Armagh, Henry Ussher, ¹ Bernard, Life, 25, states that Ussher, as the first scholar to enter, was placed first in the admissions book. This is not supported by the only surviving list (PB, 197b) of scholars, students, and fellows, where Ussher is listed fifth, but the first volume of the matriculation book, to which Bernard is presumably referring, has not survived: for evidence of an earlier matriculation book, see TCD Mun. V/5/1, p. 34. ² Bernard, Life, 30, 33; Al. Dub., s.v. Ussher, James; Bernard claims that Ussher was a BA by 1598, when he answered the philosophy act at commencements before the earl of Essex, but Essex did not arrive in Ireland until 9 May 1599: P. E. J. Hammer, ‘Devereux, Robert, Second Earl of Essex (1565–1601)’, ODNB; we know that Ussher was definitely a BA by January 1600, since he refers to himself as such in his letter to Fitzsimon: Bodl. MS Barlow 13, fol. 83r; the PB, 6a, refers to him as Sr Ussher in November 1599, suggesting that he was a BA by then. Ussher signed an acknowledgement in January 1600, apparently as a fellow: PB, 221a; he was certainly a fellow by October 1601: UW, i. 15; Bernard says he received his MA on the same day as Essex was executed, which would be 25 Feb. 1601; on the other hand Ussher is referred to as Mr (sugesting he had obtained his MA) in 1600: PB, 6b; UW, i. 15; the simplest conclusion to be drawn from this is that Ussher followed the normal course of a four-year BA (by 1598) and a two-year MA (by 1600) and was made a fellow by 1600. ³ Bernard, Life, 45; TCD MS 792, fol. 1r (printed in UW, xiv. 199), where the title page, in Ussher’s hand, describes him as professor sacrae theologiae; PB, 187a, 194a. ⁴ See the fellow’s oath in the statutes: J. P. Mahaffy, An Epoch in Irish History. Trinity College, Dublin: Its Foundation and Early Fortunes, 1591–1660 (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1970), 340.

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and in 1605 he was collated to the chancellorship of St Patrick’s by Archbishop Loftus.⁵ During his years in Trinity, Ussher settled down to a regular pattern. His first emphasis, a constant throughout his life, was preaching. The protestant stress on the overwhelming importance of unmerited grace, and the assumption that the normal way that God conveyed it was through preaching, ensured that the sermon lay at the centre of reformed protestant piety. Ussher’s, and Trinity’s, first involvement in the life of Dublin was to provide for additional preaching and instruction through public lectures and sermons. As early as 1595, Archbishop Loftus of Dublin (perhaps not the most impartial observer) claimed that the quantity and quality of preaching in the city could be compared to any church in Europe.⁶ This was partly due to a thrice-weekly lecture—an instructional sermon—served by Trinity fellows and paid for initially by Loftus, and from 1599 by a £40 annual government grant.⁷ This lectureship provided Ussher with an important public role: from the early years of the seventeenth century he lectured in Christ Church on Sunday afternoons dealing with the controversies between protestants and Catholics.⁸ When he became chancellor of St Patrick’s, Ussher, unlike many other clergy in the Church of Ireland, did not seek to acquire additional benefices, but committed himself to preaching in person every Sunday in his church at Finglas.⁹ The second constant in Ussher’s life was his theology: teaching, research, and writing. He gave his weekly divinity lectures in Trinity during term time, and also devoted himself to building up the College library into a research library without parallel in Ireland. In 1603 he travelled to England to buy books, beginning a series of regular visits in 1606, 1609, and 1612.¹⁰ This pattern of three-yearly summer trips enabled Ussher to combine college business with research, spending a month each in Oxford and Cambridge, and a month in London, where he particularly used the library of that gentleman-scholar, Sir Robert Cotton.¹¹ The result of these labours came in 1613 with his first publication, which gave an historical account of the continuity of the Christian church from the time of the apostles.¹² This established the author as a scholarly figure not only in Ireland, but also in England, ⁵ TCD MS 2624; Bernard, Life, 35, mistakenly claims that he was ordained deacon and priest (a not unusual practice in the Irish church) on Christmas day 1601; H. J. Lawlor, The Fasti of St Patrick’s, Dublin (Dundalk: W. Tempest, 1930), 63; Bernard, Life, 44–5. ⁶ SP 63/184/12 (CSPI, 1592–6, 430–1). ⁷ Ibid.; TCD Mun. P/1/38, P/1/186 (printed in UW, i. 99); James Morrin (ed.), Calendar of the Patent and Close Rolls of Chancery in Ireland, 3 vols. (Dublin, 1861–3), ii. 553; PB, 1b. ⁸ Bernard, Life, 34. ⁹ Ibid. 45. ¹⁰ Ibid. 42; Mary Pollard, Dublin’s Trade in Books, 1550–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 37; Bodl. MS Rawlinson C 849, fols. 3r, 6r; Bodl. MS Rawlinson C 919, p. 893*; PB, 63b, 80a, 82a; UW, xvi. 315–21. ¹¹ Bernard, Life, 42–3; Parr, Life, 10–11. ¹² Ussher, De successione.

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bringing him to the attention of the King, who, in 1621, appointed him Bishop of Meath, bringing to an end the first, university stage of Ussher’s career. This, then, is the period of Ussher’s intellectual formation, when he was shaped by his Irish upbringing and his education at the new Dublin university. But it is also the time when Ussher, as professor and dignitary, began himself to shape the Church of Ireland. Though complex and often difficult to untangle, these contrapuntal processes, Ussher’s reaction to his upbringing and education, and the way in which he subsequently began to shape the institutions that formed him are fundamental not only to any study of the way in which he developed religiously and intellectually, but also to the formation of an ideologically aware Church of Ireland in the early seventeenth century. The detailed information that we possess from Ussher’s published works and manuscripts means that he can serve as a kind of lens, through which we can see, with unusual clarity for early modern Ireland, the way in which the Church of Ireland responded to the challenge of Fitzsimon and the Counter-Reformation during this crucial period when it defined its theological and political identity.

S O U RC E S Never the most self-revealing of authors, Ussher himself has left us little autobiographical detail to flesh out these bare facts about his childhood and education. We do, it is true, have the records of Trinity—the extensive College muniments and the ‘Particular book’ which reveal much about the internal working of the institution—and the manuscript notebooks, library catalogues, and published and unpublished treatises by Ussher and the early students and fellows, which provide us with quite detailed information about the curriculum and intellectual interests of the new university. But these formal and informal sources, though extensive and valuable, are often difficult to interpret, and have only been used by scholars to a limited extent. Instead, when looking for information about the early Ussher scholars have turned to a much more readily accessible and superficially straightforward resource, the first biography of Ussher by Nicholas Bernard. Bernard was an English cleric, ordained by Ussher in 1626 at Drogheda, who became his chaplain, served as a minister in his province over the next two decades, encountered Ussher again in exile in England in the last decade of his life, and, finally, looked after the Primate’s funeral arrangements in 1656.¹³ Bernard’s funeral sermon, together with a biography, was published as The life and death of the most reverend and learned father of our church Dr James Usher immediately after the Primate’s death.¹⁴ The accessible style and authoritative tone of Bernard’s work, and the personal knowledge the author had ¹³ Ciaran Diamond, ‘Bernard, Nicholas (d.1661)’, ODNB. ¹⁴ London and Dublin, 1656.

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of his subject, has meant that Life has become the main, in some cases the sole, source for later treatments of Ussher’s early years, with its facts and revealing stories copied and repeated by all subsequent writers and historians. There are, though, some slight difficulties about using Bernard. First, in giving an account of the Primate’s early life he was dealing with events which had happened some twenty years before he met Ussher; second, the Life was also structured by the literary models which Bernard used; and finally, it was also shaped by Bernard’s own religious prejudices and personal concerns—in particular, he found it difficult to resist the temptation of reconstructing Ussher’s reputation after his death to suit the times in which he, Bernard, was living.¹⁵ Thus in relation to Ussher’s early life, Bernard’s factual statements, where they can be checked independently, are not always correct, which, of course, casts doubt about the accuracy of those stories for which he is the sole, unverifiable, source.¹⁶ Hesitancy is increased by the fact that we are dealing with a well-established literary genre, the funeral sermon with an accompanying ‘life’, which in this case has a distinct whiff of godly hagiography.¹⁷ Bernard was a sophisticated ‘spin-doctor’, capable of extracting good news even from the execution of an Irish protestant bishop for sodomy.¹⁸ Here in 1656 he was writing a model biography: hence the explicit analogies with the Old Testament prophet Samuel and with those two protestant saints, Augustine and Calvin. He took as the text for his sermon 1 Samuel 25:1, ‘And Samuel died; and all the Israelites were gathered together, and lamented him’, and went on to point to the parallels between Samuel’s and Ussher’s experiences. Thus ‘Samuel began to be a preacher when the word of God was precious, or rare; and so was it when this reverend person first entered the ministry in his native country’; or ‘Samuel lived to see great changes in the government, an enemy overrunning his native country, thirty thousand slain in one day . . . so did this eminent person live to see and hear the like by that horrid rebellion in his native countrey of Ireland, where were put to death 154 thousand’.¹⁹ Bernard also drew attention to correspondences with the lives of Calvin—who, like Ussher, was only able to switch from law to theology because of the sudden death of his father—and Augustine, who died at the same age—seventy-six—as Ussher, and like him dedicated his life to preaching, writing, and defending the truth.²⁰ The desire to fit Ussher into preconceived ¹⁵ They first met in 1624, Bernard, Life, 40; for Bernard’s manipulation of Ussher’s reputation, see above, p. 5. ¹⁶ See above, nn. 1, 2, 5. ¹⁷ Jessica Martin, Walton’s Lives: Conformist Commemorations and the Rise of Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Allan Pritchard, English Biography in the Seventeenth Century: A Critical Survey ( Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 41. ¹⁸ Peter Marshall, Mother Leakey and the Bishop: Ghosts and Stories in Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), ch. 5. ¹⁹ Bernard, Life, 1–18, 22. ²⁰ Ibid. 30–1, 110–16; the analogy with Augustine even extended to teenage temptations (ibid. 24), though Ussher’s depravity was, rather bathetically, card-playing.

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categories would have been accentuated by Bernard’s own assumptions and biases. He came from a markedly puritan background, and, as we have noted, he tended to respond to the tumultuous times in which he was writing. Thus, the Life, published during the Commonwealth, treated Ussher like a puritan saint—it was no coincidence that that great seventeenth-century biographer of the nonconformist saints, Samuel Clarke, was able to lift his lengthy account of Ussher almost verbatim from the pages of Bernard’s Life.²¹ Even after the Restoration in 1660, when the tide began to turn against nonconformity, Bernard was able to readjust his portrait of Ussher, producing a far less radical and more conformist picture.²² Clearly, then, we need to bear in mind Bernard’s Procrustean tendency to fit Ussher to his godly ideals. Yet the Life should—indeed can—not be entirely discarded as a source: it is not just that it provides us with unique, though otherwise unverifiable details. There is also a probability that much of what he says is true: Bernard knew Ussher well, working with or near him in Ireland for fourteen years, and subsequently remaining in contact with him in England, was in possession of many of his manuscripts, and on several occasions in his writings about Ussher makes it clear that he had checked details with the Primate.²³ In short, we are left with primary source which, though it must be used with caution, still must be used, since it contains essential personal information about a personally rather reticent subject.

R E L I G I O U S A N D I N T E L L E C T UA L F O R M AT I O N The key question about anyone born into the Dublin Anglo-Irish elite in the 1580s is, of course, their choice of religion. Given that we know that Ussher, unlike most of the Anglo-Irish community, became a protestant, it is tempting for historians simply to stitch together the various possible influences which led him in this direction. The first and most obvious is his family. That this was, in the most general sense, religious, and, more specifically, biblical is confirmed by Bernard’s delightfully paradoxical account of Ussher’s earliest education, one of those stories which, even if it is not, ought to be true: ‘two of his aunts, who be reason of their blindnesse from their cradles, never saw letters, taught him first to read. Their readiness in the scriptures was marvellous, being able suddenly to have repeated any part of the bible’.²⁴ The natural, though not necessary, assumption is that such vernacular Bible reading was essentially reformed. Since he was related to John Ussher, that Dublin ur-protestant, and had Henry Ussher as his uncle, his religious allegiance may seem to be a foregone conclusion. ²¹ Samuel Clarke, A general martyrologie (London, 1677), 277–302. ²² See below, p. 283. ²³ See Bernard, Life, 27: ‘I have often heard him speak’. ²⁴ Ibid. 22.

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However, the religious fault-lines of early modern Ireland ran right through the Ussher family too. Little information has survived on the religious views of his father, leaving him like so many of his generation of Dublin Anglo-Irish, hovering vaguely between protestantism and conformity. But we do know that his mother, Margaret, made a decisive step in the other direction. She was, as Bernard put it, ‘seduced by some of the popish priests’ in the early seventeenth century while Ussher was away in England, and despite his best efforts she, like her brother Richard, died a firm catholic.²⁵ Indeed, Richard Stanihurst’s career, moving from a distinguished Anglo-Irish background and early academic interests to a firm commitment to the Continental Counter-Reformation, provides an example of an alternative, and more common, Anglo-Irish trajectory to that pursued by James Ussher. If not home and family, then a more unambiguously protestant influence on Ussher’s early development was education. According to Bernard, Ussher from the age of eight went to Dublin city’s grammar school.²⁶ Later, it is true, the religious output of this school was decidedly mixed: between 1610 and 1622 it sent 100 pupils to Trinity College, but another 160 ‘beyond sea’, some of whom had come back priests.²⁷ However, during the time Ussher was there, the school was under the decidedly protestant regime of Fullerton and Hamilton. This may well have been the crucial influence upon the young Ussher—according to his second chaplain-biographer, Richard Parr (who, admittedly, only met him for the first time in 1643), Ussher counted it as one of the great providences of God towards him that ‘he had the opportunity and advantage of his education from these men’.²⁸ And if school was indeed decisive, then university could only have settled and strengthened Ussher’s religious commitment. The new College was not just protestant, it was fiercely so. And, in addition, Ussher had close personal links with the new fellows: his two teachers, Fullerton and Hamilton, followed him to Trinity, where they played a leading role in running the new College, and they were joined by the protestant Dublin minister Luke Challoner, Ussher’s cousin, who served as fellow and vice-provost.²⁹ There is, though, a more overarching and dramatic explanation for Ussher’s protestantism than family or teachers: the hand of God. Conversion, that crucial Augustinian moment when grace seized hold of the sinful human will—‘not mans act but Gods’, as Bernard put it—was a staple of protestant and, more particularly, puritan narratives.³⁰ Ussher’s moment came early. In the words ²⁵ Ibid. 19; UW, xv. 3–4—undated, but probably between 1609 (publication of Hebdomida Mariana, mentioned by Ussher) and 1614 (Hebdomida eucharistica, not mentioned by Ussher); see also Colm Lennon, Richard Stanihurst the Dubliner 1547–1618 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1981), 124–5. ²⁶ Bernard, Life, 22. ²⁷ NLI, MSS 8014/iv/1, 8014/v/8, 8014/v/1. ²⁸ Parr, Life, 3. ²⁹ PB, 197b; Ussher eventually married Challoner’s daughter, Phoebe. ³⁰ Bernard, Life, 20; D. B. Shea, Spiritual Autobiography in Early America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968); Patricia Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of

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of yet another chaplain-biographer, Stanley Gower, Ussher at the age of ten ‘was converted from a state of nature into grace’.³¹ The threefold catalyst was, according to Bernard, hearing a sermon on Romans 12:1—‘I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God’; reading a book of Latin meditations based on the works of Augustine; and, finally, coming across some manuscript notes on sabbath observance by the great puritan preacher and theologian William Perkins.³² Given that both Bernard and Gower were indeed writing godly narratives, it is difficult to know how much biographical weight to attach to this almost-standard rite of passage. Let us just note that Parr, who did not share his fellow chaplains’ puritan inclinations, omits the conversion experience from his narrative of Ussher’s early life.³³ Though the sources for Ussher’s intellectual formation are much fuller than those relating to his religious development, they are no less difficult to interpret. We have quite detailed information about the early academic environment in Trinity—lists of fellows, books they wrote, sermons they preached, library catalogues and notebooks of students—and we also have a significant amount of material from Ussher’s time as student, fellow, and professor—his own jottings, book purchases, lectures, letters, and more formal writings. The problem is to tease out the relationship between Ussher’s academic environment and his own formation. Obviously, he was shaped by those who taught him, but the nature of that relationship can, of course, be complex—students can react against, as well as identify with their teachers; they can even, horribile dictu, learn nothing whatsoever from them. The challenge is to work out what kind of intellectual environment Ussher encountered in Trinity and how he responded to these early influences. As an undergraduate, Ussher would have followed the usual four-year course in Trinity, which, like the English universities, had no formal theological content, focusing upon the trivium—grammar, rhetoric, and logic—and elements of natural philosophy.³⁴ And indeed, we have in one of Ussher’s earliest notebooks his calendar for a year’s study (which, in the best tradition of such student American Expression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); D. B. Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 35–41. ³¹ James Ussher, Eighteen sermons preached in Oxford 1640 (London, 1659), sig. [A3r]; Gower’s account was based on Bernard’s Life, rather than any additional personal knowledge of Ussher. ³² Bernard, Life, 23. ³³ Parr, Life, 3; apart from this and some other details, Parr generally follows Bernard’s account of Ussher’s early life; for the argument that ‘Anglicans’ placed less emphasis upon grace and conversion, see Dean Ebner, Autobiography in Seventeenth-Century England: Theology and the Self ( The Hague: Mouton, 1971), 72–9. ³⁴ M. H. Curtis, Oxford and Cambridge in Transition: 1558–1642 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 185; for a detailed description of the Trinity undergraduate curriculum, see Elizabethanne Boran, ‘Libraries and Learning: The Early History of Trinity College, Dublin from 1592 to 1641’, PhD thesis, University of Dublin, 1995, chs. 2 and 3; and also R. B. McDowell and D. A. Webb,

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timetables, tails off into blank entries after ten months) detailing reading in grammar, dialectic, logic, ethics, and rhetoric.³⁵ But if the content was traditional, the methodology that the early fellows used in teaching the students was distinctive: Ussher’s student notebook is dominated by books by and about the French Calvinist Pierre de la Ramée (Peter Ramus). Ramus’ philosophical system, which was in vogue in European schools and universities between 1570 and 1630, sought to replace Aristotelian logic with a simplified approach, concentrating on classifying and distinguishing concepts and axioms. He started from the general and proceeded by a series of divisions and distinctions to the more particular. Though elsewhere in Europe it was used by Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, and even Arminians, in England and Scotland and, as we shall see, Ireland, it was particularly associated with Calvinist or puritan institutions.³⁶ The explanation for this linkage is far from clear. Most simply, it can be ascribed to the fact that Ramus died in the Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572, earning the status of protestant martyr. More complex interpretations discern a relationship between his systematic approach and protestant religious concerns.³⁷ Alternatively, it has been suggested that the attractiveness of Ramism sprang from its radical, anti-scholastic, egalitarian nature, making it the natural bedfellow of anti-establishment puritans.³⁸ The predilection can, though, be explained more accidentally, as a product of the fact that Ramus’s first English advocate was that godly academic Dudley Fenner, who, when translating Ramus into English, set about replacing the illustrations from classical texts with biblical ones, thereby indelibly associating Ramism in England and Scotland with the study of the Bible.³⁹ Ramism in Trinity came from Cambridge and, probably, Glasgow: Fullerton’s close friend, Andrew Melville, had been responsible for introducing Ramism into Glasgow University; whilst one of the other main English advocates of Ramism, William Temple, served as Trinity’s provost from 1609 to 1626 and published a Ramist analysis of the Psalms. A subsequent provost, William Chappell, extended the range of Ramism to cover the art of preaching.⁴⁰ In this Trinity College Dublin 1592–1952: An Academic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), ch. 1. ³⁵ TCD MS 782 fol. 16r; for Ussher’s student notes on these topics, see TCD MS 778. ³⁶ J. S. Freedman, ‘The Diffusion of the Writings of Peter Ramus in Central Europe c.1570–c.1630’, Renaissance Quarterly, 46 (1993), 124, 128. ³⁷ Philippe Desan, Naissance de la méthode: Machiavel, La Ramée, Bodin, Montaigne, Descartes (Paris: Nizet, 1987), 11, cited in Elizabethanne Boran, ‘Ramism in Trinity College, Dublin in the Early Seventeenth Century’, in Mordechai Feingold et al. (eds.), The Influence of Petrus Ramus (Basel: Schwabe, 2001), 185. ³⁸ Hugh Kearney, Scholars and Gentlemen: Universities and Society in Pre-industrial Britain, 1500–1700 (London: Faber, 1970), ch. 3; Rosemary O’Day, Education and Society 1500–1800: The Social Foundations of Education in Early Modern Britain (London: Longman, 1982), 128. ³⁹ John Morgan, Godly Learning. Puritan Attitudes towards Reason, Learning and Education, 1560–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 109. ⁴⁰ William Sir Temple, A logicall analysis of twentie select Psalmes (London, 1605); William Temple, Analysis logica triginta psalmorum, a primo scilicet ad tricesimum primum (London, 1611);

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context, then, Ramism was a way of understanding, organizing, and explaining the Bible—of putting reason at the service of the word of God. But the appeal of Ramism may well have been more pragmatic than dogmatic or ideological—a product of its relative ‘simplicity and accessibility’.⁴¹ Studies of the uptake of Ramism in central Europe have shown that it was most commonly used in schools. Ramus produced straightforward textbooks in subjects such as logic, rhetoric, and grammar which were ideal for preparing students for the early years of university. Ramism appealed ‘not to the best philosophers of the age, but to the dogsbodies who laboured away to drum the arts curricula of universities into recalcitrant teenagers’. It was, in short, more about pedagogy than philosophy.⁴² It may, therefore, have offered the new Irish university—which, to remedy the defects of the Irish schooling system, also employed a schoolmaster—an educational method which simplified learning and ensured that the university produced well-rounded students from its varied intake.⁴³ The obvious comparison here is with that other Calvinist foundation designed to kick-start the Reformation, the University of Herborn in Germany, whose founders ‘were drawn to Ramism neither by some doctrinaire abhorrence of pagan philosophy nor by some abstract affinity between Ramism and Calvinism, but primarily by the utility of this simplified and practical pedagogy for the practical agenda of the second reformation’.⁴⁴ In one sense, there is little doubt that Ussher was strongly influenced by Ramism. His student notebooks contain so many Ramist diagrams that they have been characterized as ‘dichotomization gone mad’.⁴⁵ Though it has been suggested that Ussher may have redirected the Trinity curriculum away from Ramism in the late 1610s, the evidence for this is sparse, and even in the 1620s and 1630s, Ussher relied upon Ramist skeletons to provide structure for his extempore sermons.⁴⁶ However, though he used the method, there is less evidence that it shaped the content of his sermons and writings. Even Hugh Kearney, who makes the most extravagant claims for the importance of Ramism at Trinity, finds it difficult to produce concrete proof of its impact on another English fellow, Mathias Holmes, laid out his sermons by means of Ramist diagrams in the late 1590s: TCD MS 295, fols. 65v, 72r, 73v. ⁴¹ T. W. Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Division in Puritanism (Chapel Hill, 1988). ⁴² W. J. Ong, Ramus, Method and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason, 2nd edn. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), Foreword by Adrian Johns, p. v, ch. 7. ⁴³ TCD MS 782, fol. 13v, argues that a Ramist training from the age of 7 will enable a 15 year old to tackle university philosophy. ⁴⁴ Howard Hotson, Johan Heinrich Alsted 1588–1638: Between Renaissance, Reformation, and Universal Reform (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 22. ⁴⁵ Boran, ‘Ramism in Trinity College’, 182; Kearney, Scholars and Gentlemen, 67–70; Ussher’s early notebook, TCD MS 782, contains extensive notes on Ramus and Ramist authors. ⁴⁶ Ibid. 198; see Ussher’s sermon notes in Bodl. MS Rawlinson D 1290, fol. 27r–38r, 62v.

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Ussher’s theological thinking.⁴⁷ It was, in fine, less of system than a method, more a convenient organizational tool than a primary determinant of Ussher’s theological development. If Ussher’s weekdays as a student were spent studying Ramus and rhetoric, the weekends were most definitely devoted to religion. On Saturdays, all tutors read a theology lecture to their students, whilst on Sunday the fellows preached in the College chapel and the College catechist instructed and tested the students in the essentials of Christianity.⁴⁸ In addition, students were required to deliver commonplaces—sermon-like exercises on a set theme—in the College chapel, and all tutors had a primary responsibility for looking after their charges’ moral and religious development. The key questions, of course, are what kind of theology was Ussher taught, and how did he respond to it? Given the pivotal role of Trinity in fostering an indigenous protestantism in Ireland, these were important issues. There are two obvious characteristics of the Trinity staff during its early decades: their Calvinism, and their puritanism. The former was unsurprising, given the predominance of Calvinist theology in England and Scottish universities by the end of the sixteenth century. Anonymous notes of sermons preached by Trinity staff in the 1590s provide us with a window into the fare which the early fellows provided for the new students. The content is typically Calvinist in its stress upon the primacy of grace and the word, starting from the sinfulness of human nature—‘man by nature is a firebrand of hell’, as Daniel gently put it—and moving on to double predestination—preaching, Daniel explained in good Pauline fashion, hardens the hearts of some, melts the hearts of others, ‘according to that everlasting purpose which from eternitie he hath decreed’, or, as Hamilton emphasized, ‘some are adopted to eternal salvation’ before the creation of the world, ‘some are rejected to eternall punishment’.⁴⁹ The continuation in Trinity of the Irish church’s puritan strain was more striking and immediately intriguing. It began with a nexus of ministers from the English Midlands. The first link in the chain was the neglected figure of Matthias Holmes. A Warwickshire pastor, active in the synod there, he was imprisoned following the crackdown on presbyterianism in 1589. Bound over to the sum of £200 not to preach in England, he came to Ireland as chaplain to Sir Richard Bingham, the firmly protestant governor of Connacht.⁵⁰ In 1593–5 he was involved in collecting money in Connacht for Trinity, and then made the natural ⁴⁷ Kearney, Scholars and Gentlemen, 68. ⁴⁸ Bernard, Life, 26–7; Mahaffy, Epoch, 331–2. ⁴⁹ TCD MS 1210, fols. 117v, 141v, 144v–145r; the notes on the sermons are not in Ussher’s hand, but the book was clearly subsequently in his possession: see his signature, fol. 153r, and other pages which contain notes in his hand: fols 95v, 112r–113v. ⁵⁰ HMC, Salisbury MSS, vi. 460, 531; S. J. Knox, Walter Travers: Paragon of Elizabethan Puritanism (London: Methuen, 1962), 128; WW, iii. 329.

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transition to serving the new College as one of its first fellows.⁵¹ In 1596 he left Ireland for that other refuge for English radicals, Middleburg in the Netherlands, where he wrote plaintive letters to his patron, the earl of Essex, and transcribed presbyterian treatises, before returning to Ireland by 1598, dying there in 1599.⁵² The second link was another Midlands presbyterian, Walter Travers. Holmes claimed that he was instrumental in 1594 in persuading the fellows to elect Travers as Trinity’s first full-time provost—an appointment which, he said, incensed the bishops in England.⁵³ Their anger was understandable: Travers was an extraordinary choice—along with Thomas Cartwright, he was one of the two leaders of the English presbyterian movement, author of the classic text which adapted the Calvinist system of church government to English conditions, and a particular enemy of the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift. During the break-up of the English presbyterian movement in 1589–90, Travers mysteriously managed to escape arrest, possibly protected by his (and Loftus’s) long-standing patron, Lord Burghley. But he clearly could not hope for advancement in England, so the offer of Trinity was welcome and he served as provost till 1598.⁵⁴ Travers, in turn, entertained at Trinity the recently freed leader of the Warwickshire presbyterian classis, Humphrey Fenn, a close associate of Cartwright, who is recorded as preaching in Trinity and Dublin from 1594 to 1596.⁵⁵ The succession of provosts reinforced Trinity’s puritan, indeed presbyterian bent. Travers was eventually succeeded by Henry Alvey (1606–9), whose ambitions to become master of St John’s College Cambridge were thwarted by his associations with the classis movement, and he was followed by William Temple (1609–26), another Essex client, who lamented the English bishops’ determination to make ministers wear the hated surplice.⁵⁶ After Temple’s lengthy period as provost, Trinity unsuccessfully tried to attract the moderate puritan Richard Sibbes, and finally settled upon an Emmanuel graduate with a godly background, William Bedell (1627–9). The professorship of divinity provides further evidence of Trinity’s theological inclinations: after the resignation of Ussher in 1621, the College consulted the éminence grise of English puritanism, Laurence Chaderton, the Master of Emmanuel, and then offered the post first to John Preston, who succeeded ⁵¹ TCD Mun. P/1/13, printed in Mahaffy, Epoch, p. 109, but misdated; and P/1/9; PB, 197b; HMC, Salisbury MSS, vi. 460. ⁵² PB, 219b; TCD MS 180, fol. 148v; Bodl. MS Barlow 13 fols. 346r–365v; WW, iii. 329; Robert Shephard, ‘Court Factions in Early Modern England’, Journal of Modern History, 64 (1992), 728; Holmes’s papers survive, hitherto unidentified, in Bodl. MS Rawlinson C 849 fols. 376r–415v and in TCD MSS 180, 295. That these are in Holmes’s hand can be established by comparison with Mun. P/1/38. ⁵³ HMC, Salisbury MSS, vi. 460. ⁵⁴ Knox, Travers; Alan Ford, ‘Travers, Walter (1548?–1635)’, ODNB. ⁵⁵ TCD MS 1210, fol. 143v, MS 357, fol. 36v, MS 2640, p. 7; J. S. Brewer and William Bullen (eds.), Calendar of the Carew Manuscripts Preserved in the Archiepiscopal Library at Lambeth, 6 vols. (London, 1867–73), iii. 240–6, 248, 253–5, 257–8, 260. ⁵⁶ Elizabethanne Boran, ‘Temple, Sir William (1554/5–1627)’, ODNB.

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Chaderton not only as Master of Emmanuel but also as the effectual leader of moderate puritanism.⁵⁷ Preston politely declined, but amongst his suggested alternatives were Thomas Hooker (who subsequently emigrated to America) and Samuel Ward, the puritan minister of Ipswich, then in gaol for publishing an antiSpanish emblem.⁵⁸ On 28 August 1621 the College elected the latter, a startling indication of the differing standards of conformity in Ireland and England.⁵⁹ On Ward’s refusal, the post was finally accepted by one of Trinity’s own fellows, Joshua Hoyle, whose religious outlook can most easily be discerned by his pathological hatred of Archbishop Laud and his role as a leading presbyterian member of the Westminster Assembly.⁶⁰ But the crude enumeration of puritans does not necessarily tell us anything about Ussher’s own outlook, as is abundantly evident from the sharply contrasting verdicts of Ussher’s biographers about his response to his education at Trinity. Some, generally those who are part of the nonconformist tradition, have seen a direct correlation between his education and what they have seen as his later sympathy for puritans and presbyterians—the fact that he was, as Samuel Clarke put it, ‘so far from a prelatical spirit, that on the contrary he was an advocate for, and patrone of godly and conscientious non-conformists’.⁶¹ This is the historiographical tradition begun by Bernard and most recently and succinctly summarized by Crawford Gribben.⁶² Though based on very different assumptions, a similar claim was made by the Laudian historian and polemicist Peter Heylyn. For him, Trinity was staffed by extremists of the worst sort: Travers was ‘a furious zealot’, who, along with Ussher, had fostered a ‘Calvinian project’ to take over the Irish church. Ussher’s later career, as far as Heylyn was concerned, had merely reflected his dangerously puritan education.⁶³ But others have interpreted the impact of Trinity’s puritan ethos on Ussher very differently. The most notable corrective to the school of Bernard and Clarke is Ussher’s first and, in many ways, still best scholarly biographer, the professor of divinity at Trinity College Charles Elrington (1787–1850), who also edited the standard seventeen-volume edition of Ussher’s works. Sharing Heylyn’s high-church Anglicanism, his views on the choice of Travers as provost were not complimentary (‘perhaps the most improper man in England for the place’), but, unlike Heylyn, Elrington believed that Ussher had overcome ⁵⁷ UW, xvi. 371; PB, 187a; Jonathan D. Moore, ‘Preston, John (1587–1628)’, ODNB. ⁵⁸ J. M. Blatchly, ‘Ward, Samuel (1577–1640)’, ODNB. ⁵⁹ PB, 193b. ⁶⁰ [Joshua Hoyle], Jehojadahs iustice against Mattan Baals priest (London, 1645); Vivienne Larminie, ‘Hoyle, Joshua (d.1654)’, ODNB. ⁶¹ Samuel Clarke, A collection of the lives of ten eminent divines (London, 1662), 210; William Urwick, The Early History of Trinity College, Dublin 1591–1660 (Dublin, 1892), 83 ff.; J. A. Carr, The Life and Times of James Ussher Archbishop of Armagh (London: Gardner, Darton, 1895), 69–77. ⁶² Crawford Gribben, The Irish Puritans: James Ussher and the Reformation of the Church (Darlington: Evangelical Press, 2003). ⁶³ Peter Heylyn, Aerius redivivus, or, the history of the Presbyterians (Oxford, 1670), 44, 392–5; see below, pp. 88–9.

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any early presbyterian influences to become not only a thoroughly conformist bishop, but also one who by the end of his life had rejected Calvinism and ‘almost obliterated’ Trinity’s impact.⁶⁴ Several other scholars have endorsed Elrington’s interpretation.⁶⁵ Another nineteenth-century Irish churchman, James Carr, argued that though Ussher began ‘as an extreme Calvinist, under the training of men like Travers and Alvey, he ended as a man of more reasonable views’.⁶⁶ Buick Knox, author of the standard twentieth-century biography of the Primate, though himself a presbyterian, similarly stressed Ussher’s ‘Anglican’ credentials, despite his constant association with the godly and his citation of puritan authors.⁶⁷ More recently, Elizabethanne Boran has accepted that Ussher was influenced by the ‘moderate puritan ethos’ of Trinity, but claimed that in his later career, he moved away from these early associations and changed his theological views.⁶⁸ These various, indeed, startlingly different, interpretations raise important issues about the nature and consistency of Ussher’s theological development. Was he a puritan who was fundamentally and permanently shaped by Travers, Fenn, and Holmes, or did he react against his early influences, so that, like the English bishop Robert Sanderson, he ultimately became a paragon of an ‘Anglican’ divine?⁶⁹ His appearance in both Samuel Clarke’s gallery of puritan saints and in the classic compendium of Anglican theology compiled by More and Cross points clearly to the tension. But which is his natural home?⁷⁰ Ultimately, these questions will have to be resolved when looking back over Ussher’s whole career, but an essential initial step towards this goal is a detailed examination of how Ussher responded to Trinity’s early intellectual environment.

PRESBYTERIANISM IN TRINITY The first and most obvious question concerns Travers, Alvey, Fenn, and Holmes: did they seek to turn the Trinity students into presbyterians, or, more precisely, to what extent did they shape their charges’ views on the way in which the Church ⁶⁴ UW, i. 15–17, 289–95. ⁶⁵ F. R. Bolton, The Caroline Tradition of the Church of Ireland with Particular Reference to Bishop Jeremy Taylor (London: SPCK, 1958), 3–4; E. W. Watson, ‘James Ussher’, in W.E. Collins (ed.), Typical English Churchmen (London: SPCK, 1902), 62. ⁶⁶ Carr, Life and Times, 203–4. ⁶⁷ Knox, Ussher, 18–23, 123, 136 ff. ⁶⁸ Elizabethanne Boran, ‘An Early Friendship Network of James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, 1626–1656’, in H. H. W. Robinson-Hammerstein (ed.), European Universities in the Age of the Reformation (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1998), 134. ⁶⁹ P. G. Lake, ‘Serving God and the Times: The Calvinist Conformity of Robert Sanderson’, Journal of British Studies, 27 (1988), 81–116. ⁷⁰ Ussher appears in both: for Clarke, nn. 21 and 60 above; P. E. More and F. L. Cross (eds.), Anglicanism: The Thought and Practice of the Church of England (London: SPCK, 1935), p. lvii, 69–71, 134–7, 256–7, 286–8, 488–94, 608, 649, 691–2; though it should be noted that not all the excerpts from Ussher support the case for Ussher’s ‘Anglicanism’.

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should be governed? Calvin’s system of church government, which stressed the equality of ministers and the independent disciplinary power of the Church in religious matters, was, fairly obviously, diametrically opposed to the Elizabethan religious settlement, which, as the Queen repeatedly insisted, was founded upon episcopacy, hierarchy, and her supreme governorship of the Church. For Travers, Cartwright, and the leaders of the presbyterian movement, the English church was, as a result, but ‘half-reformed’. During the 1570s they put pressure on Parliament to complete the reformation and, when that failed, sought to create a ‘true church’ within the corrupt Church of England by building, from the ground up, a tiered disciplinary structure, based on equality of ministers within local classes and synods—a kind of presbyterian Trojan Horse. When the patience of the authorities finally snapped in 1589–90, the leaders of the movement were arrested, and their supporters scattered, some into exile in the Netherlands or Channel Islands, others to Ireland. The deep hostility towards presbyterianism of Elizabeth and her successor meant that there was little chance of resuscitating the movement. The general assumption is that presbyterians became, simply, puritans, still concerned with the further reformation and purification of the Church, but no longer fixated upon its discipline and structure, shifting their focus from the national to the local, from lobbying Parliament and trying to change the religious settlement, to creating godly parish communities.⁷¹ The issue is whether those presbyterians who came to Ireland accepted this shift in emphasis, or whether they saw in Ireland (and in Trinity and Ussher) a fresh opportunity for presbyterian proselytization. The dominant personality in Dublin, the guiding hand behind not only the reformation but also the foundation of Trinity College, was Adam Loftus. When he resigned as temporary provost in June 1594, he cautioned the fellows not to elect someone like him who was ‘unsound or weak’ in their dedication to the rites and ceremonies of the English church, ‘even if he does not oppose them openly’.⁷² When Travers arrived in Trinity, Loftus welcomed him, praising him for the quality and depth of his learning, but telling him that he must leave behind his presbyerianism in England—‘You are to remember that this place requires a person of exemplary conformity to the doctrine and discipline of this church as they are established by law’—and showing an acute awareness of the danger which allegations of presbyterianism could pose to Loftus’s, and his, reformation’s reputation in England:⁷³ ⁷¹ Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London: Methuen, 1967); P. G. Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); John Spurr, English Puritanism 1603–1689 (London: Macmillan, 1998). ⁷² J. W. Stubbs (ed.), Archbishop Adam Loftus and the Foundation of Trinity College Dublin: Speeches Delivered by Him on Various Occasions (Dublin, 1892), 13. ⁷³ Peter Heylyn’s claim that Loftus and Travers were in Trinity College Cambridge at the same time is supported by Venn: Heylyn, Aerius redivivus, 315; Al. Cantab., s.v. Loftus, Adam, and Travers, Walter.

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In the next place . . . it is to be hoped that you will bring them [the students] up in an universall good agreement with one another upon the just pious and solid foundation of the English reformation, to the end that when they shall be sent into the Lord’s harvest they may maintaine the sure interest of peace and true religious without blemishing our reformation with the reproachfull blotts of innovation and dissention . . . for I dread the hostility of innovation as a thing laboured by too many in England already . . . I forsee that if schisme shall be tollerated or connived at here . . . it will probably in one age indanger the overthrow of this church.⁷⁴

This was a clear, stern warning of the impossibility of espousing presbyterianism in the new and hostile climate of the 1590s, all the more powerful because it came from someone who was sympathetic to puritanism. But what was its effect? As far as we can judge, Travers steered clear of controversial issues during his four years in Trinity. We have notes on a lengthy series of sermons he preached in the College chapel.⁷⁵ His choice of text—the Psalms—was sensibly uncontroversial and pastoral, being largely concerned with exhorting the ‘godlye’ (to whom he regularly refers) to pray regularly and abstain from sin (though it is sometimes difficult not to read into them some hint of his recent troubles, as in his reference to the fact that ‘earthly kinges and judges somtyme fayle in judgment, yet God being king and judg, we should call to the Lord for justice, who will give it us’).⁷⁶ As a result, when he returned to England in 1598, the Dublin authorities were able to reassure the English privy council that he had avoided religious contention during his time in Dublin and was worthy of being allowed to resume his ministry in England. As Sir Geoffrey Fenton put it ‘and specially I have noted him always to proceed sincerely in the sound exposition of the word, nor diverting at any time to contentions, whereby the hearers may be rather led into doubts than truly edified.’⁷⁷ That said, Fenton, like Loftus, may well have been favourably disposed to Travers, and there is no evidence that Travers ever changed his underlying views about church discipline—and indeed, we know that Fenn died an unrepentant presbyterian.⁷⁸ Perhaps the most appropriate characterization of them in Dublin is that they were silent presbyterians. The extent to which the presence of these reticent Calvinists in Trinity influenced Ussher’s views on church government is thus largely speculative, but, given Ussher’s close involvement with the issue of the form of church government later in his career, not unimportant. We know that the Trinity library, which ⁷⁴ Stubbs (ed.), Archbishop Adam Loftus, 16, 18. ⁷⁵ Travers was continuing a series of sermons on the Psalms begun by Luke Challoner: TCD MS 357, fol. 36v. ⁷⁶ TCD MS 1210, fol. 102r. ⁷⁷ CSPI, 1598–99, 283. ⁷⁸ [Humphrey Fenn,] The last will and testament . . . of Humphrey Fen (London, 1641); Collinson, Puritan Movement, 462–4; Jan Broadway, ‘Fenn, Humphrey (1543/4–1634)’, ODNB; Stephen Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570–1700 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 101; Jacqueline Eales, Puritans and Roundheads: The Harleys of Barmpton Bryan and the Outbreak of the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 194.

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he helped to purchase, had a comprehensive listing of presbyterian works, and, more relevantly, we know from his own library catalogue that by 1608 he possessed the two admonitions to Parliament and Travers’ Disciplina ecclesiastica, the basic English presbyterian texts.⁷⁹ Moreover, Ussher was circulating such books amongst the Dublin protestant elite in the early seventeenth century: amongst the copies he lent from his own library were a presbyterian apologia by Travers, and Cartwright’s defence of the admonition.⁸⁰ Ussher subsequently acquired Matthias Holmes’s and probably Walter Travers’ manuscripts.⁸¹ But, again, possession of books and manuscripts tells us nothing about the views of the owner. The section of his library which was devoted to ‘protestant works of controversial theology and ecclesiastical discipline’ was by far the largest one, and also contained a wide range of forms of protestant churchmanship other than presbyterian, from Lutheran to the works of Thomas Erastus.⁸² Indeed, Ussher went considerably further in his ecclesiological explorations, investigating separatist authors such as Penry and Greenwood. But his focus when reading their works, as with that other presbyterian staple of his library, Thomas Cartwright, was on their anti-Catholic writings, rather than their attacks upon the Church of England.⁸³ The most, then, that can be said about Ussher in Trinity was that he had the opportunity to learn first hand, both from the staff and from the books in his and the College’s library, about a wide range of ecclesiological options. Given his later flexibility when it came to ecclesiastical government, this was undoubtedly significant: he was clearly not brought up in an environment where presbyterianism was viewed with universal hostility; but there is no indication that he was decisively influenced by the preferences of some of his teachers.⁸⁴ Unsurprisingly for a scholar of his calibre, Ussher had a mind of his own and was, like Loftus, aware of the dangers which presbyterianism posed: for when in 1612 he was sending back some Catholic books for the Trinity library, he asked that they be ‘kept more privately, as the books of discipline are’.⁸⁵ ⁷⁹ TCD MS 793, fol. 175r–176v; Ussher also acquired some of Travers’ manuscripits after his death: TCD MSS 168, 324, 366, 527. ⁸⁰ A defence of the ecclesiastical discipline ordayned of God to be used in his church (Middleburg, 1584): TCD MS 793, fol. 169v—lent to Mr Crewe; A replye to an answere made by M. Doctor Whitgifte (London, 1573)—lent to Mrs Hill: MS Rawlinson D 1290, fol. 1r. ⁸¹ TCD MS 295 contain notes written by Holmes, with annotations in Ussher’s hand; two bound collections of Ussher’s manuscripts also contain works by Holmes: Bodl. MS Rawlinson C 849, fols. 376r to 415v; and Bodl. MS Barlow 13, fols. 346r–365v. ⁸² TCD MS 793, fols. 175r–176v. ⁸³ Bodl. MS Rawlinson C 919, a bound volume which contains material dating back to Ussher’s early days as a fellow: see on p. 1118 the chronological list of books, latest being 1601, and the letters to Ussher dated 1602–3 (pp. 83, 893): it has detailed notes on the debate between the separatist John Greenwood (or, more precisely, the author J.G.), the presbyterian/separatist John Penry and the conformist Robert Some (pp. 1027, 1031–2, 1103); Peter Milward, Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age: A survey of Printed Sources (London: Scolar Press, 1978), 83–5. ⁸⁴ See below, pp. 235–56. ⁸⁵ UW, xvi. 319.

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‘ T H AT P U R I TA N S S WA R M E I N T H E S A M E ’ If the presbyterianism of the English fellows was foreign to the Church of Ireland, their puritanism was most definitely not. As has been noted, the Church under Loftus had always had a puritan tinge. Right from its foundation, Trinity confirmed and strengthened this by importing puritan staff. And Ussher, in due course, was absorbed seamlessly into the College’s network of puritan connections. When on his periodic visits to England, his circle of friends was like a roll call of the godly. In 1603 he called on the dying Christopher Goodman at Chester, and he also went to see Walter Travers in retirement, even offering to support him financially.⁸⁶ He became friends with three godly scholars, Henry Briggs the Ramist mathematician, Samuel Ward of Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge, and his ‘fellow labourer in the Lord’, Thomas Gataker.⁸⁷ When in England in 1612–13, he conveyed to Challoner greetings from Arthur Hildersham, another minister who lived ‘on the edge of conformity’, and baptized the son of the puritan anti-Catholic controversialist William Crashaw.⁸⁸ When that great hope of the godly, Prince Henry, died in 1612 Ussher reported how he joined with ‘Mr Dod, and Mr Culverwell . . . in humbling ourselves before God’—this was Ezekiel Culverwell, the Essex minister deprived in 1609 for nonconformity, and the leading puritan John Dod, a friend of Cartwright who had preached his funeral sermon.⁸⁹ Ussher not only moved in puritan circles in England, he also, on his regular trips there, acted as a recruiting agent amongst the godly for Trinity and the Irish church.⁹⁰ Amongst the candidates he sought to attract to a vacancy in St Warburg’s, where Trinity had the right to present, were Daniel or Jeremiah Dyke, and Alexander Cooke. The Dykes were part of a dynasty of nonconformist ministers who suffered at the hands of the authorities, whilst Cooke, a graduate of Brasenose College, Oxford, had been deprived of his living in Lincolnshire in 1604 for his refusal to wear the surplice and returned to his native Yorkshire ⁸⁶ Bernard, Life, 42; the story in Bernard is confirmed by the fact that Ussher acquired some of Goodman’s books after his death: R. C. D. Baldwin, ‘Aldersey, William (1543–1616)’, ODNB; Knox, Travers, 146. ⁸⁷ Wolfgang Kaunzner, ‘Briggs, Henry (bap. 1561, d.1631)’, ODNB; UW, xv. 47–55, 62–3, 76, 83–5, 89, 93–4, 117–19, 150; xvi. 344. ⁸⁸ UW, xv. 74–5; B. D. Spinks, ‘Hildersham, Arthur (1563–1632)’, ODNB; S. M. Holland, ‘Archbishop Abbot and the Problem of ‘‘Puritanism’’ ’, HJ 37 (1994), 28–9; W. H. Kelliher, ‘Crashawe, William (bap. 1572, d.1625/6)’, ODNB; R. M. Fisher, ‘William Crashawe and the Middle Temple Globes 1605–15’, Geographical Journal, 140 (1974), 109. Ussher later preached the funeral sermon of Crashaw’s second wife: The honour of vertue (London, 1620). ⁸⁹ UW, xvi. 320 (and see also 334, 337, 339); Holland, ‘Archbishop Abbot’, 29; Brett Usher, ‘Culverwell Family (per. c.1545–c.1640)’, ODNB; J. Fielding, ‘Dod, John (1550–1645)’, ODNB. ⁹⁰ For a much more thorough exploration of Ussher’s friendship circles, see Boran, ‘Early Friendship Network’, 116–34.

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where he was helping his brother Robert, the patristic scholar and vicar of Leeds, when Ussher in 1612 asked him to come to Ireland. Cooke initially accepted, but in the end withdrew because another minister, John Hill, had already been appointed. Hill too had been suspended from his ministry in Suffolk for refusing to use the sign of the cross in baptism.⁹¹ Unsurprisingly, Trinity soon gained a reputation as a puritan university. John Winthrop, the founder of Massachusetts, the epitome of a godly country gentleman, when looking for a college to which he could safely send his son, chose Trinity.⁹² John Brodley, the puritan minister of Sowerby in Yorkshire, also turned to Ussher and Trinity so that his two sons ‘may have as much furtherance in godliness as in learning’.⁹³ Like Emmanuel and Sidney Sussex in Cambridge, those two other late-sixteenth-century foundations, Trinity was identified as a safe refuge for those with strict religious principles. As Ussher reported in 1612 from London ‘there goeth here current a very good opinion of the religious education of scholars in our college’.⁹⁴ Not only, then, did Ussher associate with puritans whilst in England, and help attract godly students to Trinity, he also worked to bring over to Ireland similarly inclined clergy who had been deprived, even imprisoned, in England. Does this mean that the Irish church, and even Ussher himself, was puritan? From two rather different perspectives it certainly seemed so. One of the constant plaints of Irish Catholics was that the Church of Ireland was not so much protestant as puritan. This was a theme developed particularly by Henry Fitzsimon, who referred scornfully to the ‘puritan Collegists of Dublin’.⁹⁵ He used his detailed knowledge of the infighting between protestants in England to prove that his opponents were incapable of even agreeing amongst themselves.⁹⁶ This was, of course, a familiar ploy in English recusant propaganda, which delighted in retailing the insults and accusations of schism, heresy, and sacrilege which conformists and puritans hurled at each other—one Catholic controversialist gleefully listed 34 doctrinal differences between the two protestant sides. But the ploy was particularly effective for Irish Catholics, since their accusation struck home in a number of different ways.⁹⁷ Most obviously it served to ⁹¹ UW, xv. 73–4, 80–1; xvi. 316, 319–20; W. J. Sheils, ‘Cooke, Alexander (bap. 1564, d.1632)’, ODNB; Boran, ‘Early Friendship Network’, 123; Rolf Loeber, ‘Preliminaries to the Massachusetts Bay Colony: The Irish Ventures of Emmanuel Downing and John Winthrop Sr’, in T. C. Barnard, Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, and Katharine Simms (eds.), ‘A Miracle of Learning’: Studies in Manuscripts and Irish Learning: Essays in Honour of William O’Sullivan (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), 176. ⁹² Loeber, ‘Preliminaries to the Massachusetts Bay Colony’, 167–74. ⁹³ UW, xvi. 316; R. A. Marchant, The Puritans and the Church Courts in the Diocese of York 1560–1642 (London: Longmans, 1960), 234; Al. Dub., s.v. Brodley, John and Brodley, Thomas; Mun. P/1/127. ⁹⁴ UW, xvi. 316. ⁹⁵ Henry Fitzsimon, A. replie to M. Riders rescript (Rouen [= Douai], 1608), 1. ⁹⁶ Henry Fitzsimon, Britannomachia ministrorum in plerisque et fidei fundamentis et fidei articulis dissidentium (Douai, 1614), 206 ff. ⁹⁷ For its use in England, see Richard Verstegan, An advertisement written to a secretarie of my L. Treasurers of Ingland (s.l., 1592), 9–10; Robert Persons, A brief discours contayning certayne reasons

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emphasize the extremism of the Irish Reformation in the eyes of their fellowcountrymen—not only were they being invited to join a sect condemned by Rome, but one to which even the English monarch was deeply hostile. Since novelty and foreignness were two of the great problems faced by the Reformation in Ireland, the ability to claim that the protestant clergy were a new offshoot from an already alien sect gave Catholic defenders a powerful polemical argument. Emmanuel Downing, himself a member of a decidedly godly family, who later emigrated to Massachusetts with his friend John Winthrop, wrote to Ussher in 1620 lamenting how Irish Catholic priests accused protestants of holding to ‘the damnable heresie of puritanism . . . which word, though not understood, but only known to be most odious to his majesty, makes many afraid of joyning themselves to the gospel’.⁹⁸ Such accusations also had the advantage of discrediting the Irish Reformation in the eyes of the authorities in England and sowing dissension between the Churches of England and Ireland: indeed, it is possible that the allegation was first used as early as the 1570s, when the conservative opponents of Loftus’ reform efforts in Dublin forced him to defend himself in England against the charge that he was a puritan.⁹⁹ Certainly Fitzsimon lost no opportunity to identify Rider and his fellow clergy as puritans, who ‘indevoure by hooke, and crooke, to bring in this forme of presbiterie, and Geneva consistorian discipline’.¹⁰⁰ William Malone could similarly employ the arguments of English conformists in order to show that not all protestants believed that the pope was Antichrist.¹⁰¹ And finally and even more pertinently, besides being good propaganda, such accusations had a distinct ring of truth, as the authorities in England became increasingly concerned that the Church of Ireland in general, and its university in particular, was indeed a puritan breeding ground. Particular difficulties began to arise for Trinity in the second decade of the seventeenth century, as it sought to secure a new charter from the King: this involved a detailed enquiry into the College’s statutes, staff, and students by the Archbishop of Canterbury, with, why Catholiques refuse to goe to church (Douai, 1580), sig. ‡iiir; idem, A discussion of the ansvvere of M. William Barlow (s.l., 1612), sig. d2r–f 2r. For an English protestant attempt to refute this, see William Fulke, A briefe confutation, of a popish discourse (London, 1583), 13–14; Julian Davies, The Caroline Captivity of the Church: Charles I and the Remoulding of Anglicanism 1625–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 100–1; Peter White, Predestination, Policy and Polemic: Conflict and Consensus in the English Church from the Reformation to the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 153. In Ireland the accusation gained added credence in the 1640s, as the Confederate Catholics sought to distinguish between Charles and his ‘puritan’ opponents: Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, ‘ ‘‘In Imitation of That Holy Patron of Prelates the Blessed St. Charles’’: Episcopal Activity in Ireland and the Formation of a Confessional I dentity, 1618–1653’, in Alan Ford and John McCafferty (eds.), The Origins of Sectarianism in Early-Modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 89–93. ⁹⁸ Parr, Life, 16; Bremer, John Winthrop, 139–40. ⁹⁹ James Murray, ‘Tudor Diocese of Dublin: Episcopal Government, Ecclesiastical Politics and the Enforcement of the Reformation, c. 1534–1590’, PhD thesis, Dublin University, 1997, 273. ¹⁰⁰ Ibid. 221. ¹⁰¹ William Malone, A reply to Mr James Ussher his answere (s.l., 1627), 714.

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crucially, information being fed to him from Ireland by Christopher Hampton.¹⁰² Hampton, who had previously been employed by James to convince the Church in Scotland of the virtues of episcopacy and bring it into closer alignment with the Church of England, fulfilled a similar role in Ireland. Sent over to fill the see of Derry in 1611, before he could be consecrated, James appointed him to Armagh in 1613.¹⁰³ Worried about the rejection by Irish clergy of ‘the crosse in baptisme, the ring in matrimonie, kneeling at the Lords supper &c.’, Hampton stressed the importance of enforcing conformity.¹⁰⁴ This created difficulties for Trinity, and for Ussher. When the latter had an audience with Archbishop Abbot on his extended trip to England in 1613, it did not go well. The archbishop complained of ‘divers defects’ in the College statutes, including the lack of a requirement to wear the surplice in chapel, and the provision for commonplacing by lay students which he denounced as ‘flat puritanical’.¹⁰⁵ Back in Dublin, Provost Temple felt compelled to respond to the ‘sinister reports and informations’ about the College, claiming ‘that puritans swarme in the same’.¹⁰⁶ The accusations of puritanism affected not only Trinity but also its fellows, in particular Ussher. When he went over to England in 1612, and again in 1619, he felt compelled to bring with him letters of recommendation specifically rebutting the charge that he was puritan.¹⁰⁷ Whether they came from Catholics or conformist protestants, these allegations could, of course, be dismissed by Temple as hostile abuse: ‘an ordinary weapon to wound each man whom they affect not’.¹⁰⁸ He insisted that they wore the surplice, attended both cathedral services and the ordinations of bishops. But even allowing for propaganda and personal pique, there was a significant pattern here. The accusations levelled at Trinity and the Church of Ireland nearly all came ‘from the outside’—from Catholic opponents in Ireland, from clergy in England, or from those recently arrived in Ireland from England. Similarly, ministers educated at Trinity, or serving in Ireland, whom we know to be puritans have been identified as such from their careers outside Ireland—thus all the evidence of Ussher’s puritan connections comes from his association with people in or from England.¹⁰⁹ ¹⁰² UW, xvi. 329. ¹⁰³ Alan Ford, ‘Hampton, Christopher (c.1551–1625)’, ODNB; on Hampton in Scotland, see C. W. A. Prior, Defining the Jacobean Church: The Politics of Religious Controversy, 1603–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 217–19. ¹⁰⁴ Christopher Hampton, An inquisition of the true church (Dublin, 1622), sig. A3v; Hampton also complained to Abbot about Archbishop Jones’ lack of appropriate episcopoal dress: TCD MS 1062, p. 49; and see also his complaint about Scots presbyterians in Ulster, below, p. 171. ¹⁰⁵ UW, xv. 72; given that the statute on the surplice started out with a denunciation of the superstitious abuses of the vestment over many centuries, Abbot’s concerns were understandable: TCD Mun. P/1/168. ¹⁰⁶ TCD Mun. P/1/99; a different draft of the document states that the College recently ‘hath often ben charged with puritanisme’: TCD Mun. P/1/102. ¹⁰⁷ See below, pp. 105–6. ¹⁰⁸ TCD Mun. P/1/99. ¹⁰⁹ Alan Ford, ‘The Church of Ireland 1558–1641: A Puritan Church?’, in Ford (ed.), As by Law Established, 62.

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This points to a key insight: the term puritan was not one commonly used within the Church of Ireland. Nor was it a word that was very useful in the Irish context, since the Church itself was largely uninterested in distinguishing between puritans and conformists. There are, of course, obvious parallels—Scotland where ‘until 1618, the language of puritanism was conspicuous by its absence’; or America where distance from England conferred a similar but ultimately much greater degree of freedom, and where godly clergy longed to welcome someone like Ussher as one of their own.¹¹⁰ The principle was simple: ‘where the church was strongly Reformed in character’, puritans ‘disappeared into a generic Protestantism’.¹¹¹ Puritanism was not a set of beliefs or doctrines peculiar to puritans; it was, as Patrick Collinson has so elegantly argued, the product of a ‘labelling process’.¹¹² As a result, puritanism was ‘not a thing definable in itself, but only one half of a stressful relationship’. And, of course, in Ireland the lack of official interest largely eliminated the stress.¹¹³ It was only in the English polity (one is tempted to say the dysfunctional English polity) that the disputes over doctrine, discipline, and ceremonies created serious divisions, and it was only when these were applied to the churches in Scotland and Ireland in the 1620s and 1630s that puritanism came to be perceived as a problem in those countries. ‘The ultimate destabilizing elements in English religious life were not puritanism or Laudianism but the highly ambiguous English church settlement itself and the conflicting attitudes of England’s monarchs towards both the reformation of the church and the limits of their own powers.’¹¹⁴ It is, in short, possible to construct a very different view of the ecclesiastical settlements of England, Scotland, America, and Ireland if one abandons the Anglocentric assumption that England constituted the norm, the others an aberration. Allowing the Irish and Scottish protestant churches to be seen as different but normal, based much more straightforwardly on a reformed model, avoids the danger of ‘mapping issues and themes associated with English history on to the other kingdoms without doing full justice to other contexts and influences, not least those from continental Europe’.¹¹⁵ ¹¹⁰ As Roger Williams put it to John Winthrop, ‘Doe you not hope Bishop Usher hath a gracious heart?’: G. W. LaFantasie (ed.), The Correspondence of Roger Williams, 2 vols. (Hanover, NH: Rhode Island Historical Society, 1988), i. 69. ¹¹¹ John Coffey, ‘The problem of ‘‘Scottish Puritanism’’, 1590–1638’, in Elizabethanne Boran and Crawford Gribben (eds.), Enforcing Reformation in Ireland and Scotland, 1550–1700 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 76. ¹¹² Peter Lake, ‘Retrospective: Wentworth’s Political World in Revisionist and Post-revisionist Perspective’, in J. F. Merritt (ed.), The Political World of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, 1621–1641 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 259. ¹¹³ Patrick Collinson, ‘A Comment Concerning the Name Puritan’, JEH, 31 (1980), 488. ¹¹⁴ M. P. Winship, ‘Were There Any Puritans in New England?’ The New England Quarterly, 74 (2001), 122. ¹¹⁵ David Smith, ‘New Perspectives on Britain’s Civil Wars’, HJ, 46 (2003), 451, reviewing N. P. Canny, ‘The Attempted Anglicization of Ireland in the Seventeenth Century: An Exemplar of ‘‘British history’’ ’, in Merritt (ed.), Political World of Thomas Wentworth, 157–86.

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It was not just that leaders such as Loftus had no interest in or desire to distinguish between puritans and conformists. Even if they had had the will, they lacked the required disciplinary and legislative framework to put it into effect. In England, right from the beginning of the battles with the puritans over ecclesiastical vestments in the 1560s the authorities drew up provisions of ever-increasing strictness, ranging from the 1571 act requiring clergy to subscribe to the doctrine of the Thirty-Nine Articles, to Whitgift’s three articles of 1583, finally to that bˆete noire of godly preachers, the canons of 1604, which made all clergy on ordination, institution, or collation subscribe to all the Thirty-Nine Articles and to the Prayer Book as containing ‘nothing contrary to the word of God’.¹¹⁶ But in Ireland there was only the most rudimentary provision for using the Prayer Book, provided by the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity of 1560, but no requirement for subscription. The contrast between the two Churches was naturally noted by the godly under persecution in England. In 1608 a minister from Northampton who had lost his benefice for nonconformity was planning to go to Ireland.¹¹⁷ Before he went to America, John Winthrop, the founding father of Massachusetts, considered emigrating to Ireland, attracted by ‘a church that seemed to him and many others in the early 1620s to represent all that puritans had striven for in England’.¹¹⁸ Samuel Clarke tells the story of Julines Herring (1582–1644), a presbyterian protégé of Humphrey Fenn and Arthur Hildersham, whose ‘conscience was unsatisfied to enter into the ministry by episcopal subscription, but through a good providence, he, with master John Ball [another puritan preacher], were made ministers by an Irish bishop without subscription’.¹¹⁹ The extent to which this leniency was from the start a conscious policy may be doubted—initially it was most likely an accident of history, a product of the backwardness of the Irish church, the rarity and religious recalcitrance of Irish parliaments, and the pragmatic desperation of the Church of Ireland for clergy, any clergy who were committed protestants. But by the early seventeenth century, contingency had begun to be transmuted into principle, as the benefits of the flexible ecclesiology of the Church of Ireland began to become apparent—as it proved possible to staff Trinity with highly qualified teachers who would never have been allowed to teach in an English university college, and attract good preachers to Ireland who had been forced out of the ministry in England because they would not subscribe to the 1604 canons. Ussher, for one, was clearly aware of the benefits of this idiosyncratic independence, and the dangers posed by too close English inspection of Irish ¹¹⁶ G. W. Prothero, Select Statutes and Other Constitutional Documents (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913), 64, 212; Gerald Bray (ed.), The Anglican Canons 1529–1947 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998), 321; Kenneth Fincham, ‘Clerical Conformity from Whitgift to Laud’, in Peter Lake and Michael Questier (eds.), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c.1560–1660 (Woodbridge, 2000), 125–58. ¹¹⁷ Ford, ‘A puritan church?’, 62. ¹¹⁸ Bremer, John Winthrop, 138. ¹¹⁹ Clarke, Lives, 160; Jacqueline Eales, ‘Herring, Julines (1582–1644)’, ODNB.

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arrangements, for after his audience with Abbot about Trinity in London in 1613 he wrote to Challoner: ‘I pray you be not too forward to have statutes sent you from hence. Dictum sapienti.’¹²⁰ The phenomenon of Irish inclusiveness is somewhat difficult to trace, and has as a result not always been accorded its due significance by historians, relying, as it does, upon that most difficult of scholarly enterprises, interpreting the absence of evidence. There are in the Church of Ireland no long lists of clergy who refused to wear the surplice, or use the cross in baptism, no lengthy proceedings in church courts and negotiations about subscription, suspension, and deprivation, all of which are such a feature of the records of the Church of England during the early seventeenth century. It is, of course, possible that their absence is a product of the losses which Irish archives have sustained over the centuries. But it is much more likely that they never existed in the first place, because, until 1634, the Irish church lacked the disciplinary structures which produced these documents.¹²¹ As a result, ‘puritanism’ in Ireland is almost invisible. Complaints came only from those such as Hampton, who saw the English ecclesiastical polity as normative. One of the most revealing accounts of Irish nonconformity came from the Welsh émigré Meredith Hanmer, Fitzsimon’s ‘morning-after’ companion in Dublin Castle. He compiled c.1600 a list of puritan clergy and sympathizers who had served in Dublin, beginning with Cartwright and Goodman, and including not only Travers and Fenn, but also more establishment figures such as the chancellor and Dean of Christ Church, Nicholas Robinson and Jonas Wheeler, and the future Bishop of Ferns and Leighlin Thomas Ram. Wheeler, educated at the puritan seminary of Brasenose, was accused of a typically godly aversion to ‘all orders and organs’. He had been brought over to Ireland by another Oxford graduate on Hanmer’s list, the Lord Deputy, Sir William Russell, one of a succession of chief governors, ranging from Grey to Chichester, who had radical protestant associations or inclinations.¹²² Adam Loftus, according to Hanmer’s scrawled notes, ‘played all partes commended Travers and Fenne’. Hanmer also suggested the existence of a native strand of godliness by apparently including two Anglo-Irish ministers who were, intriguingly, closely associated ¹²⁰ UW, xv. 73. ¹²¹ One source suggests that the Irish Church did have canons: Bernard refers to the canons of ‘1614’, drafted by Ussher: given their similarity to the 1634 canons, it may be that this is simply an error in dating; if they do represent canons from 1614, there is no evidence that they were ever used: Bernard, Clavi, 61. ¹²² Russell had been tutored at Oxford by the leading puritan Laurence Humphrey: J. J. N. McGurk, ‘Russell, William, First Baron Russell of Thornhaugh (c.1553–1613)’, ODNB; Julian Lock, ‘Grey, Arthur, Fourteenth Baron Grey of Wilton (1536–1593)’, ODNB; John McCavitt, Sir Arthur Chichester, Lord Deputy of Ireland 1605–1616 (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1998), 5–6; A. F. S. Pearson, The Origins of Presbyterianism in Belfast (Belfast: The Christian Irishman, 1950), 1–2.

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with the foundation of Trinity, Lancelot Money and Luke Challoner.¹²³ Hanmer, according to Lord Deputy Russell, was a bitter man, but his allegations about a native, as well as a foreign, puritan element in Trinity are supported by the presence in the College of another Irish fellow, William Daniel.¹²⁴ Irishspeaking and Kilkenny-born, Daniel had been educated at the puritan college of Emmanuel in Cambridge, before becoming a fellow of Trinity in 1594, and going on to translate the New Testament and Prayer Book into Irish.¹²⁵ Though using book lists to identify the interests of their owners is perilous, it may well be significant, given his education, that amongst the seven divinity books he bought in London in September 1595, two were by prominent puritan authors.¹²⁶

USSHER’S RELIGIOUS CONTEXT Once this background has been sketched, then Ussher emerges from it much more naturally, with far less sense of tension or contradiction. He was a member of an Irish church which did not emphasize the requirement for a narrow liturgical or ceremonial conformity and therefore, unlike the Church of England, did not go out of its way publicly to punish ministers as nonconformists. Only when he went to England did the question become pressing, since, in English terms, many of the practices and habits of Ussher and his fellow Irish churchmen identified him firmly with the godly party. And, indeed, there was, and still is, a certain confusion about where Ussher ‘fits in’ ecclesiologically, often a result of the determination to read him in terms of an English dichotomy of puritans versus bishops, nonconformity versus conformity, rather than in an inclusivist, Irish context where such distinctions were simply not made. ¹²³ SP 63/214/36: dating is after the arrival of Travers in 1594 and before Hanmer’s death in 1604. Challoner is mentioned along with his prebend, Mulhuddart, Money only by his prebend of Wicklow. ¹²⁴ Brewer and Bullen (eds.), Calendar of the Carew Manuscripts, iii. 235; F. J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino: Huntingdon Library, 1967), 113, claims Henmer himself was a puritan, but cites no evidence. ¹²⁵ Entries for his commons begin in January 1594: TCD Mun. P/1/22; though Daniel was a foundation scholar, given that he already had an MA from Cambridge by the time the College opened, and that he is listed as Magister in the commons accounts strongly suggest he was a fellow from the beginning: Al. Cantab., s.v. Daniel, William; H. H. G. MacDonnell (ed.), Chartae et statuta Collegi . . . Trinitatis . . . juxta Dublin (Dublin, 1844), 3. ¹²⁶ John Udall, A parte of a register (Middelburg, 1593); Stephen Egerton, An ordinary lecture (London, 1589); list on flyleaf of Daniel’s own copy of Johannes Piscator, Analysis logica evangelii secundum Matthaeum (London, 1594) in Armagh Public Library; amongst other Irish urban protestants to follow Daniel’s path to Emmanuel and Trinity was Barnaby Bolger from Kilkenny, and Anthony Martin from Galway: Ford, Protestant Reformation, 93–4; WW, i. 157–8; Al. Cantab., s.v. Martin, Anthony.

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As we shall see, Ussher was not a prelate who was overly concerned about the pursuit of nonconformity. Similarly, he was not dogmatic about ceremonies or liturgy, though preferring for his own practice to take a decidedly ‘low’ approach on issues such as the placing of the communion table or altar, bowing at the name of Jesus, extempore prayer, and amending the Prayer Book.¹²⁷ As a result, biographers such as Elrington have created what is essentially a misleading division between his early puritan education and his later eminence as a conformist bishop. For Ussher, the two were part of a seamless protestant whole. As one of the earlier historians of English nonconformity succinctly put it, ‘the reformation in Ireland was built upon a puritan foundation, though episcopacy was the legal establishment’.¹²⁸ In 1628 William Bedell, recently appointed provost, complained that the study of law and medicine had been so neglected that Trinity was little more than a ‘college of divines’.¹²⁹ But what for Bedell was a source of concern, for his predecessors had been a matter of pride. Walter Travers had seen universities solely as seminaries for the Church, and that was precisely what Trinity set out to become in the early seventeenth century. For a newly founded provincial university, faced with considerable initial financial problems, it managed to attract a remarkably impressive range of staff, and rapidly produced a cadre of students who served as fellows in the College and as clergy in the Church of Ireland. Trinity was of course helped in this regard by the flexible approach which the Irish church took to nonconformity. As Elizabethanne Boran delicately put it, in the first two decades of the seventeenth century ‘relative cohesion despite diversity was tentatively achieved’, giving the Church of Ireland a unity which its English counterpart found difficult to attain.¹³⁰ But if the Church of Ireland tried to shun presbyterianism, and ignore the internal quarrels between puritans and conformists, where then did it focus its intellectual energy? How, in other words, is the theology of the newly protestant Irish church and its seminary to be characterized? ¹²⁷ See below, pp. 170–1, 205–6. ¹²⁸ Daniel Neal, A History of the Puritans or Protestant Nonconformists, 2 vols., 2nd edn (London, 1754), i. 454. ¹²⁹ UW, xv. 395. ¹³⁰ Elizabethanne Boran, ‘ ‘‘Propagating Religion and Endeavouring the Reformation of the Whole World’’: Irish Bishops and the Hartlib Circle in the Mid-Seventeenth Century’, in V. P. Carey and Ute Lotz-Heumann (eds.), Taking sides? Colonial and Confessional Mentalites in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2003), 176.

3 Ussher and the Shaping of Irish Protestant Theology The Church of Ireland had by the end of the sixteenth century begun the process of acquiring a self-consciously protestant theology. Three aspects of this new religious culture are immediately striking. It was predominantly Calvinist, it was largely imported, and it was a relatively late development. This, one might imagine, accurately identifies the nature of the Irish protestant reformation—intellectually derivative, externally driven, and delayed (not to mention unsuccessful). But the historical reality is more complex than such pat formulations, as the interplay between the varieties of national and international Calvinism, the lateness of the Irish theological awakening, and the divergences between the English, Scottish, and Irish kingdoms and churches all combined to ensure that what happened in early-seventeenth-century Ireland, whilst it was clearly derived primarily from England, was not just a pallid clone of its sister church, but also a subtly yet significantly different religious culture, with distinctive European and Irish elements. Calvinism is sometimes seen as a tightly disciplined monolith, its doctrine policed by The Institutes as closely as Calvin monitored miscreants in Geneva. In fact, by the early seventeenth century, it had become a broad and varied European movement.¹ The ideas of its founder had been developed and reworked by subsequent generations of theologians to such an extent that some modern authorities have even argued that there was a fundamental contrast between Calvin, on the one hand, and his successor Beza and the later ‘Calvinists’, on the other, suggesting that the latter systematized and distorted the views of the Genevan reformer.² Though it would be wrong to exaggerate this contrast, one point is clear: in several areas, such as covenant theology, predestination, ¹ S. F. Hughes, ‘The Problem of ‘‘Calvinism’’: English Theologies of Predestination’, in Susan Wabuda and Caroline Litzenberger (eds.), Belief and Practice in Reformation England (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1998), 229–49. ² B. G. Armstrong, Calvinism and the Amyraut Heresy (Madison, 1969); Basil Hall, ‘Calvin against the Calvinists’, in G. E. Duffield (ed.), John Calvin (Abingdon: Courteney Press, 1966), 19–37; R. T. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); for a short but clear refutation of this approach, see Paul Helm, Calvin and the Calvinists (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1982).

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the atonement, and apocalyptic, there is evidence of later doctrinal development which produced, by the end of the sixteenth century a broad spectrum of Calvinist theology which, at the very least, refined and enlarged Calvin’s original insights, or, in the case of apocalyptic, significantly altered them.³ Differences between Calvinist theologians, and divergences between the various national expressions of Calvinism were, as a result, common. And they were exacerbated by Calvinist churches’ predilection for composing ever-longer confessions of faith, each one seeking (and subsequently failing) to pin down doctrinal orthodoxy.⁴ To say, then, that Trinity’s graduates, or that the typical English or Scottish clerical émigré, were predominantly Calvinist is not to say very much. It is perfectly possible to find in the protestant ministry in Ireland links to many different strains of Calvinism. Some had imbibed their reformed theology at source—Travers, like Cartwright and Melville, had taught alongside Calvin’s successor Beza in Geneva; others had acquired it at one remove—Hamilton had studied under Melville in Scotland; some, such as Holmes and Travers, were familiar with Dutch Calvinism; most of the graduate clergy working in Ireland around the turn of the century had come by their Calvinism at university in England or Scotland; whilst a small but increasing number encountered it in Trinity College.⁵ The way in which these disparate clergy ‘put together’ their theology when they served in Ireland was not, though, just a product of their education and training, it was also shaped by the particular timing and context of the Reformation in Ireland. English protestant theology developed from the 1530s onwards in a series of complex interactions between the imported ideas of the Continental reformers, first Luther and later Calvin, and the way in which they were interpreted and developed by English theologians. When the English church agreed its confession in 1563, it captured many of the ambiguities of English protestantism, with identifiably Lutheran and Calvinist elements all placed within the Erastian English settlement. Even as late as the 1590s, when Calvinism dominated the English universities, there were still dissident voices arguing that the English articles were capable of a non-Calvinist interpretation. And, of course, the English church in the latter half of the sixteenth century ³ R. A. Muller, Christ and the Decree: Christology and Predestination in Reformed Theology from Calvin to Perkins (Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press, 1986); idem, After Calvin: Studies in the Development of a Theological Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); D. A. Weir, The Origins of Federal Theology in Sixteenth Century Reformation Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). ⁴ A. C. Cochrane (ed.), Reformed Confessions of the Sixteenth Century (London: SCM Press, 1966). ⁵ Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London: Methuen, 1967), 110; Charles Borgeaud, ‘Cartwright and Melville at the University of Geneva, 1569–1574’, American Historical Review, 5 (1899), 284–90; Patrick Collinson, ‘Cartwright, Thomas (1534/5–1603)’, ODNB; S. J. Knox, Walter Travers: Paragon of Elizabethan puritanism (London: Methuen, 1962), 27–8; James Kirk, ‘Melville, Andrew (1545–1622)’, ODNB. One leading Irish protestant sent his children to be educated in Geneva: Patrick Little (ed.), ‘Providence and Posterity: A Letter from Lord Mountnorris to His Daughter, 1642’, IHS, 32 (2001), 561–2.

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was riven by disagreements between puritans and conformists about ecclesiology and discipline. In Ireland, though, the pattern was different. To begin with, the period of intellectual development and debate was later and much shorter—it was not till after the foundation of Trinity that indigenous theological discussion began to emerge, with a detailed confession being drawn up in 1615; as a result, there was no early Lutheran phase of the Irish reformation—it took up the Calvinism of the majority of the contemporary Church of England, but without the dissenting voices. In addition, the Irish context shaped the way that Calvinism was expressed in two important ways. First the different disciplinary structure and attitudes of the Church of Ireland enabled it to accommodate a far broader range of Calvinist opinion, and to express that Calvinism, as we shall see, in its confession of faith. And second, the ever-present threat posed to the Church of Ireland by the Catholic majority refocused the energies of theological debate away from internal dissent, outwards towards attacking ‘papist errors’. It is no coincidence that the first public manifestation of Trinity’s theology was Ussher’s encounter with Fitzsimon, the leading Catholic controversialist. In brief, the period following the foundation of Trinity marked the beginning of a major intellectual enterprise, as the fellows of the new College, and Ussher in particular, set about laying the foundations not just of the Church of Ireland’s appropriation of Calvinism, but also its theological response to Catholicism. A N T I - C AT H O L I C IS M I N I R E L A N D In England the official attitude towards puritans had always had a certain intellectual ambivalence. For whilst the godly were detested for their attacks upon the established church, they were at the same time welcomed and respected for their leading role in refuting Catholicism. In Ireland, however, this tension largely disappeared, since the ‘hotter sort of protestants’ were left free from other distractions to direct all their fire against the papal church. And since there was no tradition in Ireland of indigenous protestant anti-papal polemic, the combined effect of the foundation of Trinity and the arrival of the English puritans was dramatic. In a remarkably short period the English anti-papal genre was adopted and adapted to Irish conditions, fixing the attitude of the Church of Ireland towards the Catholic Church in an aggressively hostile stance. The first public evidence was, of course, Ussher’s youthful encounter with Fitzsimon, just six years after Trinity’s foundation. But from the very beginning the intellectual energy of the Trinity fellows was harnessed to fight Catholicism. Their main scholarly target was the great Jesuit controversialist Robert Bellarmine. It was not just the fact that he offered a wide-ranging, intellectually sophisticated, and measured rebuttal of protestant theology, it was their timing which made his works so important for the Irish Counter-Reformation. Appointed to the chair of controversial theology in the new Collegium Romanum in

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1576, his lectures grew into his massive Disputationes de controversiis Christianae fidei adversus huius temporis haereticos, which were published at Ingolstadt between 1586 and 1593, as the Jesuits were beginning their permanent mission in Ireland, and just before the foundation of Trinity. Increasingly in the 1590s, Catholic missionaries were using such works as part of their proselytizing activities in England and in Ireland: the task of Trinity was to try to recover the initiative for the Reformation.⁶ Hence there was the intensive focus upon Bellarmine amongst the Trinity fellows. One of Ussher’s earliest works, not published until the nineteenth century, was his ‘Treatise on the papal controversies’, designed as a refutation of Bellarmine’s claims.⁷ His lectures during his fourteen years as professor were constructed in a similar fashion, designed to attack Bellarmine’s defence of the Catholic Vulgate edition of the Bible. Ussher considered publishing the latter as ‘A disputation concerning the authentic edition of scripture against the decree of the Council of Trent and Robert Bellarmine’ to be dedicated to his uncle, Archbishop Henry Ussher.⁸ The scale of these twin enterprises was enormous—amounting to 522 pages in Ussher’s collected works.⁹ In short, Ussher’s chair in Trinity can be seen as a mirror image of Bellarmine’s in Rome. Nor was it just Ussher who tackled Bellarmine. His brother Ambrose, a neglected but important figure in the early intellectual history of Trinity, compiled a detailed but unpublished refutation of the Jesuit’s views on the relation between civil and ecclesiastical power, which he dedicated to Lord Deputy Chichester, and also wrote another lengthy manuscript—a four-volume attack on Bellarmine’s views on scripture, the Church, the sacraments, and justification.¹⁰ The life work of one of the foundation fellows of the University, Henry Ussher, was also a rebuttal of Bellarmine.¹¹ And the obsession continued. Ussher’s successor, Joshua Hoyle, described in 1641 his daunting ‘weekly lectures . . . in the controversies, and my answers to all Bellarmine in word and writing. Where, in above eight years, I finished his tome of the seven sacraments . . .; his last tome in six years, and now sundry years in the tome or tomes remaining’.¹² The practice of controversy was not solely with distant Catholic theologians: Trinity also brought it home, enabling Catholics and protestants in Ireland belatedly to join in and enjoy the endless and unyielding controversial confrontations between reformation and counter-reformation. As Ussher and Fitzsimon had already demonstrated, the structure for these encounters was provided by ⁶ Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 39. ⁷ UW, xiv. ⁸ Bodl. MS Barlow 13, fol. 12r; UW, xiv. 1–197; Bernard, Life, 45–6. ⁹ UW, xiv. ¹⁰ TCD MS 286, fols. 101r–243r; TCD MS 285 (1–4). ¹¹ According to Hentry Fitzsimon, Britannomachia ministrorum in plerisque et fidei fundamentis et fidei articulis dissidentium (Douai, 1614), 348, Ussher was prevented from finishing the book by his wife. ¹² Joshua Hoyle, A rejoinder to the Master Malone’s reply concerning the real presence (Dublin, 1641), sig. (a4)r.

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the academic disputation. In protestant, just as in Catholic universities, the disputation was at the heart of the curriculum, an essential test which all students had to take if they were to obtain a degree. In a format which had survived since mediaeval times, a short proposition, or quaestio, was argued pro and contra, usually by two students, leading to a conclusion, the solutio, by the master in charge of the disputation.¹³ The usefulness to the university of this ‘ritualised verbal contest’ was obvious—by strictly applying Aristotelian logic, it could offer the tantalizing promise of proof, a final resolution to contentious matters.¹⁴ But its use in the sphere of religious controversy, especially when there was more than one church, more than one orthodoxy, had grave drawbacks. In brief, it greatly exacerbated differences without being able to resolve them. For, in transferring the debate from university to the public arena one essential element generally got lost—the agreed moderator. As has been seen, Fitzsimon, Rider, and Challoner struggled without success to agree who would serve to determine their disputes. What they were left with were a series of rigorous logical processes leading from their starkly opposed starting point to their equally opposed conclusion, and back again. And, as Alastair Macintyre has pointed out, where starkly opposed rival conclusions are ‘argued back to rival premises’, the ‘invocation of one premise against another becomes a matter of pure assertion and counter-assertion’ and the ensuing debates are ‘necessarily interminable’.¹⁵ What started out as debate generally ended up as mere propaganda, as each side set out to prove its own rectitude.¹⁶ The result is that the disputations of the Reformation Era always had two winners, enabling each side ritualistically to claim victory. Ussher’s encounter with Fitzsimon therefore launched a series of endless arguments, some conducted conversationally over dinner tables, some, as each side sought to pin down its opponent, on paper, first in manuscript, an important means of communication, even publication, in the early modern period, then finally in the ultimate apotheosis—print.¹⁷ To focus just upon the printed controversies, the first to be published was that between Rider and Fitzsimon, which extended from 1602 to 1614.¹⁸ The second aptly symbolized the divisions within the Anglo-Irish community, as Ussher confronted his uncle, Richard ¹³ Hilde de Ridder-Symoens, A History of the University in Europe: Universities in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). ¹⁴ The phrase is from Richard Lim, Public Disputation, Power, and Social Order in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 2. ¹⁵ Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth, 1981), 8: quoted in Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy, and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 112–13. ¹⁶ Andrew Pettegree, The Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). ¹⁷ Declan Gaffney, ‘The Practice of Religious Controversy in Dublin, 1600–1641’, in W. J. Sheils and Diana Wood (eds.), The Churches, Ireland and the Irish, Studies in Church History, 25 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 145–58; Philomena Kilroy, ‘Sermons and Pamphlet Literature in the Irish Reformed Church, 1603–1634’, Analecta Hibernica, 33 (1975), 110–21. ¹⁸ See above, p. 13.

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Stanihurst.¹⁹ Quoting Matthew 10:34–6, ‘Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father’, Stanihurst lamented that it had come to pass that ‘not only does an Irishman clash with an Irishman, a Dubliner with a Dubliner, but even—and this most deeply saddens my heart—an uncle with a nephew who immaturely fights against the Catholic faith’.²⁰ This encounter was cut short by Stanihurst’s death in 1618, but was soon eclipsed by longerlasting debate began when Ussher tangled with William Malone, another Jesuit scion of a Dublin merchant.²¹ This arose from a meeting between Malone and one of those ‘rare transcultural exhibits’, a protestant gentleman of native Irish extraction, Sir Piers Crosby, after which Malone wrote a challenge c.1616 to protestants to prove when precisely the papacy had departed from the truths of the early church.²² The task was undertaken by Ussher, and there followed a polite, even friendly interchange of letters between Malone and Ussher, as they sent each other their contributions to the controversy in instalments, leading in 1624 in the publication of Ussher’s An answer to a challenge made by a Jesuite in Ireland, and in 1627 to the printing of Malone’s reply.²³ This ended Ussher’s contribution, but the controversy was continued, at even greater length by his surrogates, Roger Puttock, George Synge, and Joshua Hoyle, who divided up the task of responding to Malone and published their replies in 1632 and 1641.²⁴ Closely linked to this dispute was that begun by Sir Christopher Sibthorp, an English judge expelled from the Middle Temple for nonconformity in 1588, who came to Ireland early in the sixteenth century, where he served as justice of the king’s bench. From an early stage in his career, Sibthorp had a ‘detestation of the popish religion’, and in Ireland he developed a marked interest in theology of a firmly protestant kind.²⁵ He was a regular borrower of books from Ussher, and in 1622 he published, with the help of Ussher, a decidedly unfriendly Friendly advertisement to the pretended Catholickes of Ireland.²⁶ To this a pseudonymous ¹⁹ Ussher, De successione; UW, ii. 1–413; Richard Stanihurst, Brevis praemunitio pro futura concertatione cum Jacobo Usserio (Douai, 1615). ²⁰ Stanihurst, Brevis praemunitio, 3–4. ²¹ Bernadette Cunningham, ‘Malone, William (1586–1656)’, ODNB. ²² Aidan Clarke, ‘Sir Piers Crosby, 1590–1646: Wentworth’s ‘‘Tawney Ribbon’’ ’, IHS, 26 (1988), 149; for the text of the challenge, see UW, iii. 3–5. ²³ Bodl. MS Barlow 13, fols. 492r–499r; James Ussher, An answer to a challenge made by a Jesuite in Ireland (Dublin, 1624); UW, iii; William Malone, A reply to Mr. James Ussher his answere ([Douai], 1627). ²⁴ Joshua Hoyle, A rejoinder to the Master Malone’s reply concerning the real presence (Dublin, 1641); Roger Puttock, A rejoinder unto W. Malone’s reply (Dublin, 1632); George Synge, A rejoynder to the reply (Dublin, 1632); see below, pp. 152–3. ²⁵ C. H. Hopwood, Middle Temple Records, 4 vols. (London: Butterworth, 1904–5), i. 300; John McCafferty, ‘Sibthorp, Sir Christopher (d. 1632/3)’, ODNB. ²⁶ TCD MS 793, fol. 169; Bodl. MS Rawlinson D 1290, on fragment of parchment inside cover, and fols. 1r–2v, 162r.; UW, xv. 62, 68; Christopher Sibthorp, A friendly aduertisement to the pretended Catholickes of Ireland (Dublin, 1622; repr. 1623).

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Catholic replied, inducing Sibthorp to respond in 1625.²⁷ A further Catholic rejoinder, produced, with inevitable logic, A surreplication to the rejoinder from the judge.²⁸ Nor did it stop there. William Malone mentioned Sibthorp in his Reply to Ussher, and Sibthorp drafted a further retort which survives in manuscript.²⁹ Moreover, when A friendly advertisement was first published it had an addendum, written by Ussher at Sibthorp’s suggestion, entitled An epistle concerning the religion anciently professed by the Irish and Scottish, shewing it to be for substance the same with that which at this day is by publick authoritie established in the Church of England.³⁰ Paul Harris, a maverick Catholic priest, responded to this in manuscript, and Harris tackled Ussher again, this time in print, when he replied to Ussher’s 1624 sermon before King James at Wansted on the nature of the church.³¹ Another protestant bishop, William Bedell, in turn replied to Harris.³² The dominance of anti-Catholic controversy was hardly unusual in protestant universities in Europe. What is significant in the case of Ireland is the timing and the scale. Elsewhere the marshalling of theological and historical resources to resist the attacks of the Catholic Church was by the late sixteenth century well established, but in Ireland it was new. In England, for example, the standard modern catalogue of religious polemic in Elizabeth’s reign runs to 630 books.³³ The Irish equivalent is somewhat easier to compile: there is only one volume, and that published just the year before the Queen died.³⁴ But in the first four decades of the seventeenth century controversy, in print, in manuscript, and in person, grew exponentially, as Ussher and Trinity, with the help of its large library, domesticated the European phenomenon and supplied Irish protestants with the training and knowledge, the tools and texts, to meet the Catholic challenge. The controversies, in Ireland as elsewhere, focused around four main theological and historical issues: the Bible—its text and its interpretation; the early church and the church fathers, and the extent to which they can be claimed as ‘protestant’ or ‘catholic’; the linked and equally vexed question of descent—how ²⁷ Christopher Sibthorp, A reply to an answere (Dublin, 1625). ²⁸ Christopher Sibthorp, A surreplication to the reioynder of a popish adversarie (Dublin, 1627). ²⁹ Bodl. MS Rawl C 849, fols. 294r–302r; and at end of the copy of Sibthorp, Reply to an answere in TCD Library, shelf mark BB.ll.28. ³⁰ This was subsequently revised and extended by Ussher and appeared in his collected works in 1631 under the title A discourse of the religion anciently professed by the Irish and Brittish: this was subsequently reprinted in London (1687) and Dublin (1815). ³¹ NLI, MS 16250, ‘An answer unto an epistle written by James Usher to Sr Christopher Sibthorp Knight’; UW, ii. 469–506; Paul Harris, A briefe confutation of certain absurd, hereticall, and damnable doctrines delivred by Mr James Usher (St Omer, 1627; 2nd edn, Antwerp, 1639); T. H. Wadkins, ‘The Percy-‘‘Fisher’’ Controversies and the Ecclesiastical Politics of Jacobean anti-Catholicism, 1622–1625’, Church History, 57 (1988), 166, suggests that Ussher’s work was part of the wider Percy–Fisher debate. ³² Shuckburgh, Bedell, 157. ³³ Peter Milward, Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age: A Survey of Printed Sources (London: Scolar Press, 1978). ³⁴ John Rider, A friendly caveat to Irelands Catholics (Dublin, 1602).

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the protestant church traced its origins back from the Reformation to Christ; and, finally, the issue of how to interpret and apply the apocalyptic books and passages of the Bible.

T H E B I B L E : P ROT E S TA N T O R C AT H O L I C ? All protestants, of whatever shade, were agreed that their primary aim should be the provision of the Bible in the language of the ordinary people. Indeed, there was in the early stages of the Reformation a hope that the basic principle of sola scriptura—the Bible alone—would carry all before it, that the mere experience of reading scripture would sufficiently expose the errors of the papacy to win people over to protestantism. As Luther memorably put it: ‘while I slept, or drank Wittenberg beer with my friends Philip and Amsdorf, the word so greatly weakened the papacy that no prince or emperor ever inflicted such losses upon it’.³⁵ In Ireland that naïve belief in the power of the word could survive for longer because of the neglect of the provision of protestant Bibles: Luther’s German New Testament had emerged first in 1522, Tyndale’s English version in 1525, and the first Welsh translation came out in 1567; but the New Testament was not published in Irish till the early seventeenth century.³⁶ The first statement of the case for vernacular Bibles in Ireland came from the young Ussher in 1601.³⁷ Responding to ‘Allegations out of scripture and fathers produced by the popishe priestes in Ireland, against the vulgar intermedlinge with scriptures’, he examined the patristic and scriptural citations used by the Catholic clergy and sought to show that even in the early church, people were encouraged to read and study the sacred word. Thus he took Acts 17:11, where the people of Berea ‘received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily’: In whose example this course being recommended unto us by the holy ghost, discovereth to the sight of the simplest the cousinage of these Romish merchants: which would make men beleeve that the bookes of the scripture were so kept by the priestes, that they were not in the hands of the people; and that the learninge of the lawe from the mouths of the minister discharged the vulgar from intermedlinge with scriptures. As though these two could not stand together; but private readinge of scriptures must of force be denyed, where publicke teachinge of them is permitted.³⁸

The added complication in the case of Ireland, of course, was that there was not one, but two vernaculars. Trinity tried, with varying degrees of success, to tackle the challenge of providing the basic text for the reformation in Ireland in both ³⁵ ³⁶ ³⁷ ³⁸

H. T. Lehmann (ed.), Luther’s Works, 54 vols. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press,1959), li. 77. Isaac Thomas, William Morgan and His Bible (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1988). TCD MS 291, fols. 1r–10r; Bodl., MS Barlow 13, fols. 22r–25r, dated on fol. 22r. TCD MS 291, fols. 1v–2r.

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languages. Ambrose Ussher, a particularly talented linguist, embarked on the monumental task of translating the whole Bible into English, seeking to provide a more contemporary and ‘fresh’ version.³⁹ Unfortunately, he finished just after the publication of the authorized version in 1611. He dedicated the manuscript to James in the forlorn hope that the King, unlike the pope, would welcome different versions of the Bible. In fact, the purposes of the two translations were very different, reflecting the divergent concerns of the two Churches: where James saw his new Bible as replacing the subversive puritan Genevan bible, Ambrose Ussher’s work was directed at the enemy without—he explained its purpose as being to contribute to ‘the popish controversie’ by freeing the Bible of ‘popish monstrosities’.⁴⁰ The College’s involvement with the Irish Bible was only slightly more successful, though again the polemical thrust was uppermost. William Daniel, skilled in Hebrew and Greek, took up the task whilst a fellow of translating the New Testament into Irish, whilst the College set up a printing press to publish it. But relations between College and printer broke down, and Daniel was sent to Galway as a preacher early in 1596, so when his translation of the New Testament was finally published in 1602, he, and it, had severed relations with Trinity.⁴¹ Again, though, Daniel’s purpose, like nearly all of the early Trinity theology, was firmly, indeed fiercely, anti-papal, as he made quite clear in his preface, where he complained that Ireland ‘doth generally sit in darkness’ because ‘Satan hath hitherto prevailed . . . through the ignorance of our ministers, the carelessness of our magistrates, and the subtlety of antichrist and his vassals, the filthy fry of Romish seducers, the hellish firebrands of all our troubles’.⁴² As it began to become apparent that protestant Bibles would not carry all before them, controversial attention focused instead upon a number of linked issues: the question of which was to be the standard text of the Bible, the Latin Vulgate or the Hebrew Old and Greek New Testament; the theological implications of scriptural translation and exegesis and how these were to be conveyed in notes and glosses; and the wider issue of the authority of the Bible—who was responsible for its interpretation? Catholics attacked the protestant translations as both dangerous and inaccurate: as Fitzsimon put it: ‘their bibles . . . have not bene the woord of God’.⁴³ Given their commitment to sola scriptura, it is unsurprising that the English puritans were quick to respond, with, close behind them, Ussher and the Trinity fellows. When the Catholics published the ‘Jesuit’ ³⁹ Though what survives in three manuscript volumes is incomplete—nearly all the Old and about half of the New Testament—Ussher claimed that it was ‘a new translation of the intire and whole bible’: TCD, MS 68 (unpaginated), Preface. ⁴⁰ Ibid. ⁴¹ SP 63/193/38 (CSPI,1596–7, 121); Tiomna nuadh, transl. Daniel; N. J. A. Williams, ‘Daniel, William (c.1575–1628)’, ODNB. ⁴² Tiomna nuadh, tranls. Daniel, fol. 1v. ⁴³ Henry Fitzsimon, A Replie to M. Riders rescript (Rouen [=Douai], 1608), 47.

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translation of the New Testament at Rheims in 1582, it was the two prominent puritan authors, Cartwright and Fulke, who launched the counter-attack.⁴⁴ Though the latter’s rebuttal was published in 1589, Cartwright’s did not see the light of day till after his death, in 1618, largely because, as the church historian Fuller put it, even though he was ‘shooting at Rome’ he was at the same time ‘glancing at Canterburie’.⁴⁵ Nevertheless, Cartwright’s manuscript circulated widely, and one of the first things that Matthias Holmes did when he arrived back in Trinity from Middleburg in 1598 was to start making a copy which, after his death the following year, came into Ussher’s hands.⁴⁶ Yet another puritan academic, William Whitaker, the regius professor of divinity at Cambridge, took on Stapleton’s and Bellarmine’s defences of the Catholic approach to scripture, in Disputatio de sacra scriptura in 1588. After the Irish Jesuit Christopher Holywood had replied to Whitaker with a defence of the Vulgate in 1604, Ussher completed the hibernicization of the dispute by taking on Bellarmine and Holywood at great length in his theological lectures, using the full authority of protestant, humanist, and patristic scholarship to defend the accuracy and orthodoxy of the Hebrew and Greek texts.⁴⁷

PAT R I S T I C S If the Bible was the primary battleground for protestants and Catholics in the early modern period, the secondary source of conflict was provided by the church fathers. All were agreed that its closeness to Jesus, the Apostles, and the words of scripture made the early church pure and relatively uncorrupted. Disagreements began over which church could rightfully claim to be closest to that early pristine state. Protestants argued that the whole purpose of the Reformation was to restore a church corrupted by later papal abuses to the purity of the first five hundred years. Catholics insisted that the papacy was the bulwark of orthodoxy, which had successfully preserved the biblical truth and apostolic tradition handed down from the early church. The arbiters in this difference of opinion were the church fathers, who provided a record of the beliefs and practices of the church during ⁴⁴ A. F. S. Pearson, Thomas Cartwright and Elizabethan Puritanism 1535–1603 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925), 198 ff.; Milward, Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age, 46–50. ⁴⁵ William Fulke, The text of the new testament of Jesus Christ (London, 1589); Thomas Cartwright, A confutation of the Rhemists translation ([Leiden], 1618); Thomas Fuller, The church history of Britain (London, 1655), book IX, § 6, p. 171. ⁴⁶ TCD MS 180, fols. 1r–283r; Holmes’ hand: fols. 148v–168r; NB notes in Ussher’s hand: fols. 148v and 168v. ⁴⁷ Christopher Holywood, Defensio decreti Tridentini et sententiae Roberti Bellarmini (Antwerp, 1604); Ussher wrote his lectures up in the form of a book in 1610, but never published them: TCD MS 792; UW, xiv. 199–523.

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the early centuries.⁴⁸ The classic statement of the protestant case in England came at the start of the Elizabethan reformation, when John Jewell challenged English Catholics to prove that all their current beliefs and practices could be traced back to the early church.⁴⁹ In Ireland the challenge was resurrected by Rider and Fitzsimon, the latter maintaining that there was ‘no diversitie of beleefe, or religion . . . betwixt the Catholicks of these tymes, and the primative Catholicks of the tymes of the apostles. Contrarie to which assertion, the forsayd M. Rider affirmed, that the difference was as great, as betwixt protestancye, and papistrie; because the first Catholicks, by his saying, had beene protestants’.⁵⁰ Rider and Fitzsimon went on to argue at length about one of the most contentious issues—the Eucharist, in particular the nature of Christ’s presence in the bread and wine. Malone’s subsequent repetition of the challenge to Ussher widened the debate: Your doctors and masters grant that the Church of Rome, for four or five hundred years after Christ, did hold the true religion. First then would I fain know, what bishop of Rome did first alter that religion, which you commend them of the first four hundred years? In what pope his days was the true religion overthrown in Rome? Next, I would fain know, how can your religion be true, which disalloweth of many chief articles, which the saints and fathers of that primitive Church of Rome did generally hold to be true?

He then listed the main issues: the authority of tradition; the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist; auricular confession and the power of priests to forgive sins; Purgatory; prayer for the dead; limbus patrum; Christ’s descent into hell; prayers to saints and use of images; and finally, free will and the merit of works.⁵¹ Initially, some protestants were hostile to the idea of relying on the church fathers, seeing it as undermining the authority of scripture.⁵² Catholics generally thought of the church fathers as theirs, supportive of them on practices such as praying for the dead. Ussher most decidedly did not share this view. From an early stage of his academic career he threw himself into patristic study. The very first dated work we possess by him, from 1594, is an alphabetical list of the church fathers with their dates.⁵³ According to Bernard, Ussher as an undergraduate read The fortress of faith, by Thomas Stapleton, one of the leading English Catholic respondents to Jewell’s challenge. This inspired him to devote eighteen years of his life (1601–19) to reading through the works of the fathers.⁵⁴ Ussher even sought the help of his Catholic uncle, Richard Stanihurst. He told ⁴⁸ Pontien Polman, L’élément historique dans la controverse religieuse du XVIe siècle (Gembloux: Duculot, 1932); Irena Backus, Historical Method and Confessional Identity in the Era of the Reformation, 1378–1615 (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2003). ⁴⁹ John Jewel, The copie of a sermon pronounced at Paules Crosse (London, 1560); Milward, Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age, 1. ⁵⁰ Henry Fitzsimon, A Catholike confutation of M. John Riders clayme of antiquitie (Rouen [=Douai], 1608). sig. o˜ 2r. ⁵¹ UW, iii. 4–5. ⁵² Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 273–4. ⁵³ TCD MS 1210, fols. 112r–113v. ⁵⁴ Bernard, Life, 29.

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him c.1610 how ‘the principal part of my study at this time is employed in perusing the writings of the fathers, and observing out of them the doctrine of the ancient church,’ and asked for help in locating an unpublished work on the church fathers by the Louvain theologian Molanus.⁵⁵ Given the state of patristic scholarship, even establishing the correct text was difficult, and here Ussher cooperated with Bodley’s librarian, Thomas James, who, convinced that the Catholics had perverted the patristic texts, was engaged in the task of researching more accurate editions.⁵⁶ Ussher and James each saw their patristic studies as part of a larger enterprise. The latter sought financial support to bring together a team of scholars to collate all the manuscripts of the fathers, as part of his wider assault on Catholicism, whilst Ussher had a similar aim in view in compiling his Bibliotheca theologica, a massive compendium of patristic and theological texts which he hoped, but failed, to publish in his lifetime.⁵⁷ Ussher was more successful in getting in to print the other product of his early patristic researches, his reply to Malone, first published in 1624. He was not particularly interested in responding to Malone’s challenge to date precisely when the papal church had gone wrong: first, ‘we do not hold that Rome was built in a day; or that the great dunghill of errors, which now we see in it, was raised in an age: and therefore it is a vain demand, to require from us the name of any one bishop of Rome, by whom or under whom this Babylonish confusion was brought in’; and second, the errors were not those of blatant heretics, but rather the ‘mystery of iniquity’ referred to in 2 Thessalonians 2:7 which is cloaked in the name of piety—much more difficult to pin down.⁵⁸ Instead, he went systematically through the issues raised by Malone, giving a chapter to each, and providing a thoroughly researched account—what Ussher termed ‘a kind of a doctrinal history’—of what the early church had thought and how these ideas had developed down the ages.⁵⁹ The style is typical of Ussher—the measured listing of authorities, with extensive quotations from the Bible, church fathers, and later theologians, with minimal, but very clear authorial intervention. The result is far easier to follow than Jewell’s debate with Harding (where the format of replying piecemeal to each of Harding’s points obscures the thrust of the argument), and much more comprehensive in its effect. He accepted that the superficial reader might ‘easily be induced to believe that in divers of these controversies the fathers speak clearly for them, and against us’, but contended that closer inspection revealed that ‘they have only the shell without the kernel, and we the kernel without the shell: they having retained certain words and rites of the ancient church, but applied them to new invented doctrine; and we on ⁵⁵ UW, xv. 3–4. ⁵⁶ Thomas James, The humble supplication of Thomas James (London, c.1607); Backus, Historical Method, 237–43. ⁵⁷ BL Harl 822; Bodl. MSS e. Mus 46, Add D 35–6; TCD MSS 795, 1211; Ussher referred to it as his ‘theological bibliotheque’: UW, iii, p. xiii. ⁵⁸ Ibid. 9–10. ⁵⁹ Ibid., p. xii.

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the other side, having relinquished these words and observances, but retained nevertheless the same primitive doctrine, unto which by their first institution they had relation.’⁶⁰ Thus with regard to confession, Ussher maintains that the Church of England fully respects the practice of the Bible and the early church—there is here ‘no . . . wall of separation betwixt the ancient doctors and us’.⁶¹ Rather, ‘the thing which we reject is that new pick-lock of sacramental confession, obtruded by men’s consciences, as a matter necessary to salvation, by the canons of the late conventicle of Trent . . . This doctrine . . . we cannot but reject: as being repugnant to that which we have learned both from the scriptures, and from the fathers.’ In effect Ussher is here appropriating more than the early church for the protestants—he is in effect claiming the whole period up to the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century, quoting in his defence such established catholic figures as Gratian and Peter Lombard.⁶² When handling other issues, though, he dated the decline much earlier. With regard to the worship of images, Ussher wrote off nearly all the scholastics, and dated the beginning of error to early heretics such as the Gnostics and pagan converts to Christianity.⁶³ Reliance on free will began, obviously, with Pelagius in the early fifth century, and, despite the efforts of Augustine, grew until, during ‘the midnight of popery’ in the fourteenth century, Thomas Bradwardine could complain: ‘the whole world almost is gone after Pelagius into error’.⁶⁴ At the end, Ussher concluded: That which he desired . . . was, that we would allege but ‘any one text of scripture, which condemneth any of the above written points.’ He hath now presented unto him not texts of scripture only, but testimonies of the fathers also, justifying our dissent from them not in one but in all those points, wherein he was so confident that ‘they of our side that had read the fathers could well testify,’ that all antiquity did in judgement concur with the now Church of Rome. And if he look into every one of them more nearly, he may perhaps find, that we are not such strangers to the original and first breeding of these Romish errors, as he did imagine.⁶⁵

Ussher and Thomas James set out to rescue the church fathers from the previous protestant suspicion, and demonstrate that they were a valuable witness to the purity of the early church and its consonance with later protestant beliefs and practices. The fact that at their deaths their massive patristic compilations remained unpublished may say something about the immense scale of their enterprise, or the lack of scholarly and popular enthusiasm for their project, or, even, its sheer tedium.⁶⁶ But their more popular anti-papal works were welcomed. As one enthusiastic Suffolk minister put it in 1625: ‘The reverend and learned bishop of Meath hath lately put out a worke in answere to a Jesuite, of the noveltie of poperie, in so complete a manner, as that a man would thinke, ⁶⁰ Ibid., p. vi. ⁶¹ Ibid. 90. ⁶² Ibid. 111–14 ⁶⁴ Ibid. 543–4. ⁶⁵ Ibid. 582. ⁶⁶ R. J. Roberts, ‘James, Thomas (1572/3–1629)’, ODNB.

⁶³ Ibid. 501, 509.

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as it was said of the answer of our blessed saviour, none should dare to ask that question any more’.⁶⁷ And indeed, Ussher’s Answer went on to become a classic statement of the protestant position, serving as a basic guide to the controversies for protestants high and low right down to the nineteenth century.⁶⁸

L E G I T I M AC Y A N D D E S C E N T A much more concrete and immediately appealing topic for scholars and lay people alike concerned the origins of the protestant church, best summed up in the familiar Catholic taunt, ‘Where was your church before Luther?’ In an age where tradition, legitimacy, and bloodlines were of immense importance, having a respectable ancestry was essential. But the protestant church seemed like a radical departure, emerging out of nothing in 1517. Moreover, by renouncing the Roman Catholic Church as corrupt it deprived itself of its most obvious source of a legitimate descent. Catholics seized upon this disjuncture, portraying the whole Reformation as a dangerous novelty, a recent invention, just like other heretical movements dotted throughout church history which had abandoned the true church.⁶⁹ Catholics believed that this was an area of the greatest protestant vulnerability. As the English Jesuit martyr (and Irish historian) Edmund Campion put it ‘At the very sound of the word church, the enemy turns pale.’ Over the span of fifteen centuries up to Luther, he complained, his opponents had been unable to provide evidence of a single town, village, or house which was protestant.⁷⁰ In contrast, Catholics could point to the visible succession of popes from St Peter himself, providing them with a continuous source of authority; the antiquity of the papal church, its unity and universality; in short, they could claim all the marks of the true church—fifteen in all, as listed by Bellarmine. The claim to continuous succession stimulated considerable historical research, most notably by the great Catholic historian Baronius, who set out to ‘demonstrate the duration of the visible monarchy of the Catholic church instituted by Christ the Lord, founded on Peter and preserved in its entirety and carefully guarded by Peter’s true and legitimate successors, the Roman Pontiffs’.⁷¹ ⁶⁷ John Mayer, An antidote against popery (London, 1625), sig. A1r–v. ⁶⁸ It was republished in 1831 as part of Ussher’s works, and last printed in 1835: James Ussher, Archbishop Usher’s Answer to a Jesuit; with other tracts on popery (Cambridge, 1835); a chapter was reprinted by Pusey as part of the tractarian controversy: E. B. Pusey, The Articles Treated on in Tract 90 Reconsidered (Oxford, 1841). ⁶⁹ S. J. Barnett, ‘Where Was Your Church before Luther? Claims for the Antiquity of Protestantism Examined’, Church History, 68 (1999), 14–41; Milton, Catholic and Reformed, ch. 6. ⁷⁰ Edmund Campion, Rationes decem ([Stonor Park, Oxfordshire], 1581), 7–8. ⁷¹ Caesar Baronius, Annales ecclesiastici, 23 vols. (Antwerp, 1612–78), quoted and transl. in Backus, Historical method, 377.

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This was not just a recondite scholarly dispute. It featured prominently in the conversion manuals for Catholic missionaries, and was seized upon by Henry Fitzsimon, for one very good reason: it had a significant popular impact. As Thomas James complained to Ussher, Catholics could exploit this issue ‘for it is plausible amongst the people and vulgar sort’.⁷² It was particularly sensitive in Ireland, where the Reformation seemed to have no native roots, but was simply imposed by a foreign power. The everyday relevance of these disputes over the legitimacy of the two Churches surfaced most obviously in 1611, when the government sought to impose religious uniformity in the Irish towns. Two Drogheda aldermen, Thomas Flemming and Stephen Duffe, who had been repeatedly fined and eventually imprisoned for their refusal to conform, challenged the protestant authorities not on legal, but theological grounds, that they were being compelled to attend a false church.⁷³ As far as they were concerned, the marks of the true church were ‘antiquitye, unitye and succession’ and these were only found in the Roman Catholic Church.⁷⁴ The protestant response to taunts of novelty was, of course, antiquity. Francis Bacon later claimed that Martin Luther had been ‘enforced to awake all antiquity and to call former times to his succours . . . so that the ancient authors, both in divinity and humanity, which had long time slept in libraries, began generally to be read’. The trail blazer here was Matthias Flacius Illyricus, the organizer of the massive publishing project known as the Magdeburg Centuries.⁷⁵ Though clearly, like nearly all early modern church history, it had a polemical purpose, it was also a remarkable work of scholarship, unearthing and printing numerous primary sources. It covered the whole of Christian history (though only the first thirteen centuries were published), and the way in which it focused upon the development of doctrine and, in particular, how the papacy had progressively perverted the true gospel, marked a decisive shift in focus: ‘for the first time ever history of the church was equated not with the history of an institution within the framework of God’s plan but with history of Christian thought and teaching.’⁷⁶ A similar approach was applied to English church history by John Foxe in his Acts and monument, the Book of Martyrs, which was such an essential part of every protestant library in England. Foxe traced the descent of the ‘true gospel’ from the early church down to the Reformation, often relying upon those whom the Catholic Church had termed heretics. The dilemma for protestants was how to go about establishing their legitimacy, how to prove that they were not heretical bastards. They could, roughly, take one ⁷² UW, xv. 264. ⁷³ CSPI, 1603–6, 17; HMC, Egmont, i. 32. ⁷⁴ Bodl. MS Barlow 13, fol. 280r. ⁷⁵ O. K. Olson, ‘Flacius Illyricus, Matthias’, in H. J. Hillerbrand (ed.), The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). ⁷⁶ Backus, Historical Method, 361. In Ussher’s catalogue of his library, he gave the seven volumes of the Magdeburg Centuries pride of place in his section on scripture, the fathers, councils, and church history, listed ahead of even the Bibles: TCD MS 793, fols. 170r–187r.

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of two tacks. They could identify themselves with the broader Catholic Church, of which they argued the papal church was a part, and claim descent through that. This had the advantage of giving a clear line of succession, but the drawback of associating protestants with the very church they were rebelling against: they were faced with the awkward question of how orthodoxy had been preserved within the Roman church and, if it had been, why had it been necessary to separate from her? Or, more radically, they could reject the visible papal church as corrupt and defiled, and, faced with the break in the human pedigree, either simply accept it by looking to the invisible church of elect Christians down the ages, accepting that there might have been periods when there was no true visible church, or trace their lineage back to the pure early church by following the succession of true doctrine, even, if necessary, through groups opposed to the corrupt mediaeval papacy—i.e. heretics.⁷⁷ Ussher and other Irish protestants opted for the more radical option. Thus in response to Fitzsimon, Rider argued that the protestants depended not on ‘that false succession of the place, and a rotten worme eaten chaire that you brag of ’, but on the descent of true faith.⁷⁸ The Trinity fellows, commissioned to respond to Flemming and Duffe, argued that ‘Antiquitye, unitye, and succession are not as is pretendit principall, essentiall, or infallible markes of the true church, but beinge severd from veritye may be found wher the true church is not, neither hath the church of Rome at all tymes bene knowen by them’.⁷⁹ Quoting Ambrose, the fellows claimed that rather than focusing upon human succession, the emphasis should be on the succession of true doctrine: ‘They who do not have the faith of Peter do not have the succession of Peter.’⁸⁰ This, though, merely begged the question: How had this ‘true succession of the faith’ been handed down, especially after the early patristic period when, protestants claimed, abuses had increasingly crept into the visible church? It was Ussher who provided the most methodical and meticulous answer, in his first published work, De successione, which provided, as its title put it, ‘an historical account of the most important question of the continual succession and condition of the Christian church . . . from apostolic times up to the present.’⁸¹ Ussher acknowledged that Jewel had successfully recovered the first 600 years as ‘ancientest and best’, but the following 900 years were more complex and obscure. Catholics ‘proclaim that our church either did not exist at all, or that ‘‘it was forced to serve other Gods, worship idols and make common cause with sacrilege’’ ’.⁸² Quoting Campion, he complains of the impudence of Catholic writers who have asserted, as if it was beyond all controversy, that before Luther, Calvin, and the other chief heretics ⁷⁷ Milton, Catholic and Reformed. ⁷⁸ Rider, A friendly caveat, sig. [F4r]. ⁷⁹ Ibid. ⁸⁰ Ibid. 281r. ⁸¹ Ussher, De successione; UW, ii, uses London edn of 1687, which includes Ussher’s revisions from TCD MS 784, pp. 73–360. The work was not complete: the list of contents includes 15 chapter headings, but the book only includes the first ten chapters. ⁸² UW, ii, p. vii.

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not a single protestant existed.⁸³ His purpose, he explains to the reader, is not only to trace the continual succession of the church but also to give a more general history of these latter times: hence De successione is as much a history of the corruptions and abuses of the papacy as it is an account of those groups who opposed the Roman church. The framework for Ussher’s response is provided by the Bible, more particularly Revelation 20:1–3: And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years, And cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled: and after that he must be loosed a little season.

This is one of the most potent apocalyptic texts in the Bible, which gave rise to the hopes and dreams of the millennium, that thousand-year period of bliss at the end of history, either before or after the return of Christ, which inspired such fevered speculation in the seventeenth century. Ussher, though he saw it as a prophecy, like most sixteenth-century protestant commentators quashed its millenarian implications by locating it firmly in past, rather than future history. Though he examined various possible interpretations of precisely when Satan had been bound, from the incarnation of Christ to the end of the Jewish state, since these all fell within the first century, their implications were the same—Satan had been loosed sometime during the eleventh century. Into this Ussher wove the parallel story of Antichrist. Since he placed his birth in the early seventh century, this explained the gradual decline of the church from its initial purity. The combination of the freeing of Satan and the rise to power of Antichrist after 1000—the latter reached his height in the papacy of Gregory VII (1073–85)—marked the beginning of the period when the Catholic Church was taken over by the mystery of iniquity.⁸⁴ As Ussher traced the decline of the mediaeval church into antichristian tyranny, he counterpointed this by tracing the emergence of groups such as the heretical Waldensians and the Albigensians that had, he claimed, sought to preserve the true faith amidst ‘popish abuses’. With Satan unbound and Antichrist’s tyranny at its height, Ussher raised the obvious question where then was the true church? This was the real test of how radical he was prepared to be: was he willing to rely wholly upon the sects and heretics to preserve the succession of true doctrine? Ussher was certainly quite prepared to consider the possibility that the church had ceased to be visible, quoting Augustine’s view that the church could be forced to disappear from view as a result of the severity of its oppression. Here Ussher’s scholarly skills came to ⁸³ Ibid., p. iii.

⁸⁴ Ibid. 122–57.

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the fore, as he reconstructed the history and beliefs of these fringe movements, and tried to show how they had maintained the purity of doctrine against the papal church. Given the rather bizarre beliefs of some of those he dug up, this was not always straightforward, but when faced with awkward evidence Ussher could always claim that it was tainted by papal bias. But there was a sense here of genuine historical discovery, as Ussher pieced together the beliefs and persecutions of the Waldensians, one of the few mediaeval heresies to survive till the Reformation. De successione became a classic statement of the ‘heretical’ succession of the protestant church, especially valuable because of its depth of historical scholarship. It was used by Ussher’s fellow anti-papal controversialist Daniel Featley, chaplain to Archbishop Abbot, in his dispute with another Jesuit, John Percy (alias Fisher), in 1624: ‘the golden thread of succession’ was handed down ‘from Christs blessed hand, and his apostles . . . to later ages, even to Luthers time’, but rather than proving the visibility of the protestant church by having ‘to seek the golden purity of faith, amidst the dung and drosse of Romish superstitions, and depravations in later ages . . . many of our worthies haue shewne mee a more excellent way . . . Doctor Abbot, now my Lord of Canterbury, in his Answer to Hill; Humfrey to Campion his third reason; Doctor Usher . . . de successione Ecclesiae’.⁸⁵ Featley particularly welcomed Ussher’s work on the Waldensians as having ‘so cleared them, even by the testimonies of Papists, from those erroneous assertions and scandalous aspersions, that the Papists themselves seeme to be ashamed of their shameless slander’.⁸⁶ And in due course, Featley’s protégé, Simon Birckbek, produced The Protestants evidence: taken out of good records, shewing, that for fifteene hundred yeares next after Christ, divers worthy guides of Gods Church, have in sundry weightie poynts of religion, taught as the Church of England now doth, which was heavily reliant upon Ussher.⁸⁷ Nevertheless, Ussher’s response in De successione to the question ‘Where was your church before Luther?’ was a potentially radical one. It associated him firmly with Foxe and the idea that the true faith had been preserved by an invisible remnant, conceding to Catholic opponents the possibility that at certain times the protestant church might have no visible succession at all, and running the risk of associating protestantism with fringe witnesses who were quite clearly not part of an episcopal succession.⁸⁸ Of course, for Foxe and others of a godly disposition, the shortage of bishops was hardly a drawback. And equally, Ussher’s remnant ecclesiology was one which naturally appealed to minorities (such as English puritans or Irish protestants) who saw themselves as preserving the truth in the face of overwhelming odds. And, indeed, the parallel between the ⁸⁵ Daniel Featley, The Romish Fisher caught in his owne net (London, 1624), K3∗ r–v. ⁸⁶ Ibid., sig. P3*v. ⁸⁷ (London, 1635), sig. b4v, c1v, c2r; part I, pp. 53, 84, 91, 111–12, 216, 221, 240, 243, 246–7; part II, 51. ⁸⁸ Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 284.

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mediaeval heretics and the later puritans and Irish protestants was one drawn directly by Ussher’s brother Ambrose. Not content to leave De successione as a purely academic treatise, Ambrose, at the prompting of some protestant friends, set about translating it ‘as being a work that would be well accepted and liked of among the English’.⁸⁹ He did so because the author was his brother, ‘and also because the subject of the booke serveth to stoppe the mouthes of the adversarie in that most common objection wherein they thinke at the first to stifle . . . the profesours of the fayth as not being able to show the continuance of their religion’.⁹⁰ For the most part the translation is straightforward, but in one respect it offers an intriguing insight into how Ussher’s brother saw the mediaeval heretics in contemporary terms. For he regularly translated their ‘meetings’ as ‘conventicles’. Lexicologically, this is perfectly appropriate—Fuller defines the term as denoting ‘the meeting of such in a clandestine way, contrary to the commands of . . . lawfull authority’, which accurately describes what the Waldensians were engaged in.⁹¹ But, as Fuller was fully aware, the term was largely used by conformist bishops to refer contemptuously to the meetings of puritans.⁹² The suspicion that Ambrose Ussher was consciously adopting a term of abuse and using it positively for these ancestors of modern protestants is reinforced by his translation of mediaeval reformers as ‘puritans’.⁹³ The implicit radicalism of Ussher’s first publication or, to be more precise, its attraction to extreme as well as moderate protestants has made some of his biographers, especially those hostile to his ‘puritan’ leanings, somewhat uneasy. Thus E. W. Watson, in a collection of biographies designed to typify Anglican churchmanship, saw Ussher’s vision of the succession as a ‘strange distortion of history’, which destroyed the church’s claim to historical continuity.⁹⁴ R. B. Knox similarly judged that ‘instead of proving an unbroken succession his work was becoming a disproof of any succession as that term was normally understood by the church.’ Knox suspected that Ussher’s failure ever to complete De successione could partly be attributed to his realization of the dangerous implications of his argument were he to trace the descent from the Albigensians and the papacy of Innocent III (1198–1216), where the first volume finished, down to the Reformation.⁹⁵ It is possible to construct a plausible case for a shift in Ussher’s views from youthful extremism to later moderation. In his later works, when tracing the ⁸⁹ TCD MS 2940, unpaginated: Preface to the reader. ⁹⁰ Ibid. ⁹¹ Fuller, Church history, ch. ix, section 3, § 4. ⁹² Even Thomas Cartwright rejected the term as too insulting, arguing that it should be applied only to Anabaptists: A second replie (London, 1575), 38. ⁹³ TCD MS 2940, pp. 194, 197, 206, 228: I am grateful to Crawford Gribben for these references; see also Crawford Gribben, The Puritan Millennium: Literature and Theology, 1550–1682 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2000), 85–6. ⁹⁴ E. W Watson, ‘James Ussher’, in W. E. Collins (ed.), Typical English Churchmen (London: SPCK, 1902), 64. ⁹⁵ Knox, Ussher, 110.

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descent of doctrine from the early church he is quite prepared to cite canon lawyers and scholastic theologians, and to concede that in certain areas the mediaeval Catholic Church maintained true doctrine right up to the Council of Trent. As he put it: it could not be called properly the religion of Rome, till the Councell of Trent, which determined many years after our falling off from the see of Rome. The papists ask us, Where was our religion before Luther? we might reply, Where was the popish Religion before that time. ‘Tis true, most of those poysonous errours were sowen up and down the world before, but not collected fully into a body; and so owned and headed by the papacy till then. For till that time, scarce any point we hold now against them but there were some of their own authours who held it also.⁹⁶

Similarly, in his sermon before the King at Wansted, in 1624, when dealing with the Catholic challenge about the fate of the protestants’ forefathers, Ussher argued that it was possible for people to be saved within the Catholic Church, so long as they were ignorant of its abuses.⁹⁷ But even in De successione it would be misleading to say that Ussher was exclusively committed to his heretical succession. Here too, he was happy to find the roots of protestantism inside as well as outside the Roman Catholic Church, tracing the views both of heterodox figures such as Berengar of Tours (c.1010–88), whose opposition to transubstantiation endeared him to protestants, and of mainstream theologians such as the scholastic Peter Lombard, whose untridentine views on the sacrifice of the mass were also disinterred by Ussher. In fact, rather than ‘progressing’ from one explanation to another, Ussher, like many other Jacobean Calvinists, was perfectly capable of holding several different explanations of the succession at the same time.⁹⁸

A P O C A LY P T I C By the early seventeenth century, as protestant and Catholic in Ireland argued over the Bible, church history, and ecclesiology, it is clear that they had created a new Irish genre: controversial theology. Though each of the particular arguments, over the Bible, patristics, and the succession of the true church, had its own dynamic, there was one underlying theme which bound them together and shaped and sharpened the claims of the protestant side—their use of the apocalyptic books and passages of the Bible. Essentially, protestants believed that they had discovered the key to the way in which God operates in history. They found it in apocalyptic, that mysterious form of biblical literature which offered crucial information about the outcome ⁹⁶ Ussher, Certain discourses, ed. Nicholas Bernard (1659), 223–4. ⁹⁷ UW, ii. 491–3. ⁹⁸ Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 283.

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of the battle between good and evil, Christ’s Second Coming, the rise of the four great empires, and the end of the world, but covered up the insights in figurative and mysterious language—allusions to seven trumpets, plagues, seals, vials, the whore of Babylon, the beast with seven horns, etc. Whereas Catholic historians, following Augustine, consigned the fulfilment of this prophetic imagery to the far distant future, or confined it safely to the past, as a product of the persecution of early Christians by Rome, protestants from Luther onwards were increasingly convinced that the apocalyptic passages in the Bible contained the secrets not only of what would happen in the distant future, but also to events in the whole of history, including the present. The difficulty lay, of course, in uncovering (‘apocalyptic’ comes from the Greek to uncover, disclose) and interpreting what the symbols meant, working out how the trumpets, plagues, seals, and vials related to known history, identifying where precisely you were in the transition from events which had already happened to those still to come: where in these repeated sevens you reached by the time of the Reformation? Had the sixth trumpet already sounded? If it had, the implications were terrifying: there was only one to come before the end of the world. For apocalyptic carried with it a powerful eschatological impulse, a temptation to believe that you were truly living in the ‘last days’, to look around and see, in the decay of contemporary society and the desperate struggle between protestant truth and Catholic darkness, a clear sign that the final battle was about to be joined and the world was about to end. This gave apocalyptic a dual power: not only did it have immense academic significance, bringing together theological, biblical, and historical scholarship in a single overarching whole; it also, in the broader political sphere, served to underpin foreign policy, attitudes to recusancy, even popular anti-Catholicism.⁹⁹ The obvious example of the theological and practical power of apocalyptic was the protestant contention that the pope was Antichrist. This was, of course, the topic which the young Ussher had seized upon in his debate with Fitzsimon. As far as he was concerned, there was a relentless logical connection between what it said in the Bible and the identification of Rome with Antichrist. Revelation 17 stated that the great whore of Babylon would sit on the seven mountains—a clear reference to Rome. If Rome is the principal seat of Antichrist, ‘then he onlie that maketh Rome his principall seate is antichrist’. This suggested two candidates: one was the Roman emperor, but he no longer sat in Rome; the other was the papacy, which did. Quod erat demonstrandum: Fitzsimon had been ‘convicted by the manifest truthe of Gods worde’.¹⁰⁰ For Fitzsimon, however, the identification of Antichrist was neither particularly pressing nor especially important. He was ⁹⁹ R. A. Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse (Appleford, 1978); Paul Christianson, Reformers and Babylon ( Toronto, 1978); K. R. Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain 1530–1645 (Oxford, 1979); Glanmor Williams, Reformation Views of Church History (London, 1970). ¹⁰⁰ Bodl. MS Barlow 13, fols. 80v, 83r.

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happy to follow Augustine, and place the events of the millennium safely in the distant future, and reiterate the increasingly popular mediaeval conviction that Antichrist was a single person who would return for a three-and-a-half year period before Christ’s final coming. Hence, despite Bellarmine’s insistance that the seat of Antichrist was to be Jerusalem, Fitzsimon was even prepared to concede to Ussher that Antichrist’s seat might well be Rome because, since Antichrist was safely confined to the future, his texts ‘maketh nothing to prove that this present pope is antichrist’. As he made clear in the debate with Ussher, he was frustrated by the sheer pointlessness of the discussion on this issue: ‘If I had thought you would have wrought such trifles I should never have entred into communication with you. And indeede I must condemn myselfe of great imprudencie, that ever I admitted your conference, having more waightie matters to deale in and a great concourse of people resorting to me to be resolved in matters of conscience’.¹⁰¹ Just as in the Rhemists’ and Cartwright’s notes on Revelation, it was as though protestant and Catholic were reading two utterly different texts.¹⁰² Clergy took what they had been taught about Antichrist at Trinity and pondered over it their parishes. Edward Warren, a minister in Kilkenny and former pupil of Ussher’s, wrote to him in 1617 asking for help in interpreting a typically gnomic apocalyptic text concerning ‘the mystery of the woman, and of the beast that carrieth her’ and Revelation 17:8: ‘The beast that thou sawest was, and is not; and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition: and they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, whose names were not written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast that was, and is not, and yet is.’ Ussher supplied him with a detailed account of how to identify the mysterious images: the woman/Babylon was Rome; while the beasts corresponded to the two beasts mentioned in Revelation 13:1 and 13:11—by the first was meant the Roman empire; the second corresponded initially to the pontifex maximus, the Roman high priest, and now to his successor, the papacy which had in turn taken on many of the attributes of the old Roman emperors.¹⁰³ Ussher’s friend and fellow controversialist Christopher Sibthorp provides the clearest example of the way in which a protestant could apply the identification of the pope as Antichrist to Ireland. As far as he was concerned this simple equation undercut all Catholic defences by establishing the papacy was fundamentally opposed to the truth of Christ. Addressing Irish Catholics, he bluntly argued that your pope is the grand Antichrist, that your Romish church is the whore of Babylon, and that your religion is false and antichristian, and consequently abominable, and to be deserted. Neither maketh it anything against this that the Church of Rome was once ¹⁰¹ Bodl. MS Barlow, fol. 80v. ¹⁰² Cartwright, Confutation of the Rhemists translation, 708–61. ¹⁰³ UW, xv. 126–7; Bodl. MS Barlow 13 fol. 85v; printed in Bernard, Judgement (1659), 13–20; and in UW, xii. 545–50.

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a good church. For she could not have beene a whore, if she had not beene before an honest woman.¹⁰⁴

This raised the important issue of the status of the Roman Catholic Church. If it was headed by Antichrist, and dedicated to the destruction of the truth, then surely it was no true church? The key text here was 2 Thessalonians 2:4, which stated that Antichrist sat within the temple of God. For someone such as George Downham, later Bishop of Derry, this meant that the church of Rome had once been a true church, but no longer: ‘the whore of Babylon, an adulterous, and idolatrous, and apostatical church, which once was Rome . . . now Babylon . . . once the church of Christ, now the church of Antichrist’.¹⁰⁵ But Ussher was more cautious, accepting that Thessalonians implied that, despite the manifold antichristian corruptions imposed by the popes, Antichrist could still be sitting in a true church: ‘wee must distinguish the papacy from the church wherein it is, as the Apostle said, Antichrist from the temple of God wherein he sitteth.’¹⁰⁶ This was not merely an academic debate—it had direct implications for public policy, as spelt out by Downham: For if the Pope be antichrist (which is prooved in this booke) and consequently the church of Rome, the whore of Babylon, and synagogue of antichrist the papists . . . the limmes of antichrist; the religion and doctrine of popery, the mysterie of iniquitie and meere antichristianisme: it followeth necessarily, that Christian princes are not to tolerate either the religion of papists or their persons within their dominions.¹⁰⁷

Apocalyptic was both a powerful and a plastic ideology.¹⁰⁸ It could be used, with equal facility, to explain and justify both triumph and disaster: for just as God would test the tenacity of the godly with trials and tribulations, just as the forces of Antichrist would, as foretold clearly in Revelation, take on the most terrifying shape and appear at times to overwhelm the temple of God, so at the same time, the prophecies insisted that the forces of good would eventually triumph and bring about the final rule of Christ. It proved particularly attractive to English puritans, reinforcing their sense of embattled rectitude: ‘their role as Christ’s shock troops in the struggle against antichrist could thus . . . be use to explain their position as a minority ( . . . a persecuted or a reviled minority) still under the cross of antichrist’s hostile intention and influence’.¹⁰⁹ Similarly, apocalyptic was easily adapted to underpin the position of Irish protestants. It offered it an overarching explanation for their place in the world, for their contribution ¹⁰⁴ Bodl., MS Rawlinson C 849, fol. 295v. ¹⁰⁵ George Downame, A treatise concerning Antichrist (London, 1603), bk II, 129. ¹⁰⁶ Ford, Protestant Reformation, 186; UW, ii. 490; Balliol College, Oxford, MS 259, fol. 430v. ¹⁰⁷ Downame, Treatise concerning Antichrist, sig. A3r. ¹⁰⁸ Peter Lake, ‘The Significance of the Elizabethan Identification of the Pope as Antichrist’, JEH, 31 (1980), 161–80. ¹⁰⁹ Peter Lake, ‘William Bradshaw, Antichrist and the Community of the Godly’, JEH, 36 (1985), 580.

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to the battle between Christ and Antichrist. The process was begun by the historian John Hooker, who explained the Desmond rebellion as a product of the plotting of Antichrist.¹¹⁰ The Nine Years War was similarly viewed as part of the wider struggle.¹¹¹ Most importantly, apocalyptic spoke to Irish protestants’ peculiar position—to the fact that they were a small minority, favoured by the state, but rejected by the vast majority of the population. The prevalent assumption amongst those who shared the apocalyptic view of history was that the number of true Christians could, at times, be a perilously small minority.¹¹² Irish protestants were thus offered a double reassurance: first, that their slender population did not mean that the protestant gospel to which they owed their allegiance was in any way in error or had ‘failed’ in Ireland by sheer weight of numbers; and, second, that, whatever the seemingly overwhelming odds against them, God would ultimately preserve them against the attacks and wiles of Antichrist.¹¹³ Labelling Catholics as followers of Antichrist served another important purpose for Irish protestants. It provided an explanation for why the population of Ireland was so reluctant to recognize the manifest superiority of the protestant gospel. Here again 2 Thessalonians 2 provided the proof text. There Paul warned that before the return of Christ, ‘that man of sin’, Antichrist, would use ‘signs and lying wonders’ to deceive ‘them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth . . . And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: that they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.’ As we have seen, Ussher used 2 Thessalonians 2:7 to explain why it was so difficult to identify Catholic abuses, and went on to use it to account for the reluctance of his fellow countrymen to embrace protestantism.¹¹⁴ His views were echoed by Sibthorp, who explained that the reason he wrote his Friendly advertisement to the pretended Catholickes of Ireland was to show on which side the strong delusions were.¹¹⁵ Those who remained attached to the papacy were actually being made to suffer by God for their sinfulness: ‘For it is expressly said, that God sent this strong delusion upon them; namely, as a punishment . . . for their contempt of his gospel, and neglect of his word and truth’.¹¹⁶ Though, however hard protestants might preach the gospel, and demonstrate to Catholics that the pope was Antichrist and Rome the whore of Babylon, Sibthorp was worried that, such was the strength of Antichrist, they might remain unconvinced:¹¹⁷ ¹¹⁰ Ford, ‘Ussher and Irish Identity’, 189–90. ¹¹¹ Raph Byrchensha, A discourse occasioned upon the late defeat (London, 1602), sig. D1v: I am grateful to Hiram Morgan for bringing this text to my attention. ¹¹² Based on Rev. 14:3. ¹¹³ See the description of English apocalyptic in P. G. Lake, ‘The Significance of the Elizabethan Identification of the Pope as Antichrist, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 31 (1980), 161–78. ¹¹⁴ See above, p. 68; and below, p. 201. ¹¹⁵ Sibthorp, Friendly advertisement, 36. ¹¹⁶ Ibid. 171. ¹¹⁷ Ibid. 407.

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forget not, I beseech you, amongst what manner of people it is, that this wicked and antichristian Popery prevaileth, namely, that it is amongst them that perish, that all they might be damned that believed not God’s truth . . . For do you not hereby perceive the . . . most woeful condition that all papists be in, that notwithstanding they be often admonished will not, for all that, forsake antichrist and his religion to embrace the truth . . . ? Be they not here expressly affirmed to be such as perish, and are to be damned if they persist obstinate, and will not be converted.¹¹⁸

As the seventeenth century progressed, apocalyptic developed a more dramatic, radical dimension, as some scholars raised the possibility that the thousand-year binding of Satan might lie, not in the past, as Ussher had suggested in De successione, but in the future, offering the much more optimistic possibility of Christ returning again to rule for a thousand years on earth (premillennialism), or returning after a thousand-year rule by the saints (postmillennialism). It has been suggested—on the basis of a prospective chapter heading for the second, unwritten, half of De successione —that Ussher might have flirted with millennialism.¹¹⁹ Certainly, we know his brother Ambrose, who died in 1629, was a millenarian, but even Joseph Mede, the great apocalyptic scholar, reported in 1637 that he was unable to extract from Ussher a clear statement of his views on this matter.¹²⁰ Ussher’s caution on this issue would certainly have only been increased by his experience of the radical implications of millenarianism in the 1640s.¹²¹ His conservatism in relation to apocalyptic was also evident when faced with speculations about the end of the world. When asked to comment upon one John Harrison’s 1615 claim that the world would end in 1630, Ussher rejected the assumption upon which the claim was based—that the world would last 6,000 years from Creation: that to the six daies of creation so many thousands of years should be correspondent in the continuance of the world is but a meer imagination destitute of all proof from the word of God and is therfore generally rejected by such as have learned not to be wise above that which is written. The Jewish Cabbalists indeed observe that in the 1st v. of Genesis the letter Aleph is 6 times repeated. And because aleph sign. 1000, thence they gather the world must last 6000 years. But such playing and toying with sacred word of God must be far from the thoughts of sober minded Christians.¹²²

However cautious in his approach to the millennium, Ussher was in no doubt that the pope was Antichrist. Not only did he teach this to the students at Trinity, he also preached and instructed his protestant acquaintances and parishioners to the same effect. We can get a flavour of how Ussher interpreted his apocalyptic to a lay audience from that curious book, Ussher’s Body of Divinity. This is generally treated by scholars as if it is Ussher’s work: indeed, according to Ian Green’s list ¹¹⁸ Ibid. 309. ¹¹⁹ Gribben, Puritan Millennium. ¹²⁰ J. D. D. Worthington (ed.), The works of . . . Joseph Mede (London, 1672), 845, 851. ¹²¹ See below, p. 239. ¹²² Bodl. MS Add C 301, fol. 95r.

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of early modern bestsellers, it is by far his most popular piece.¹²³ Its structure is that of a catechism, but a particularly detailed one, running in the first edition to some 470 pages, containing a comprehensive coverage both of the basics of Christian belief and of early-seventeenth-century divinity. It is, accordingly, regularly cited as a proof-text both for Ussher’s, and for early modern English Calvinist theology.¹²⁴ In fact, though there was little in it that he would have actively disagreed with, it can hardly be described as Ussher’s work, in that he was not the author, but rather the compiler, responsible for bringing together texts from a range of sources. Ussher explained that ‘the catechisme . . . is none of mine, but transcribed out of Mr Cartwrights Catechisme, and Mr Crooks, and some other English divines, but drawn together in one method, as a kind of common-place-book.’¹²⁵ From our immediate point of view, however, the significance of the Body of divinity lies in its origins—here Bernard again provides the unique details: ‘It was begun in the publick, but finished some yeares after in his private family, constantly twice a week instructing them . . . unto which persons of quality and learning resorting, notes were taken, divers copies were gotten’.¹²⁶ If this catechism consists of what Ussher thought fit to impart to the literate laity—the book was described by a later editor as being ‘as little above the vulgar, as below the learned’—then it gives us an interesting insight into what it was he was teaching his parishioners in early seventeenth-century Dublin.¹²⁷ And, when it came to the Catholic Church, Ussher did not spare his audience: Who is that Antichrist? He is one who under the colour of being for Christ, and under title of his vicegerent, exalteth himselfe above, and against Christ, opposing himselfe against all his offices and ordinances both in church and common-wealth, bearing authority in the church of God; ruling over that city with seven hils, which did bear rule over nations, and put our lord to death: a man of sinne, a harlot, a mother of spirituall fornications to the kings and ¹²³ Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), appendix 1. ¹²⁴ Richard Hill, An apology for brotherly love, and for the doctrines of the Church of England (London, 1798), 76; H. C. G. Moule, Outlines of Christian Doctrine, 3rd edn (London, 1890), 245–6; G. J. Schochet, ‘Patriarchalism, Politics and Mass Attitudes in Stuart England’, HJ, 12 (1969), 432; Michael McGiffert, ‘The Perkinsian Moment of Federal Theology’, Calvin Theological Journal, 29 (1995), 119–20. ¹²⁵ Parr, Life, 62; James Ussher, The reduction of episcopacy unto the form of synodical government, ed. Nicholas Bernard (London, 1658), 171–2; Ussher did eventually come round to the idea of it being published, accepting that it performed a useful purpose: Bernard, Life, 41–2. I am grateful to Michael McGiffert for encouraging me to reconsider the status of the Body of divinity. ¹²⁶ Bernard, Life, 41. ¹²⁷ James Ussher (ed.), A body of divinity (London, 1677), sig. [A3r]; the date of the original compilation is far from clear: in the dedication To the Christian reader there is a reference in the first (1645) edition (repeated in the 1658 and 1670 editions) to the work having been finished some twenty years earlier, i.e. 1625; but the 1647 edition makes this thirty years, implying 1617; in the most careful edition of the Body, that of 1677 this is extended to sixty years which brings us back again to 1617.

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people of the nations, a childe of perdition, and a destroier establishing himselfe by lying miracles and false wonders. All which marks together do agree with none but the Pope of Rome . . . What is the use of all this doctrine? That whosoever are partakers of the sins of Rome, are also under the same curse: and therefore such of us as have lived in popery should examin our selves if we have truly repented us of it, first, by the change of our understanding; as whether we have grown in the knowledg of the truth: and secondly, by the change of our affections, as whether we hate popery, and love the truth unfeignedly, and so let every one judge himself, that he be not judged, and that with harder judgment, according as God hath been the longer patient towards us. What further? That there can be no sound agreement betwixt popery and the profession of the gospel, no more then betwixt light and darknesse, falsehood and truth, God and Beliall, and therefore no reconciliation can be devised betwixt them. For if the members of Antichrist shall be destroyed, we cannot in any sort communicate with them in their errors, unlesse we wil bear them company in their destruction also.¹²⁸

The source for this material is, indeed, as Ussher intimated, the work of one of the leading figures in English presbyterianism—Thomas Cartwright.¹²⁹ The puritans’ interest in apocalyptic, and their activist determination that the remnants of Antichrist should be rigorously rooted out in religious and political life, had interesting implications when transferred to Ireland.¹³⁰ Again, it was Irish Catholics who gleefully pointed out that the identification of the pope as Antichrist was only an extreme protestant (= puritan) conviction. Sibthorp responded by insisting that it was a much more broadly held view, and, revealingly, that even if it was puritan, it was none the worse for that.¹³¹ There is a strong temptation to see the early modern interest in apocalyptic as mad or marginal. Ussher’s scholarly interests and methodology are in many other respects so modern and ‘normal’, that there has been a tendency to downplay his apocalyptic concerns. This would, however, be a mistake, especially during the first part of his life, when his interpretation of apocalyptic was central to his thinking. What must be done in relation to Ussher, and many other early seventeenth-century Irish protestants, is to engage in that difficult historical exercise of ‘understanding how familiar people think strangely’.¹³² Only then is it possible to understand the ideological power of apocalyptic as the missing link ¹²⁸ James Ussher (ed.), A body of divinity (London, 1658), 438–9. ¹²⁹ Thomas Cartwright, A treatise of Christian religion (London, 1616), 315–16. ¹³⁰ P.G. Lake, ‘The significance of the Elizabethan identification of the Pope as Antichrist’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 31 (1980), 161–78. ¹³¹ Malone, Reply, 714; Bodl. MS Rawlinson C849, fol. 295v. ¹³² J. W. Davidson, The Logic of Millennial Thought: Eighteenth-Century New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), p. ix.

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which binds together the various elements of the early seventeenth-century Irish protestant mindset.

C O N C LU S I O N During the James’ reign, Ussher and his fellow Irish protestants set out to domesticate Calvinism and, in particular, Calvinist anti-Catholicism. The latter formed the main, almost the sole focus of research in the new university. Whole sets of lectures were devoted to refuting the chief enemy, Bellarmine. The errors of the Rhemist translation of the Bible were demonstrated. The consonance between protestant beliefs and those of the early church was exhaustively and exhaustingly ‘proved’ through extensive patristic research. The legitimacy of the protestant line of descent was traced through the mediaeval heretics. The pope’s antichristian identity was exposed. And the whole historical and theological edifice was underpinned and explained by God operating in history in a pattern foretold in the apocalyptic books of the Bible. The Irish protestant theologians promulgated and popularized this fiercely anti-Catholic ideology through publishing controversial theology, circulating manuscript tracts, teaching it to the students of Trinity, and providing graduates in the parishes with distance-learning support in their encounters with Catholic clergy and laity. To a certain extent, what was taught by Ussher and the Trinity fellows was little different from that which students at any university in England would have encountered. But though the content was often similar, it was subtly altered by its new Irish context. The different disciplinary framework of the Irish church changed the dynamics within which puritans operated: freed from the need to conform and fight on two fronts against the bishops and the Catholics, they could direct their energy entirely against the papal forces. The fact that protestants were in a minority in Ireland also inevitably coloured the way in which they used and related to anti-Catholic theology, and appropriated Calvinism. Even more tellingly, their Irish experience of rebellion and violence made the apocalyptic interpretation of recent history terrifyingly real. It gave them a salient and unyielding sense of identity which marked them off—indeed, which required them to rigidly distinguish themselves—from their Catholic neighbours. Irish protestantism had been defined not just to condemn but actively to exclude Catholicism.

4 Ussher and the Irish Articles of 1615 Confessions of faith are, to the postmodern eye, tedious documents, verbose monuments to the challenge of precisely defining imprecise theological concepts, witnesses to the impossibility of tying a text and its meaning to its author’s original intentions. But, to those living amidst the religious warfare of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, confessions were a denominational cornerstone, the defining feature of a national church, providing a litmus test for doctrinal orthodoxy which separated truth from heresy and defined the limits of toleration. In England, the Thirty-Nine Articles formed the centrepiece to efforts to establish a uniformity of belief, with ministers being required to make a formal subscription of assent. But Ireland lacked such a sophisticated statement, or the means of enforcement. There was, it is true, the twelve articles of 1567, derived from the brief stop-gap English confession of 1561 probably composed by Archbishop Parker.¹ But these were short and general, and, given their origin, were hardly an independent expression of the theological outlook of the Church of Ireland. Consequently, by the early seventeenth century, as émigré clergy and Trinity graduates gave a new ideological impetus to Irish protestantism, it became apparent that there was a mismatch between the increasing theological awareness of the clergy and the relative simplicity, even naïveté, of the twelve articles. The obvious solution was simply to adopt the Thirty-Nine Articles as the Irish confession, ensuring that the two Churches remained in step. This, however, was not the option chosen: instead, it was decided to draw up a separate Irish confession of faith. The reasons behind this decision are unclear—indeed, as will be seen, we know very little at all about the background to the new Irish articles. Three broad factors which may have steered the Church of Ireland in this direction can, however, be tentatively identified. To begin with, the Church of Ireland was not the Church of England—it faced markedly different challenges to its English sister, which naturally would have led some to prefer a separate confession. And by the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Thirty-Nine Articles were, in any case, suffering from that perennial problem of an aging written confession—they were insufficiently precise to deal either with starkly differing interpretations of their text, or with new theological trends which had developed after their original ¹ A declaration of certain principal articles of religion (London, 1561); Brefe declaration of certein principall articles of religion.

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composition—notably the Arminian challenges to Calvinist predestination in the Netherlands and in England. Most important of all, as the Church of Ireland began to mature theologically in the early 1600s, and attract theologically literate clergy, it began to demonstrate an independent streak, evident in its willingness to employ puritans, and most notably manifested in the decision to summon for the first time a national convocation, which met in tandem with the Parliament of 1613–15 and made a decision to produce a separate Irish confession.² Like its English equivalents Irish convocation had two houses, one for bishops, presided over by Archbishop Jones of Dublin, the other for lower clergy, which had, as its prolocutor, Ralph Barlow, Archdeacon of Meath.³ Given that Barlow was chaplain to Lord Deputy Chichester, whilst Jones also served as lord chancellor, the Dublin authorities were, to say the least, closely in touch with what went on in the clerical assembly. But apart from these appointments, and its one tangible result—a confession of 104 articles—we know remarkably little about the composition, debates, or deliberations of convocation, except, that is, for another of those unique nuggets of information embedded in Bernard’s Life: ‘Anno 1615 there was a . . . convocation of the clergy, then those learned articles of Ireland were composed and published, he [Ussher] being a member of the synod was appointed to draw them up.’⁴ There has been a certain amount of disagreement over what this means, perhaps most straightforwardly explained by the definition of ‘draw up’ in the Oxford English Dictionary: ‘to put together in proper form; to frame, compile, compose, write out in due form’. In other words, Ussher could have done anything from composing the articles to copying out the final draft. His grandson, James Tyrrell, a distinguished Whig historian and friend of John Locke, opted for the latter, arguing that ‘the lord Primate . . . was ordered by the convocation to draw up those articles, and put them into Latin, as if Dr Usher could have then such a great influence upon it, as to be able to govern the church at his pleasure; or that the scribe of any synod or council could make it pass what acts or articles he pleases’.⁵ William Prynne, in 1629, did not link Ussher to the articles, but saw them as having been composed ‘in the convocation at Dublin’ by the Irish archbishops and bishops.⁶ Some have followed this, and argued that it would be wrong to treat the articles simply as another theological work by Ussher.⁷ But the vast majority of historians, from Peter Heylyn and Richard Parr in the seventeenth to Buick Knox and Amanda Capern in the twentieth century, have ² Clerical proctors had been summoned to Irish parliaments before but there is no evidence that they met as a distinct body or dealt with religious issues: TCD MS 1062, p. 420. ³ Ibid. 49. ⁴ Bernard, Life, 49. ⁵ Parr, Life, ‘An appendix to the life of the lord Primate Usher’, 30; UW, i, app., p. clxxx. Tyrrell’s case might be stronger if there was any evidence that Ussher had actually translated them into Latin. ⁶ William Prynne, The Church of Englands old antithesis to new Arminianisme (London, 1629), 13, 119; IA also referred to at 3, 7, 53, 69, 73, 89, 100, 109. ⁷ Ford, Protestant Reformation, 157–9; William O’Sullivan (ed.), ‘Correspondence of David Rothe and James Ussher, 1619–23’, Collectanea Hibernica, 36–7 (1994–5), 10 n 29.

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viewed Ussher as, simply, the author of the Irish articles—which, as Parr put it, he ‘himself made, and drew up’.⁸ Though the two viewpoints are not wholly exclusive—it is perfectly possible that Ussher composed some parts, but merely copied out others—the actual evidence that we possess about their composition suggests that Ussher had a significant role in writing at least some of the text of the confession. Samuel Hartlib, that collector and communicator of information, was the first to associate Ussher with the articles in some laconic notes he made around 1634: ‘Articles of the Church of Ireland 3. or 4. things against Arminianisme my Lord . . . Primate being the clarke of the synod in King James time’.⁹ More compellingly, Ussher’s two short catechisms, published in 1654, but written, according to Ussher, when he was twenty-two or twenty-three years old—i.e. around 1603–4—contain clear textual links to the confession.¹⁰ Just to take two examples: Catechism Repentance is a gift of God, whereby a godly sorrow is wrought in the heart of the faithful, for offending God their merciful Father, by their former transgressions, together with a constant resolution for the time to come, to forsake their former courses, and to lead a new life.¹¹ IA 40 Repentance is a gift of God whereby a godly sorrow is wrought in the heart of the faithful, for offending God their merciful Father by their former transgressions, together with a constant resolution for the time to come to cleave unto God, and to lead a new life. Catechism What does this commandment require? That we keep holy the Sabbath day, by resting from the ordinary businesses of this life, and bestowing that leisure upon the exercises of religion, both publike and private.¹² IA 56 The first day of the week, which is the Lord’s Day, is wholly to be dedicated unto the service of God, and therefore we are bound therein to rest from our common and daily business, and to bestow that leisure upon holy exercises, both public and private.

Some of the similarities could be explained by the fact that the catechism, like the confession, is heavily dependent upon the Bible, and they often share the same scriptural text. But the fact that on at least another eight occasions it ⁸ Peter Heylyn, Aerius redivivus, or, the history of the Presbyterians (Oxford, 1670), 394 ff.; Parr, Life, 42; Knox, Ussher, 16 ff.; Capern, ‘Caroline Church’, 72. ⁹ The Hartlib papers, 2nd edn (Sheffield: Humanities Research Institute, 2002), 29/2/29A. ¹⁰ James Ussher, The principles of Christian religion . . . Now fully corrected, and much enlarged by the author, 5th edn (London, 1653); first published nine years previously (London, 1644), this was Ussher’s most popular work: Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), app. 1; the fifth is the first edition to have a preface by Ussher; UW, xi. 189. ¹¹ Ussher, Principles of Christian religion, 24; UW, xi. 189. ¹² Ussher, Principles of Christian religion, 30; UW, xi. 191.

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is possible to trace quotations from the catechisms in the articles¹³ strongly suggests that Ussher served as the primary draughtsman: thus in the case of relatively uncontroversial issues, we may well be reading Ussher’s words verbatim in some of the final articles; in other, more complex and disputed subjects, it is difficult to believe that the final text is not the result of the debates and compromises of convocation itself. As we shall see, in one important area, Ussher’s theology developed significantly beyond the Irish confession almost as soon as it was published. Perhaps the best conclusion is simply to quote Bernard’s later amendment to his earlier description of Ussher’s role: ‘he had then the honour to be appointed by the synode as a principall person to draw them up.’¹⁴ In the end, in the absence of any further information about convocation, we are forced back to the text of the articles themselves. And here we find a battlefield. On one side is the high-church party, led by Peter Heylyn and Charles Elrington, on the other, Ussher’s standard modern biographer, Buick Knox. The general issue is where the 1615 articles place the Church of Ireland in the wider theological and ecclesiological context of Britain, Ireland, and Europe. Or, more narrowly, to what extent does the Irish confession depart from the Thirty-Nine Articles? Peter Heylyn had no doubts: he set out to prove that the articles, composed by Ussher, were part of the puritan plot to abandon the English confession and impose extreme Calvinism on the Church of Ireland: For Calvinism by degrees had taken such deep root amongst them, that at the last it was received and countenanced as the only doctrine which was to be defended in the Church of Ireland. For, not contented with the articles of the Church of England, they were resolved to frame a confession of their own; the drawing up whereof was referred to Dr. Iames Usher, then Provost of the Colledg of Dublin, and afterwards Arce-bishop [sic] of Armagh, and Lord Primate of Ireland. By whom the book was so contrived, that all the sabbatarian and Calvinian rigors were declared therein to be the doctrines of that church. For first, the articles of Lambeth, rejected at the conference at Hampton-Court, must be inserted into this confession, as the chief parts of it. And secondly, an article must be made of purpose to justifie the morality of the lord’s-day-sabbath, and to require the spending of it wholly in religious exercises. Besides which deviations from the doctrine of the Church of England . . . all ministers adjudged to be lawfully called, who are called unto the work of the ministry by those that have publick authority given them in the church (but whether they be bishops, or not, it makes no matter, so they be authorized unto it by their several churches). No power ascribed to the church in making canons, or ¹³ UW, xi. 183 (‘In the beginning of time . . . all things’), IA 18; UW, xi. 193 (‘The sacrament . . . with Jesus Christ’), IA 89; UW, xi. 194 (‘The sacrament . . . increase in Christ’), IA 92; UW, xi. 195 (‘The souls . . . endless torments’), IA 101; UW, xi. 196 (‘Christ . . . all in all’), IA 104; UW, xi. 203 (‘it seemeth good . . . of his justice’), IA 14; UW, xi. 205 (‘whereby God . . . the same’), IA 21; UW, xi. 205 (‘By one man . . . have sinned’), IA 22. ¹⁴ William Barlee, A necessary vindication (London, 1658), sig. b1r; there still remains, though, one puzzle: apart from a copy of the Lambeth articles, there is nothing in Ussher’s voluminous manuscript notebooks which would suggest he had drafted the IA.

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censuring any of those who either carelesly or maliciously do infringe the same. The pope made antichrist, according to the like determination of the French Hugonots at Gappe in Daulphine. And finally, such a silence concerning the consecration of arch-bishops and bishops (expresly justified and avowed in the English book), as if they were not a distinct order from the common presbyters. All which, being Usher’s own private opinions, were dispersed in several places of the articles for the Church of Ireland; approved of in the convocation of the year 1615: and finally, confirmed by the Lord Deputy Chichester, in the Name of King James.¹⁵

Elrington, while accepting that Heylyn may have gone too far, shared his highchurch hostility to the articles’ content: some of the Irish articles ‘with rigid precision determine questions which hitherto had never been introduced into articles of faith’; others created a ‘serious impediment . . . to . . . any agreement between the churches of England and Ireland’ in all, they were ‘most injurious to the progress of true religion’ in Ireland.¹⁶ Antipathy continued in the most notable twentieth-century exponent of a high vision of Irish Anglicanism, H. R. McAdoo, who dismissed the Irish articles as ‘an unworkable combination of contradictory views’.¹⁷ On the other side, though, is Knox: It is frequently assumed that, when Ussher drew up the Irish articles . . . he sought to outline a system of doctrine and practice which was substantially at variance with the position set forth in the thirty-nine articles . . . In view of this assumption, it is essential to compare the two series in detail and to see how far the assumption is justified.¹⁸

Having done just that, Knox concluded that Heylyn and Elrington were largely mistaken. Far from being extreme or puritan, the articles, and Ussher, were fully in line with a broadly ‘Anglican’ position.¹⁹ Thirty-six of the English articles had been used in part or whole in the Irish articles; twenty-eight were quoted verbatim in the Irish; where the Irish added to the English, the material was uncontroversial, often taken from the English Homilies: there was, therefore, little real disparity between the two confessions. Faced with the choice between Heylyn’s bile and Knox’s measured scholarship, it hardly seems necessary to return to the issue again. But the matter is not quite as clear-cut as it seems. To begin with, the categories used to characterize Ussher and the articles give cause for concern. Heylyn and Elrington assume that the heritage of the Churches of England and Ireland was, and had always been, a via media Anglicanism which was innately hostile to Calvinism. Knox sensibly attempts to locate Ussher more accurately in his early-seventeenth-century context, but his determination to establish that Ussher, and the articles, are nevertheless ‘Anglican’ ¹⁵ Heylyn, Aerius redivivus, 394. ¹⁶ UW, i. 44–7. ¹⁷ H. R. McAdoo, John Bramhall and Anglicanism (Dublin: SPCK, 1964), 9. ¹⁸ R. B. Knox, ‘The Ecclesiastical Policy of James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh’, PhD thesis, London University, 1956, 69. ¹⁹ Knox, Ussher, 23.

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is unhelpful for two reasons: the use of the term Anglican is anachronistic; and it leads him to attempt, wherever possible, to minimize the differences between the Irish articles (i.e. Ussher) and the Church of England. To place Ussher, the Church of Ireland, and the Irish articles more accurately requires both a subtler taxonomy and a closer analysis of the 1615 confession.²⁰ Though we will have to return at the end to Ussher’s own personal theological development, the obvious starting point is the relationship between the Irish and the Thirty-Nine Articles. The additional evidence that all but one (not three) of the Thirty-Nine Articles are included in the Irish set may, at first sight, seem to reinforce Knox’s point.²¹ In fact, though, it is not the similarity of the two confessions, but their differences which are more striking. While Knox traced methodically what the Irish articles borrowed from the English, seeking to prove their obvious debt, he paid far less attention to what is much more significant—what they left out, what they added, and what they changed.²² Take the one article that the Irish omitted: EA 36, Of consecration of bishops and ministers: ‘The book of consecration of archbishops and bishops and ordering of priests and deacons, lately set forth in the time of Edward the sixth and confirmed at the same time by authority of parliament, doth contain all things necessary to such consecration and ordering; neither hath it anything that of itself is superstitious or ungodly.’ Given their sensitivities about episcopacy, ordination, and the Book of Common Prayer, this was decidedly unwelcome to those of a godly disposition. Indeed, EA 36 had been added in 1563 specifically to rebut puritan objections to the ordinal and strengthen the rather weak EA 23.²³ The obvious conclusion is that it was dropped from the Irish confession in order to preserve the Church’s tolerant approach to nonconformity. Wedded to the assumption that Ussher composed the whole confession, Knox struggles with Ussher’s known commitment to episcopacy: the most he can concede is that Ussher omitted it ‘to avoid raising an awkward controversy’.²⁴ But there is no proof that Ussher was responsible for leaving it out. It is equally possible that ²⁰ Articles of religion (Dublin, 1615); for modern editions, see UW, i, app. iv; Charles Hardwick, A History of the Articles of Religion (Philadelphia, 1895); W. D. Killen, The Ecclesiastical History of Ireland. From the Earliest Period to the Present Times, 2 vols. (London, 1875), i, app. iii; Philip Schaff, The Creeds of the Evangelical Protestant Churches (London, 1877), 526–44; Gerald Bray (ed.), Documents of the English Reformation (Edinburgh: James Clarke and Co, 1994), 437–52. ²¹ EA 32, which Knox claimed was not included in the Irish articles is in fact used in IA 64; ditto EA 39 and IA 55: Knox, Ussher, 21. I have followed Knox in omitting from the comparison EA 35 on the Homilies, though here too, given puritan hostility to the Homilies as encouraging the use of reading ministers, its omission from the IA may not (pace Knox) be wholly innocent. ²² His claim that 28 EAs are quoted verbatim simply does not stand up; even a flexible interpretation of verbatim produces only 13: EA 4, 5, 10, 12, 18, 21–24, 26, 29, 33, 38; for a much more thorough analysis of the IA, see R. L Wallace, ‘The Articles of the Church of Ireland of 1615’, PhD thesis, Edinburgh University, 1949. ²³ E. J. Bicknell, A Theological Introduction to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, 2nd edn (London: Longmans, Green, 1947), 405. ²⁴ Knox, Ussher, 23.

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he included it and it was rejected by a convocation which, if representative of the Irish church, would have had a significant godly presence. What is clear, though, is that Ussher, or the convocation, or both, made a conscious decision to accommodate puritan concerns—or, more broadly, to depart from the Thirty-Nine Articles in order to lessen the gap between the Irish church and the non-episcopal European protestant churches. This is confirmed by a linked change elsewhere in the Irish articles. EA 32 dealt with the marriage of priests: ‘Bishops, priests, and deacons are not commanded by God’s laws either to vow the estate of single life or to abstain from marriage.’ Uncontentious in itself, this was included in IA 64, but with a suggestive alteration in wording from ‘bishops, priests, and deacons’ to ‘ministers of the church’, allowing in that bland phrase both Calvinist equality of ministry and the English and Irish church’s threefold ministry. The end result of these alterations is that, whereas the English articles allude to bishops three times, the only reference which the Irish confession retains is a single disparaging comment on the Bishop of Rome. And, of course, as far as puritans were concerned, this was the only mention of bishops that they would have wanted in a confession. This is not to say that the Church of Ireland did not use the threefold ministry, nor that it was not episcopalian: it did, and it was content to remain so.²⁵ But it saw no need narrowly to define itself in its articles, limiting itself, as Heylyn acutely complained, to the limp IA 71, derived from EA 23: It is not lawful for any man to take upon him the office of public preaching or ministering the sacraments in the church unless he be first lawfully called and sent to execute the same. And those we ought to judge lawfully called and sent, which be chosen and called to this work by men who have public authority given them in the church, to call and send ministers into the Lord’s vineyard.

Changes were also made to the articles dealing with the nature and authority of the church. In the English confession, the visible church was confidently and positively defined in EA 19 by its two marks: ‘The visible Church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men, in the which the pure word of God is preached and the sacraments be duly ministered according to Christ’s ordinance in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same.’ The emphasis in the Irish articles was rather different. First, IA 69, like the Scottish confession of 1560, added a further mark to help identify the true church—the power of the keys—reflecting the reformed interest in discipline.²⁶ Second, its approach to the visible church was much more diffident, even pessimistic, referring to the possibility that it might lapse into impurity: ²⁵ See IA 71. ²⁶ G. D. Henderson and James Bulloch (ed.), The Scots Confession 1560 (Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press, 1960), article XVI; though Calvin strongly emphasized discipline, he did not make it a mark of the church.

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But particular and visible churches (consisting of those who make profession of the faith of Christ and live under the outward means of salvation) be many in number; wherein the more or less sincerely, according to Christ’s institution, the word of God is taught, the sacraments are administered and the authority of the keys is used, the more or less pure are such churches to be accounted.

Instead of concentrating wholly on this fallible visible church, as the English confession did, the 1615 articles, again following the Scottish confession, gave pride of place in its section ‘Of the church’ to a new article, on the invisible church, clearly consonant to Ussher’s much more radical emphasis in De successione on the church of the elect: There is but one Catholic church (out of which there is no salvation) containing the universal company of all the saints that ever were, are or shall be, gathered together in one body, under one head Christ Jesus; part whereof is already in heaven triumphant, part as yet militant, here upon earth. And because this church consisteth of all those, and those alone, which are elected by God unto salvation, and regenerated by the power of his spirit, the number of whom is known only unto God himself; therefore it is called Catholic or universal, and the invisible church.²⁷

When the Irish articles dealt with the authority of the church, they also made significant changes. EA 20 began with a statement that ‘The Church hath power to decree rites or ceremonies and authority in controversies of faith.’ This clause had been added in 1563 in an attempt to defend the right of the authorities to require puritan clergy to observe ceremonies which they viewed as superstitious and unbiblical.²⁸ It was, unsurprisingly, unpopular with the English puritans.²⁹ IA 75 dealt with the problem summarily, by dropping the phrase. The addition of a new article, IA 52, denouncing ‘all worship devised by mans phantasie’, though it was specifically targeted at Catholic practices such as pilgrimages, ‘praying upon beades and such like superstition’, could also be used to denounce the imposition of practices which were not specifically endorsed by the Bible.³⁰ This shift in emphasis, from defending the church’s right to impose what ceremonies it wished, to stressing that superstitious ceremonies had to be removed, was equally evident in the way that the Irish confession handled another puritan bˆete noire, EA 34: It is not necessary that traditions and ceremonies be in all places one or utterly alike; for at all times they have been diverse, and may be changed according to the diversity of countries, times, and men’s manners, so that nothing be ordained against God’s word. ²⁷ IA 68; Henderson and Bulloch (ed.), Scots Confession, article XVIII; for a discussion of the possible reasons for the silence of the EA on the invisible church, see Oliver O’Donovan, On the Thirty-Nine Articles: A Conversation with Tudor Christianity (Exeter: Paternoster Press, 1986), 92. ²⁸ Bicknell, Thirty-Nine Articles, 312; Richard Mocket, Doctrina et politia Ecclesiae Anglicanae: an Anglican summa, ed. M. A. Screech (Leiden: Brill, 1995), pp. xlix–l, suggests that the purpose of the phrase was less to attack puritanism than strengthen the royal prerogative against Parliament. ²⁹ See the argument between Heylyn and Ussher’s friend John Prideaux: LW, v. 89. ³⁰ Conrad Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 79.

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Whosoever through his private judgement willingly and purposely doth openly break the traditions and ceremonies of the Church which be not repugnant to the word of God, and be ordained and approved by common authority, ought to be rebuked openly that other may fear to do the like, as he that offendeth against common order of the Church, and hurteth the authority of the magistrate, and woundeth the conscience of the weak brethren. Every particular or national Church hath authority to ordain, change, and abolish ceremonies or rites of the Church ordained only by man’s authority, so that all things be done to edifying.

Here the puritans objected to the weak caveat at the end of the first sentence, fearing that this allowed particular churches to force ministers to follow traditions and ceremonies of their own devising: anything could be ordained, so long as it was not directly contradicted by the Bible. Instead, they preferred the much stricter requirement that all ceremonies had to be positively endorsed and enjoined by the Bible. IA 77 responded to these concerns by omitting the whole of the first two paragraphs, the EA being reduced to a wording taken from the twelve articles of 1567: ‘Every particular church hath authority to institute, to change and clean to put away ceremonies and other ecclesiastical rites, as they be superfluous or be abused; and to constitute other, making more to seemliness, to order or edification.’³¹ The implications of this new draft were interesting. First, the omission of the second paragraph can only have been a concession to godly concerns. Second, the change of emphasis, from ‘ordain, change, and abolish’ to ‘institute, change and clean put away’, and the addition of ‘as they be superfluous or be abused’, could have appeared in the eyes of a godly minister as a welcome hint of further reform of superfluous popish ceremonies. Linked to this was a further ramification. Whilst following the Church of England in asserting its right to change ceremonies, by doing so the Church of Ireland was also differentiating itself from its sister church and asserting its independence. For, as Ussher was later to insist, as a particular church, the Church of Ireland could, if it wished, choose to differ in its ceremonies from the Church of England.³² The Irish confession also departed from the English in its approach to Catholicism. For the most part, the English anti-Catholic articles were included verbatim, but strengthened by the addition of further material.³³ Thus EA 37 on the papal deposing power was expanded; IA 60 was added, denouncing as ‘impious doctrine’ the idea that excommunicate princes could be murdered by their subjects; and another new article, IA 67, criticized ‘the popish doctrine of equivocation and mental reservation’. The papacy in particular came in for attack, culminating in IA 80, which identified the Bishop of Rome with Antichrist: ‘The Bishop of Rome is so far from being the supreme head of the universal church of Christ that his works and doctrine do plainly discover him to be ‘‘that man ³¹ Brefe declaration of articles of religion, Article 3. ³³ Compare EA 30, IA 97; IA 100; IA 70.

³² See below, p. 192.

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of sin’’ foretold in the Holy Scriptures, ‘‘whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and abolish with the brightness of his coming.’’ ’³⁴ The most famous, and controversial, difference between the Irish and English articles was the inclusion of the Lambeth articles. The reason for doing this was probably little different from the purpose of the original framers of the Lambeth articles. Whitaker and Whitgift, when faced in the 1590s with a protoArminian challenge to the Calvinist interpretation of EA 17, ‘Of predestination and election’, had responded by drawing up nine further articles which ensured that the EA would be interpreted in a Calvinist manner. Given the dominance of Calvinism in the early-seventeenth-century Church of Ireland, it was natural that Ussher and the convocation should wish to eliminate from the Irish confession the ambiguities of the English.³⁵ The result was a greatly expanded treatment of predestination, the single English article growing to seven in the Irish confession, mainly through the incorporation of all the Lambeth articles. Where EA 17 had focused upon predestination to life, the IA 12 balanced this a clear endorsement of double predestination by including the first Lambeth article: ‘God hath predestinated some unto life and reprobated some unto death.’³⁶ IA 14 also used the second Lambeth article in order to prevent people mitigating the savagery of double predestination by invoking divine foreknowledge. And, in a marked departure from the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Irish church committed itself to assurance of salvation for the true believer, and the perseverance of the regenerate.³⁷ Indeed they even strengthened the Lambeth articles: where the third of the latter merely stated that there was a predetermined number of those predestined to salvation, IA 12 followed the logic through to the conclusion that the number of the elect and the reprobate were predetermined. Convocation reinforced the English articles in other respects as well. Thus where EA 9 referred to the impact of original sin on human nature ‘whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness, and is of his own nature inclined to evil, so that the flesh lusteth always contrary to the spirit’, IA 23 was far more blunt, pessimistic and Calvinist: ‘whereby it cometh to pass that man is deprived of original righteousness and by nature is bent unto sin’. Similarly, with regard to the impact of sin on the regenerate Christian, EA 16 claimed that ‘After we ³⁴ 2 Thess. 2:3 and 8. ³⁵ H. C. Porter, Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), ch. 16; P. G. Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 218–26; Dewey Wallace, Puritans and Predestination: Grace in English Protestant Theology, 1525–1695 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 66–8; Elizabeth Gilliam and W. J. Tighe, ‘To ‘‘Run with the Time’’: Archbishop Whitgift, the Lambeth Articles, and the Politics of Theological Ambiguity in late Elizabethan England’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 23 (1992), 325–40. ³⁶ For the text of Lambeth articles see Hardwick, Articles of religion, 317–24; Porter, Reformation and Reaction, 365–66. ³⁷ IA 37 and IA 38 relying on Lambeth articles 6 and 5.

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have received the Holy Ghost, we may depart from grace given and fall into sin, and by the grace of God we may arise again and amend our lives.’ The Catholic possibility that this raised of the elect falling from grace was worrying to firm Calvinists, and was raised by the puritan spokesman John Rainolds at the Hampton Court conference in 1604.³⁸ But what King James had refused then, the Irish Articles resolved in 1615 in a manner which would have been wholly satisfactory to Rainolds.³⁹ The orientation of the Irish church in a firmly Calvinist direction was also evident in the treatment of the sacraments. Here again, the 1615 articles expanded on 1563, seven articles being transformed into sixteen. On sacraments in general, the Irish church edged away from the Church of England’s distinctly unprotestant ambiguity over their number—where two were given primacy but the other five not wholly disavowed. Where EA 25 neutrally referred to ‘those five, commonly called sacraments’, IA 87 distanced itself from ‘those five which by the Church of Rome are called sacraments’, and further downgraded them by stressing (with EA 25) that not only did they not have ‘any visible sign or ceremony ordained of God’, but by adding to this that neither did they have any ‘promise of saving grace annexed thereunto’. In the case of the Lord’s Supper, the approach of the Irish articles also expanded and developed the Thirty-Nine. Both work within what is broadly a Calvinist theology, but the Irish confession spelled out the nature of the sacrament more explicitly. Indeed, the Irish article moved beyond Calvin, towards what Gerrish has called a ‘symbolic parallelism: outwardly we eat the bread, inwardly at the same time we also feed upon Christ’s body’.⁴⁰ Even more revealing is the treatment of baptism: EA 27 Baptism is not only a sign of profession and mark of difference whereby Christian men are discerned from other that be not christened, but is also a sign of regeneration or new birth, whereby, as by an instrument, they that receive baptism rightly are grafted into the Church; the promises of the forgiveness of sin, and of our adoption to be the sons of God, by the Holy Ghost are visibly signed and sealed; faith is confirmed, and grace increased by virtue of prayer unto God.

³⁸ William Barlow, The summe and substance of the conference . . . at Hampton Court (London, 1604), 24; Bicknell, Thirty-Nine Articles, 253; Kenneth Fincham and P. G. Lake, ‘The Ecclesiastical Policy of James I’, Journal of British Studies, 34 (1985), 174; Alan Cromartie, ‘King James and the Hampton Court Conference’, in Ralph Houlbrooke (ed.), James VI and I: Ideas, Authority and Government (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 61–80. ³⁹ IA 44 dropped the unwelcome sentence, whilst IA 38 asserted that a true justifying faith could never be extinguished in the regenerate; three other concerns about the EA raised by Reynolds at Hampton Court were also partly met by the IA: most obviously in the inclusion of the Lambeth articles, but also by the slight change to EA 23 in IA 71, and the strengthening of EA 37, which Rainolds had complained was too weak, by IA 58: Barlow, Summe and substance, 24–5, 37–8. ⁴⁰ B. A. Gerrish, ‘The Lord’s Supper in the Reformed Confessions’, Theology Today, 33 (1966), 234.

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IA 89 Baptism is not only an outward sign of our profession and a note of difference whereby Christians are discerned from such as are no Christians, but much more a sacrament of our admission into the Church, sealing unto us our new birth (and consequently our justification, adoption and sanctification) by the communion which we have with Jesus Christ.

The removal of all reference to regeneration was a startling change. The EA linked the sign to the possibility of actual regeneration—the inner renewal of the individual by the Holy Spirit—opening up a debate within the Church of England which divided not only Laudians and Calvinists, but also high and low churchmen, and reached its climax in the Gorham case in the nineteenth century.⁴¹ For those with a ‘high’ view of the sacraments, baptism was a means of grace which actually began the process of regeneration; for those who believed in predestination, it was impossible that all should receive this grace, since it was confined only to the elect. But the IA foreclosed this debate in a decisive manner, insisting that baptism was merely a seal, a sign of admission into the Church, dedicating the Christian to the service of God under the new covenant. Even though Ussher’s friend Samuel Ward later sought to rescue the link between baptism and grace, the consensus of the Church of Ireland in the early seventeenth century—what Ussher called ‘the opinion more vulgarly received among us’—held to IA 89.⁴² Rather than tying regeneration to baptism, therefore, the Irish confession, reflecting Ussher’s views on the matter, linked it firmly to election.⁴³ Another major new development in the Irish articles was the endorsement it gave to covenantal, or federal theology. The idea of a covenant goes back, of course, to God’s pledge to Israel in the Old Testament, but it had been adapted by the early reformers as the covenant of grace, whereby God promises man grace in return for faith and repentance. But where Calvin had focused upon a single covenant, later reformed scholars developed a more complex theology, based on two. First there was the covenant of works or of the law, which promised man eternal life if he obeyed the commandments. This, though, was an impossible challenge for sinful mankind, hence the need for the second covenant of grace whereby Christ atones for human sin and restores the ability to fulfil the ⁴¹ J. C. H. Nias, Gorham and the Bishop of Exeter (London: SPCK, 1951); Ussher was in fact cited in the Gorham case: E. F. Moore (ed.), The Case of the Rev. G. C. Gorham, against the Bishop of Exeter (London, 1852), 215. ⁴² UW, xv. 482; for a summary of this consensus see George Downame, A treatise of the certainty of perseverance (Dublin, 1631), 396 ff. ⁴³ UW, xii. 564; see the change to Lambeth article 5 when it was incorporated into IA 38 on perseverance: where the former had referred to the sanctifying spirit of God as not vanishing away ‘in the elect’, the latter replaced ‘elect’ with ‘regenerate’; Hardwick, Articles of religion, 172; William Maskell, A Second Letter on the Present Position of the High Church Party in the Church of England (London, 1850), 21–2.

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law. The details of covenant theology were complex and difficult to untangle: arguments still rage over such issues as how Calvin’s views relate to those of his later followers, and whether the covenantal relationship between man and God was mutual or one-sided. Some things are clear, though. Federal theology met a number of pressing Calvinist needs: it provided a reassuringly formal legal structure to the frighteningly random and unknowable decision of God to grant saving grace; it tied that grace to good works in a way that restored the link between protestantism and moral behaviour, without falling into the Catholic trap of works righteousness or legalism, thus providing a framework upon which the clergy could attempt to create a functioning protestant society—covenant doctrine, as Michael McGiffert put it in relation to England, was used to ‘build Jerusalem’.⁴⁴ The importance of federal theology within the Calvinist tradition grew dramatically during the latter quarter of the sixteenth century, mainly thanks to the writings of the Heidelberg theologians, such as Olevianus.⁴⁵ Their ideas were in turn taken up in the last two decades of the sixteenth century by English puritan theologians such as Cartwright, Dudley Fenner, and Perkins, and thereby entered into the mainstream of English Calvinist theology.⁴⁶ Here again, the Irish articles incorporated with remarkable speed a new development in Continental and English Calvinism, absent from the Thirty-Nine Articles. The 1615 articles were thus the first reformed confession to outline the twofold covenant, pointing the way in this, as in other areas, to the much more detailed exposition in chapter VII of the Westminster confession. As well as these significant additions, there were also a number of minor changes to the English articles. Some reflected the particular needs of the Irish church—hence the reference to the need for the Bible to be ‘translated out of the original tongues into all languages for the common use of all men’ in IA 4. Others were a product of the concerns of both godly and moderate protestants. Thus the section entitled ‘On the service of God’, which consisted almost entirely of new material, reads like a manual of Calvinist piety, ranging across prayer, religious ⁴⁴ Michael McGiffert, ‘Grace and Works: The Rise and Division of Covenant Divinity in Elizabethan Puritanism’, Harvard Theological Review, 75 (1982), 463–502. ⁴⁵ J. W. Baker, ‘Heinrich Bullinger, the Covenant, and the Reformed Tradition in Retrospect’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 29 (1998), 359–76; L. D. Bierma, Calvinism in the Confessional Age: The Covenant Theology of Caspar Olevianus (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1996); J. L. Farthing, ‘Foedus evangelicum Jerome Zanchi on the Covenant’, Calvin Theological Journal, 29 (1994), 149–67; P. A. Lillback, ‘Ursinus’ Development of the Covenant of Creation: A Debt to Melanchthon or Calvin?’, Westminster Theological Journal, 43 (1981), 247–88; idem, ‘The Continuing Conundrum: Calvin and the Conditionality of the Covenant’, Calvin Theological Journal, 29 (1994), 42–74; R. A. Muller, After Calvin: Studies in the Development of a Theological Tradition (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); J. H. Stek, ‘ ‘‘Covenant’’ Overload in Reformed Theology’, Calvin Theological Journal, 29 (1995), 12–41; Derk Visser, ‘The Covenant in Zacharias Ursinus’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 18 (1987), 531–44; John von Rohr, The Covenant of Grace in Puritan Thought (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986). ⁴⁶ McGiffert, ‘Grace and Works’; idem, ‘From Moses to Adam: The Making of the Convenant of Works’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 19 (1988), 131–55; idem, ‘The Perkinsian Moment of Federal Theology’, Calvin Theological Journal, 29 (1995), 117–48.

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fasting, humility in the face of divine affliction, the dangers of images, the evil of swearing, and, finally, the necessity of keeping Sunday holy: ‘The first day of the week, which is the Lord’s Day, is wholly to be dedicated unto the service of God, and therefore we are bound therein to rest from our common and daily business, and to bestow that leisure upon holy exercises, both public and private.’⁴⁷ The material here was difficult to take exception to, since it was drawn from perfectly respectable sources—the Prayer Book catechism and the homilies.⁴⁸ But its inclusion in a confession of faith, and the subsequent controversy over some of the issues it covered—most notably Sunday observance, which became a bone of contention between Laudians and their opponents—again gave the Irish articles a greater retrospective significance in the eyes of the godly.⁴⁹ The Irish confession catered for those of a godly disposition in one literally final respect: at the end of the 104 articles was appended the ‘Decree of the synod’: ‘If any minister, of what degree or quality soever he be, shall publicly teach any doctrine contrary to these Articles agreed upon, if, after due admonition, he do not conform himself and cease to disturb the peace of the Church, let him be silenced and deprived of all spiritual promotions he doth enjoy.’ Though it seemed fierce, in reality it was toothless, ineffective in just the way that nonconformist clergy would have appreciated. For there were no canons associated with the Irish confession, and therefore no way of making clergy subscribe to the articles, a marked contrast to the situation in England where, not only was the confession much less accommodating to those of a godly disposition, it was also enforced with much greater rigour.⁵⁰ Evidently, the Irish articles differed from their English original in a number of major and minor ways: the question remains, though: how significant were these divergences? Did Ussher, as Heylyn and Elrington asserted, detach the Church of Ireland from its English sister and subvert it by introducing Calvinism, or were the changes and additions, as Knox argues, much less dramatic? There is, it is true, a case to be made that many of the differences between the two confessions are a product not of serious theological disagreements, but, rather, of two factors, the differing Irish context, and the passage of time. Thus IA 4 was designed to recognize the fact that the Church of Ireland operated in a country where there were two vernaculars. Equally, the simple fact that the Irish confession was composed over half a century after the English one meant that it had, of necessity, to deal with new emphases and challenges ⁴⁷ IA 46–56; IA 55 was partly based upon EA 39. ⁴⁸ Wallace, ‘Articles of the Church of Ireland’, 156–68. ⁴⁹ K. L. Parker, The English Sabbath: A Study of Doctrine and Discipline from the Reformation to the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). As Samuel Ward put it to Ussher in 1638, they were now living in times when ‘both homilyes and liturgy are sleighted’: Bodl. MS Cherry 23, fols. 190r–191v. ⁵⁰ Bernard does print some canons drawn up by Ussher in, he claims, 1614, but from the context, this would appear to be a misprint for 1634: Bernard, Clavi, 61–2.

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had grown up in the intervening period. This was most obvious in the case of the approach to Catholicism, where the lengthier and more aggressive tone of the Irish articles can be seen as a natural product of the bitter struggles in both Ireland and England which followed the excommunication of Elizabeth in 1570. And, as Knox pointed out, the inclusion of the Lambeth articles, which were, after all, approved by the Archbishop of Canterbury, simply reflected the increasing dominance of Calvinism in the English church during the later sixteenth century, and therefore did not significantly widen the gap between the two Churches.⁵¹ Similarly, IA 56, according to Knox, fell short of full ‘sabbatarian rigours’.⁵² All this is true, up to a point. Much of what the Irish articles included reflected the views of most English protestants and the predominant theology of the Church of England. To that extent, it did not separate the two Churches. But that does not mean that the Irish confession did not represent a significant departure. Here we return to the importance of confessions in early modern Europe. What was radical about the Irish articles was the very fact that they were a national confession, that many of the commonplaces of early-seventeenth-century Calvinism and puritanism—fasts, sabbatarianism, predestination, perseverance—had been given a new and authoritative status which they never gained in England.⁵³ The contrast was most evident in the case of the Lambeth articles. Even though Whitgift had endorsed them, he found, to his embarrassment, that the Queen refused to accept them or give them any authority.⁵⁴ James proved similarly hostile to the idea of adding the Lambeth to the Thirty-Nine Articles. Yet the Irish church made them articles of faith. Where EA 17 on predestination left considerable scope for interpretation, as became abundantly evident over the following centuries as the Church of England swung vertiginously from Calvinism to Arminianism, the Irish confession barred such future reinterpretation, and constituted a clear challenge to English latitude. Hence there was the general Calvinist satisfaction at IA 38, which enshrined the crucial principle of perseverance—the idea that, once granted grace, you would persevere to salvation. As William Bedell wrote to Sam Ward in 1629: ‘the 38 article is most orthodoxicall in my opinion also’.⁵⁵ The identification of the pope with Antichrist was similar, in that it was commonly accepted amongst Calvinist clergy, but until the Irish articles did not have confessional status.⁵⁶ As a result disputes over the nature of Antichrist in Ireland could be resolved authoritatively in a way that they could ⁵¹ Knox, Ussher, 20. ⁵² Knox, ‘Ecclesiastical Policy’, 90. ⁵³ On fasts and sabbatrarianism, see T. D. Bozeman, The Precisionist Strain—Disciplinary Religion and Antinomian Backlash in Puritanism to 1638 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 113–20. ⁵⁴ Lake, Moderate Puritans, 228–30. ⁵⁵ Charles McNeill (ed.), The Tanner Letters (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1943), 89; see also Downame’s defence of the IA in Certainty of perseverance. ⁵⁶ Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 97.

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not be in England—and, given the strength of Catholicism in Ireland, the formal identification had, as we have seen, important practical implications. The Irish confession was significant, then, because it represented a comprehensive revision of the Thirty-Nine Articles, which brought them up to date, and systematized and defined the prevailing Calvinist concerns of the Irish and English churches. But there is a puzzling aspect to this development. Both Elizabeth and James had refused requests to change the English articles: why, then, did the King allow the Irish church to draw up a new confession? More precisely, how, for example, did an amendment to the Thirty-Nine Articles which he had specifically rejected at Hampton Court come to be included in the 1615 articles? The scarcity of reliable information about the composition of the Irish confession makes it difficult to answer this question with complete confidence, but there are sufficient hints amidst the silences at least to construct a plausible scenario—indeed, the very silence is itself suggestive. There were several references in the 1620s to the Irish articles as having been confirmed by King James—Ussher’s friend Francis Rous, for example, claimed that they ‘came forth’ under his ‘authority and protection’.⁵⁷ This, though, is misleading. The situation is clarified somewhat by Heylyn and Bernard. One of the few things that they agreed about was that the Irish articles were ‘approved of in the convocation of the year 1615: and finally, confirmed by the Lord Deputy Chichester, in the name of King James’; or, as Bernard put it, ‘signed by the then Lord Deputy Chichester, by order from King James in his name’.⁵⁸ This is confirmed by the nearest we can get to a contemporary source: in 1711 Archbishop William King told Dean Swift that he had seen a license from James to convocation to frame articles of religion.⁵⁹ If King is correct, and the convocation was given a license to draw up a new confession, then the Church of Ireland had again skilfully managed to exploit its distance from the monarch and his court to preserve its freedom of manoeuvre. It is impossible to imagine that the Church of England would even have conceived of the idea of composing fresh articles, let alone have secured their passage through convocation, without royal involvement. But in Ireland it was possible to do so in James’s name, without the King having sight of the actual confession, a political achievement of Machiavellian subtlety. Indeed, perhaps the strongest evidence in favour of the idea that Chichester acted on delegated authority from James, and that the articles were not referred to England for approval, is the overpowering theological curiosity of James himself. Had he been aware of the Irish articles he would have been incapable of refraining from intervening and interfering in the process of drafting.⁶⁰ This conclusion gains support from the delay before the Irish articles became more widely known on the other side of ⁵⁷ Francis Rous, The truth of three things ([London, 1633]), 29; idem, Testis veritatis (London, 1626), 2; see below, p. 137. ⁵⁸ See above, n. 14; Bernard, Life, 50. ⁵⁹ TCD MS 1062, p. 56. ⁶⁰ On James’s theological interests, see Anthony Milton (ed.), The British Delegation and the Synod of Dort (1618–1619) (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005), pp. xxiii–xxiv; W. B. Patterson,

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the Irish sea—it was not till the mid-1620s that English clergy and politicians belatedly woke up to their potential significance as a means of interpreting the Thirty-Nine Articles.⁶¹ Indeed, even as late as 1629, William Bedell managed to arrive in Ireland as provost of Trinity completely unaware that the Church of Ireland had, as he put it, ‘such a good confession’.⁶² In 1613 Ussher had warned Challenor to ensure that Trinity’s statutes were drafted in Ireland, not England. The Irish convocation clearly appreciated the wider implications of Ussher’s advice. The Irish articles were thus a product of the Church of Ireland, and provide us with a revealing picture of the views and theological preferences of that Church and its leading theologian, James Ussher. And when viewed in this light, as a joint product of a united church, many of the difficulties which have been experienced in interpreting the character of the Irish confession, or the theological outlook of its drafter, diminish or disappear. Just as with the tension between Ussher the puritan and Ussher the conformist, which bedevilled interpretation of the impact of his Trinity education, so too it would be misleading to view the Irish articles in terms of a false dichotomy between puritan and Anglican, or the Church of England and the Church of Ireland. The reality of the early-seventeenth-century Church of Ireland was much more nuanced and far less polarized. The Irish articles united all Irish protestants under the banner of a second-generation Calvinist confession. In other words, for all his polemical hostility, Heylyn was very largely right in his evaluation of the 1615 articles: they established Calvinism as the doctrinal orthodoxy of the Irish church. Knox was also correct to see the Irish articles as closely linked to the theological consensus of the early-seventeenth-century English church, but he mislabelled it as Anglican rather than Calvinist, mistakenly tried to link it too closely to the Thirty-Nine Articles, and failed to appreciate the crucial significance of enshrining that consensus in a new confession of faith for an independent church. Ussher’s treatment of the English and Irish articles is interesting. Surprisingly, he hardly ever refers to the latter in either his printed works or manuscript notebooks. Rather, when seeking to reinforce doctrinal points, he preferred to refer to the English confession. This can partially be explained by the fact that he did so when addressing an English audience, as in 1621 when preaching to the English House of Commons: ‘we all subscribe to the articles of doctrine agreed upon in . . . 1562, for the avoiding of diversities of opinions, and the establishing of consent touching true religion.’⁶³ But he also used EA 37, rather than the subtly different IA 58, when addressing Irish Catholics in Dublin in 1622.⁶⁴ What this points to, though, is not a preference for the English over the King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). ⁶¹ See below, pp. 137–40. ⁶² McNeill (ed.), Tanner Letters, 89. ⁶³ UW, ii. 421. ⁶⁴ Ibid. 465; for his use of the Irish articles when disciplining a minister, see below, p. 162.

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Irish, but rather an assumption that the two sets were perfectly compatible, since Ussher saw the Thirty-Nine Articles as, simply, Calvinist, albeit reinforced and interpreted by the Irish articles.⁶⁵ As Francis Rous put it, the teaching of the Church of England had been ‘explained and enlarged’ by the Lambeth articles, and ‘hath also been sealed up and settled in articles of the Church of Ireland, betweene which church, and the Church of England, to make a contraritie and opposition is a thing of extreame danger and absurditie’.⁶⁶ The point is reinforced by one of Ussher’s rare references to the Irish articles, made in an unusually tart response to Heylyn’s accusation that the Irish confession espoused an extreme sabbatarianism alien to the Church of England. Ussher insisted that IA 56 was thoroughly in harmony with the English articles on this issue, since the IA was derived from the homilies which were in turn endorsed by the 1563 articles. Thus ‘by the verdict of the Church of England, I am sure the lord’s day had obtained such a pitch of credit, as nothing more could be left in the Church of Ireland in their articles, afterward to adde unto it.’⁶⁷ The Irish articles provided the Church of Ireland with a comprehensive confession that distinguished it as a separate national church. They also linked the Church of Ireland closely to the Church of England, both to its confession and to its prevailing theological consensus in 1615. But where the Thirty-Nine Articles were tentative and open to interpretation, the Irish confession was much fuller and sought to pin down the doctrine of the Irish church as unequivocally reformed, even European, in its outlook. In this achievement—enshrining the Calvinist consensus of the early seventeenth century—lay the ultimate significance of the Irish confession. It gave to the Church something which the Church of England conspicuously lacked—a distinct and distinctive theological identity, and, given the lack of subscription, a flexibility in relation to whom it wished to include. To Ussher’s eyes, the 1615 articles did not differentiate the Church of Ireland significantly from the Church of England, since he saw the latter as also committed to Calvinist orthodoxy. But, as the theological climate changed in England during the 1620s, and as Calvinism came increasingly to be marginalized by those who directed ecclesiastical policy, and as Calvinists came to realize to their horror that the Thirty-Nine Articles could be interpreted in a non-Calvinist manner, the differences and the distinctiveness of the Irish confession gained enormously in retrospective significance. Even elements of the Irish confession which had been normative and relatively unexceptionable for Irish and English conformists in the 1610s—such as, for example, IA 56 on the Lord’s Day, or the insistance in the new IA 74 that the priestly power to forgive sins was merely ⁶⁵ Bernard, Judgement (1658), 129. ⁶⁶ Rous, Truth of three things, 30–1; the same point was made, though with rather less subtlety, by Prynne, Old antithesis to new Arminianisme, 13. ⁶⁷ Bernard, Judgement (1658), 100 (UW, xii. 594).

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declarative and that people were not bound to confess to any man—appeared much more radical by the 1630s as the Laudians moved well beyond the earlier consensus.⁶⁸ Unsurprisingly, the Irish articles turned out to be one of the first targets of Archbishop Laud when he set about bringing the Church of Ireland into line with the Church of England in the 1630s.⁶⁹ ⁶⁸ IA 74; Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 472–3; Parker, English sabbath. ⁶⁹ See below, ch. 8.

5 Theology and Politics: 1615–25 By the latter part of the second decade of the seventeenth century, Ussher was an established academic, a dominant force in Irish protestant intellectual life. He had played the leading role in domesticating Calvinism and creating an indigenous Irish protestant theology. He had helped to draft its articles of faith that codified its beliefs and defined them much more clearly and precisely than the confession of the Church of England. He had also played his part in establishing Trinity’s reputation as a centre for godly education whose teaching and library equipped its students and fellows with to do battle with counter-reformation Catholicism. Not least, he had also published his first work, demonstrating both his remarkable historical skills and his commitment to an apocalyptic interpretation of world history. And he had begun to acquire an extensive network of friends and contacts amongst the protestant clergy and laity, not just in Ireland but also in England, where he moved with ease amongst not only the godly community, but amidst the scholarly elite, men such as Sir Robert Cotton, William Camden, Henry Briggs, John Selden, and Sir Henry Spelman.¹ The obvious question was: How could he put his immense and increasing academic knowledge to good use? He could, of course, have chosen to remain within Trinity, or even move to an English university. But he had no wish for further advancement in his alma mater—he had been offered the provostship by the fellows in 1609 and refused it.² Nor did he show any desire to pursue his career in England—he was a proud Irishman and wished to serve his country. This left one other obvious option—to leave the ivory tower altogether and pursue promotion within the Irish church. Given that he was already a dignitary, this meant a bishopric: given the large number, small size, and, in some cases, miniscule income of the Irish sees, this in itself was hardly challenging. But to get a richer diocese which could support Ussher’s academic ambitions required influential connections, right up to the supreme governor himself. In other words, it meant that Ussher had to enter the world of politics and patronage, not just in Ireland, but also in England. ¹ Elizabethanne Boran, ‘An Early Friendship Network of James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, 1626–1656’, in H. H. W. Robinson-Hammerstein (ed.), European Universities in the Age of Reformation (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1988), 116–34. ² Bernard, Life, 47; UW, i. 31; in 1615 he was appointed vice chancellor, confirming that he had no ambitions to become provost: PB, 187a.

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The process of making his way in England began in May 1612. Ostensibly, this was another of his triennial trips on Trinity business, but this time he had an additional purpose.³ He brought with him a draft of his first book, De successione, an ideal offering for that most theological of monarchs, King James. For a provincial academic, Ussher was able to call on surprisingly influential connections. He brought with him two letters, both addressed to key members of the coterie of Scottish courtiers which had gathered around James. One was from the Master of the Ordnance, Oliver St John, asking ‘Mr Newton’—presumably Adam Newton, the Scottish tutor and secretary to Prince Henry—to present Ussher to the King and ensure that he preached before him.⁴ The other was from James Hamilton, Ussher’s former teacher, who wrote to his fellow Scot Sir James Sempill, the King’s childhood companion, who was not only an influential royal adviser, but also a scholar with godly sympathies. He recommended Ussher as ‘a gentleman of as great pietie and as learned of his years as any in his majestys dominions’, suggesting that he get the Archbishop of Canterbury to introduce him to the King so that he could present his book. Pointedly, he also asked Sempill to reassure James that Ussher was not a puritan.⁵ There is no record of Ussher preaching to James, but we know that Semple endorsed the proposal to give De successione to him, and Ussher also showed the draft to Abbot who had himself written on the same subject and suggested amendments.⁶ In the end, according to Bernard, Abbot presented the book to the King as ‘the eminent first-fruits of that Colledg of Dublyn’.⁷ Ussher had a precise and financially rewarding goal in mind—one of the richest benefices in Ireland, the rectory of Trim in the diocese of Meath. On this occasion he was disappointed, but the King did promise him future preferment.⁸ Hence in April 1619, when Thomas Jones died, vacating not only the see of Dublin, but also the rectory of Trim and the lord chancellorship, Oliver St John, now Lord Deputy, immediately presented Ussher to Trim, and wrote to England reminding the King of his promise and recommending that he succeed to the archbishopric.⁹ Not only was he possessed ‘of singular learning . . . a native of this country and reverenced and esteemed of all’, he was a ‘modest man’ who would be content with the archbishopric without the lord chancellorship.¹⁰ Soon after, Ussher went over to England, clearly intending a lengthy visit, for he brought his family with him, and came prepared with a letter from St John and the Irish privy council.¹¹ Again it was felt necessary to rebut the charge that he was puritan, which, according to Bernard and Parr, had been levelled at ³ PB, 82a. ⁴ Thomas Birch, The life of Henry Prince of Wales (London, 1760), 274. ⁵ National Archives of Scotland CH1/5/1/8. ⁶ UW, xvi. 316, 318. ⁷ Bernard, Life, 48. ⁸ UW, xv. 75; Bodl. MS Carte 30, fol. 100r. ⁹ M C. Griffith (ed.), Irish Patent Rolls of James I (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1966), 432; Bodl. MS Carte 30, fol. 100r. ¹⁰ Bodl. MS Carte 30, fol. 100r. ¹¹ Ussher’s only daughter, Elizabeth, was baptized in London on 19 September 1620: W. B. Wright, The Ussher Memoirs; or, Genealogical Memoirs of the Ussher Families in Ireland (Dublin, 1889), 110.

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Ussher by Irish enemies.¹² The letter sought to reassure the King that Ussher was not ‘transported with singularities, and unaptness to be conformable to the rules and orders of the church. We are so far from suspecting him in that kind, that we may boldly recommend him to your lordships, as a man orthodox, and worthy to govern in the church.’¹³ Ussher failed to secure the archbishopric, and was prevented from securing his grant of Trim by the intervention of Bishop Montgomery of Meath who wanted it to be united to his see.¹⁴ But he remained in London, preaching, researching, and widening his contacts. On 5 November 1619 Ussher preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields, a parish with a high proportion of courtiers and officials.¹⁵ The following July he was still in London, delivering a fiercely anti-Catholic sermon at the Temple church.¹⁶ It was from this period that Ussher came in regular contact with the King—in the preface to his Answer to Malone in 1624 he referred to being often present at James’s dinner table.¹⁷ According to the informative (though rather late) Montgomery family records, Ussher was introduced to the King by Bishop Montgomery, made a royal chaplain, asked to preach before James, and even promised the reversion of the bishop’s see.¹⁸ Whatever the truth of these claims, Ussher undoubtedly made a favourable impression. For when Montgomery died in January 1621, James immediately nominated Ussher as his successor, with the rectory of Trim annexed and, just to complete the royal largesse, the onerous financial burden of first fruits remitted.¹⁹ On 2 December 1621, Ussher was consecrated Bishop of Meath.

U S S H E R A N D T H E G O D LY C AU S E I N E N G L A N D Immediately before and during his long stay in England, from mid-1619 to mid-1621, Ussher accomplished more than just his own personal advancement. He also expanded his horizons, playing a role in English theological debate, and establishing contacts at court and in Parliament which took him beyond scholarship into the turbulent world of politics. He had arrived at a difficult time, as tensions mounted amongst Calvinists over two issues: the theological challenge posed by Arminianism, and the military threat posed to European protestantism by the Catholic powers in Europe, particularly in Bohemia. Arminianism, strictly defined, was a Dutch theological movement, founded by Jacobus Arminius (1560–1609), which rejected the cast-iron certainties of ¹² Bernard, Life, 50–1; Parr, Life, 15. ¹³ Parr, Life, 15. ¹⁴ See the dramatic account of the encounter between Ussher and Montgomery in George Hill (ed.), The Montgomery Manuscripts (1603–1706) (Belfast, 1869), 104 ff. ¹⁵ Bodl. MS Rawlinson D 1290, fol. 38r. ¹⁶ Bodl. MS Perrott 9, fol. 3r. ¹⁷ UW, iii, p. iv. ¹⁸ Hill (ed.), Montgomery Manuscripts, 107. ¹⁹ Bernard, Life, 50–1; Parr, Life, 16–17; Griffith (ed.), Irish Patent Rolls, 495, 497; Bodl. MS Tanner 75, fol. 2r.

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Calvinist double predestination and sought to rescue human free will from its Augustinian cul-de-sac. The English version of Arminianism, though, was somewhat different. There were indeed those who endorsed Arminius’s objections to Calvinist views on grace and predestination, but because of the dominance of Calvinism they tended to downplay their adherence to the Dutch theologian. There were, however, a significant number of English churchmen who opposed Calvinism on a much broader basis, espousing not only an alternative Arminian view of grace but also criticizing the current emphasis on preaching and challenging Calvinist approaches to worship and the sacraments. These churchmen, a small band in the early seventeenth century, but increasingly dominant by the 1630s, have been labelled many things, from Arminians, to Laudians, to avantgarde conformists.²⁰ The confrontation between ‘Arminianism’ and Calvinism first came to a head in the second and third decades of the seventeenth century in two distinct manifestations: first, as part of a wider European discussion of the theological issues, which culminated in the reassertion of Calvinist orthodoxy at the Synod of Dort in the Netherlands in 1618–19, an international gathering of Calvinists, including five representatives of the English church chosen by James; and subsequently as a complex interweaving of political, diplomatic, and ecclesiastical issues within the English polity, as Calvinists, using their strength in Parliament, sought to label Arminians as little better than ‘papist heretics’, whilst the Arminians sought to gain the crucial support of the monarch. Ussher was involved in both manifestations of the struggle against Arminianism. As the Remonstrants and Calvinists jockeyed for position immediately before the Synod of Dort met in November 1618, the Calvinist side sought to hammer out its theological position. One area of difficulty for them lay in the doctrine of atonement. The problem sprang from an apparent contradiction between the Calvinist system of double predestination, so clearly enunciated in the Irish Articles of 1615, and the universal extent of Christ’s atonement—his sacrificial death which made amends for the sins of the world. If God had, before the creation of the world, chosen only part of mankind for salvation, and chose the rest for damnation, as more hardline predestinarians believed, then there was an obvious and rather disturbing question: What was one to make of those references in the Bible to Christ dying for ‘all men’? Or to put it more theologically, what was the extent of the satisfaction which Christ made by his death on the cross? Did he die for all, or only for those he had previously chosen? To opt for the former raised what was for Calvinists the uncomfortable ²⁰ For a brief introduction to the literature on this topic, see N. R. N. Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c.1590–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); P. G. Lake, ‘Calvinism and the English Church, 1570–1635’, Past & Present, 114 (1987), 32–76; Peter White, Predestination, policy and polemic: Conflict and Consensus in the English Church from the Reformation to the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). For the sake of simplicity, I have adopted the term ‘Arminian’ to describe what others might call Laudianism or avant-garde conformism.

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possibility of universal salvation; on the other hand, the latter seemed to restrict the inestimable benefit of Christ’s death to only a part of mankind—to limit an omnipotent God’s effectiveness, as it were. This forced many Calvinists to interpret scripture in a rather artificial way—‘all men’ was read as ‘all kinds of men’, for instance. To Arminians this was nonsense, and their challenge made atonement one of the more difficult topics to be decided by the Synod of Dort. Before the English delegation departed, there were discussions amongst English Calvinists about their approach to the problem, stimulated in particular by Ezekiel Culverwell, the Essex puritan who circulated a treatise in manuscript in 1618 (eventually published in 1623 as A treatise of faith) in which he questioned the assumption that the benefit of Christ’s death was only applicable to the elect. This document was sent to Ussher for his opinion, and he in turn sent it on, with critical marginal annotations, to that ‘formidable theologian’ and eminence grise of godly orthodoxy, Laurence Chaderton, the Master of Emmanuel College in Cambridge.²¹ News of Ussher’s intervention evidently reached the English delegation, since one of them (the obvious candidate is Ussher’s close friend Samuel Ward, though it could also have been John Davenant) asked him to explain his views more fully. This he did in a position-paper ‘The true intent and extent of Christ’s death and satisfaction’, dated 3 March 1618.²² The reply is a model of judicious, moderate Ussherianism. He sets out to avoid what he sees as the two extremes: one ‘extends the benefit of Christ’s satisfaction too far, as if hereby God, for his part, were actually reconciled to all mankind, and did really discharge every man from all his sins’; while the other ‘contracts the riches of Christ’s satisfaction into too narrow a room; as if none had any kind of interest therein, but such as were elected before the foundation of the world, howsoever by the gospel everyone be charged to receive the same’. Instead, he seeks ‘a middle course’.²³ He begins by making a distinction between the extent of Christ’s satisfaction and its efficacy or application. Christ’s death, he insists, was more than enough to satisfy the debt for the sins of all mankind: it was ‘done for all’ sufficiently ‘to discharge the whole debt’.²⁴ This would, of course, have been music to the ears of Arminians, and somewhat disturbing to hardline Calvinists. But Ussher went on to insist that the effective application of Christ’s satisfaction was limited to those who were called and received grace—the elect. ‘For the universality of the satisfaction derogates nothing from the necessity of the special grace of its application: neither doth the speciality of the one any ways ²¹ Bodl. MSRawlinson C 849, fols. 282r–283r; David Como, ‘Puritans, Predestination and the Construction of Orthodoxy in Early Seventeenth-Century England’, in Peter Lake and Michael Questier (eds.), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English church, c. 1560–1660 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000), 68; Patrick Collinson, ‘Chaderton, Laurence (1536?–1640)’, ODNB. The heading ‘Mr Culverwell’ and the marginal annotations and comments are in Ussher’s hand. ²² Parr, Life, letter 22 (which gives the date); UW, xii. 560 prints the version in Bernard, Judgement (1658); but this needs to be compared with the version in the first edition of Judgement. ²³ UW, xii. 553–4. ²⁴ Ibid. 554.

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abridge the generality of the other.’²⁵ His conclusion was neat: ‘in one respect he may be said to have died for all, and in another respect not to have died for all.’²⁶ Hypothetically, Christ’s satisfaction was universal; practically its application was limited. This was a rhetorically and theologically subtle and influential performance. To take the latter first: Ussher was taking one of the theological issues on which Calvinists were most vulnerable to Arminian criticism—an aspect of their doctrine which, strictly interpreted, seemed to be contradicted by the scriptural evidence, and, above all, where Arminians could claim to have a far more pastoral, preachable, and comforting doctrine than double predestinarians. Equally, his timing was good, providing the English delegates with a mediatory position between the extremes of Arminianism and hardline Calvinism. Ward and Davenant, both privately and publicly, adopted Ussher’s ‘hypothetical universalism’ (as it is catchily labelled by theologians), and fought for it at Dort.²⁷ Ussher’s influence extended beyond the delegation. His letter gained a wide circulation and caused controversy amongst English protestant theologians. In July 1619 one of Ussher’s correspondents in London reported how his ‘medium of the business’ was now ‘scattered abroad’ in many copies, and was ‘by some liked, and by some not’.²⁸ Much later, Richard Baxter thought himself to be at one with the Primate on this issue, and reported that Ussher had claimed, when Baxter had met him in the mid-1650s, that he had been the person responsible for converting not only Davenant, but also the puritan leader John Preston to hypothetical universalism.²⁹ He has accordingly been seen by the most thorough study of this topic as the founder of English hypothetical universalism, offering Calvinism a more pastoral, mediatory position on the atonement.³⁰ Rhetorically, Ussher’s positioning of himself is also interesting. The assumed tone of moderation fits, of course, with his character and personal reputation for gentleness. But it was also a polemical stance. Though Ussher was apparently concerned with moderating between the two extremes, in fact, as a committed anti-Arminian, he was seeking to defend Calvinist orthodoxy by shoring it up at one of its weaker points. Though the style, as David Como rightly put it, was ‘inclusive’, it should not be ‘mistaken as either comprehensive or tolerant, for in this case . . . the point was to neutralize and silence the opposition’. Ussher’s difficulty, evident in the contemporary reaction to his paper, but ²⁵ Ibid. 558. ²⁶ Ibid. 559 ²⁷ Vivienne Larminie, ‘Davenant, John (bap. 1572, d. 1641)’, ODNB. ²⁸ UW, xvi. 356. ²⁹ Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae, ed. Matthew Sylvester (London, 1696), ii. 206, § 61. ³⁰ J. D. Moore, ‘ ‘‘Christ is dead for him’’: John Preston (1587–1628) and English Hypothetical Universalism’, PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2000; and see also Crawford Gribben, ‘Rhetoric, Fiction and Theology: James Ussher and the Death of Jesus Christ’, Seventeenth Century, 20 (2005), 53–76. The origin and originality of Ussher’s ideas, and particularly the links with other contemporaries thinking on the same lines, remain to be explored.

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which continued long after his death, was that not all fellow Calvinists, or later historians, recognized the essential orthodoxy of hypothetical universalism.³¹ Indeed, some mistakenly imagined that he had accommodated himself so far that he had turned Arminian.³² The threat posed by Arminianism would continue to trouble Ussher, right down to the 1630s. But when he travelled to England in 1619 the most immediate challenge facing him was the dispute over the role of religion in determining the direction of English foreign policy. On the one side were committed protestants who, viewing the world through the lens of the struggle between Christ and Antichrist, insisted that it was the duty of a protestant country like England to place its opposition to Catholicism at the heart of its diplomacy. On the other side were James and many of his advisers, who, whilst protestant, were nevertheless prepared to put national interests above religious principles and deal with Catholic powers on a more pragmatic basis. In particular, the King’s fear of the financial burden of war, his consequent desire to remain at peace with his European neighbours, and his need for a suitable marriage for his son Charles all led him in the second decade of the seventeenth century to turn to an alliance with Catholic Spain.³³ Unfortunately for James, events in Europe conspired to throw into high relief the stark choices which he, and Britain, faced. On the one hand, as negotiations with Spain slowly progressed, it had become apparent by 1617 that if he was to secure the hand of the Spanish infanta, then James in return would have to grant toleration to his Catholic subjects in England, Scotland, and Ireland, something which was anathema to godly protestants. At the same time, the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War in 1618 renewed the military confrontation between protestant and Catholic, as the Catholic forces of the Holy Roman Emperor, with the help of Spain, attacked the protestant Elector Palatine and King of Bohemia, Frederick V. Given that Frederick was married to James’ daughter, Elizabeth, the English king was faced with a difficult choice: religious and familial loyalty, and apocalyptic fear of Catholicism, pointed firmly in the direction of military intervention in Europe on the protestant side; but his desire for peace and a Spanish match pushed him in the direction of a negotiated settlement with Catholic Spain and the abandonment of the protestant cause.³⁴ As James continued to pursue the latter option, those English protestants in favour of military intervention grew increasingly concerned at the failure to ³¹ A not uncommon problem faced by hypothetical universalists: e.g. J. D. Moore, ‘Calvin versus the Calvinists? The Case of John Preston (1587–1628)’, Reformation and Renaissance Review, 6 (2004), 327–48. ³² See below, pp. 282–3. ³³ Thomas Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution. English Politics and the Coming of War 1621–1624 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Conrad Russell, Parliaments and English Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 85 ff. ³⁴ Cogswell, Blessed Revolution, 1–20; Glyn Redworth, The Prince and the Infanta: The Cultural Politics of the Spanish Match (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).

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recognize the religious imperatives to action.³⁵ This loose ‘Bohemian party’, strongly anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish, was led by prominent but ultimately marginal figures such as the earl of Pembroke and Archbishop Abbot. The rhetoric of their case was firmly apocalyptic. As Abbot put it in 1619, recent events were ‘the work of God, that by piece and piece, the kings of the earth that gave their power unto the beast (all the word of God must be fulfilled) shall now tear the whore, and make her desolate, as St John in his Revelation hath foretold.’³⁶ Indeed, such was the clamour from the pulpits in favour of Frederick, that James was forced in December 1620 and again in 1622 to issue directions ordering preachers to refrain from interfering in matters of state.³⁷ Stories of Catholic efforts to remove a reformed ruling class naturally resonated with Irish protestants, and there can be little doubt where Ussher’s natural sympathies lay.³⁸ He made them abundantly plain in his sermon in the Temple church in July 1620, in which he warned of the threat posed by Catholicism. He took as his text Revelation 19:20: ‘And the beast was taken, and with him the false prophet that wrought miracles before him, with which he deceived them that had received the mark of the beast, and them that worshipped his image. These both were cast alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone.’ This was Ussher in prophetic mode, urging, not toleration, but strong and immediate action against Catholics: ‘These are the last dayes . . . This book of the Revelation unto the church nowe is instead of prophecies of the olde testament to the church of old.’³⁹ He was particularly concerned that protestants might not recognize the seriousness of the Catholic menace. Though Catholics were clearly distinguished by the mark of the beast ‘as a leperosie in theire foreheads, that a man may runn and reade it in theire faces’, nevertheless they deceive good Christians by covering over their false doctrine with piety, speaking lies in hypocrisy.⁴⁰ Ussher was fully aware of the political sensitivity of his topic and of royal displeasure at controversial preaching, acknowledging that such matters may not be thought suitable to raise in the pulpit. But ‘when wee are in the middeste of these evill devises of Sathan’, the good minister had, he asserted, a God-given duty to speak out: I choose this place to showe, what should become of this whore that shall after soe longe tyme perish. Here is the people deceaved. Here is the meanes, by which they weare deceaved. And the nomber of them that weare deceaved. ³⁵ S. L. Adams, ‘The Protestant Cause: Religious Alliance with the West European Calvinist Communities as a Political Issue in England, 1585–1630’, DPhil thesis, Oxford University, 1973. ³⁶ Quoted in ibid. 284. ³⁷ Ibid. 308; J. P. Kenyon (ed.), The Stuart Constitution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 145–6. ³⁸ On the parallel between Ireland and Bohemia, see N. P. Canny, ‘Protestant Planters and Apartheid in early modern Ireland’, IHS, 25 (198), 108; T. C. Barnard, ‘Crises of Identity among Irish Protestants 1641–1685’, Past & Present, 127 (1990), 44–5. Ussher’s old opponent Fitzsimon moved on to serve in Bohemia: Bernadette Cunningham, ‘FitzSimon, Henry (1566–1643)’, ODNB. ³⁹ Bodl. MS Perrot 9, fol. 5r. ⁴⁰ Ibid., fol. 3.

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And the issue. These both were casts into a lake of fire burninge with brimston. That though men thinke it a small matter to joyne with poperie, yet those that are branded with this marke of the beast and worshipp his image, professing this religion and followinge this spiritt They must goe togeather with the man of sinn into a lake of fire burning with brimston. You may thinke wee speake somewhat censoriously: but when wee finde it recorded playnely in the word of God whoe shall then bid the minister hould his peace?⁴¹

Ussher went on to warn ‘that at this day poperie is brought to as high a degree of abomination as ever’.⁴² He cited Revelation 19:19, ‘I saw the beast, and the kings of the earth, and their armies, gathered together to make war against him that sat on the horse, and against his army,’ and identified the rider as Christ, who now ‘comes to conquer another enemy worse then heathenisme which is popery and Antichristanisme’.⁴³ Talk of the dangers of joining with the abomination of popery and of the need to fight Antichristianity—the language of uncompromising apocalyptic—meant only one thing in 1619. It placed Ussher firmly in the camp of the Bohemian party, ruling out negotiation and diplomacy, urging immediate military action. But, at the same time, Ussher had also become part of the King’s coterie of scholar-clerics, and his strong natural deference to his royal master pointed him in a very different direction. This conflict of loyalties became apparent when James, desperate as always for money, called a parliament, which met early in 1621. On 5 February, less than a month after he had been nominated for the see of Meath, the Commons selected Ussher to preach before a special communion of the whole house, a surprising choice given that the natural candidate was the Dean of Westminster, John Williams.⁴⁴ But the service had a clear political purpose, which Ussher was ideally placed to fulfil. It was a manoeuvre designed by godly MPs to flush out pro-Spanish crypto-papists—‘a touchstone to try their faith’ as the Commons put it. Two of the MPs behind the motion, Sir James Perrott and Sir Francis Barrington, were closely associated with Ussher as members of the Bohemian party.⁴⁵ Sir Francis had family ties with the new bishop and regarded Ussher as his ‘most noble friend’, whilst Perrott was the illegitimate son of one Irish Lord Deputy, and the (half ) brother-in-law of another. He had extensive experience of Ireland and kept in close touch with a range of Irish connections, including Ussher, who shared his interest in Irish history and was on sufficiently friendly terms to recommend to Perrott a manager for his estates in Wales. Noted as an outspoken supporter of Frederick, Perrott was also a client and close ally of the earl of Pembroke.⁴⁶ ⁴¹ Bodl. MS Perrot, fol. 5. ⁴² Ibid., fol. 7v. ⁴³ Ibid., fols. 6r–7r. ⁴⁴ CJ, i. 508, and see also 510, 515–17; Adams, ‘Protestant Cause’, 313; William Camden, ‘Diary (1603–1623): A Hypertext Edition’, ed. D. F. Sutton, 6 February 1621, accessed 2 Jan. 2006. ⁴⁵ CJ, i. 508; Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 507. ⁴⁶ Arthur Searle (ed.), ‘Barrington Family Letters 1628–1632’, Camden Society, 4th ser., 28 (1983), 12; Andrew Thrush, ‘Barrington, Sir Francis, First Baronet (c.1560–1628)’, ODNB; James

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The sermon placed Ussher in a difficult position. He was expected by his friends to deliver a suitably protestant message.⁴⁷ But he also had to do his duty by his impecunious monarch, anxious for the Commons to grant him money quickly before he had to reveal his hand in relation to foreign policy. James summoned Ussher to dine with him on the Tuesday before he was due to preach and pointedly mentioned the motto ‘quickly given is twice given’.⁴⁸ Ussher’s dilemma was recognized by the diplomat Sir Thomas Roe, an adviser to Frederick’s wife, Elizabeth, who wrote to warn him of the need to balance the wishes of king and parliament, lest he end up in the Tower of London.⁴⁹ In the event, Ussher was helped by the fact that the House had voted subsidies two days before he was due to preach, and he passed the first major test of his political skills with ease, earning the thanks of both the house and the King in a long and (according to one contemporary gossip) boring but carefully balanced sermon.⁵⁰ Ussher took as his text the obvious 1 Corinthians 10:17: ‘We, being many, are one bread and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread.’ He opened by stressing the importance of union—both amongst protestants and with Christ—but contrasted this with the twin need for ‘disunion and separation from all idolatrous worship’.⁵¹ With regard to the need to maintain unity, Ussher warned against the disastrous tendency to internal division. As he made plain by his reference to ‘the late experience of our neighbour churches in the Low Countries’, his target here was the Arminian threat to Calvinist orthodoxy, which, he thought, endangered the very survival of that kingdom.⁵² What should be done? ‘We should hold our peace,’ rally round the Thirty-Nine Articles, and care for suffering fellow-Christians—a particularly urgent task given ‘the face of Christendom, so miserably rent and torn, as it is at this day’.⁵³ Congratulating the members on their willingness to vote supply, he made it quite clear what he thought it was for: ‘The season of the year is approaching, wherein ‘‘kings go forth to battle:’’ the . . . offer of your subsidy was done in a time most seasonable’.⁵⁴ His political duties ended, Ussher then launched into a theological discussion of the Eucharist, beginning with the standard lament that what should be the sacrament of unity had been turned into a source of division, before going on to expound his Calvinist understanding of the sacrament and the relationship between sign and reality.⁵⁵ Whilst the sacrament united the faithful, it also distinguished them from the faithless: ‘as the lord’s supper is a seal of our Perrott, The chronicle of Ireland, 1584–1608, ed. by Herbert Wood (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1933), pp. v–viii; Andrew Thrush, ‘Perrot, Sir James (1571/2–1637)’, ODNB; TCD MS 582, fol. 59r. ⁴⁷ Godfrey Goodman, The court of King James the first, ed. J. S. Brewer, 2 vols. (London, 1839), ii. 201. ⁴⁸ Parr, Life, 17–18. ⁴⁹ UW, xvi. 375. ⁵⁰ Parr, Life, 18; CJ, i. 523; N. E. McClure (ed.), The Letters of John Chamberlain, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939), ii. 347. ⁵¹ UW, ii. 418. ⁵² Ibid. 420–3. ⁵³ Ibid. 421. ⁵⁴ Ibid. 425; the reference is to Sam. 11:1. ⁵⁵ Ibid. 426–32.

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conjunction one with another, and with Christ our head: so it is an evidence of our disjunction from idolaters, binding us to disavow all communion with them in their false worship’.⁵⁶ And Catholics were guilty of ‘gross idolatry’, both in their treatment of the Eucharist and in their worshipping of images.⁵⁷ This led naturally to the question of how protestants should respond to the practice of Catholicism, a pertinent issue in the light of Spanish pressure to free Catholics from civil penalties in Britain and Ireland. Ussher was worried about any idea of being associated with such idolatry, for fear of divine punishment—‘For if we will be partakers of Babylon’s sins, we must look to receive of her plagues.’⁵⁸ Nor was it enough passively to shun such false worship—‘it is further required that we restrain, as much as in us lieth, the practice thereof in others.’ In Judges 2 ‘God telleth the children of Israel what mischief should come unto them, by tolerating the Canaanitish idolaters in their land. ‘‘they shall be thorns in your sides’’ saith he, ‘‘and their gods shall be a snare unto you.’’ ’⁵⁹ The toleration of such idolatry was particularly dangerous in the case of Catholics, since they hid their false worship in the ‘mystery of iniquity’: ‘we are’, he warned, ‘like to find these men not thorns in our sides to vex us, but daggers in our hearts to destroy us.’⁶⁰ After a further denunciation of Catholic disloyalty and Jesuit treason, Ussher then drove home his point. He did not want to stir people up to attack Catholics or to deny that they might be saved: Only this I must say, that (things standing as they do) I cannot preach peace unto them For, as Jehu said to Joram, ‘What peace, so long as the whoredoms of thy mother Jezebel, and her witchcrafts are so many?’ so I must say unto them: What peace can there be, as long as you suffer yourselves to be led by ‘the mother of all harlots’⁶¹

Where this was leading was fairly plain: to a denunciation of any idea of tolerating the practice of Catholicism; a welcome conclusion for Ussher’s godly friends, but not for his monarch. As if realizing this, Ussher abruptly broke off his argument, limiting the necessary action against Catholics to the suppression of ‘open idolatries’—something James was quite happy to endorse: In the mean time, they who sit at the helm and have the charge of our church and commonwealth . . . must provide by all good means that God be not dishonoured by their open idolatries, nor our King and state endangered by their secret treacheries. Good laws there are already enacted to this purpose: which, if they were duly put in execution, we should have less need to think of making new. But it is not my part to press this point. I will therefore conclude as I did begin: ‘speak as to wise men: judge ye what I say.’⁶²

Ussher’s appointment to Meath in 1621 marked a turning point in his career. He had gained the ear and the confidence of the King—who reportedly boasted ⁵⁶ UW, ii. 437. ⁵⁷ Ibid. 440, 447. ⁵⁸ Rev. 18:4. ⁵⁹ UW, ii. 450. ⁶⁰ Ibid. 451; see Bishop Jones’ use of the same text in 1586: ch. 1, n. 81. ⁶¹ Ibid. 456. ⁶² Ibid. 457.

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that Ussher was ‘a bishop of his own making’.⁶³ He was now no longer just a provincial academic, but a leader of the Irish church and a public figure with a political as well as an ecclesiastical role, not just in Ireland, but also in England. His resignation as professor and appointment to the Irish privy council symbolized the transition.⁶⁴ But, as Ussher had discovered when asked to preach before the Commons, translating his scholarly and religious convictions into public policy was far from straightforward. Difficult in England, it proved, as he was soon to discover, well-nigh impossible in Ireland.

‘ F O RC E A N D F E A R O F P U N I S H M E N T ’ : P U B L I C P O L I C Y TOWA R D S C AT H O L I C S I N I R E L A N D In September 1622, the new Bishop of Meath was asked to preach in Dublin at the swearing-in of the new Lord Deputy, Henry Cary, Lord Falkland. As always, the governor was burdened with the hopes and fears of the two communities in Ireland. Where Irish protestants prayed for the strict enforcement of the laws against Catholics, the latter, fully aware of the momentous implications of the marriage negotiations, anticipated that Spanish influence would secure for them freedom to practice their religion. Ussher’s sermon, his first major public statement as Bishop of Meath, did not flinch from tackling the central issue. He took his text from the start of Romans 13, dealing with the duties of the ruler: For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same: For he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.

Though his application of this to the new governor was, he subsequently stressed, cautious and moderate, it nevertheless proved highly inflammatory. Buoyed up by the changing political climate, Irish Catholics complained publicly that Ussher had said that ‘the sword had rusted too long in the sheath’, and had criticized the former Lord Deputy, Oliver St John, now Lord Grandison, for his laxity in prosecuting recusants. Ussher immediately wrote to Grandison denying these allegations. He had, he admitted, urged Falkland to execute the laws ‘for the furtherance of God’s service’, but he had at the same time acknowledged that the King could, if he wished, suspend the execution of those statutes. All that he had insisted on, as in his sermon to the Commons, was that the Lord Deputy ⁶³ Bernard, Life, 51; the speed of his appointment (Montgomery died 15 Jan.; Ussher was nominated the following day) would tend to confirm this report. ⁶⁴ He was appointed privy councillor on 13 June 1623: Wright, Ussher Memoirs, 91.

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should take firm action against public displays of Catholic triumphalism.⁶⁵ But the damage was done, and Ussher was reproved by his metropolitan, Archbishop Hampton, who, whilst accepting that Ussher may have been misunderstood, not only urged him to make a public retraction ‘seeing so many men of quality have something against you’, but also tartly suggested that he should spend less time in Dublin and more in his diocese.⁶⁶ In July of the following year, with Charles in Spain hoping to conclude the match, the King issued instructions to the Irish administration to enforce the laws on conformity with temperance—i.e. they were effectively suspended. Hampton immediately wrote to warn Ussher: ‘Seeing it hath pleased God (whose councils may be secret, but not unjust) to exercise us with this mixture, let us remember how dangerous it is to provoke princes with too much animosity. The gospel is not supported with wilfulness, but by patience and obedience.’⁶⁷ Catholic leaders also sensed Ussher’s weakness: one reportedly had the temerity to write to him ‘desyring him not to be soe violent against his nychtbourebeschepes’.⁶⁸ Though Ussher may have been more circumspect in expressing them, he did not change his views. The strength of his feelings on this issue was apparent in his Reply to Malone, published in 1624. In the dedication to James he praised the King’s achievements in pacifying Ireland. Only one task remained—to enforce religious uniformity, or, as Ussher put it rather more graphically, to ‘hurry and help cure our dying people, suffering in misery from the popish plague’. In case James missed the moral imperative to action, Ussher, ever alert to making a contemporary point by an historical reference, quoted at length from the work of Firmicus Maternus, the fourth-century author of De errore profanarum religionum. Maternus, a recent convert from paganism, had used his book both to attack the absurdities of his former beliefs and to call on the newly Christian state to act immediately to destroy such an immoral religion by the sword: ‘ ‘‘To you the most high God has granted this power, that through you the wounds of this country might be healed . . . It is better that you free them against their will, than let them go willingly to destruction.’’ ’⁶⁹ This, ‘the first surviving Christian text which asks for . . . the total intolerance of pagan worship’, had an obvious resonance in early-seventeenth-century Ireland, given that the identification of ⁶⁵ UW, xv. 180–2; Ussher cited a letter he had received from one of his former students, John Ankers, vicar of Athlone, who had told of his recent experience in Kilkenny, where he had gone into the protestant church to say prayers and found a priest distributing communion to fifty Catholics: Al. Dub., s.v. Ankers, John; TCD Mun. P/1/54/1, 2, and 5; Ankers’ letter is in NLI, MS 18651: Ankers attributed the growing Catholic confidence to ‘the remissness of the higher powers, the distracted state of most parts of Christendom, or their hope of the present alteration of times’. ⁶⁶ UW, xv. 183–4. ⁶⁷ Ibid. 199. ⁶⁸ Report on the manuscripts of the Earl of Mar and Kellie, 2 vols. (London: Historical Manuscripts Commission, 1904–30), ii. 192. ⁶⁹ UW, ii, pp. iv–v.

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Catholicism with pagan idolatry was a Protestant commonplace.⁷⁰ The message was clear: James, like the first Christian emperors dealing with the pagans, had a duty to impose harsh medicine upon the Irish Catholics in order to stamp out their idolatry. The application of such an outspoken work to the Irish situation was, again, inflammatory, and was again seized upon by Ussher’s Catholic opponents, who cited his use of Maternus as further evidence of the persecutory mentality of Irish Protestants.⁷¹ Ussher reiterated the point in an undated sermon. Citing Augustine on the Donatists, those African heretics whom protestant preachers in Ireland saw as analogous to Catholics, he argued that the only way to deal with religious error was the ‘rod of correction’.⁷² Instruction and persuasion were useless against determined heretics: ‘We find by trial, that, as being taught and not terrified, they shut their ears against the word of truth . . . so contrariwise, if they be terrified, and not taught, their punishment doth not [un]commonly work their amendment.’⁷³ To an age that views tolerance as a virtue, understanding the mindset behind these kind of views can be problematic. The first point that must be made is that tolerance in the early modern period was rarely viewed positively. As one of Ussher’s colleagues later put it in blunt logic: if ‘true religion is already established according to Gods word, no seminge of any tolleracion is to be made . . . . It is established by law of this realme. No tolleracion.’⁷⁴ The strength of feeling on this issue amongst protestants in Ireland sprang from a complex interweaving of motives. Some of these were political and pragmatic—for instance, exclusion of Catholics from public life on account of their refusal to conform had the highly satisfactory effect of preserving office-holding for the protestant minority. But reinforcing such practical reasons were the strong theological arguments for intolerance advanced by Ussher and the new protestant preachers, based on their fundamental antithesis between protestantism and Antichristian Catholicism.⁷⁵ Given that most of the native population of Ireland were members of that church, such a theological focus had major religious, theological, political, and even social implications. To attack papists in England as heretics and Antichristians was to demonize an influential but still small minority; but to ⁷⁰ Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (Harmondsworth: Viking, 1986), 672. For two contemporary Irish examples of this identification of Catholicism with paganism, see Robert Daborne, A sermon preached in Waterford (London, 1618), 33; and UW, xv. 151–2. ⁷¹ Richard Stanihurst, Brevis praemunitio pro futura concertatione cum Jacobo Usserio (Douai, 1615); David Rothe, The analecta of David Rothe, Bishop of Ossory, ed. P. F. Moran (Dublin, 1884), 52. ⁷² Proverbs 22:15: ‘Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child; but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him.’ ⁷³ UW, xvii, p. xx. ⁷⁴ TCD MS 1088, fol. 2r. ⁷⁵ For a full discussion of this issue, see Alan Ford, ‘ ‘‘Force and fear of punishment’’: protestants and religious coercion in Ireland, 1603–33’, in Elizabethanne Boran and Crawford Gribben (eds.), Enforcing reformation in Ireland and Scotland, 1550–1700 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 91–130.

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do so in Ireland was not only to anathematize the vast majority of the island’s inhabitants, but it was also to imply that the civil authorities had a duty to take a similarly hostile stance, at the risk of destabilizing the country, or even inciting rebellion. This placed the Dublin administration in a difficult position. In regular, even daily contact with the leaders of the established church, they were fully aware of their uncompromising views. Yet, they were also under pressure from the King and his ministers to ensure, not merely that Irish Catholics remained at peace, but they were prepared to cooperate with the government to ensure the smooth working of the Irish polity. At the same time, the Catholic community were becoming increasingly confident that their majority status made it, at the very least, politically imprudent for the authorities to act against them, and used every opportunity to press the King and his ministers to grant formal toleration. As Ussher was soon to discover, the clash between these immovable forces—the simple mathematics of an Irish polity where Catholics were in an overwhelming majority on the one hand, and the zealous refusal of protestant churchmen to tolerate Antichristianity on the other—made this one of the most important, and difficult, issues in Irish ecclesiastical and secular politics. Ussher was now in a position of influence and importance, a member of the Irish privy council, and one of the leading bishops in the Church of Ireland. He had, in short, acquired the power and position to put his theological ideas and his vast learning into practice. He did so in three main areas: in defence of godly interests in England; in the formulation of public policy towards Roman Catholics in Ireland; and in his work on Irish history. It is to the last of these that we now turn.

6 Religion, History, and Protestant National Identity Such was the scale of scholarly enquiry into the Irish past in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that it is hardly an exaggeration to label it the Irish historical renaissance, the beginning of the investigation of the country’s history using a wide range of scholarly tools.¹ The intellectual currents which nourished this dramatic growth can easily be outlined. An essential foundation was provided by the mediaeval method of annalistic compilation, together with the antiquarian instinct for unearthing manuscripts and artefacts, both of which helped to establish essential facts and chronologies without which history could not have been written. The methodological breakthrough in identifying and analysing original sources was supplied by Renaissance humanism, with its determination to return ad fontes, back to the original sources.² More specific to Irish scholarship were the professional historians, poets, brehons, and scribes with their rich inheritance of genealogies, annals, and saints lives, and the growing fear that conquest and anglicization would result in the loss of this precious cultural heritage; and the distinctive form of Anglo-Irish colonial historiography created by that master of racial stereotyping, the twelfth-century Welsh historian Giraldus Cambrensis.³ And finally, there were two driving forces common across all European nations: the growing sense of patriotic pride which led scholars to try and defend and glorify their native land and its past; and, most crucially, the polemical historiography of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, ¹ Alan Ford, ‘The Irish Historical Renaissance and the Shaping of Irish Protestant History’, in Alan Ford and John McCafferty (ed.), The Origins of Sectarianism in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 127–57. ² Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England: c.1307 to the Early Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1982); Graham Parry, Trophies of Time, English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); D. R. Woolf, The Idea of History in early Stuart England ( Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990); F. S. Fussner, The Historical Revolution: English Historical Writing and Thought, 1580–1640 (London: Routledge, 1962); F. J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino: Huntingdon Library, 1967). ³ For a summary of the traditional Irish sources available to a seventeenth-century Irish historian, see Bernadette Cunningham, The World of Geoffrey Keating (Dublin: Four Courts, 2000), ch. 4, and Nollaig Ó Muraíle, The Celebrated Antiquary Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh (c.1600–1671) (Maynooth: An Sagart, 1996), ch. 11; Michael Richter, Giraldus Cambrensis (Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales, 1976); Robert Bartlett, Gerald of Wales (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982).

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inspired by each side’s determination to establish its own exclusive historical legitimacy.⁴ Some scholars, emphasizing the critical methodology of the humanists, have viewed the renewed interest in such studies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as an ‘historical revolution’, leading naturally to ‘modern’ historical writing.⁵ But this teleology should not be allowed to obscure the complexities of early modern scholarship, in particular the key role which religion played. This latter force, in particular the power of religious controversy to inspire—and distort—historical scholarship, was already abundantly evident in Ussher’s De successione, his Answer to Malone, and the subsequent Catholic replies. But these controversies were concerned with the broad sweep of western European Christian history. There remained the obvious task of applying the formidable apparatus of humanist scholarship, and the shaping force of religious conviction, to domestic events. This was the achievement of Foxe and his Acts and monuments in England—to convert ‘the general to the national’.⁶ And this was the challenge facing Irish protestant historians in the early seventeenth century. The essential issue at stake had been hinted at by Meredith Hanmer, and briefly mapped out by Rider and Fitzsimon.⁷ According to Fitzsimon (we lack Rider’s side of the exchange on this crucial point) Rider claimed that there was ‘a conformitie betwixt the first Christianitie planted among us, and their puritan profession’. Fitzsimon, in response, set out to prove that Ireland’s primitive Christianity thoroughly conformed to ‘our profession’. He then went on to explore the early history of Christianity in Ireland, proving his humanist historical skills by discarding as spurious and undocumented claims that it was planted by St Andrew or Joseph of Arimathea, before going on to hail St Patrick as the great missionary who converted the whole country. Indeed not only did Patrick personally bring Ireland to Christianity, he also, through his prayers, helped ensure that it subsequently remained forever loyal to the true Catholic faith, ‘not only against infidels, Danes, Normans . . . but also against hereticks, Arians, Pelagians, puritans’. Fitzsimon stressed St Patrick’s adherence to the (Roman) Catholic faith, demonstrated by his reverence for the crucifix, his abstinance from meat, and the number of monasteries he founded. He cited protestant authors such as Bale and Camden to show how Ireland had become the island of saints and scholars, attracting students from England, and rhetorically asked his readers whether they thought such success should be attributed to the strict adherence of the Irish people to Catholic practice or to ⁴ For a helpful general discussion of the intellectual elements involved in the creation of modern historiography see D. R. Kelley, ‘Johann Sleidan and the Origins of History as a Profession’, Journal of Modern History, 52 (1980), 573–4. ⁵ Fussner, Historical Revolution. ⁶ Levy, Tudor Historical Thought, 101. ⁷ See above, p. 13.

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‘puritanisme’.⁸ Unfortunately, this early strength was weakened by the emigration of so many Irish religious to spread the gospel abroad and by the Viking invasions which destroyed so many monasteries. The basic point, though, was plain: ‘our first Christianitie was repugnant to puritanisme, and conformable to Catholike Christianitie in the principal perfection therof as now it is professed.’⁹ Contemporary Catholic historiography, led by the Irish Franciscans in Louvain, subsequently filled out Fitzsimon’s claims in much greater detail, again linking admirable scholarship to denominational self-interest. The mediaeval lives of the early Irish saints were examined, and their exemplary allegiance to Catholicism was demonstrated, launching a resurgence in Irish hagiography which culminated in John Colgan’s Acta sanctorum veteris et majoris Scotiae seu Hiberniae (Louvain, 1645).¹⁰ Closely linked to this, but with a much sharper polemical edge, was martyrology. Lists were made of modern Irish martyrs killed by the English for their religion, and their sufferings compared to those of the early Christians, with Lord Deputy Chichester cast as Nero.¹¹ Most notably, three works, by Peter Lombard, David Rothe, and Philip O’Sullivan Beare, sought to trace the continuity of Irish Catholicism from the first arrival of Patrick down to the present day.¹² The Irish people were portrayed as eternally loyal to the Roman see, despite invasion, persecution, torture, and martyrdom. Rothe even argued that one of the essential characteristics of the island of Ireland ⁸ Henry Fitzsimon, A Catholike confutation of M. John Riders clayme of antiquitie (Rouen [=Douai], 1608), sig. a3r–v. ⁹ Ibid., sig. e3r–v. ¹⁰ Richard Stanihurst, De vita S. Patricii libri duo (Antwerp, 1587); Richard Conway, Quaedam sanctorum quorundam, et graviorum virorum de sanctitate, et literis Ibernorum testimonia (s.l., s.d.)—see A. F. Allison and D. M. Rogers, The Contemporary Printed Literature of the English Counter-Reformation between 1558 and 1640: An Annotated Catalogue, 2 vols. (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1989–94), i, no. 268; this may be part of Conway’s lost ‘History of Ireland’: John MacErlean, ‘P. Richard Conway, S.J. 1573–1626’, The Irish Monthly, 51 (1923), 309; William Thyraeus, Discursus panegyrici de nominibus, tribulationibus et miraculis S. Patricii Ibernorum apostoli (Douai, 1617); Stephen White, Apologia pro Hibernia adversus Cambri calumnias, ed. Matthew Kelly (Dublin, 1849); David Rothe, Brigida thaumaturga, sive dissertatio . . . in laudem ipsius Sanctae (Paris, 1620); Bernadette Cunningham and Raymond Gillespie, ‘ ‘‘The Most Adaptable of Saints’’: The Cult of St Patrick in the Seventeenth Century’, Analecta Hibernica, 49 (1995), 82–104; Canice Mooney, ‘Father John Colgan O.F.M., His Work and Times and Literary Milieu’, in Terence O’Donnell (ed.), Father John Colgan OFM, 1592–1658 (Dublin: Assisi Press, 1959), 7–40; Salvador Ryan, ‘Steadfast Saints or Malleable Models? Seventeenth-Century Hagiography Revisited’, Catholic Historical Review, 91 (2005), 251–77; Richard Sharpe, Medieval Irish Saints’ Lives: An Introduction to the Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). ¹¹ P. J. Corish and Benignus Millett, The Irish Martyrs (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005); Clodagh Tait, ‘Adored for Saints: Catholic Martyrdom in Ireland c.1560–1655’, Journal of Early Modern History, 5 (2001), 128–59; Alan Ford, ‘Martyrdom, History and Memory in Early Modern Ireland’, in Ian McBride (ed.), History and Memory in Modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 43–66. See the list of marytrologies in Denis Murphy, Our martyrs: A Record of Those Who Suffered for the Catholic Faith under the Penal Laws in Ireland (Dublin, 1896), pp. xxiii–xxvii; David Rothe, The analecta of David Rothe, Bishop of Ossory, ed. P. F. Moran (Dublin, 1884), 188. ¹² Peter Lombard, De regno Hiberniae, sanctorum insula, commentarius, ed. P. F. Moran (Dublin, 1868); Rothe, Analecta; Philip O’Sullivan Beare, Patritiana decas (Madrid, 1629).

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was to turn anyone who lived there for any period of time into an orthodox Catholic.¹³ Underpinning this resurgence in Catholic historiography was a sense of national pride, stimulated particularly by Giraldus’ twelfth-century assault upon the barbarity and backwardness of Ireland and the efforts of the Scottish ‘saint-stealer’, Thomas Dempster, to claim the mediaeval Irish saints as Scots. Ireland was thus portrayed as civilized, with an ancient and learned Gaelic culture, which, before its temporary decline at the hand of the Vikings, had preserved Christianity—‘saved civilization’ as one over-enthusiastic Irish-American later put it—during the European Dark Ages.¹⁴ The cumulative result of these efforts was the creation of an Irish history that brought together the previously disparate and hostile groups in a common identity of faith and fatherland which was firmly rooted in Ireland’s glorious Christian past. The various elements of this new syncretic view of Ireland’s past—legend, folklore, origin-myth, and history—were brought together with consummate skill by the historian Geoffrey Keating in his Foras feasa ar Éirinn, the key text of popular Catholic history in the seventeenth century.¹⁵ By the early 1620s, then, Catholic historiography was flourishing, giving Catholics a new sense of their historical identity. For protestants, though, this exclusive claim to ownership of the ancient Irish church was troubling. It left them with two alternatives. They could, like Spenser, accept that the protestant church in Ireland was a colonial offshoot of the English reformation, writing off St Patrick and the early and late mediaeval Irish church as no true church at all, as part of the Antichristian ‘dunghill or brothelhouse of Satan’, as it was put in one of Ussher’s manuscripts.¹⁶ Or, like Rider and Hanmer, they could attempt to wrest St Patrick from the Catholics and claim him as their legitimate ancestor. It was a vital, even existential, choice for Irish protestants. How they classified the pre-reformation church in Ireland helped define not only their religious and cultural identity, but also the way in which they viewed their presence in Ireland. Were they simply English colonists, bringing over protestantism and civility from England to a tabula rasa, an otherwise barren and barbaric land, or were they rescuing or building upon a decayed but indigenous Irish tradition. The first option suggested the rejection of Irish history and culture as depraved and irrelevant; the second offered the possibility not only of reclaiming that same ¹³ Rothe, Analecta, 43. ¹⁴ Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1995). ¹⁵ Thomas O’Connor, ‘Towards the Invention of the Irish Catholic Natio: Thomas Messingham’s Florilegium (1624)’, Irish Theological Quarterly, 64 (1999), 157–77; B. I. Bradshaw, ‘Geoffrey Keating: Apologist of Irish Ireland’, in B. I. Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield, and Willy Maley (eds.), Representing Ireland Literature and the Origins of the Conflict, 1534–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 166–90; Bernadette Cunningham, ‘Seventeenth-Century Interpretations of the Past: The Case of Geoffrey Keating’, IHS, 25 (1986), 116–28; Geoffrey Keating, Foras feasa ar Éirinn The history of Ireland, ed. David Comyn and P S. Dineen, 4 vols. (London: Irish Texts Society, 1902–14); Cunningham, World of Geoffrey Keating, p. xiii. ¹⁶ Bodl. MS Barlow 13, fol. 481v.

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tradition for protestantism, but of proudly endorsing and embracing its rich and civilized heritage. It was not till 1622 that a decisive answer was provided. It came, unsurprisingly, from James Ussher. In his treatise, An epistle . . . concerning the religion anciently professed by the Irish and Scottish, shewing it to be for substance the same with that which at this day is by publick authoritie established in the Church of England, he applied his considerable historical skills to the ancient Irish church. First published as a modest appendage to a much longer work by his legal friend Sir Christopher Sibthorp, the two were reprinted again in 1623, before a separate second, expanded edition was produced as part of Ussher’s collected works in 1631, when it assumed the title by which it became more generally known, A discourse of the religion anciently professed by the Irish and Brittish. ¹⁷ What Ussher set out to prove was that ‘the religion professed by the ancient bishops, priests, monks, and other Christians in this land, was for substance the very same with that which now by public authority is maintained therein, against the foreign doctrine brought in hither in latter times by the bishop of Rome’s followers.’ The reference to the last times pointed clearly to the familiar apocalyptic time frame. Ussher showed how the Irish church, like the European church in De successione, followed a pattern of early purity followed by the gradual increase in ‘corruption’ until finally, around about 1000 ad ‘the devil was set loose to procure that seduction which prevailed so generally in these last times’.¹⁸ His focus was not, he stressed, upon ‘matters of inferior note, much less of ceremonies and such other things as appertain to the discipline rather than to the doctrine of the church’—sidestepping potentially divisive arguments on the protestant side between conformists and nonconformists and uniting them in what Ussher saw as the primary task, attacking Catholic doctrinal errors.¹⁹ He set out to gather together as many sources as possible from the early history of Christianity in Ireland and Britain, relying especially upon Bede, St Patrick, and the saints’ lives, and, in particular, on two Irish theologians and biblical commentators, Sedulius and Claudius. The work was divided into eleven chapters, which dealt successively with views of the early Irish and British churches on ‘the substantial points of doctrine’ over which Catholic and protestant disagreed.²⁰ Thus Ussher began with the scriptures, showing how in the time of Bede the ordinary people had had access to the Bible in their own languages, whilst the learned used not only the Vulgate, but also the original Hebrew and Greek versions of the Bible, and paid little attention to those decidedly unprotestant books contained in the apocrypha.²¹ The early churches in Ireland and Britain followed St Augustine of Hippo faithfully in stressing the ¹⁷ Christopher Sibthorp, A friendly advertisement to the pretended Catholickes of Ireland (Dublin, 1622; repr. 1623); James Ussher, A discourse of the religion anciently professed by the Irish and Brittish, 2nd edn (London, 1631); the text in UW, iv, is from this edition. ¹⁸ UW, iv. 238: this is the 1631 edn. ¹⁹ Ibid. 239. ²⁰ Ibid. 375. ²¹ Ibid. 241–51.

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primary of grace and predestination, and believed in justification by faith alone, as Ussher showed by a detailed examination of the New Testament commentaries of Sedulius and Claudius.²² And so on, through the doctrines of Purgatory, the Eucharist, confession and penance, and the church.²³ To modern eyes, Ussher’s efforts seem anachronistic, asking questions of the sixth century which were dictated solely by concerns of the sixteenth. But to contemporaries, convinced that doctrinal truth was a given, the product of God’s unchanging revelation which could be traced back through history, it seemed like a thoroughly natural intellectual enterprise, and one in which both Catholics and protestants happily engaged. Ussher was mindful that he was treading a delicate line between, on the one hand, objectivity and academic rigour—‘the true discovery of the state of former times’—and, on the other, proving his case—producing ‘such evidences as might shew the agreement that was betwixt our ancestors and us in matter of religion’. He added a self-aware addendum in 1631 in which he admitted that he had had ‘to leave the instances which might be alleged for the contrary to them unto whom the maintaining of that part did properly belong’.²⁴ Not only was Ussher consciously presenting only one side of the argument, he was also caught awkwardly between exegesis and eisegesis, between the scholarly desire to expound what was in the texts and the propagandistic impulse to read into them one’s own ideological concerns. Sometimes, history made his task relatively straightforward and little more than exegesis was required in order to fit the events of history to his template. Thus when early purity was followed by later decay, Ussher could explain this as the result of the rise of Antichrist. The early Irish monasteries had been models of religious discipline, ascetic, godly, and dedicated to scholarship, attracting students from all over Europe. They were ‘seminaries of the ministry . . . so many colleges of learned divines’, or, as John McCafferty neatly put it, ‘like so many proto-TCDs’.²⁵ Ussher was clearly proud of their role in preserving learning ‘in that inundaton of barbarism, wherewith the whole west was in a manner overwhelmed’.²⁶ But these early monasteries had little to do with their successors: ‘Our monks were religious in deed, and not in name only; far from the hypocrisy, pride, idleness and uncleanness of those evil beasts and slothful bellies that afterward succeeded in their room.’²⁷ Ussher then embarked on the task of proving that later-mediaeval monasticism perverted the early idealism, seizing in particular upon the attack on the mendicant friars by his fourteenth-century predecessor as Archbishop of Armagh, Richard FitzRalph.²⁸ Equally, when later Roman Catholic doctrinal or liturgical developments were unknown in the early church, Ussher could simply contrast early (protestant) ²² UW, iv. 252–62. ²³ Chs. 4, 5, 7. ²⁴ Ibid. 376–7. ²⁵ Ibid. 297; John McCafferty, ‘St Patrick for the Church of Ireland: James Ussher’s Discourse’, Bullán, 3 (1998), 93. ²⁶ UW, iv. 297–8. ²⁷ Ibid. 299–300. ²⁸ Ibid. 301–2.

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purity with later (papal) invention. Thus the fact that the term transubstantiation did not begin to be used before the eleventh and twelfth centuries to explain the real presence allowed Ussher to trawl through the theology of the early British and Irish churches for evidence of a symbolic view of Christ’s presence in the bread and wine. Similarly he demonstrated that Communion was administered in both kinds in the early mediaeval period.²⁹ The indisputable evidence of clerical marriage, where clerical sons succeeded clerical fathers—where, indeed, St Patrick was the son of a priest—was further evidence that the early Irish church was closer to protestantism than Catholicism.³⁰ But on other occasions the sources were less helpful, forcing Ussher into intellectual gymnastics. Take the simple fact that the Irish church throughout its history had had regular contact with the papacy. Ussher happily gave prominence to the arrival in Ireland in 1151 of the papal legate, Cardinal Paparo, bringing four pallia from Leo IX for the newly established Irish archbishops, because the assertion of papal control neatly coincided with the freeing of Antichrist, providing a convenient explanation for the decline of the mediaeval Irish church and its need to be rescued by the Reformation. But the evidence for earlier contacts between Ireland and Rome, and the generally believed claim that Patrick had been sent by the papacy, were more problematic. It was possible to argue that during the previous seven hundred years, when the Irish and Roman churches were purer, contact was more excusable. But there was a persistent desire in Ussher’s Discourse to preserve the independence of the early Irish church by distancing it from the papacy. The result was a delicate pas de deux between historical fact and protestant interpretation. Ussher thus acknowledged that St Patrick ‘had a special regard unto the Church of Rome’: If I myself had lived in his days, for the resolution of a doubtful question I should as willingly have listened to the Church of Rome, as to the determination of any church in the whole world; so reverend an estimation have I of the integrity of that church, as it stood in those good old days. But that St Patrick was of opinion, that the Church of Rome was sure ever afterward to continue in that good estate, and that . . . it should never err in judgement, or that the pope’s sentences were always to be held as infallible orations, that I will never believe; sure I am, that my countrymen after him were of a far other belief, who were so far from submitting themselves in this sort to whatsoever should proceed from the see of Rome, that they oftentimes stood out against it, when they had little cause so to do.³¹

Hence Ussher, like modern devotees of ‘Celtic’ Christianity, was always anxious to preserve the purity and uniqueness of the early Irish church by downplaying its contact and highlighting its disagreements with Rome.³² He rightly dismissed as a Glastonbury legend the account of Patrick’s purchase of indulgences from Pope Celestine I, and went to great length to emphasize the persistence of the ²⁹ Ibid. 279–86. ³⁰ Ibid. 294–5. ³¹ Ibid. 330–1; and see also, 333–4. ³² Donald Meek, The Quest for Celtic Christianity (Edinburgh: Handsel Press, 2000).

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argument with the papacy over how to calculate Easter.³³ Various liturgies were used in the Irish church, Ussher claimed: it was not till the twelfth century that the Roman rite was imposed by the papal legate.³⁴ Nor did the papacy always appoint Irish bishops. Ussher seized gleefully upon the role of Irish kings: ‘the kings and people of this land in those elder times kept the nomination of their archbishops and bishops in their own hands, and depended not upon the pope’s provisions that way’—not only did this distance Ireland from Rome, it also proved that the early church had anticipated royal supremacy.³⁵ Another sensitivity which Ussher betrayed in A discourse of the religion anciently professed was his belief, and pride, in the independence of the Irish church. Though often couched in terms of the early British and Irish churches sharing a common aversion to papal error, the work nevertheless also sought to distance the Irish from the British churches. Thus when dealing with the fact that in the eleventh century the Norse-Irish bishops of Dublin, Waterford, and Limerick had been consecrated by Canterbury, he pointed out that this was a special arrangement, born of their natural ties with Britain. The rest of the Irish bishops had been hostile to the idea of ‘this continuation of their dependence upon a metropolitan of another kingdom, which they conceived to be somewhat derogatory to the dignity of their own primate.’³⁶ Equally, Ussher stressed the independence and pre-eminence of Armagh, founded by St Patrick as the metropolitan see of a separate church.³⁷ Prior to the arrival of the first papal legate in the early eleventh century, Ussher claimed that the archbishop had had extensive powers, not only consecrating bishops but even erecting new sees.³⁸ This was to be a theme to which he returned when he succeeded to Armagh, even to the extent of arguing that the primacy constituted an independent patriarchate.³⁹ Underlying this was a sense of national pride, which surfaced most notably when he defended the claim made at the Council of Constance in 1417 that Europe had originally been divided into four kingdoms, the Roman, the Constantinopolitan, the Irish (subsequently translated to the English), and the Spanish: ‘this have I here inserted the more willingly, because it maketh something for the honour of my country, to which, I confess, I am very much devoted.’⁴⁰ Here, at least, Irish history could be bent to fit Ussher’s providential scheme. Much more problematic was the dilemma which he faced when tackling the twelfth century, when, it appeared, secular and religious events were out of kilter. The arrival of the papal legates, and the way in which the Irish church was whipped into line with Roman norms, all fitted neatly with the unleashing of Antichrist. Unfortunately, at the very same time, the Anglo-Normans, Ussher’s ethnic ancestors, also arrived in Ireland. Not only that, they procured a papal ³³ UV, iv. 329, 336–59. ³⁴ Ibid. 274. ³⁵ Ibid. 329. ³⁶ Ibid. 326–9. ³⁷ Ibid. 320–1. ³⁸ Ibid. 322. ³⁹ Corresp. Ussher–Laud, 16–17; see below, p. 219. ⁴⁰ UW, iv. 370.

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bull, Laudabiliter, which granted Ireland to Henry II. Ussher was faced with a difficult, almost impossible task of distinguishing between Christ and Antichrist, royal and papal authority. If he denied Laudabiliter he reduced papal claims on Ireland, but also diminished the English right to the island. If he praised the reforming impact of the English kings, it was difficult to distinguish it from the parallel efforts of the papacy to remodel the Irish church—or, indeed, to dispel the impression that the Anglo-Norman arrival was a primary means of conforming the Irish church to Roman norms. In short, Ussher struggled to avoid the implication ‘that the Old English helped antichrist to gain control of the Irish church’.⁴¹ A brief comparison to the construction of Welsh protestant identity is instructive here. When the first Welsh New Testament was published in 1567, Bishop Richard Davies of St David’s also traced the development of Christianity from its early unspoiled British days to later Catholic corruption. But he could safely associate the imposition of Roman control with the Saxons, thus safely linking early Welsh religion with the purity of primitive protestantism and its Romanization with foreign invaders.⁴² ‘This apparent restoration of the golden age of early British Christianity was the complete answer in the eyes of protestant apologists to the hitherto most damaging criticisms of the reformation that it was a new-fangled heresy and an alien error, deriving from English sources and imposed on the Welsh against their will.’⁴³ Such a simple solution was not possible in Ireland. In the end, Ussher, in good humanist fashion, challenged the papal right to grant Ireland to the English king in Laudabiliter as being founded on the forged donation of Constantine. But though he rejected papal claims, he did not wish, like O’Sullevan and some Catholic commentators, to undermine the authority of the English kings to rule in Ireland, arguing that Henry had claimed the country either by conquest, or through the submission of the Irish lords and prelates.⁴⁴ Indeed, Ussher was so anxious to buttress the English royal claim to Ireland that he even claimed that Henry made his son John king (rather than lord) of Ireland with papal blessing.⁴⁵ There is a pervasive sense of strain in A discourse of the religion anciently professed, as Ussher struggled to mould recalcitrant historical events into his desired shape. The feeling is even stronger when his efforts are viewed with the benefit of historical hindsight. When his verdicts are compared to those of more recent historians, they come off decidedly second best. This is of course perfectly ⁴¹ Ute Lotz-Heumann, ‘The Protestant Interpretation of History in Ireland: The Case of James Ussher’s Discourse’, in Bruce Gordon (ed.), Protestant History and Identity in Sixteenth Century Europe: The Later Reformation, 2 vols. (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), ii. 117. ⁴² Ibid.; Glanmor Williams, Reformation Views of Church History (London: Lutterworth Press, 1970). ⁴³ Glanmor Williams, The Welsh and Their Religion: Historical Essays (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991), 157. ⁴⁴ UW, iv. 363–70. ⁴⁵ Ibid. 367–9.

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understandable—modern scholarship, after all, has the benefit of almost four hundred years of additional research: Minerva’s owl flies at dusk. But one still must note that on two significant issues, the dispute over Easter and the resurgence of Pelagianism in seventh-century Ireland, Ussher’s much-maligned Catholic opponent, Philip O’Sullevan Beare—a ‘rakehell’ who was ‘as egregious a liar as any (I verily think) that this day breatheth in Christendom’, according to the usually temperate Ussher—whether through luck or judgement, got much closer to the current received opinion.⁴⁶ Part of Ussher’s problem arose from his difficulty in finding reliable witnesses to the beliefs and practices of the early Christians in Ireland and Britain. One of the sources that he used most heavily to demonstrate the Irish church’s adherence to grace, justification by faith, and predestination was the early-ninth-century author of a commentary on Matthew, Claudius Scotus. Unfortunately for Ussher, Claudius was subsequently identified as the strongly Augustinian, indeed almost proto-protestant, but, alas, probably Spanish-born, Bishop of Turin.⁴⁷ This element of misrepresentation points us in an interesting direction, away from history and more in the direction of myth. At first sight this seems rather counter-intuitive. Using the OED definition of myth as ‘a traditional story, typically involving supernatural beings or forces, which embodies and provides an explanation, aetiology, or justification for something such as the early history of a society, a religious belief or ritual, or a natural phenomenon’, it is evident that Ussher’s work marks a sharp break from the truly mythic accounts in the Leabhar gabhála, beloved of Catholic historians as a means of providing the Irish nation with a noble genealogy going back to Noah and the Tuatha Dé Danainn. Ussher determinedly remains within the remit of knowable history, seeking to replace myth with fact. But as with so much of the deconstruction of such fables by sophisticated Renaissance humanists, what they offered instead was just a more ⁴⁶ Ussher, An epistle, 67; UW, iv. 334–5; Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, Early Medieval Ireland, 400–1200 (London: Longman, 1995), 152–3, 166, 172–3, 206–7. The claim that Pelagianism was rife in mid-7th-century Ireland was probably based on a misunderstanding: Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, ‘ ‘‘New Heresy for Old’’: Pelagianism in Ireland and the Papal Letter of 640’, Speculum, 60 (1985), 505–16; and see B. R. Rees, Pelagius: Life and Letters (Rochester: Boydell, 1998), 114–22. ⁴⁷ UW, iv. 242, 257, 378, 468–71. There has been considerable confusion over the identification of various mediaeval Claudii: Simon Birckbek, The Protestants evidence: taken out of good records shewing, that for fifteene hundred yeares next after Christ, divers worthy guides of Gods Church, have in sundry weightie poynts of religion, taught as the Church of England now doth: distributed into severall centuries, and opened (London, 1635) 216; John Bale, Index Britanniae scriptorum, ed. R. L. Poole (Woodbridge: Brewer, 1990), 55; R. H. Rouse, ‘Bostonus Buriensis and the Author of the Catalogus scriptorum ecclesiae’, Speculum, 41 (1966), 473; Samuel Morland, The history of the evangelical churches in the valleys of Piemont (London 1658), 8–11; Michael Gorman, ‘The Commentary on Genesis of Claudius of Turin and Biblical Studies under Louis the Pious’, Speculum, 72 (1997), 279–329; New Catholic encyclopedia, 17 vols. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967–89), iii. 921–2. Note the continuing difficulties modern scholars have had in attributing early mediaeval biblical commentaries: Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, ‘Bischoff ’s Wendepunkte Fifty Years On’, Revue Bénédictine, 110 (2000), 204–37; Michael Gorman, ‘The Myth of Hiberno-Latin Biblical Exegesis’, Revue Bénédictine, 110 (2000), 42–85.

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sophisticated fable—‘less obviously fabricated myths of ethnic origin, ancient constitutions and the like’.⁴⁸ In other words, Ussher’s work hovers delicately between myth, the invention of tradition as recorded by Terence Ranger and Eric Hobsbawm, and that standard, but tantalizingly unattainable, task of the historian, accurately recovering the events of the past.⁴⁹ Two modern parallels for what Ussher was doing in A discourse spring to mind. One was another product of writers seeking to refashion the past to fit their present needs: ‘that entity—beloved of modern sectarians, and romantics, but unknown to the early Middle Ages—‘‘the Celtic Church’’.’⁵⁰ Indeed, in many ways Ussher provided the contemporary believers in Celtic Christianity with their ur-text. Another was the way in which history was reconstructed and reimagined in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to provide an underpinning for many modern nation-states and ethnic groups.⁵¹ Narrative, history, representation, and the construction of identity were then, as in early-seventeenth-century Ireland, inextricably interconnected.⁵² What we are seeing in the Discourse, therefore, is that most interesting of events, the forging (in whatever sense you may wish to take the term) of the historical origins of the Church of Ireland.⁵³ Or even more grandly, Ussher was laying down the basis for the construction of an indigenous Irish protestant identity. But to whom precisely was this origin myth designed to appeal? Here we come to the difficult but important issue of the Discourse’s audience. Ostensibly, Ussher was trying to win over the Catholic Irish. As he put it in the book’s dedication to Sir Christopher Sibthorp, I confess, I somewhat incline to your mind, that if unto the authorities drawn out of scriptures and fathers . . . a true discovery were added of that religion which anciently was professed in this kingdom; if might prove a special motive to induce my poor countrymen to consider a little better of the old and true way from which they have hitherto been misled.

But almost as soon as he had stated his intention, Ussher rowed back, falling prey to the growing Irish protestant pessimism about the possibility of ever winning over the Catholic population: Yet, on the one side, that saying of the gospel runneth much in my mind; ‘If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the ⁴⁸ Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 27. ⁴⁹ Eric Hobsbawm and T. O. Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). ⁵⁰ T. M. Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 261. ⁵¹ B. R. O’G. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edn (London: Verso, 1991). ⁵² Felicity Heal, ‘What Can King Lucius do for you? The Reformation and the Early British Church’, English Historical Review, 120 (2005), 593. ⁵³ See below, pp. 275–9.

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dead:’ and on the other, that heavy judgement mentioned by the apostle; ‘because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved, God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe lies.’ The woful experience whereof, we may see daily before our eyes in this poor nation: where, such as are slow of heart to believe the saving truth of God delivered by the prophets and apostles, do with all greediness embrace, and with a strange kind of credulity entertain those flying legends, wherewith their monks and fryars in these latter days have polluted the religion and lives of our ancient saints.⁵⁴

If Ussher’s apocalyptic forboding was correct, this left him with a very different audience: not the Catholic Irish, not even his kinsmen the Old English, but those few Anglo-Irish and native Irish who had adopted protestantism, together with the new English. Rhetorically, the piece was designed to convert Catholics: realistically, it served to convince the existing protestant community of the Irish origins of their church. Of course, for many of the new English, freshly arrived from England and intending to return there, the need to identify with Ireland was not very strong, nor did they much care whether the Church of Ireland could claim independent Irish roots. But some of those who came over settled, had families, and were, in turn, faced with that most difficult of questions for the colonist: where did their loyalties lie, with their old or their new country? Some had the decision made for them, as people in England viewed those new English long-resident in Ireland as, simply, Irish: Joshua Hoyle, Ussher’s successor as professor, was a Yorkshireman who had come over to study at Trinity in the first decade of the seventeenth century. Yet when he eventually returned to England after the 1641 rising to serve as professor of divinity at Oxford, there were complaints about the decline in academic standards as a result of the appointment of foreigners.⁵⁵ Others made the choice for themselves. Ussher possessed a commonplace book which had initially belonged to an Edward Dawson, like Ussher one of the earliest scholars of Trinity. Inside the front cover, Dawson, with youthful enthusiasm, had signed his name with a flourish and a brief epithet: ‘Edward Dawson Hybernicus olim Anglius’.⁵⁶ The process of transition, of course, was not as straightforward as simply inscribing ‘Irishman, formerly Englishman’: it was personal, lengthy, and could be complex—Irish protestant identity was fractured and far from monolithic.⁵⁷ But Ussher’s A discourse of the religion anciently ⁵⁴ UW, iv. 237–8; Luke 16:31; 2 Thess. 2:10–11. ⁵⁵ Nicholas Tyacke, The History of the University of Oxford: Seventeenth-Century Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), iii. 348; even Tyacke assumes that Hoyle was Irish. ⁵⁶ TCD 790, fol 2r.; given that we know nothing of Dawson’s subsequent career, he may have died young. ⁵⁷ T. C. Barnard, ‘Crises of Identity among Irish protestants 1641–1685’, Past & Present, 127 (1990), 39–83; idem, ‘Protestantism, Ethnicity and Irish Identities, 1660–1760’, in Tony Claydon and I. R. McBride (eds.), Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland, c.1650–c.1850 (Cambridge, 1998), 206–35; S. J. Connolly. ‘Culture, Identity and Tradition: Changing Definitions of Irishness’, in Brian Graham (ed.), In Search of Ireland: A Cultural Geography (London, 1997), 43–63; Ford, ‘Ussher and Irish Identity’, 185–212; Willy Maley, Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism,

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professed offered new English and Anglo-Irish protestants alike a clear sense of a past and a country with which they could identify. Hence the significance of his use of possessive pronouns in relation to his Irish heritage: when he spoke of ‘the religion of our ancestors’ he was speaking as an Irish native, and when he referred to the ‘honour of our country’ he was referring to Ireland.⁵⁸ If Ussher offered an inclusive Irish identity to the new English, he and his fellow Anglo-Irish protestants were much less hospitable to their kinsmen, the Old English. Though Ussher clearly still identified with the ‘ancient English’, as he called them, their determined adherence to the Catholicism created a grave problem: papal Antichristianity seemed to preclude tolerance. Of course, the extent to which theology and ideology influenced the actions of ordinary people, and led to the creation of two communities divided by religion is open to debate.⁵⁹ But the growing distance between protestant and Catholic ‘ancient English’ was evident in one measurable way: patterns of marriage. Increasingly, partners were chosen not by race but by religion: new English Catholics in Ireland chose Old English partners, whilst Anglo-Irish protestants opted for new English protestants.⁶⁰ Thus Ussher’s own daughter married into the Oxfordshire gentry; his sister Sarah married Theophilus Buckworth, the English-born Bishop of Dromore; his sister Mabel married the Welsh Bishop of Killaloe, Lewis Jones; whilst another sister, Anne, married the English settler and ecclesiastical lawyer William Hilton.⁶¹ Similarly, Ussher’s academic and social contacts, as revealed by his book-lending, confirm that he moved in firmly protestant and largely new English circles in Dublin.⁶² The growing importance of religion thus left the protestant Anglo-Irish delicately poised between Ireland and England. Like Hoyle, they were viewed as Irish in England but English—i.e. new English—in Ireland. The experience of Ussher’s successor as Bishop of Meath, Anthony Martin, a member of a prominent Galway Anglo-Irish family, but educated at the puritan seminary of Emmanuel in Cambridge, is telling. Ussher’s friend, the orientalist William Eyre, wrote to him from England in 1607. Discussing Martin’s academic prospects in Cambridge and Dublin, Eyre observed: ‘In terms Culture, and Identity (New York, 1997); K. M. Noonan, ‘ ‘‘The Cruel Pressure of an Enraged Barbarous People’: Irish and English Identity in Seventeenth-Century Policy and Propaganda’, HJ, 41 (1998), 151–77. ⁵⁸ See below, p. 216. ⁵⁹ See the different views of Raymond Gillespie, Devoted People: Belief and Religion in Early Modern Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997) and John McCafferty, review of Devoted People, IHS, 31 (1998), 280–3, and the discussion in Ford and McCafferty (eds.), Origins of Sectarianism, ch. 1. ⁶⁰ See above, p. 24; David Edwards, ‘Haven of popery: English Catholic Migration to Ireland in the Age of Plantations’, in Ford and McCafferty (eds.), Origins of Sectarianism, 95–126. ⁶¹ See also the marriage alliances of the wider Ussher family with families such as Parsons, Perceval, Meredith, Newcomen, and Loftus: W. B. Wright, The Ussher Memoirs; or, Genealogical Memoirs of the Ussher Families in Ireland (Dublin, 1889), 126, 133, 135, 139, 141, 145. ⁶² TCD MS 793, fol. 169; Bodl. MS Rawlinson D 1290, on fragment of parchment inside cover, and fols. 1r–2v, 162r.

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of nationality and disposition, he is yours; and would be ours, not only by disposition and by our wishes (and equally by his own merits), but also by his place in our fellows’ list, if he had been of our nationality.’⁶³ From the perspective of Irish history, then, A discourse of the religion anciently professed is probably one of the most revealing and important pieces that Ussher wrote. The way in which he constructed his argument, and, in particular, how he handled evidence that did not fit with his overarching narrative or his personal preferences uncovers some of his innermost ideological concerns: the independence of the Irish church; the deep hostility to Rome; the subservience of the church to the monarch; and, above all, the Irishness of protestantism. The result was an ethnic origin-myth, designed specifically for protestants in Ireland, a fusion of new English and Anglo-Irish identities which enabled them to identify themselves as English-Norman by origin, Irish by nationality, and protestant by religion. ⁶³ UW, xv. 22–3.

7 Defending Calvinism: 1626–33 On 29 January 1625 James Ussher was appointed Archbishop of Armagh. His elevation was, of course, a tribute to his reputation and achievements. But Stuart episcopal appointments were not always a product of high-minded judgements about the candidates’ abilities. Influence complemented and, on occasions, replaced talent.¹ Somewhat surprisingly for an Irish cleric without obvious political skills, Ussher was well-placed on both counts. His trump card was, of course, his familiarity with the King, a product of his long residence in England after 1619. James, ‘who valued learning in clerics as much as good legs in courtiers’, had soon recognized Ussher’s academic gifts, encouraging him to remain in England and pursue his researches, even after his appointment as Bishop of Meath, and often inviting him to dine with him.² Ussher repaid this royal patronage with an unswerving loyalty to James as the ideal Calvinist godly prince, whom he admired most particularly for his ‘singular dexterity in detecting the frauds of the Romish church, and untying the most knotty arguments of the sophisters of that side’.³ Equally important were Ussher’s court connections, which ensured that after Archbishop Hampton’s death on 3 January 1625 it was his candidature that was pressed on the King. There was at least one rival for the position. John Williams, the politique Bishop of Lincoln, tried (not for the first time) to promote his countryman John Price.⁴ But Ussher had more powerful allies and was, crucially, plugged into the heart of the English puritan patronage network. The key link was provided by Lady Mary Vere, committed to godly causes both at home through her close ties ¹ For an exposé of the corrupt and murky background to an Irish episcopal appointment, see T. O. Ranger, ‘The Career of Richard Boyle, First Earl of Cork, in Ireland, 1588–1643’, DPhil thesis, Oxford University, 1959, 191. ² D. K. Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 17; UW, iii, p. iv; Parr, Life, 16–17. Ussher was already ‘knowen to his Majesty’ in April 1619, when Lord Deputy St John wrote to James recommending him for the see of Dublin: Carte 30, fols. 100r–v; he may have come into contact with the King as early as 1612: Thomas Birch (ed.), The life of Henry Prince of Wales (London, 1760), 274. For further evidence of Ussher’s intimacy with the King and St John, see The Hartlib papers, 2nd edn (Sheffield: Humanities Research Institute, 2002), 28/2/51A. ³ UW, iii, p. iv; this image of James became after his death a useful polemical tool with which to assault anti-Calvinists: Northamptonshire CRO, Finch Hatton MS 247, p. 194; UW, xiii. 350. ⁴ J. F. Merritt, ‘Price, Theodore (c.1570–1631)’, ODNB; Williams was not a natural ally of Ussher: UW, xv. 278–80.

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with puritan clergy and abroad through her husband’s heroic defence of the Palatinate against overwhelming odds.⁵ She used her influence with her brotherin-law, the secretary of state, Sir Edward Conway, to help push through Ussher’s appointment with remarkable speed.⁶ The see which Ussher had won was, potentially, the most powerful in Ireland. In the past, it is true, Dublin had tended to overshadow it, even laying claim to the primacy. The translation of Adam Loftus from the remote fastnesses of Armagh to Dublin in 1567 symbolized the respective positions of the sees in the sixteenth century, as Loftus went on to lead the Church of Ireland from the centre of government, exploiting his twin offices of archbishop and lord chancellor. But the Ulster plantation transformed the position of Armagh by re-endowing the archbishopric and providing the Gaelic areas of the see with English and Scottish tenants.⁷ The appointment in 1613 of Hampton, a royal chaplain, had begun the political rehabilitation of Armagh, as he asserted his primacy against the claims of the Archbishop of Dublin, Thomas Jones.⁸ With the separation of the lord chancellorship from the see of Dublin after the death of Jones in 1619, Hampton became the clear leader of the Church of Ireland, a position which Ussher, with his membership of the Irish privy council and political contacts in Ireland and England, consolidated during his first eight years as archbishop.⁹ Ussher’s position as Irish primate also increased his standing in the international scholarly community. Already well-established in English intellectual circles, Ussher from the late 1620s began to be recognized as a member of the European republic of letters, exchanging books and Latinate courtesies with the leading academics.¹⁰ He was now delicately poised between mainland Europe, England, and Ireland, the only native protestant Church of Ireland bishop who could move with ease in intellectual circles across the whole of northern Europe. His ability ⁵ Jacqueline Eales, ‘A Road to Revolution: The Continuity of Puritanism, 1559–1642’, in Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales (eds.), The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 200–1; eadem, Puritans and roundheads: The Harleys of Barmpton Bryan and the Outbreak of the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 22, 41–2; N. R. N. Tyacke, The Fortunes of English Puritanism 1603–1640 (London: Dr Williams’s Trust, 1989), 13–15; Janice Knight, Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading America Puritanism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 39, 45, 66; Jacqueline Eales, ‘Vere, Mary, Lady Vere (1581–1671)’, and D. J. B. Trim, ‘Vere, Horace, Baron Vere of Tilbury (1565–1635)’, ODNB. ⁶ BL Add. MS 4274, fol. 32r; Hampton died 3 Jan. 1625; Ussher was nominated before the end of the month. See Ussher’s thanks to Conway for his promotion: PRO, SP 63/241/84. ⁷ R. J. Hunter, ‘The Ulster Plantation in the Counties of Armagh and Cavan’, MLitt thesis, Dublin University, 1969. ⁸ TCD MS 582, fols. 1v–17r: a collection of material made by Hampton, to which Ussher contributed a treatise on the episcopal succession at Armagh: printed in UW, i, app. VI. ⁹ On 26 June 1634 he secured from Wentworth a judgement which confirmed the primacy of Armagh: UW, i. 160–3. ¹⁰ UW, xv. 550–8, 576–7, 585–6, 589–90; xvi. 11–33, 529–30.

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to straddle the Irish Sea proved to be of increasing importance in the later 1620s, as Irish ecclesiastical affairs were sucked into the ambit of English politics and patronage, and Ussher had to use his scholarly arguments and political influence both to defend his vision of the Church of Ireland and to contribute to debates within the Church of England. In each realm, as a result, Ussher was both in demand and facing serious challenges. At home his clergy congratulated him on his appointment, but bemoaned his inheritance. Bishop Moigne of Kilmore welcomed him as ‘a special instrument for the good of the Irish church’, but went on: ‘the growth whereof . . . receives every day more impediments and oppositions than ever’. The main difficulty was the rapacious habits of landowners, even protestant ones, and the difficulty the Church encountered in defending itself from their depredations: ‘the inheritance of the church’, it was complained, ‘is made arbitrary at the council table’.¹¹ John Parker, the English-born Prebendary of Maynooth (St Patrick’s, Dublin) and Dean of Leighlin, in a congratulatory epistle which doubled as a begging letter, made a similar point. Lamenting the impotence of the clergy, he claimed that the Church now lyeth exposed to miserable contempt and scorn; and unless God in mercy to it, raise up such as your lordship is expected to be, we shall be driven to sit down by the waters of Babylon, to hang up our harps, to weep, and with the church of the Jews take up this complaint, ‘how shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land’.¹²

Initially, however, Ussher had little time to deal with the problems of Ireland. Just as in 1621 when he had been appointed to Meath, so in 1625 when made Primate, he found it rather difficult to extract himself from England and return to his new see. This was not wholly his fault. He had fallen ill late in 1624 while staying at Much Hadham in Hertfordshire, and was not fully to recover till late 1626. But he was well enough to deliver a series of sermons in a variety of places in England from 1 January 1625 and to spend three days debating with a Catholic priest in the home of Lord and Lady Mordaunt in November.¹³ He came home in early 1626 because of his illness, but by June he was back in England, and it was not till August 1626 that he finally settled back in Ireland to take up his duties as archbishop.¹⁴ ¹¹ UW, xv. 272. ¹² H. J. Lawlor, The Fasti of St Patrick’s, Dublin (Dundalk: Tempest, 1930), 129; W. J. R. Wallace, Clergy of Dublin and Glendalough: Biographical Succession Lists (Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 2001), 954; UW, xvi. 425–6; Psalms 137:4. ¹³ Bodl. MS Eng. Th. e.25, fols. 4r, 53r, 109r; Essex County Record Office, Chelmsford, CRO D/Dba F5/1; UW, i. 67–9. ¹⁴ Maurice Lenihan (ed.), ‘The Fee Book of a Physician of the Seventeenth Century’, Transactions of the Kilkenny Archaeological Society, 6 (1867), 146–7; Bernard, Life, 56; CSPI, 1625–32, 180.

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C A LV I N I S TS A N D A R M I N I A N S : 1 6 2 5 – 6 His reluctance to leave is more easily explained when viewed against the backdrop of contemporary English ecclesiastical politics. On his last protracted stay in England, in 1619–21, Ussher had been drawn into the political arguments over the fate of the Palatinate: as his godly friends pushed for war, his pacific monarch pursued the Spanish match. Now Charles, after the disastrous failure of his courtship in Madrid in 1624, was pressing for war with Spain, and parliament was called in 1625 and 1626 to gain financial support. This should, of course, have pleased the ‘protestant’ party, but they were now increasingly concerned by their other main concern—the rise of ‘Arminian’ clergy who challenged many of the central tenets of English Calvinists, and the fear that the new King might, as a result of his French marriage, prove too tolerant towards Catholics. On both of these, Ussher had strong views, and was drawn into English politics, this time into the inner circles of the godly, associating with leading figures such as John Preston and Sir Francis Barrington. The dominant figure amongst English Arminians in the 1620s was Richard Montagu, who, like Ussher, was an historian-cleric whom the King had favoured with his patronage. When faced with a Fitzsimon-like challenge from Catholic priests in his English parish, Montagu, rather than seeking to place as much distance as possible between Catholic and protestant theological beliefs, had embarked on a re-examination of the beliefs of the Church of England which relocated English protestantism between the Calvinist and Roman extremes. Inevitably, this involved rejecting some of the shibboleths of the Calvinists, not just in England but also in Ireland. In A new gagg for an old goose Montagu cast doubt on whether Antichrist could confidently be identified with the pope, and queried Calvinist views on grace and predestination.¹⁵ He laid particular stress upon the inconclusiveness of Article 17, and generally argued that the ThirtyNine Articles were not necessarily a Calvinist confession.¹⁶ Though he denied having read Arminius, he was immediately labelled by defenders of the Calvinist orthodoxy as an Arminian, and he, along with the earl of Buckingham, became the main object of assault in the parliaments of the late 1620s. More seriously, from the perspective of Irish protestants, Montagu, by labelling Calvinists as extremists, provided welcome support for that traditional Irish Catholic ploy of labelling Irish churchmen as puritans.¹⁷ ¹⁵ J. S. Macauley, ‘Mountague, Richard (bap. 1575, d. 1641)’, ODNB; Richard Montagu, A gagg for the new gospell? No: a new gagg for an old goose (London, 1624). ¹⁶ E.g. Montagu, Gagg for the new gospell, 157. ¹⁷ Peter Lake, ‘Calvinism and the English Church, 1570–1635’, Past & Present, 114 (1987), 69, 71.

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As the opposition to Montagu grew in parliament, and as his opponents broadened their attack to include the ‘growth of popery’—Ireland came to play a minor yet significant part in the debates. Not only was the confidence of Irish Catholics and the increasingly open practice of their religion seized upon by the opposition as an example of the dangerous results of government laxity and toleration, but the doctrinal significance of the Irish articles of 1615 began to dawn upon the English Calvinists as an answer to their besetting problem, the indeterminacy of the Thirty-Nine. Their main difficulty, of course, was that Article 17, as Montagu had so cleverly demonstrated, was neither precise nor comprehensive enough to require belief in double predestination, perseverance, and assurance. What they wanted to do was to copperfasten the Calvinist interpretation of the Thirty-Nine Articles by means of some other authoritative, preferably royally endorsed confession. There were three candidates, the articles of Lambeth, Ireland, and Dort.¹⁸ Unfortunately, none of these had been officially ratified in England, but the Irish came nearest, having (it was assumed) been agreed by King James.¹⁹ Previously ignored and unknown, from 1625 the Irish articles suddenly became a matter of considerable interest in England, a pointer to the way in which interaction between the interlocking but different ecclesiastical settlements in England and Ireland and Scotland could in the future create potentially explosive political problems.²⁰ The Commons in 1625 decided, with a confidence based more on Calvinist hope than primary evidence, that the 1615 articles had been ‘sent into Ireland, under the great seale of Englande’.²¹ George Carleton, the Bishop of Chichester and former head of the British delegation at Dort, wrote to Ussher when preparing a rebuttal of Montagu in 1625, asking him for a copy of the Irish Articles, having obviously never encountered them before.²² When his work appeared it saw the Irish as endorsing the Lambeth which in turn clarified the Thirty-Nine Articles, and cited IA 38 to support the perseverance of the elect.²³ Another Calvinist opponent of Montagu, John Pym’s stepbrother, Francis Rous, writing in 1626, cited IA 15, ‘such as was approved by his Maiestie’, in order to reject the possibility of God’s foresight having a ¹⁸ N. R. N. Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists. The Rise of English Arminianism c. 1590–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 127, 132, 135–6, 155; Richard Cust, Charles: A Political Life (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2005), 116. ¹⁹ As Nicholas Tyacke righly remarks, ‘It remains a mystery both what part James played in framing the Irish Articles and how he subsequently regarded them’: Anti-Calvinists, 155: for a discussion of this, see above, pp. 100–1. ²⁰ Conrad Russell, ‘The British Problem in the English Civil War’, History, 72 (1987), 399. ²¹ S. R. Gardiner (ed.), Debates in the House of Commons in 1625, Camden Society, n.s. 6 (1873), 48. ²² UW, xvi. 430–1. ²³ George Carleton, An examination of those things wherein the author of the late Appeale holdeth the doctrines of the Pelagians and Arminians, to be doctrines of the Church of England, 1st edn (London, 1626), 6–7.

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role to play in predestination.²⁴ In parliament John Pym shrewdly claimed that Montagu’s views on grace opposed the English to the Irish Articles.²⁵ Even the text of the Irish confession subsequently became a bone of contention, as it was published twice in London, despite efforts by Laud to censor it.²⁶ The process of claiming, not just the Irish Articles, but the history of the whole Irish church in support of Calvinist orthodoxy, was completed by that indefatigable polemicist William Prynne, who had evidently enjoyed Ussher’s 1622 Epistle concerning the religion anciently professed by the Irish and Scottish, and now identified the ‘incomparable Doctor Usher’ and the Church of Ireland as his natural allies.²⁷ For the Church of Ireland; its out of quaestion, that she hath alwayes both in ancient and moderne ages concluded with us. For in ancient times, in the points of the immutability, aeternity, and freenesse of Gods election; the praedetermined number of Gods elect; the infallible certainety of their effectuall calling and salvation: reprobation, freewill, and universall grace, we shall finde Saint Gallus, Sedulius, and Claudius, three ancient Irish fathers, and with them the ancient Irish church; concurring fully with us, and with St. Augustine, in these our orthodox positions, as that reverend, learned, and incomparable Irishman, Doctor Usher, arch-bishop of Ardmagh, the honor of our church, and glory of his nation, hath evidently, and largely proved, in his Epistle of the Religion professed by the ancient Irish.²⁸

After quoting in full articles 11–16, 22–3, 25–6, 31–3, and 37–8 from the Irish confession, Prynne triumphantly concluded: Since therefore the Church of England and Ireland are but one church under one gracious soveraigne: since most of our Irish bishops who composed these articles, were English divines of speciall note and learning . . .: since our late learned soveraigne K. James, approved of these articles, which have beene lately licenced and printed here amongst us by authority: and since it cannot be presumed that the Churches of England and Ireland should contradict or oppugne one the other in their articles of religion . . .: we may infallibly collect, that our anti-Arminian assertions are the established, the received doctrine of the Church of England, because they are the litterall, the manifest, and undoubted tenets of the articles of Ireland.²⁹ ²⁴ Francis Rous, Testis veritatis (London, 1626), 2. ²⁵ Russell, Monarchies, 36. ²⁶ W. B. Bidwell et al. (eds.), Commons Debates 1628, 4 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977–8), iv. 324; Ephemeris parliamentaria (London, 1654), 245—though, of course, not all accusations of Laudian censorship were necessarily true: Anthony Milton, ‘Licensing, Censorship, and Religious Orthodoxy in Early Stuart England’, JEH, 41 (1998), 638; Articles of religion agreed . . . in the yeare of our Lord God 1615 (London, 1628; 2nd edn, 1629): to make the point of publication even more plain, the IA derived from the Lambeth Articles were helpfully noted in the margin. ²⁷ William Prynne, The Church of Englands old antithesis to new Arminianisme (London, 1629), 61. Prynne did, it is true, somewhat spoil his enthusiastic endorsement of Ussher by getting his Christian name wrong: William Prynne, Anti-Arminianisme ([London], 1630), 217. ²⁸ Prynne, Church of Englands old antithesis to new Arminianisme, 118–19, and see sig. A3v, ¶ ¶ 2v, pp. 7, 10–13, 61. ²⁹ Prynne, Anti-Arminianisme, 17–21.

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Ussher by now had a burgeoning reputation in political and ecclesiastical circles in England. In March 1626 he preached a sermon in Cambridge (which Bernard, with the benefit of hindsight, again deemed prophetic) on the anniversary of King James’s death, choosing as his text 1 Samuel 12:25: ‘But if ye shall still do wickedly, ye shall be consumed, both ye and your king.’³⁰ In Parliament, his fellow Irish privy councillor Sir Francis Annesley tried to win over opponents of Buckingham by citing as evidence for Buckingham’s theological orthodoxy his support for ‘the Bishop of Armagh, whom I think you all esteem’; whilst Montagu cheekily tried to enlist the Primate’s backing on the issue of free will in A new gagg.³¹ Ussher was, of course, as Prynne realized, quite firmly on the opposite side, and Montagu privately observed that the new Primate, along with his two friends, Joseph Hall, soon to be Bishop of Exeter, and the Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, Thomas Morton, were amongst his most respected opponents.³² Ussher’s movements during this period were suggestive. He continued to progress around his godly contacts, preaching in London and Felsted and joining with Preston in a fast held at Hatfield Broad Oak in Essex, home of the Barringtons, late in 1625.³³ Given that this came just before the set piece on 11 and 17 January 1626, when Preston and Morton confronted the English Arminians at York House in theological debate, it is natural to speculate that Ussher and Preston were preparing for the forthcoming battle.³⁴ Certainly the mood of his sermon at Much Hadham on 2 October was bleak and worried, a typical penitential lament, warning his hearers of the dangers of provoking God by sin, especially ‘now when thowsands of our brethren fall at our right and left hand’.³⁵

³⁰ Bernard, Life, 86. ³¹ Thomas Bidwell et al. (eds.), Commons Debates 1628, iv. 254; Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution. English Politics and the Coming of War 1621–1624 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 93; Richard Montagu, Appello Caesarem: a just appeale from two unjust informers (London, 1625), 104. On the Laudian penchant for hijacking the words of their opponents, see Anthony Milton, ‘The Church of England, Rome, and the True Church: The Demise of a Jacobean Consensus’, in Kenneth Fincham (ed.), The Early Stuart church, 1603–1642 (London: Macmillan, 1993), 203, and Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 429. ³² George Ornsby (ed.), The correspondence of John Cosin, 2 vols., Surtees Society, 52 (1869–72), i. 80; for Usher and Hall, see Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake, ‘Popularity, Prelacy and Puritanism in the 1630s: Joseph Hall Explains Himself ’, EHR, 111 (1996), 864–5; Dan Steere, ‘ ‘‘For the Peace of Both, for the Honour of Neither’’: Bishop Joseph Hall Defends the via media in an Age of Extremes, 1601–1656’, The Sixteenth Century, 27 (1996), 751–2; Peter Lake, ‘The Moderate and Irenic Case for Religious War: Joseph Hall’s Via media in Context’, in S. D. Amussen and Mark Kishlansky (eds.), Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 55–83. For Ussher’s closeness to Morton, see UW, xv. 143, 195. ³³ Bodl. MS Engl. Th. e.25; for Felsted as a ‘centre of godliness’, see Tom Webster, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England: The Caroline Puritan Movement c.1620–1643 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 51; Essex County Record Office, CRO D/Dba F5/1. ³⁴ William Hunt, The Puritan Moment: The Coming of Revolution in an English County (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 193; Webster, Godly Clergy, 9–10. ³⁵ Bodl. MS Rawl. D 1290, fol. 62v.

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The refusal of Buckingham at the York House conference to endorse the articles of the Synod of Dort were a further disappointment to the Calvinist party.³⁶ Political tensions rose with the Commons’ continued assault on Montagu and its refusal to grant supply.³⁷ In early June the drama reached its climax. On 13 June 1626 a bill which gave statutory authority to the Irish Articles alongside the Thirty-Nine was introduced; on 15 June Charles dissolved parliament, and the following day issued a royal proclamation ordering clergy not to preach or publish ‘any new inventions or opinions concerning religion, then such as are clearly grounded and warranted by the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England’.³⁸ Meanwhile the King had invited Ussher to preach before him at Greenwich on 25 June.³⁹ Ussher was an assiduous preacher, and his sermons are generally straightforward treatments of scripture, delivered in a plain manner, and aimed at the pastoral needs of the individual Christian. Just occasionally, though, Ussher’s style changed utterly, as he spoke out on contemporary issues, admonishing those in power for their failure to act in a godly fashion. Bernard tells how Ussher hath often acknowledged, that sometimes that which he hath fully resolved in his sermon not to utter, when he came to it, was like ‘Jeremiahs fire shut up in his bones, that he could not forbeare’, unlesse he would have stood mute, and have proceeded no further; whereof I might give you many instances; as of his boldnesse and freedome in the publick, reproving what he did not approve of in the greatest, ‘even before kings he was not ashamed’.⁴⁰

Ussher demonstrated this boldness and freedom in 1602, when the state suspended action against recusants, in 1622 at the inauguration of the Lord Deputy, and now again, he abandoned all pretence of personal spiritual instruction, and spoke directly to the ecclesio-political problems of the day, in particular what he saw as the serious threat posed by the rise of Arminianism.⁴¹ ³⁶ Irvonwy Morgan, Prince Charles’s Puritan Chaplain (London: Allen and Unwin, 1957), 157–8; Barbara Donagan, ‘The York House Conference Revisited: Laymen, Calvinism and Arminianism’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 64 (1991), 312–30. ³⁷ Conrad Russell, Parliaments and English Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 297 ff.; CJ, i. 845, 847; Macauley, ‘Mountague, Richard’, ONDB. ³⁸ W. B. Bidwell and Maija Jansson (eds.), Proceedings in Parliament 1626, 3 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), iii. 431–2. In the 1628 parliament, the bill received a second reading and was committed on 7 April, and in 1629 it was revived again: Victor Treadwell, Buckingham and Ireland 1616–1628 (Dublin: Four Courts, 1998), 289; L. S. Popofsky, ‘The crisis over Tonnage and Poundage in Parliament in 1629’, Past & Present, 126 (1990), 63; Bidwell et al. (eds.), Commons Debates, 1628, ii. 324; A proclamation for the establishing of the peace and quiet of the Church of England (London, 1626); J. P. Kenyon (ed.), The Stuart Constitution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 154–5; J. F. Larkin (ed.), Stuart Royal Proclamations, II: Royal Proclamations of King Charles I 1625–1646 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 90–3. ³⁹ UW, xvi. 432. ⁴⁰ Bernard, Life, 88; the references are to Jer. 20:9 and Ps. 119:46. ⁴¹ Davies, Caroline Captivity, 112; Tyacke, Anti-Calvinism, 49; Nicholas Tyacke, ‘Anglican Attitudes: Some Recent Writings on English Religious History, from the Reformation to the Civil War’, Journal of British Studies, 35 (1996), 155; Alexandra Walsham, ‘Vox piscis: Or the Book-Fish:

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He chose as his text 1 Cor. 14:33: ‘For God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, as in all churches of the saints.’⁴² He opened by tackling the central issue—who was to exercise authority in theological disputes. ‘The delivery of what doctrine a man please without controule is the ground from whence growes sedition in the church of God. Therefore the apostle, though he commends prophesying, yet he would have it done in order; and therefore saith in verse 29: ‘‘Let the prophets speak two or three, and let the other judge.’’ ’ The perpetual challenge for protestant churches, of course, was deciding who was to do the judging. Here Ussher referred back to the previous verse, ‘Let the spirits of the prophets be subject to the prophets.’ This meant that the fewer should ‘be content to submit themselves to be ordered by the greater company of prophets; for, saith my text, ‘‘God is not the author of confusion, but of peace’’ ’.⁴³ Peace comes from the infusion of God’s grace, and those who are peaceful can be sure they are God’s children.⁴⁴ Tumult and confusion, on the other hand, are the work of the Devil, a product of worldly, corrupt wisdom: ‘the greatest seditions that are and ever were commonly raysed in the church have bene grounded on worldly respects’.⁴⁵ ‘Wee need not goe far for a proofe of this. If wee cast our eyes upon the Netherlands, wee shall see that the contentions and divisions that have bene brought in amongst them was for earthly and temporall ends.’⁴⁶ Left unchecked such tumult becomes unstoppable—Ussher quotes Prov. 17:14: ‘ ‘‘The beginning of strife is as the opening of the waters . . . therefore leave off contention before it be meddled with.’’ ’⁴⁷ Though the very existence of church and state in England were threatened, Ussher was worried that people did not understand the danger: I would to God wee had noe cause to speake . . . Wee see the prognostication of our ruine before our eyes and yet wee are not sensible of it. Noe, see distemper in the state, and dissention in the church and yet persuade ourselves all wilbe well, and that wisedome and pollicye will hould us out. Beloved this may not bee. Providence and the Uses of the Reformation Past in Caroline Cambridge’, EHR, 114 (1999), 596; Peter White, Predestination, Policy and Polemic: Conflict and Consensus in the English Church from the Reformation to the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 244; Graeme Murdock, ‘The Importance of Being Josiah: An Image of Calvinist Identity’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 29 (1998), 1054; Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 46. ⁴² Bernard, Life, 87. The sermon survives in four sources: Ussher’s own sermon notes: Bodl. Rawl. MS D 1290, fols. 63v–64v; and three contemporary copies, evidently based on notes of the sermon taken by listeners: UW, xiii. 337–51 (misdated as 1627); Northamptonshire CRO, Finch Hatton MS 247, pp. 161–97; and Cambridge University Library, MS Dd.v.31, fols. 94r–103r. Of the contemporary notes, the last two are virtually identical, but the first differs significantly, suggesting that at least two of Ussher’s auditors transcribed the sermon. Further evidence of interest in the sermon comes from a contemporary hand in the BL copy of Ussher’s 1621 sermon to Parliament: Ussher, Sermon before the Commons (call no.: 4475.b.101). ⁴³ Northamptonshire CRO, Finch Hatton MS 247, p. 161; UW, xiii. 337; 1 Cor. 14:29. ⁴⁴ UW, xiii. 340–1. ⁴⁵ Northamptonshire CRO, Finch Hatton MS 247, p. 175; UW, xiii. 343. ⁴⁶ Ibid. ⁴⁷ Northamptonshire CRO, Finch Hatton MS 247, p. 187; UW, xiii. 347.

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Aware of the fierce hostility of James and Charles to those subjects who tried to meddle with arcana imperii, Ussher knew he was skating on thin ice. But, again he felt that he was impelled by his duty as a godly prophet to speak out: I intrude not, far be it from mee to meddle with matters of state. I leave that to my superiors to whome it doth belonge. But my text leads mee to all the churches of the saints. Here I am sure I am within my owne element. Doe wee not see a great distemper in the churches of the saints? May wee not cast our eyes upon our neighbouring countries where the selfe same plague did first beginne, where first it begunn but with disputations in the schooles . . . I beseech God that wee trye not conclusions, to see howe farre such a thing may goe with us before it be stopped.⁴⁸

He went on to explain what steps should be taken to end the contention. First, ‘all odious termes be . . . supprest . . . It is come to that passe now a dayes, that those that will not yeild unto the newe doctrine, which hath lately allmost destroyed the Lowe Countries, that there is cast upon them that odious and contemptible name of puritanes. It is a pestilent thing tending to the everlasting maintenance of this contention.’⁴⁹ ‘We know who are esteemed by Christ, and were it not a vile thing to term him a puritan?’⁵⁰ Ussher then played the trump card which those who opposed the Arminians regularly employed—the Calvinism of Charles’s father: with what brasen face durst any man ever saye that King James (our late dears soveraigne of ever lasting memorye) was a puritane. Doe you not thinke it a high dishonor to brand him with that reproachfull name, and shall there be men found soe bould as to brand the foreheads of those men with that odious name of puritane, that professe and holde in the same things, noe more, nor noe lesse, then our late dread soveraigne did professe with his mouth and maintain with his penn?⁵¹

He looked back to recent events to identify those who introduced a note of dissension and went on to apply the rule he had outlined at the start: See how many of the brethren be of that mynde, take a survey of the prophetts. And if you see the greater number of the prophetts goe another way, what can the meaning of the Apostle bee heere? But let the spiritt of the fewer prophetts be subject to the spiritt of the greatest number of their fellowe prophetts. This is the cheife place on which wee build our councells, yea our generall councells on . . . This I say is Gods order and playnely sett downe. That those that bring in a newe doctrine which God hath noe hand in that those fewer, that have bene the cause of the breach, that they shalbe required to be subject to the greater number of the prophetts whose peace they have disturbed.⁵²

This was a somewhat uncomfortable doctrine for a protestant such as Ussher to be advocating, given his belief that a small minority of godly heretics had ⁴⁸ ⁴⁹ ⁵⁰ ⁵¹ ⁵²

Northamptonshire CRO, Finch Hatton MS 247, pp. 189–90; UW, xiii. 348. Northamptonshire CRO, Finch Hatton MS 247, pp. 190–1; UW, xiii. 348. UW, xiii. 348. Northamptonshire CRO, Finch Hatton MS 247, p. 192; UW, xiii. 348. Northamptonshire CRO, Finch Hatton MS 247, pp. 193–4; UW, xiii. 349.

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preserved Christian truth during the height of mediaeval popery. What, he was forced to ask, if the minority is right? Here he resorted to that decidedly useful if vague distinction between essential and inessential truths. Even if the minority were correct, providing what they were advocating was not part of the fundamentals of faith, then they had a duty to remain silent so as not to disturb the peace of the church. The manner in which Ussher arrived at the conclusion that the Arminians should keep their, and the Church of England’s, peace was, obviously, parti pris, and he was sufficiently self-aware to recognize this: ‘But you will say that the advise that I give comes from a man that is partiall. I confesse that in these five points that have lately disturbed the peace of the Netherlands, I am fully of the judgement that my late dread soveraigne was of before.’⁵³ But, he stressed, he was not here concerned with truth, but with maintaining the peace, and even if he was an Arminian, he claimed, he would recognize the necessity for silence, given that the majority of the prophets were clearly on the other side.⁵⁴ Having said that he would not interfere with mysteries of state, Ussher then, at the end of his sermon, did precisely that, arguing that the royal proclamation banning both sides from public discussion of the contentious issues was unwise: And heere I saye it was not soe good advise given as might have bene that both sides should be stopped. It is not an easie matter to silence a multitude in that they have bene borne, bredd and taught in, as to keepe in order a fewe. Those fewe that move opinions may be easily made to keepe their limitts and not to disturb the peace of the church, but to keepe their opinions to themselves.⁵⁵

As if aware of his outspokenness, Ussher ended on a note that was both elegiac and prophetic: ‘This is the last time I shall be called to this place, therefore I will leave this advice; which, if it be neglected, peradventure it will be too late easily to stop things.’⁵⁶ Concerned to carry on the fight, Ussher wrote immediately after his sermon to Ward, urging him to ensure that the Calvinist heads of colleges in Cambridge buried their differences and joined together ‘to promote the cause of God’.⁵⁷ Ward wrote back praising his friend’s brave parrhesia ‘touching the repressing of the Arminian faction’.⁵⁸ Brave it certainly was. Ussher had taken a considerable risk, openly opposing royal policy in front of the King, clearly identifying himself with the ‘moderate Calvinist rearguard action against the Arminian insurgency’ of Montagu.⁵⁹ But the true significance of Ussher’s 1626 sermon ⁵³ Northamptonshire CRO, Finch Hatton MS 247, p. 194; UW, xiii. 350. ⁵⁴ Ibid. ⁵⁵ Northamptonshire CRO, Finch Hatton MS 247, p. 196; UW, xiii. 350. ⁵⁶ Northamptonshire CRO, Finch Hatton MS 247, pp. 196–7; UW, xiii. 350. ⁵⁷ UW, xv. 346. ⁵⁸ Ibid. 347. ⁵⁹ Fincham and Lake, ‘Popularity, Prelacy and Puritanism’, 868; H[enry] B[urton], A plea to an appeale: traversed dialogue wise (London, 1626), sig. ¶ 3r, ¶ 4rv, a1r; Jeremiah Dyke, A sermon preached at the publicke fast (London, 1628); Walsham, ‘Vox piscis’, 602 ff.

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only really became apparent with the benefit of hindsight. At the time, with even Montagu unsure as to whether the King supported him, and Buckingham only a recent convert, Ussher’s appeal for Charles to suppress the Arminians did not appear wholly unrealistic.⁶⁰ And indeed, Ussher did not forfeit royal approval.⁶¹ Only as the King continued to promote Arminians (Montagu was made Bishop of Chichester in 1628) and reinforced the ban on the discussion of predestination (in 1628 and again in 1629) and only after the disastrous end to the 1629 parliament did it become abundantly apparent that the tide had turned decisively against the Calvinism, which Ussher saw as the theology of the Church of England.⁶² The change in atmosphere was clear by 1630, when Ussher’s theological twin, John Davenant, Bishop of Salisbury, was hauled before the Privy Council and reprimanded for repeating the Primate’s defence of Calvinist orthodoxy in another lenten sermon before the King.⁶³ The ultimate retrospective validation of Ussher’s Cassandra-like prophetic powers came, of course, from the simple fact that he did not return to England for fourteen years, and when he did, in 1640, he was to witness precisely the destruction of the English church and state of which he had warned in 1626.⁶⁴ T H E P RO B L E M S O F I R E L A N D , 1 6 2 6 – 3 3 When Ussher finally arrived back in Ireland in August 1626, though, his most pressing problem was not the rise of Arminianism, but the growing confidence ⁶⁰ Macauley, ‘Mountague, Richard’, ODNB. See another, even more outspoken attack on the proclamation: Samuel Fell, Primitiae (Oxford, 1627). ⁶¹ CSPI, 1625–32, 687. ⁶² Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, ch. 8; Articles agreed upon by the arch-bishops and bishops of both provinces . . . Reprinted by His Majesties commandment: with his royall declaration prefixed thereunto (London, 1628); Larkin, Stuart Royal Proclamations, ii. 220–2. ⁶³ Vivienne Larminie, ‘Davenant, John (bap. 1572, d. 1641)’, ODNB; D. R. Como, ‘Predestination and Political Conflict in Laud’s London’, HJ, 46 (2003), 268; Peter Lake, ‘Calvinism and the English Church’, Past & Present, 114 (1987), 65; White, Predestination, policy and polemic, 299–300. Ward commented on Davenant’s case to Ussher: ‘I am right sorry, the delivery of the established doctrine of our church should thus be questioned’: UW, xv. 500, as did Francis Quarles, UW, xvi. 512–13: G. S. Haight, ‘Francis Quarles in Ireland’, Times Literary Supplement, 17 October 1935, 652. On Ussher and Davenant, see J. D. Moore, ‘ ‘‘Christ is Dead for Him’’: John Preston (1587–1628) and English Hypothetical Universalism’, PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2000; see also Bedell’s relief that Davenant had not been too severely punished for his sermon: UW, xv. 520. ⁶⁴ Parr, Life, 40, claims that Ussher travelled to England in 1631 to see his book The religion anciently professed by the Irish through the press: there is, however, no evidence that he did so; it was in fact part of a collected edition of his works being printed in London for the Irish factory of the Company of Stationers. The printing of the work began in late 1630 whilst Ussher was in Dublin, and he was also in Dublin in late 1631 when Parr claims he was in England: UW, xv. 542, 549. Further confusion over whether Ussher returned to England after 1626 (e.g. Capern, ‘Caroline Church’, 59 n. 10) stems from the erroneous dating of his 1626 sermon in UW, xiii. 335. The one occasion where Ussher did venture out of Ireland between 1626 and 1640—his visit to Scotland in July 1633 for Charles I’s coronation—has been missed by historians: Corresp. Ussher–Laud, 15; HMC, Hastings, iv. 55.

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of Catholics, along with its obverse, the increasing insecurity of Irish protestants. The latter had been dismayed in the early 1620s by the suspension of measures to enforce religious conformity, and the consequent public celebration of Catholic rites and ceremonies. The collapse of the Spanish match and the drift to war with Spain had briefly raised hopes of firmer measures—a proclamation was issued in January 1624 banishing Catholic priests.⁶⁵ But paradoxically, just as the alliance with Spain had helped Irish Catholics to extract concessions, so too did the threat of war. While Dublin pressed for the enforcement of anti-recusancy legislation, the authorities in London, concerned again at the old strategic realities, again judged that, when faced with the possibility of Spanish invasion, it was safer to placate than alienate the majority of the Irish population. The proclamation was therefore dropped and in 1625–6 negotiations got under way between Irish Catholics and Charles.⁶⁶ Increasingly confident and assertive as a result of their de facto toleration, Old English leaders first proposed to a receptive King that they be allowed to form local militias, an idea that horrified Irish protestants, since it involved arming Catholics. Then the Old English suggested that they make a substantial financial contribution to the upkeep of an enlarged army in return for a set of religious and civil reforms—the ‘matters of grace and bounty’, usually known as ‘the graces’, a draft of which was sent over to Dublin by the English privy council in September 1626. As the King overruled the doubts of the Protestant leaders, the prospect loomed of a formal toleration for Catholicism, confirmed by an Irish parliament. While most of the proposed graces were purely secular, notably the promise of security of tenure for landholders, and some were equally welcome to new English as well as Old English and native Irish, there was also provision for specifically Catholic religious concerns: Catholic lawyers were to be allowed to practice and wards were to be allowed to inherit, providing they took a modified oath of allegiance, and the 12d. penalty for not attending church was to be suspended.⁶⁷ From the historian’s perspective, this was one of those rare usually untaken opportunities to break the sectarian mould of Irish politics. But for contemporary Irish protestants it was a nightmare, threatening not only their privileged position, but challenging all their religious assumptions about Catholicism and its evils. In October 1626 John Hill, Dean of Elphin, wrote to Ussher concerned at the ‘subtle instruments of Satan, that seek cunningly to undermine the holy ⁶⁵ SP 63/238(pt 1)/11 (CSPI, 1615–25, 459–60); PRO, SP 14/160/36 (CSPD, 1623–5, 180). ⁶⁶ NHI, 233–5. ⁶⁷ SP 63/243/446 (CSPI, 1625–32, pp. 156 ff.); Aidan Clarke, The Old English in Ireland (London: Macgibbon and Kee, 1966), ch. 2; idem, The Graces, 1625–41 (Dundalk: Dublin Historical Association, 1968); idem, ‘The Army and Politics in Ireland, 1625–30’, Studia Hibernica, 4 (1964), 28–53; NHI, 232–5; Treadwell, Buckingham and Ireland, 278 ff.. Capern, ‘Caroline Church’, 60–1, suggests that Ussher was acting as an agent for the King in Ireland: I have found no evidence for this.

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and blessed truth’. He was particularly worried about what kind of concession might be offered to the Catholics: ‘if it be about toleration or liberty to popery’, he urged the Primate, ‘do not so much as yield to the least evil . . . lest it prove a disadvantage to the gospel.’⁶⁸ Aware of the wider British dimension, he went on: ‘for assure yourself, if anything you yield in this kingdom, you make way for the rest of the kingdoms.’⁶⁹ Hill’s view of the proposal to grant toleration as the Devil’s plot was clearly shared by Ussher. He called his fellow bishops to a meeting at his house on 26 November 1626. As he later recounted it to Archbishop Abbott, the bishops ‘with one voice protested against these courses’ and agreed a formal declaration, one of the most notable statements of uncompromising early modern intolerance, a clear product of the Calvinist theology and apocalyptic mentality of the Church of Ireland: The religion of the papists is superstitious and idolatrous; their faith and doctrine, erroneous and heretical; their church in respect of both, apostatical. To give them therefore a toleration, or to consent that they might freely exercise their religion, and professe their faith and doctrine, is a grievous sinne, and that in two respects. For: 1. It is to make ourselves accessary not onely to their superstitions, idolatries, heresies, and in a word, to all the abominations of popery; but also (which is a consequent of the former) to the perditions of the seduced people, which perish in the deluge of the Catholick apostasie. 2. To grant them toleration, in respect of any money to be given, or contribution to be made by them, is to set religion to sale, and with it, the soules of the people.

This unequivocal message was a direct challenge to royal policies. It is true that it stepped back from recommending any specific action, instead simply commending its propositions ‘to the wise and judicious’, but its conclusion repeated its unyielding definition of what was required of godly public officials: ‘Beseeching the God of truth, to make them who are in authority zealous of God’s glory, and of the advancement of true religion: zealous, resolute and courageous against all popery, superstition and idolatry.’⁷⁰ Realizing their outspokenness, the bishops refrained from publishing the declaration for the meantime, hoping that the political negotiations over the graces would fail. When, however, matters progressed in April 1627 to the meeting of a ‘great assembly’ to decide on a financial contribution, they decided that it was finally time to speak out in the protestant interest, and in the most ⁶⁸ UW, xvi. 435–6. ⁶⁹ Ibid. ⁷⁰ Bernard, Life, 57–61; also printed in Richard Cox, Hibernia Anglicana (London, 1689), ii. 43; Thomas Leland, The history of Ireland from the invasion of Henry II, 3 vols. (London, 1773), ii. 482; Richard Mant, History of the Church of Ireland, 2 vols. (London, 1840), i. 422; UW, i. 73–4; Parr, Life, 28; UW, xv. 366–7; most notably cited for its outrageous intolerance by Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique, 4 vols. (Amsterdam, 1740), iv. 482. The apocalyptic context of the declaration was brought out more clearly by Downham in a private letter to a Catholic planter in 1629: ‘your religion of popery is superstitious and idolatrous, your faith erroneous and hereticall, your church in respect of both apostaticall, your deified pope the head of that Catholique apostacie, and consequently antichrist’: Chatsworth House, earl of Cork’s letter book (1), p. 55.

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public manner possible. In a series of linked sermons in the most prominent churches in Dublin, Ussher, Archbishop Malcolm Hamilton of Cashel, and Bishop George Downham of Derry attacked the ‘sale of religion’. Downham led the way, preaching on 22 April before the Lord Deputy and council in Christ Church Cathedral and taking as his text Luke 1:73–5—God’s promise to Abraham ‘That he would grant unto us, that we being delivered out of the hand of our enemies might serve him without fear’. Downham took the unusual step of distributing a text of his sermon to the congregation, and read out the 1626 bishops’ declaration. He asked: ‘Are not many among us for gain and outward respects, willing and ready to consent to a toleration of false religion’?⁷¹ Such open opposition to royal policy was dangerous, as Downham—like Ussher in 1626—was clearly aware: ‘But some may object . . . saying you hinder the king’s service.’ His response, however, rhetorically exploited the assumed consonance between the godly prince and the interests of true religion, whilst actually pointing to the tensions at the heart of the Irish polity.⁷² ‘God forbid, that what is spoken for the maintenance of religion and the service of God, should be thought to be an hindrance of the king’s service.’ In fact, of course, the whole purpose was to point out the contradiction between godly and royal policies, as Downham went on to do: ‘only this we desire, that his gracious Majesty will be pleased to reserve to himself the most of those peculiar graces, which of late have been offered, the greatest whereof might much better be spared than granted for the dishonour of God and the king, to the prejudice and impeachment of true religion, and countenance of the contrary.’⁷³ Over the following weeks Ussher and Hamilton preached along similar lines.⁷⁴ The Primate took as his text 1 John 2:15:⁷⁵ ‘rebuking such, who for worldly ends like Judas, sell Christ for 30 pieces of silver . . . foretelling, as he had often done, of judgments for these our inclinations, that wherein men might think to be gainers, at the end would be losers’.⁷⁶ Hamilton in his sermon, ‘spoke much against the projectors of tolleration of religion’, and also composed a lengthy treatise detailing the case against toleration, which he sent to the King.⁷⁷ This gives the most detailed indication of the nature and depth of protestant feeling ⁷¹ Bodl. MS Carte 1, fols. 85r–86r (I am grateful to Raymond Gillespie for bringing this reference to my attention); Bernard, Life, 62–4, gets Downham’s text wrong. ⁷² For the lengthy tradition of clerical harping on royal responsibilities to suppress idolatry and irreligion: Walsham, Charitable Hatred, 45 ff; Murdock, ‘Importance of Being Josiah’. ⁷³ Bernard, Life, 63. ⁷⁴ Bernard claims Ussher preached the following Sunday; Ware, probably more trustworthy, claims in his annals it was Hamilton: Bernard, Life, 64; TCD MS 6404, fol. 65v. ⁷⁵ ‘Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.’ Bernard, Life, 64 (and Parr, Life, 29, following him) gets the reference for Ussher’s text wrong. ⁷⁶ Ibid. ⁷⁷ TCD MS 6404, fol. 65v; Hamilton’s treatise is in TCD MS 1188, edited by Alan Ford, ‘Criticising the Godly Prince: Malcolm Hamilton’s Passages and Consultations’, in V. P. Carey and Ute Lotz-Heumann (eds.), Taking Sides? (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2003), 124–37.

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in Ireland against Charles’s policy. As with Ussher’s sermon in 1626, it is a warning about and a condemnation of official policy, phrased as advice, but in fact constituting a total rejection of royal intentions. The method of argument he used was one of the few open to contemporaries seeking to criticize the King—historical analogy. Sometimes, he insisted, it was the responsibility of the church to instruct the secular leaders in their religious duty towards heretics: Consider that the ancient emperors opposed themselves against the Arians and other heretics of those times. If the emperors did seem to yield, for policy sake, yet the true orthodox bishops did stoutly stand both against the heretics and against the emperors in this point as appears in the ecclesiastical histories concerning Athanasius, Chrysostom, Amphilocius, and others.⁷⁸

Hamilton then proceeded to stand stoutly against Charles, using that classic Lucan text beloved of those advocating coercion: God grant that his Majesty may doe his part and remember the words of Christ that master of the great banquet saying Compel them that are without in the streets, and about the hedges to come in that my house may be filled . . . And if they will not come, that the statute may take hold of them.⁷⁹

Hamilton expressed in precise, exaggerated figures the vast amount of money which protestants were convinced that the Catholic population of Ireland paid to support their priests, and compared this to the costs of supporting the army. For protestants in Ireland the equation was crudely, frustratingly simple: get rid of the priests, and the Catholics could easily afford to support the army. The point was also taken up by Ussher’s friends in Parliament in England, where Charles’s willingness to tolerate Catholicism in Ireland was used by Pym to attack official policy.⁸⁰ In Dublin, protestant reaction was positive. When Downham asked his congregation to endorse his plea, ‘suddenly the whole church almost shaked with the great sound their loud amens made’.⁸¹ James Ware, the historian son of the Auditor General, called it an ‘excellent and learned sermon’, whilst the Lord Deputy, Lord Falkland, far from criticizing Ussher’s intervention, actively encouraged him to address the assembly with an alternative proposal just a week after his sermon.⁸² ‘The duty of subjects to supply the king’s necessities’, delivered in Dublin Castle 30 April 1627, was, as a result, an interesting exercise in political gymnastics, as Ussher, as in his 1621 sermon to Parliament, struggled with conflicting loyalties, trying to reach an accommodation between the government’s need for revenue and Catholic desires for, and protestant rejection of, a formal toleration. ⁷⁸ TCD MS 1188, fol. 2v. ⁷⁹ Ibid., fol 10v. ⁸⁰ Treadwell, Buckingham and Ireland, 281. ⁸¹ CSPI, 1625–32, 240; Bernard, Life, 62–3. ⁸² TCD MS 6404, fol. 65v. According to Ware, Falkland specifically requested Ussher to seek to move both parties to grant an aid without any conditions: WW, i. 106.

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Ussher’s performance was politically shrewd, balancing the various demands with aplomb. On the one hand, he clearly identified with what he called the ‘ancient English’, or, as an English cleric less sensitively termed them ‘his deare countrimen, the Irish gentrie of the Pale’.⁸³ In a rare insight into Ussher’s instinctive ethnic identity, we find him seeking to turn back the clock and remind the Anglo-Irish of their twin ancestral principles: loyalty to the English monarch and suspicion of the native Irish. He praised them for their steadfastness during the Nine Years War when ‘they were assaulted with as powerful temptations’ from the pope, the king of Spain, and O’Neill ‘to move them from their loyalty, as possibly can hereafter be presented unto them’.⁸⁴ He attacked the new colligatory Catholic identity, the ‘faith and fatherland’ mentality of such as O’Sullivan Beare (‘the traytor O’Sullevan’) which tried to bring together Old English and native Irish.⁸⁵ In an effort to drive a wedge between them and their new allies, he warned that even though they were Catholic, the Old English would be shown no mercy either by the native Irish—who hated them even more than the new English—or by the Spanish in the event of an invasion. He also exhibited an old-fashioned Anglo-Irish distaste for the landless native Irish. These, he argued, posed the real threat: having nothing to lose, they were ‘apt to joyn with any foreign invader’.⁸⁶ Hence the urgent necessity for the assembly to contribute to the defence of Ireland. On the other hand, in an interesting indication of the extent to which commitment to protestantism altered instinctive Anglo-Irish attitudes, Ussher also identified with the protestant new English. He supported colonization, and lamented the failure to remove the landless Irish from settled lands.⁸⁷ And, most notably, Ussher made quite clear his sympathies with the godly new English hostility to toleration. He noted that those who were ‘most forward to further his Majestys service’—the new English—were nevertheless reluctant to contribute because they were ‘troubled in conscience’ by the promise of toleration. Whilst he acknowledged that the bishops’ declaration had been controversial, he nevertheless defended it, not on religious—that would have involved condemning many of his audience as heretics—but legal grounds, by pointing to the duty imposed on the bishops by the Irish Act of Uniformity to execute the statute or answer before God for such ‘evils and plagues’ with which he will ‘justly punish his people’.⁸⁸ He even managed, in a neat rhetorical flourish, to join together the apparently conflicting Catholic and protestant interests: just as he was sure that the former would not agree to a contribution on the condition that the recusancy legislation was enforced, so equally, the protestants should ⁸³ George Synge, A rejoynder to the reply (Dublin, 1632), 7. ⁸⁴ Parr, Life, 30–1. ⁸⁵ Hiram Morgan, ‘Faith and Fatherland in Sixteenth-Century Ireland’, History Ireland, 3 (1995), 13–20; Parr, Life, 31; on O’Sullivan, see Clare Carroll, Circe’s Cup: Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 2001), 104–23. ⁸⁶ Parr, Life, 30–2. ⁸⁷ Ibid. 31. ⁸⁸ Ibid. 33; 2 Eliz. ch. 2, § 3.

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not be forced to agree when it was linked to something equally repugnant to them—toleration. Then Ussher came up with his solution to these irreconcilable demands: that the present proposal should lapse, and that instead both protestants and Catholics should agree to contribute to the cost of the army, leaving it to the King’s discretion what he should grant in return. As Ussher pointed out, since Charles had over the past two years forborne to execute the statute, Catholics could not expect any greater liberty than they already possessed.⁸⁹ This was, of course, consciously missing the point: there was an enormous difference for the Irish Catholics between toleration de facto, by royal concession, which could be rescinded at any moment, and the more permanent toleration de jure, by statutory provision. In fact, though, Ussher’s proposal was not far off what eventually happened: Catholic hopes for formal toleration were stymied by a mixture of official incompetence (Lord Deputy Falkland failed to summon Parliament properly so the graces were never ratified), protestant procrastination, and changing diplomatic circumstances, in particular peace with Spain: in the end, all they got was the grant of some of the graces on an informal basis.⁹⁰ But in the meantime, the recall of Lord Falkland on 10 August 1629 left power in the hands of the new English Lords Justices for, as it turned out, almost four years. The conjunction of two protestant justices, Adam Loftus, viscount Ely, and Richard Boyle, earl of Cork, a firmly Calvinist secretary of state in England, Dudley Carleton, viscount Dorchester, and an increasingly shrewd Church of Ireland Primate provided the personnel and the political space for the new English interest in Ireland to sort out religious policy along the lines which they had long been demanding, and carry out a short experiment in Calvinist government.⁹¹ There were still tensions between church and state, of course, particularly over the issue of church land and endowments. Here Ussher sensibly sought to win friends in England. In 1628 he began to correspond with William Laud, the rising star in English ecclesiastical politics, appointed to the see of London in the same year, and already replacing Archbishop Abbot of Canterbury as the most influential royal adviser.⁹² Though theologically at odds and politically very different animals, initially, during the period 1628–33, Laud and Ussher had no difficulty in cooperating to serve the interests of the Church of Ireland. By 1629 they were corresponding almost on a monthly basis, concentrating upon three areas: patronage and promotions; protecting ⁸⁹ Parr, Life, 33–5. ⁹⁰ NHI, 239 ff. ⁹¹ John Reeve, ‘Secret Alliance and Protestant Agitation in Two Kingdoms: The Early Caroline Background to the Irish Rebellion of 1641’, in Ian Gentles, John Morrill, and Blair Worden (eds.), Soldiers, Writers and Statemen of the English Revolution (Cambridge, 1998), 19–35; L. J. Reeve, ‘The Secretaryship of State of Viscount Dorchester’, PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1984. ⁹² WW, i. 107; Corresp. Ussher-Laud, 5–21: to the catalogue of correspondence, pp. 8–9, should be added: 11 July 1631: Ussher to Laud, CSPI, 1625–32, 622; 22 Sept. 1631: Ussher to Laud, CSPI, 1625–32, 630; references to Prynne, Breviate should be replaced by William Prynne, Hidden workes of darkenes (London, 1645).

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and improving the endowments and finances of the Church of Ireland; and in managing Trinity College Dublin.⁹³ But the one issue which united church and state in Ireland was the determination to suppress popery. Falkland, a frustrated supporter of ‘force and fear of punishment’, had led the way before he left, issuing a proclamation seeking to close Catholic monasteries and colleges. There were, however, two difficulties for the Dublin authorities. First, the nature of the problem had changed since they had last been given a free rein in enforcing conformity after the Gunpowder Plot in 1605. Then the Irish were still reeling from defeat in the Nine Years War, and the Catholic Church was disorganized; by the end of the 1620s it had benefited from years of relative toleration, and had built up a parochial and diocesan structure with resident bishops which paralleled that of the established church. As Sir Francis Annesley put it in 1628, ‘It is a tender pointe to deale with these people in matter of religion nowe after so longe forbearance when popery is growen to a greater height than ever it was.’⁹⁴ Falkland’s proclamation had reflected these new realities, seeking not to banish all priests, as had been attempted in 1605, but rather to control the exercise of papal jurisdiction, prevent Catholics from celebrating their religion in public, and exploit a split in the Catholic ranks between secular and regular clergy by closing down the latter’s houses and colleges.⁹⁵ The second difficulty was getting the support of the King and his English privy council for the imposition of a vigorous religious policy in Ireland. In 1628, Alexander Spicer, the Dean of Killaloe, well connected in Dublin and London, had summed up Irish protestant concerns: ‘How great is the exaltation of the papists, how insufferable their insolences . . . What can be expected but misery, treachery, desolation. I conceive one of the main reason of these extremities is the little credence of, or the slow despatch unto the advertisements of the Lord Deputy and council here.’⁹⁶ But in 1629–32 this changed, as Dorchester ensured royal support for measures against Irish Catholics, and the new Lords Justices, in particular the earl of Cork, initiated a campaign that vigorously enforced Falkland’s proclamation.⁹⁷ Instructions were issued for the suppression of religious houses, and Cork, together with the Archbishop of Dublin, led the way, with a spectacularly clumsy attempt to suppress a ‘mass house’ in Dublin that provoked a popular riot.⁹⁸ By January 1630 ten houses had been seized in Dublin, and Cork sought ⁹³ Corresp. Ussher-Laud. ⁹⁴ SP 63/248/45 (CSPI, 1625–32, 441). ⁹⁵ P. J. Corish (ed.), ‘Two Seventeenth-Century Proclamations against the Catholic Clergy’ in Archivium Hibernicum, 39 (1984), 54–5. ⁹⁶ SP 63/252/36 (CSPI, 1625–32, 605); The manuscripts of the Earl Cowper, 3 vols. (London: Historical Manuscripts Commission, 1888–9), i. 361–2; ii. 106. ⁹⁷ Nicholas Canny, The Upstart Earl: A Study of the Social and Mental World of Richard Boyle, First Earl of Cork, 1566–1643 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 29. ⁹⁸ Clarke, Old English, 62; J. P. Mahaffy, An Epoch in Irish History. Trinity College, Dublin: Its Foundation and Early Fortunes, 1591–1660 (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1970), 213–14.

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and got royal permission to raze one of them to the ground as an exemplary punishment. He then set about extending his activities to the rest of the country, and considering additional measures, from banishing Jesuits and Franciscans to reimposing the 12d. fine and restoring the high commission.⁹⁹ Ussher strongly supported the former, but opposed the latter—since he saw it solely as an instrument to prosecute Catholics, it was, he felt, redundant to employ it as well as the Act of Uniformity. Though he stressed that his motivation was ‘the desire to reform recusants’, he pragmatically recognized the new reality of Catholic strength by noting that even if the fine was only imposed on three or four Catholics in each parish, it would still be sufficient to support the army.¹⁰⁰ By the summer of 1632 the Lords Justices had reintroduced the 12d. fine, hoping that Wentworth, the new Lord Deputy, who had himself been in charge of collecting recusant fines in the north of England, would endorse this means of meeting the shortfall in the Irish budget.¹⁰¹ Public policy was underpinned by academic argument. Again, Ussher led the way. In 1631 he published a collected edition of his English works in London, which included a revised and expanded edition of his 1622 treatise, now entitled A discourse of the religion anciently professed by the Irish and Brittish.¹⁰² The following year he published, almost as an addendum to A discourse, an edition of sources relating to the early Irish church.¹⁰³ Also included in his collected works was another edition of his Answer to Malone’s challenge. This latter controversy sprang back into life in 1632 with the publication of two protestant rebuttals of the Jesuit’s 1627 reply.¹⁰⁴ Both Synge and Puttock had served as ministers under Ussher as Bishop of Meath, and both confirmed the domestication of religious polemic in Ireland by producing reassuringly learned and sterile tomes. Their contemporary purpose was evident from their twin dedications to Lord Deputies past and future, Synge to Falkland, Puttock to Thomas Wentworth. Synge set the tone in his opening quotation from that favourite work of postreformation polemicists, protestant and Catholic, Tertullian’s Prescription against heretics, ‘They undermine our buildings in order to erect their own’, pointing out how Catholic priests attack scripture, church, and state and force people ⁹⁹ UW, xv. 537; Chatsworth, first earl of Cork’s letter book (1), p. 100. ¹⁰⁰ SP 63/252/148 (CSPI, 1625–32, 638); SP 63/254/17 (CSPI, 1633–47, 6). ¹⁰¹ CSPI, 1625–32, 659; Marsh’s Lib MS Z3.2.6/55; Fiona Pogson, ‘Wentworth and the Northern Recusancy Commission’, Recusant History, 24 (1999), 271–87. See the views of a godly minister in the diocese of Down, John Ridge, in 1632: ‘divers hope that he [Wentworth] shall come better furnished then some have bin before him for restraining of those vile idolatries and abominations in the kingdome’: NLI, MS 8014/i. ¹⁰² James Ussher, The workes of the most reverend father in God, James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, and primate of all Ireland (London, 1631). ¹⁰³ James Ussher, Veterum epistolarum hibernicarum sylloge (Dublin, 1632); UW, iv. ¹⁰⁴ William Malone, A reply to Mr James Ussher his Answere ([Douai], 1627); Roger Puttock, A rejoinder unto W. Malone’s reply to the first article (Dublin, 1632); Synge, Rejoynder.

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to ‘fall down and worship their beast’.¹⁰⁵ Puttock rammed home the point by urging Wentworth to defend by his sword the faith that Puttock was fighting for with his pen, echoing the familiar Irish protestant complaint that preaching and teaching were useless without the support of compulsion: ‘we have cause to pray, that terror may expel that hard and evil custom, which by teaching will not be removed.’¹⁰⁶ The most striking linkage between academic argument and public policy arose over Purgatory. From the start of the European reformation the existence of Purgatory had been one of the main bones of contention between Catholic and protestant theologians, but it was given added consequence and immediacy in Ireland by the presence of St Patrick’s purgatory in Lough Derg in Donegal, a mediaeval place of pilgrimage, famous throughout Europe, whose mysterious cave offered an earthly glimpse of that halfway-house between heaven and hell.¹⁰⁷ As a result, Purgatory featured prominently not only in theological controversy in Ireland—Ussher and Malone, and later O’Sullivan Beare, took up the subject at length, whilst the Primate advised one errant minister to abandon his interest in esoteric Jewish theology and focus instead upon refuting the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory—but also in historiography.¹⁰⁸ Protestant scholars such as Hanmer, Ussher, and Bishop Spottiswood of Clogher explored the historical background to St Patrick’s purgatory, seeking to debunk the connection with the saint and expose the belated invention of the very concept of Purgatory.¹⁰⁹ And in September 1632, protestant theology was put into practice when the Lords Justices ordered Spottiswood to stop the ‘extremely abusive and superstitious’ pilgrimages by destroying the site.¹¹⁰ On his way to Lough Derg Spottiswood received instructions from the Primate, and on 31 October he reported to him on a job well done. ¹⁰⁵ Tertullian, De praescriptione haereticorum, c.42; Synge, Rejoynder, sig. *2r; Irena Backus, Historical Method and Confessional Identity in the Era of the Reformation, 1378–1615 (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 154–72. ¹⁰⁶ Puttock, Rejoinder, sig. [¶ 4v–¶ ¶ 1r]; the quotation was from Augustine’s letter to Vincentius. ¹⁰⁷ M. J. Haren and Yolande de Pontfarcy, The Medieval Pilgrimage to St Patrick’s Purgatory, Lough Derg, and the European Tradition (Enniskillen: Clogher Historical Society, 1988); St J. D. Seymour, St. Patrick’s Purgatory: A Mediaeval pilgrimage in Ireland (Dundalk: Tempest, 1918); Bernadette Cunningham and Raymond Gillespie, ‘The Lough Derg Pilgrimage in the Age of the Counter-Reformation’, Éire-Ireland, 39 (2004), 136–62; C. G. Zaleski, ‘St. Patrick’s Purgatory: Pilgrimage Motifs in a Medieval Otherworld Vision’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 46 (1985), 467–85. ¹⁰⁸ UW, iii. 177–97; TCD MS 790, fol. 96r; Malone, Reply to Ussher, 434–67; Philip O’Sullivan Beare, Historiae Catholicae Iberniae compendium, ed. Matthew Kelly (Dublin, 1850), 18–31; idem, Patritiana decas (Madrid, 1629), bk. 9, ch. 2; CSPI, 1615–25, 435–6, 461; UW, xv. 161–3; xvi. 379–82. For Catholic arguments about Purgatory, see HMC, Hastings, iv. 60. ¹⁰⁹ John Spottiswood, Saint Patricks purgatory ([Dublin], 1632); Hiram Morgan, ‘The Island Defenders: Humanist Patriots in Early Modern Iceland and Ireland’, in Gudmundour Halfdanarson and A. K. Isaacs (eds.), Nations and Nationalities in Historical Perspective (Pisa, 2001), 228–30; Jacques le Goff, The birth of Purgatory (London: Scolar Press, 1984). ¹¹⁰ Spottiswood, Saint Patricks purgatory, 129.

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The cave had turned out to be a ‘poore beggerly hole . . . such as husbandmen make to keepe a few hogs from the raine’, which he had destroyed, along with the chapel, and without the divine punishment that local Catholics had predicted.¹¹¹

I R I S H A N T I - A R M I N I A N IS M Though Ussher, as he saw it, may have left England for good after his sermon before the King in 1626, he did not abandon the fight. As the Dublin authorities used their new-found freedom of manoeuvre to implement a more rigorous policy towards Catholics, so Ussher and his clergy exploited their privileged position in Ireland to shore up Calvinism and tackle the second concern of the godly during the 1620s, the rise of Arminianism. Indeed, it was almost as if the returning Ussher was trying to open a second front in Ireland, gathering round him a collection of advisers notable for their anti-Arminian, puritan backgrounds. Thus he employed as his chaplain Nicholas Bernard, a graduate of both Emmanuel College Cambridge and Richard Blackerby’s informal puritan academy. Recommended by Blackerby to Ussher, Bernard came over to Ireland in late 1626 and was ordained by the Primate on 24 December.¹¹² The Primate’s taste for puritan chaplains was confirmed by his choice of Stanley Gower, whom Ussher had taken under his wing as a student in Trinity College Dublin in the early 1620s. Like Bernard, Gower was ordained by Ussher (thus avoiding the subscribing to the Prayer Book and Thirty-Nine Articles as required by the English canons of 1604), and appointed chaplain in 1627. He subsequently served in England, as minister at Brampton Bryan in Herefordshire under the patronage of Sir Robert Harley, as a member of the Westminster Assembly, and from 1649 as rector of the puritan stronghold of Dorchester.¹¹³ Ussher also brought back with him from England in 1626 two like-minded scholars, Francis Quarles, who served as his secretary, and Nathanael Carpenter, who also became one of his chaplains.¹¹⁴ Both had difficulty in publishing their anti-Arminian ¹¹¹ Spottiswood, Saint Patricks purgatory, 132–4. Queen Henrietta Maria later pressed strongly for it to be reopened, pressure which Wentworth resisted: WWM, 7, fol. 147r–v; SL, ii. 221; LW, vii. 484, 508. ¹¹² Bernard, Life, 57; Ciaran Diamond, ‘Bernard, Nicholas (d. 1661)’, ODNB; Samuel Clarke, The lives of sundry eminent persons in this latter age (London, 1683), 58; TCD MS 1067, p. 122; Webster, Godly Clergy, 30–2; K. W. Shipps, ‘Lay Patronage of East Anglian Puritan Clerics in Pre-revolutionary England’, PhD thesis, Yale University, 1971, 74–5. ¹¹³ James Ussher, Eighteen sermons preached in Oxford 1640 (London, 1659), sig. A2r; Al. Dub., s.v. Gower, Stanley; Jacqueline Eales, ‘Gower, Stanley (bap. 1600?, d. 1660)’, ODNB; for Gower’s objections to subscription, see J. T. Cliffe, The Puritan Gentry: The Great Puritan Families of Early Stuart England (London: Routledge, 1984), 219. ¹¹⁴ Ussher’s acquaintance with Quarles probably sprang from his time in Much Hadham in 1624–5; Karl Josef Höltgen, ‘Quarles, Francis (1592–1644)’, ODNB. Quarles was the godson of Ussher’s ‘connexion and intimate friend’, Sir Francis Barrington: Haight, ‘Quarles in Ireland’, 652. Jim Benedict, ‘Carpenter, Nathanael (1589–1628)’, ODNB.

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works in England, but Carpenter seized the opportunity of the move to Dublin to print some Oxford sermons which wove into the biblical story of Abalom, Achitophel, and David a further assault on Arminianism, with clear echoes of his new master’s voice:¹¹⁵ How much the odious name of a Puritane hath abused many a sincere Christian . . . we may well see in some of our own mungrell Diuines, who as it were betwixt hawke and buzzard, can see nicely to distinguish betwixt a Puritane in opinion, and a Puritane in discipline: and haue taught the name contrary to the first institution, so farre to enlarge it selfe, that a Protestant must make a hard shift (eyther by Popery or Arminianisme) to save himselfe harmelesse.¹¹⁶

At the same time, George Downham also used the freedom of the Dublin press to defend Calvinist orthodoxy, publishing in 1631 his Covenant of grace, a sermon he had originally preached at St Paul’s Cross many years before, to which he added a brief 180-page appendix, A treatise of the certainty of perseverance: maintaining the trueth of the 38th Article of the nationall synode holden at Dublin in the yeare 1615: that a true, lively, justifying faith, and the sanctifying spirit of God, is not extinguished, nor vanisheth away in the regenerate, either finally or totally.¹¹⁷ Though the title suggested a reprise of earlier English efforts to use the Irish Articles to defend Calvinist orthodoxy, the treatise in fact focused most of its attention on attacking that favourite Irish protestant adversary, Cardinal Bellarmine. The Primate himself joined the controversial fray in the same year, with a typically oblique treatment of a ninth-century German theologian, Gottschalk of Orbais. The son of a noble, Gottschalk was a reluctant monk, who nevertheless developed into an original theologian, poet, and missionary, zealously preaching a doctrine of double predestination which limited the extent of the atonement to the elect. But he ran foul of Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims who was convinced that Gottschalk was teaching heresy. Though Gottschalk gained significant support from prominent theologians, and even from church councils and the papacy, in the end Hincmar prevailed, having Gottschalk condemned, tortured, imprisoned, and deprived of the sacraments. He died after twenty years in prison, still refusing to recant.¹¹⁸ ¹¹⁵ David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English renaissance, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 222. ¹¹⁶ Nathanael Carpenter, Achitophel, 1st edn (Dublin, 1627)—only the title page survives; 2nd edn ([London], 1629), 13; the book was dedicated to Ussher. Licensing in England for reprints was more relaxed than for first editions: S. M. Towers, Control of Religious Printing in Early Stuart England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003), 247. ¹¹⁷ George Downame, The covenant of grace, or an exposition upon Luke 1.73.74.75 (Dublin, 1631); there are in fact two appendices, one dedicated to refuting ‘W.P.’, William Pemble, the second, A treatise of the certainty of perseverance, begins on p. 235, and has a separate title page. ¹¹⁸ D. E. Nineham, ‘Gottschalk of Orbais: reactionary or precursor of the Reformation?’ JEH, 40 (1989), 1–18; Willemien Otten, ‘Carolingian Theology’, in G. R. Evans (ed.),

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Ussher rescued Gottschalk from mediaeval obscurity and provided the first proper modern study, together with an edition of his two confessions.¹¹⁹ Eschewing authorial comment, his tone throughout was largely neutral. He recounted the known facts of Gottschalk’s life and views, dealing with his supporters and opponents by placing lengthy quotations from their works side by side. The neutrality, though, should not be allowed to conceal the contentiousness of what Ussher was about, nor his passionate involvement in the project. Gottschalk’s sufferings not only elicited Ussher’s sympathy, they also touched his instinctive desire to reclaim the memory of those who had sought to maintain the eternal (protestant) Christian truths in the face of popish persecution. At the end of the work, when he prints two of Gottschalk’s confessions, Ussher’s mask slips: ‘Therefore having brought this tragedy through to its conclusion with the death of Gottschalk, it only now remains to pluck these two confessions from obscurity (in which they have for so long been concealed) and add them here as a kind of epitaph.’¹²⁰ Or, when dealing with the Council of Valence of 855, which came down in Gottschalk’s favour, Ussher remarked how it had supported ‘the orthodox opinion on predestination of Gottschalk and, equally, Augustine.’¹²¹ There was, in short, little doubt where Ussher’s sympathies lay. Not necessarily with Gottschalk in every detail of his theology, which was harsher than Ussher’s hypothetical universalism, but certainly with those whom he saw as Gottschalk’s allies, in particular Remigius, Archbishop of Lyons. As Ussher explained his purpose (to Laud!) ‘if that moderation had been used by those of our time, which we find in Remigius and others that have handled these controversies heretofore: things had not come to that excesse of opposition which now we see they have done.’¹²² Linking the disputes of the early church with those of the early seventeenth century was a complex, nuanced manoeuvre, which threw up a number of historical ironies and difficulties as each side sought to finagle the endorsement of the past. The first problem was the extreme sensitivity of such comparisons: even ‘the suspicion of the intent’ to draw a parallel between the reigns of Richard II and Elizabeth in his History of King Henry VIII had resulted in Sir John Hayward being imprisoned in the tower.¹²³ Adding to this difficulty was the royal ban on public discussion of predestination, which increasingly prevented the publication of Calvinist works in the 1630s. Ussher had, therefore, to be extremely cautious The Medieval Theologians (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 76–81; John Marenbon (ed.) Routledge History of Philosophy: Medieval Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1998), 111–12; Gregory Johnson, ‘A Bibliographical Review of Historiography on a Persecuted Medieval Augustinian’, accessed. 12 Mar. 2005. ¹¹⁹ Two confessions: UW, iv. 205–33; the publication of Gottschalk’s works was completed in 1945 by D. C. Lambot in his edition of the Oeuvres théologiques et grammaticales de Godescalc d’Orbais (Louvain: Spicelegium sacrum Lovaniense, 1945). ¹²⁰ UW, iv. 204. ¹²¹ Ibid. 192. ¹²² SP 63/252/86 (CSPI, 1625–32, 618). ¹²³ Paulina Kewes, ‘History and Its Uses: Introduction’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 68 (2005), 14–15.

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not to allude to contemporary controversies in Gotteschalci historia, using a covert form of discourse which relied upon the alert reader to draw the requisite parallels between the past so minutely described and the present so conspicuously absent from the narrative.¹²⁴ That it was published in Latin—since Ussher judged it ‘convenient that the common people should not be troubled with questions of this nature’—merely added to the latency of the text.¹²⁵ The first challenge, then, was to suggest an analogy between the early church and the present time which made it clear which side was heretical, which orthodox. Ussher achieved this simply by juxtaposition. He chose to open the book with a seemingly innocent account of how the resurgence of Pelagianism in Ireland and Spain in the seventh and eighth centuries provided the backdrop to Gottschalk’s reassertion of Augustinian values.¹²⁶ Though devoid of overt contemporary reference, the parallel would have been obvious. The views of Montagu and his friends were known in Calvinist circles as ‘Pelagiarminianism’. As Samuel Ward spelt it out in a letter to Ussher in 1634, when rebutting the Arminian views of the Dean of Cashel, William Chappell: ‘the Arminian opinions were condemned in the synods which condemned the Pelagian heresy.’¹²⁷ Ussher now revealed Gottschalk as a German proto-Calvin defending predestination against Arminian attacks.¹²⁸ The Primate’s chaplain, Nathanael Carpenter, argued along similar lines: ‘Here, stood it with my time or your patience, could I proceed to taxe Pelagius, and his latter spawne the Jesuites and Arminians: who imagining our will to be her owne mistresse, have admitted God no otherwise than as a servant or assistant.’¹²⁹ This was, of course, crude polemic. More subtle was the way in which contemporary Arminians sought to fight back by linking their hostility to Calvinism with those much more orthodox and respectable theologians in the early church who dissented from Augustine. Both Ussher and Ward were particularly exercised by the way in which the semi-Pelagians—those theologians such as Cassian, who, in the fifth and early sixth centuries, sought to moderate some of the ¹²⁴ Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 39–47; though some have argued that censorship was relatively ineffective under Charles, more recent work suggests otherwise: Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 651; idem, Remapping Early Modern England: The Culture of Seventeenth-Century Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 317–18; Sheila Lambert, ‘The Printers and the Government, 1604–37’, in Robin Myers and Michael Harris (eds.), Aspects of Printing from 1600 (Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic Press, 1987), 1–29; eadem, ‘Richard Montagu, Arminianism and Censorship’, Past & Present, 124 (1989), 36–68; Milton, ‘Licensing, Censorship, and Religious Orthodoxy’; Towers, Control of Religious Printing. ¹²⁵ SP 63/252/86 (CSPI, 1625–32, 618); Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation, 48. ¹²⁶ On Pelagianism in 7th-century Ireland, see above, p. 128, n. 46. ¹²⁷ UW, xv. 581; and see Lake, ‘Calvinism and the English Church’, 63. ¹²⁸ Daniel Featley, A parallel: of new-old Pelgiarminian error (London, 1626); Daniel Featley, Pelagius redivivus: or Pelagius raked out of the ashes by Arminius and his schollers (London, 1626). ¹²⁹ Carpenter, Achitophel, 30.

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more extreme Augustinian positions on grace, perseverance, and predestination—portrayed hard-line predestinarianism as a deviation from orthodoxy. In Gotteschalci historia, Ussher traced this tendency back to the fifth-century continuation of Prosper of Aquitaine’s chronicle, which, referred to ‘the predestinarian heresy, which is said to have begun with Augustine’.¹³⁰ Ward thought that it was Arnobius the younger (died after 451) that ‘was one of the first that imposed the name of heresy upon the doctrine of predestination and reprobation, as it was delivered by St Augustine’.¹³¹ This same slur—what Ussher called privately ‘a nickname that the semi-Pelagians put upon the followers of St Augustine’—was, Ward noted, echoed by the Dutch Arminians in the early seventeenth century.¹³² Ussher’s publication of his account of Gottschalk’s life and views was not, therefore, either theologically or historically innocent. It represented a covert statement about what was orthodox in the early church and, by extension, in the 1630s. By criticizing the semi-Pelagians for libelling the predestinarians as heretics, Ussher was implicitly attacking the English Arminians who sought to pin a similar label on supra-lapsarian double predestinarians. The problem, of course, was that not everyone agreed that Gottschalk represented orthodoxy. Ussher had dedicated the book to Gerardus Joannes Vossius, a leading member of the European republic of letters and the author of one of the two standard protestant histories of Pelagianism and semi-Pelagianism.¹³³ Though Vossius may, with Samuel Ward, even be included in that rare category of Ussher’s close friends—the Primate had vainly sought in 1628 to attract him to the Deanery of Armagh—they nevertheless differed markedly in their approach to Gotteschalk and the early debates over predestination.¹³⁴ Vossius had to be cautious and indirect in his writings. Treading a careful path amidst the remonstrants and counter-remonstrants in the Netherlands, he was too good a scholar, and too shrewd a politician, to come down openly on either side.¹³⁵ Working on the principle that those who are not with us are against us, the Dutch anti-Arminians, the contra-remonstrants, attacked Vossius, ‘but sheltered behind his massive barricades of patristic quotations, he formed an ¹³⁰ UW, iv. 18; Mark Humphries, ‘Chronicle and Chronology: Prosper of Aquitaina, His Methods and the Development of Early Medieval Chronography, Early Medieval Europe, 5 (1996), 155–75; Steven Muhlberger, The Fifth Century Chroniclers. Prosper, Hydatius and the Gallic Chronicler of 452 (Leeds: Francis Cairns, 1990). ¹³¹ UW, xv. 501; A D. Fitzgerald and J. C. Cavadini, Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), s.v. Arnobius the younger. ¹³² UW, xv. 481, 503. ¹³³ G. J. Vossius, Historiæ de controversiis (Leiden, 1618); Joannes Latius, De Pelagianis, et semipelagianis, commentariorum (Harderwijk, 1617); C. S. M. Rademaker, Life and Work of Gerardus Joannes Vossius (1577–1649) (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1981), 123–5. ¹³⁴ Rademaker, Life of Vossius, 287; idem, ‘Gerardus Joannes Vossius and his English Correspondents’, Lias, 19 (1992), 195–8. ¹³⁵ Rademaker, Life of Vossius, 143–9; Nicholas Wickenden, G. J. Vossius and the Humanist Concept of History (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1993), 8, 21–2, 37–9.

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elusive, and in the event an impossible target.’¹³⁶ Ussher, by contrast, had carved a much clearer path through the patristic undergrowth and had come down firmly against the Arminians and firmly on the side of a predestinarian Augustine. Vossius revealed his reaction to Ussher’s work in a letter to another of his friends, William Laud, in February 1632. ‘We do not’, he acknowledged, ‘agree on everything about this subject.’ Even accepting that Hincmar’s treatment of Gottschalk was excessive, this did not, he insisted, mean that Gotteschalk as well did not go too far. Where Ussher had given equal weight to those councils which had endorsed Gottschalk’s views, Vossius emphasized the fact that Gottschalk had been condemned by the good Augustinian members of the Council of Mainz; where Ussher had painted Remigius as an ally of Gotteschalk, Vossius commented on his reluctance openly to support him—indeed, for Vossius, Ussher was ‘the first to undertake such a defence of Gotteschalk’.¹³⁷ Laud also had his doubts. Whilst he acknowledged Ussher as a grave and erudite man ‘dear to me for his great learning’, he was worried by several things on his first hurried reading of the book, most notably ‘the more narrow sense of St Augustine’, which distorted the church father’s views.¹³⁸ The interpretation of Augustine was indeed the central point at issue, not just in the ninth, but also in the early seventeenth century. Both Gottschalk and Hincmar thought they were defending the church father’s true views. Vossius himself stressed that he was an Augustinian, strongly opposed to the semi-Pelagians.¹³⁹ But then, so too were his otherwise rather antithetical friends, Ussher and Laud. Indeed, Ussher responded to Vossius’ thanks for the dedication of Gotteschalci historia with a ringing assertion that, whatever differences they might have over where precisely Gottschalk departed from or concurred with the Bishop of Hippo, ‘I nevertheless rejoice and congratulate you from my heart that we agree on the central issue so long as we both embrace the views of St Augustine.’¹⁴⁰ The crucial question, though, was which Augustine: the early, moderate opponent of Pelagius, or the more extreme, later adversary of Julian of Eclanum, goaded into an unyielding defence of grace and predestination at the expense of free will. Laud and Vossius preferred the former, but Ussher and Ward clearly sided with Gottschalk in opting for the latter.¹⁴¹ ¹³⁶ Wickenden, Vossius and the Concept of History, 22. ¹³⁷ Paul Colomiès (ed.), Doctissimi clarissimique Gerardi Joannis Vossii et ad eum virorum eruditione celeberrimorum epistolae, 2 vols. (London, 1693), i. 189. For Ussher’s rather different view of Remigius, see UW, xv. 555. ¹³⁸ LW, vi. 299; Laud’s biographer contrasts the response to Gotteschalci Historia of that strict Calvinist William Twisse, who saw it as a useful antidote to the use made of Vossius’ book by the Arminians: Peter Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus (London, 1668), 215–16. ¹³⁹ ‘I clearly agree with Augustine and Prosper, who most strongly resisted both the Pelagians and the semi-Pelagians’: Colomiès (ed.), Epistolae, i. 111. ¹⁴⁰ UW, xv. 555. ¹⁴¹ See the revealing discussion between Laud and Vossius over the categorization of the different views on grace and predestination: LW, vi. 298; Colomiès (ed.), Epistolae, i. 208–9; White,

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However latent and Latinate, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Gotteschalci historia, like Downham’s A treatise of the certainty of perseverance, contravened the royal ban on the public airing of such matters.¹⁴² Their fates, though, were markedly different. Ussher got away with it; Downham didn’t. Downham’s book, the contents of which he had discussed in some detail with Ussher, was published just before Gotteschalci historia, and came to Laud’s attention in August 1631. On the King’s orders, Laud wrote to Ussher commanding him to suppress it.¹⁴³ Ever obedient, Ussher agreed to do so, though he warned that most copies had been sold.¹⁴⁴ Why was only Downham’s book suppressed? It was not as though Ussher’s did not provoke controversy. Samuel Hoard, like Chappell a Calvinist who by the early 1630s had discovered the joys of true Arminianism, launched an attack upon predestinarian theology in 1633, and was joined by his fellow-Laudian, Henry Mason, who mined Gotteschalci Historia for material to illustrate the illogicality of double predestination.¹⁴⁵ Davenant and Twisse both responded, the latter using Ussher’s exposition of Remigius to defend reprobation and election.¹⁴⁶ Ussher’s work even had an influence on the parallel dispute between Jansenist and anti-Jansenists in mainland Europe.¹⁴⁷ Part of the reason for Laud’s forbearance was undoubtedly Ussher’s position as Primate and his scholarly standing (not to mention that of the book’s dedicatee) in the European republic of letters. But Downham too was a distinguished academic, a bishop who had played an important role in developing a more elevated vision of the nature of episcopacy.¹⁴⁸ One reason why the Primate escaped might lie in the contrast between Ussher’s determined, Latin, self-denying focus upon the ninth century, and Downham’s vernacular inability to resist the temptation to Predestination, Policy and Polemic, 284. In response to contra-remonstrant pressure, Vossius promised to publish a statement confirming that he agreed with Augustine’s final position on predestination. But he never did so in an unequivocal fashion: Rademaker, Life of Vossius, 146–8; for Ward’s doubts about Vossius’ views on Pelagius: UW, xv. 501. ¹⁴² The royal proclamation of 1626 for the establishing of the peace and quiet of the Church of England (though not the declaration of 1628) explicitly included Ireland; Articles agreed upon by the arch-bishops and bishops, 1–6; Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, 229. ¹⁴³ UW, xv. 493; CSPI, 1625–32, 633; William Prynne, Canterburies doome (London, 1646), 171–2; Elrington, probably because of his dislike of the puritanism of Prynne, claimed that the letter was a forgery—he was not aware of the holograph in the state papers: UW, i. 130–1. ¹⁴⁴ Prynne, Canterburies doome, 171–2. ¹⁴⁵ R. L. Greaves, ‘Hoard, Samuel (1599–1658/9)’, ODNB. Hoard’s treatise was printed but not licensed, Mason’s remained in manuscript, though by 1639 Ussher was aware of their existence: Charles McNeill (ed.), The Tanner Letters (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1993), 119; UW. xvi, 46; Milton, ‘Licensing, Censorship, and Religious Orthodoxy’, 642. For the background to the debate and for Mason’s use of Gottschalk, see William Twisse, The riches of Gods love unto the vessells of mercy (Oxford, 1653), bk II, 1–5, 13–14, 17–19, 83. ¹⁴⁶ Neither of their works could be published in the 1630s: John Davenant, Animadversions . . . upon a treatise intitled Gods love to mankind (Cambridge, 1641); Twisse, Riches of Gods love, bk II, 13–14, 17–19, 83. ¹⁴⁷ Bernard, Life, 14. ¹⁴⁸ Kenneth Gibson, ‘Downham, George (d. 1634)’, ODNB.

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draw contemporary analogies—he had both cited the Irish Articles and referred specifically to ‘the erroneous conceipts of the patrones of freewill, the Pelagians, papists, Arminians, and our new Anabaptists’.¹⁴⁹ Ussher was clearly aware of the royal ban on dealing with controversial matters, but, bizarrely, explained to Laud that his book somehow enhanced it: ‘I make bold . . . to present your Lordship with the History of Gotteschalcus latelye here published: which maketh good the advertisement prefixed before the new edition of the articles of religion . . . that the questions now afoot touching predestination, grace, and free-will, have bene heretofore agitated in the church of God, and indifferently maintayned by the doctors thereof.’ It is possible that the inscrutible Ussher was being deliberatively provocative, sending to the sceptical Laud his book defending double predestination, confident that his ‘elliptical anti-Laudianism’, the smuggling in to printed works of ‘disguised criticisms’ of the current orthodoxy, could not be criticized even by Laud.¹⁵⁰ It is more probable that the Primate was simply and naïvely convinced that the case for what he saw as the moderate orthodoxy of double predestination was so historically evident that all it needed was careful elucidation. There is in Ussher something of the disoriented Calvinist, not quite able to believe that what James had embraced was shunned under his son.¹⁵¹ As he explained to Laud, ‘my special drift in setting forth this historicall declaration, was to bring either side to some better temper.’ If only the line defended by Gottschalk and Remigius had been upheld, he claimed, then ‘things had not come to that excesse of opposition which now we see they have done.’¹⁵² Most likely of all, though, is that Ussher was including Laud, like Vossius, in the international fellowship of scholars always willing to exchange their works even though they might have differences over particular interpretative issues.¹⁵³ The affair also exposed the lack of an effective system of censorship in Ireland, part of the wider problem of Irish exceptionalism and laxity which enabled the Church of Ireland to escape measures, such as the royal ban, which were firmly enforced on the other side of the Irish Sea. Ussher lamely explained to Laud that he had thought supervision of the presses was the responsibility of Archbishop Bulkeley of Dublin.¹⁵⁴ But there is no evidence at this stage that there was any control over the press in Dublin either. Laud had had the quixotic idea in late 1631 that William Bedell could keep an eye on Irish printing, but nothing came ¹⁴⁹ Downham, Covenant of grace, 32; see also 227. ¹⁵⁰ The phrase is Anthony Milton’s: ‘Licensing, Censorship, and Religious Orthodoxy’, 649. ¹⁵¹ See his typically Calvinist defence of Downham’s book to Laud: all that Downham had done was to teach the established doctrine of the Church of England—most of the first part of the book, Ussher pointed out, was in fact a sermon Downham had preached at St Paul’s Cross in London in Archbishop Bancroft’s time: Prynne, Canterburies doome, 172. ¹⁵² SP 63/252/86 (CSPI, 1625–32, 618). ¹⁵³ As late as 1639, after a tempestuous relationship, Ussher was still meeting and passing on theological treatises to the Arminian William Chappell: UW, xvi. 47. ¹⁵⁴ SP 63/252/86 (CSPI, 1625–32, 618).

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of it.¹⁵⁵ It was not until the end of the 1630s that a proper system of licensing was established under the control of the reliably Laudian Edward Parry, Treasurer of Christ Church and chaplain to Bulkeley.¹⁵⁶ In addition to such recondite theological treatments of ninth-century problems, Ussher also had to deal with the much more contemporary issue of Arminianism in Ireland. Though Ussher had been reading Arminius as early as 1607, in Ireland as in Scotland there had been only a desultory interest in Dutch Arminianism.¹⁵⁷ By 1618 Ussher’s fellow fellow at Trinity College, Edward Warren, had encountered Arminius and detailed his objections to Ussher.¹⁵⁸ In June 1623, another of Ussher’s former students complained from Cork about a local English cleric, George Stuke, one of the earl of Cork’s chaplains, who was, he claimed, preaching Arminianism.¹⁵⁹ Since the Church of Ireland, unlike its English sister, possessed a confession which clearly condemned such opinions, when Ussher became Archbishop of Armagh, and was confronted with a minister (possibly Stuke) who was troubling the Church with ‘unsound opinions, touching predestination, free-will, falling from grace’, he could straightforwardly condemn him as teaching contrary to the Irish Articles.¹⁶⁰ The strength of feeling against Arminianism in Ireland was evident in 1627 when the professor of theology, Joshua Hoyle, publicly accused the new provost of Trinity, William Bedell (whose only sin was to be an openminded, slightly left-field Calvinist with a friendly approach towards Catholics), of Arminianism.¹⁶¹ By the 1620s, then, Ussher was already aware of the threat posed by Arminianism and was willing to use the Irish Articles to stamp it out. He was also using his godly contacts in England to try to preserve the Calvinist ethos of Trinity, the seminary of the Church of Ireland. As early as 1619, John Preston ¹⁵⁵ Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus, 216. ¹⁵⁶ See the imprimaturs in James Ware, De scriptoribus Hiberniae (Dublin, 1639), sig. A4v; and Lysimachus Nicanor, The ungirding of the Scottish armour (Dublin, 1639), sig. [A1v]; Mary Pollard, Dublin’s Trade in Books, 1550–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 12; Declan Gaffney, ‘The Practice of Religious Controversy in Dublin, 1600–1641’, in W. J. Sheils and Diana Wood (eds.), The Churches, Ireland and the Irish, Studies in Church History, 25 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 154 n.; Ciaran Diamond, ‘Parry, Edward (d. 1650)’, ODNB; Raymond Gillespie, ‘The Crisis of Reform, 1625–60’, in Kenneth Milne (ed.), Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin: A History (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), 198, 205. ¹⁵⁷ TCD MS 793, fol. 4r; D. G. Mullan, ‘Masked Popery and Pyrrhonian Uncertainty: The Early Scottish Covenanters on Arminianism’, Journal of Religious History, 21 (1997), 159–77. ¹⁵⁸ UW, xv. 141 (misdated as 1610). ¹⁵⁹ UW, xvi. 403–4; W. M. Brady, Clerical and Parochial Records of Cork, Cloyne and Ross, 3 vols. (Dublin, 1863–4), i. 55; M. C. Griffith (ed.), Irish Patent rolls of James I: Facsimile of the Irish Record Commissioner’s Calendar Prepared Prior to 1830 (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1966), 368, 373. ¹⁶⁰ UW, xvi. 439; see also Robert Blair’s refutation of an Arminian minister in Ulster c.1630: William Row (ed.), The life of Mr Robert Blair (s.l., 1848), 86–9; J. S. Reid, History of the presbyterian church in Ireland, ed. W. D. Killen, 3 vols. (Belfast, 1867), i. 129. ¹⁶¹ Shuckburgh, Bedell, 27, 324; Ford, Protestant Reformation, 218–19; this was not the first time that Bedell’s moderation had alienated his puritan friends: Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 41–2.

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had warned him only to consider appointing William Chappell as professor of theology ‘if free from Arminianism’.¹⁶² Ussher’s increasing reliance upon Laud, Laud’s growing influence with the King, and Laud’s and the King’s increasing preference for Arminians had particularly alarming implications for Trinity. The College’s charter guaranteed the right of the fellows to elect the provost, a right which Trinity had happily exercised to secure its solidly Calvinist, not to mention puritan, succession. But such independence was decidedly unpopular with Laud and Charles, who were determined to impose their authority on the universities.¹⁶³ So long as William Temple remained provost (1609–27), the problem was theoretical, but his death was followed by three vacancies in rapid succession. Ussher and Trinity worked frantically to ensure that the right candidates got the post, using all their connections at the English court, from Archbishop Abbot to Sir Nathaniel Rich. They even began before Temple’s death, writing in 1626 to an influential courtier asking him to secure a letter from the King—preferably, it was urged, when no Arminian bishop was present—granting the next vacancy to the Cambridge graduate and preacher at Gray’s Inn, Richard Sibbes, who was seen as a ‘sound good anti-Arminian’, who would be ‘a means under God to preserve the wholesome seed of a sound ministry’ in Ireland ‘free from Popery and Arminianism’.¹⁶⁴ The fellows eventually secured the election of Bedell in 1627. But the battle was won at the expense of the war, for Bedell was only ‘freely elected’ by the fellows after the King had directed them to choose him.¹⁶⁵ The college was, as a result, no longer insulated from court patronage and central direction. The transfer of the de facto power to choose the provost to London was all the more important since by the time of the next vacancy Laud had replaced Abbot as the power behind the throne, and he favoured William Chappell.¹⁶⁶ Ussher’s agent in London warned him of the danger: Trinity might have imposed on it a provost ‘who will not, it may be, so truly aim at the religious education of the students; for some one deeply tainted with the Arminian tenets, putteth in close ¹⁶² UW, xvi. 371. The story Chappell beat Milton is unproven: D. L. Clark, ‘John Milton and William Chappell’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly, 18 (1955), 329–50; Leo Miller, ‘Milton’s Clash with Chappell: A Suggested Reconstruction’, Milton Quarterly, 14 (1980), 77–87. ¹⁶³ Kenneth Fincham, ‘Oxford and the Early Stuart Polity’, in N. R. N. Tyacke (ed.), The History of the University of Oxford: iv. Seventeenth-Century Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 198–210; even James had sought to restrain Trinity’s freedom of election: Acts of the Privy Council of England, 1623–25 (London, HMSO, 1933), 443. ¹⁶⁴ PRO, SP 63/268/29 (CSPI, 1647–1660, 83). For Sibbes, see M. E. Dever, ‘Moderation and Deprivation: A Reappraisal of Richard Sibbes’, JEH, 43 (1992), 396–413; idem, Richard Sibbes. Puritanism and Calvinism in late Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2000). ¹⁶⁵ TCD Mun. P/1/178, 179, 181, 183; J. W. Stubbs, The History of the University of Dublin (Dublin, 1889), 392. ¹⁶⁶ P. A. Welsby, George Abbot: The Unwanted Archbishop, 1562–1633 (London: SPCK, 1962), 120–2; Trevor-Roper, Ussher, 67; Charles Carlton, Archbishop William Laud (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), 74–6; LW, 6. 355–6.

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to be recommended thither by his Majesty’.¹⁶⁷ Joshua Hoyle prayed publicly in Trinity ‘that God would send to the College a good head, no Arminian’.¹⁶⁸ In the event, Chappell proved reluctant to take up the post, but that merely postponed the evil day for Trinity, for when the next vacancy occurred in 1634, Laud had Chappell in place in Ireland as Dean of Cashel and ready to accept and tackle the reform of the College.¹⁶⁹

USSHER AND IRISH PRESBYTERIANISM The threat from Arminianism was mirrored on the other wing of the Church of Ireland by the challenge posed by presbyterianism. The influx of Scots settlers into Ulster in the early seventeenth century had been followed by the arrival of Scottish clergy: some had episcopal, some presbyterian orders, many others came over to Ireland seeking ordination. The Church of Ireland was attractive to these ministers because of its much more relaxed attitude towards conformity, and the absence of any form of subscription.¹⁷⁰ In particular, clergy who could not stomach the 1618 Articles of Perth (which included the requirement to kneel at communion) and subsequent efforts to impose conformity in Scotland found ready refuge across the Irish sea. Indeed, ministers thought too unruly for Scotland were even expelled to Ireland.¹⁷¹ These emigrants posed a delicate problem for the established church. On the one hand it was desperate for good protestant clergy. On the other hand, those same clergy were instinctively hostile to both the episcopate and the liturgy of the Church of Ireland. Faced with the choice between pragmatism or principle, the local bishops took the line of least resistance and allowed a significant number of Scottish presbyterians to serve as ministers, especially in the eastern dioceses of Down and Connor. The extent to which they compromised the discipline and government of the Church of Ireland in doing so has been the subject of some controversy. According to the clergy themselves, and later presbyterian historians, the Church of Ireland was prepared to go to considerable lengths to accommodate them. Two accounts survive, one by Robert Blair, the Glasgow University regent who had left Scotland in 1623 because of the Articles of Perth and settled as a minister at Bangor in the diocese of Down, the other by John ¹⁶⁷ UW, xv. 433. ¹⁶⁸ Shuckburgh, Bedell, 324; Hoyle’s animus was probably directed against Bedell rather than Chappell. ¹⁶⁹ Alan Ford, ‘ ‘‘That Bugbear Arminianism’’: Archbishop Laud and Trinity College, Dublin’, in C. F. Brady and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds.), British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 135–60. ¹⁷⁰ Row (ed.), Life of Blair, 91. ¹⁷¹ Alan Ford, ‘The Origins of Irish Dissent’, in Kevin Herlihy (ed.), The religion of Irish Dissent 1650–1800 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1996), 15–16.

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Livingstone, who, because he was ‘from my infancy bred with aversnes from episcopacy and ceremonies’, failed to receive an appointment in Scotland and settled in 1630 at Killinchy, also in Down.¹⁷² Both were invited to serve in the established church in Ulster by Viscount Clandeboy—Ussher’s former teacher and lecturer James Hamilton.¹⁷³ But first, they needed to be ordained. It was Clandeboy, they said, who had pointed them in the direction of compliant Scottish bishops, Robert Echlin in Down and Connor and Andrew Knox in Raphoe, who had overcome their objections by arranging a ceremony which combined elements of episcopal and presbyterian ordination.¹⁷⁴ Blair told how he had warned Echlin ‘how opposite I was to episcopacy and their liturgy’, but that the bishop suggested a compromise: ‘ ‘‘Whatever you account of episcopacy, yet I know you account a presbyter to have divine warrant; will you not receive ordination from Mr Cunningham and the adjacent brethren, and let me come in amongst them in no other relation than a presbyter.’’ This I could not refuse, and so that matter was performed.’¹⁷⁵ According to Livingstone, Knox had given him the book of ordination ‘and desired that anything that I scrupled at I should draw a line over in the margine . . . but I found it had been so marked by some others off before, that I needed not mark anything.’¹⁷⁶ From a pastoral perspective the Scots clergy were highly successful. John Ridge, an English puritan minister who also served in Down and Connor, gave a detailed and enthusiastic account of their ministry: Round about there are divers Scottish ministers that Scotland would not bear because of their nonconformity . . . These are such men for strict walking and abundant pains with their people Sabbath day, week days, in church and from house to house that I have never . . . known of any more heavenly in their conversation or more laborious in their ministry, and unto this they have a very sweet encouragement, for the Lord hath exceedingly blessed their labours for they have brought a great number of people for 20 miles about them to as great a measure of knowledge and zeal in every good duty, as, I think, is to be found again in any part of Christendom . . . Their congregations are some 7 or 800, some 1000, some 1,500, some more some less.¹⁷⁷

Bishop Echlin accepted their usefulness—though paid a pittance, he said, they nevertheless had ‘great congregations’—whilst even the Dean of Down, Henry ¹⁷² Row (ed.), Life of Blair; W. K. Tweedie (ed.), Select Biographies (Edinburgh: Wodrow Society, 1847), 133; John Livingstone’s Diary: The Diary of a Covenanting Minister 1626–1667 (Wigtown: Wigtown District Museum Service, 1993); J. B. Leslie and H. B. Swanzy, Biographical Succession Lists of the Clergy of Docese of Down (Enniskillen: R. H. Ritchie, 1936), 95, 138–9. ¹⁷³ Row (ed.), Life of Blair, 51, 58, 64; Clandeboy is known to have been the patron of at least seven nonconformist Scots clergy in Down and Connor: Blair (Bangor), Boyle (Killyleagh), Cunningham (Holywood), Hamilton (Ballywalter), Alexander Forbes (Blaris), Livingston (Killinchy), Porteous (Ballyhalbert): WWM, 20/179; T. K. Lowry (ed.), The Hamilton manuscripts (Belfast, 1867), 33–4, 74–5; S. A. Millsop, ‘The State of the Church in the Diocese of Down and Connor during the Episcopate of Robert Echlin 1613–35’, MA thesis, Queens’ University Belfast, 1979, 317–19, 321–3, 326. ¹⁷⁴ John Livingstone’s Diary, 6. ¹⁷⁵ Row (ed.), Life of Blair, 59. ¹⁷⁶ John Livingstone’s Diary, 6–7. ¹⁷⁷ NLI, MS 8014/i.

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Leslie, a fierce opponent of the nonconformist clergy, had to acknowledge the extent of popular enthusiasm for their ministry.¹⁷⁸ Indeed, the Scots ministers were responsible for the first recorded protestant religious revival in Ireland, at Six Mile Water in Co. Antrim in 1625, which revealed an interesting evangelical piety founded not only, as might be expected, upon hellfire sermons, but also, more surprisingly, upon large-scale public eucharists which attracted over a thousand people.¹⁷⁹ But success created problems. The new clergy stretched even the Church of Ireland’s flexibility. Livingstone established a ‘tolerable discipline’ at Killinchy, as did Blair in Bangor—presyberian Trojan Horses within the established church, which showed that the Scots had proceeded much further than Travers and Holmes in the 1590s. Only when a disgruntled sinner complained to the bishop was the Livingstone’s structure of elders and deacons dismantled.¹⁸⁰ When asked to preach at Ussher’s visitation in 1626,¹⁸¹ Blair chose to show that Christ had instituted no lord bishops in his kirk, but presbyters and ministers, both to teach and govern his kirk, and proved this, first, from holy scripture; secondly, from the testimonies of purer antiquity; and thirdly, from the famous divines that have been seeking reformation these thirteen hundred years; and, lastly, from the modern divines, both over sea and in England; closing all my proofs with the consent of learned Dr Usher, thereby to stop their mouths.¹⁸²

According to Blair’s account, Ussher’s substitute, the Primate’s brother-inlaw, Theophilus Buckworth, bishop of the neighbouring diocese of Dromore, refrained from questioning him publicly, but ‘spoke to me privately, desiring me also to be moderate towards them’.¹⁸³ When in 1632 Bishop Echlin was taxed with his failure to impose discipline, he accepted that he had ordained Blair, but stressed that he ‘was at that tyme free from the least suspicion of unconformity’. Though he acknowledged that he had subsequently had ‘cause to doubt their unconformity to the observation of the courses prescribed by the Booke of Common Prayer’, he then produced a catalogue of excuses for his laxity: he had, he said, been reluctant to move against them because of their pastoral effectiveness, their popularity, their cheapness, the lack of alternative clergy and ¹⁷⁸ PRO SP 63/253/39, fol. 147r (CSPI, 1625–32, 661–2); SP 63/252/121 fol. 235r (CSPI, 1625–32, 629); Ford, ‘Origins of Irish Dissent’, 25. ¹⁷⁹ W. D. Bailie, The Six Mile Water Revival of 1625 (Newcastle: Presbyterian Historical Society of Ireland, 1976); M. J. Westerkamp, The Triumph of the Laity. Scots-Irish Piety and the Great Awakening, 1625–1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 23–35; Ford, ‘Origins of Irish Dissent’, 25–9. ¹⁸⁰ John Livingstone’s Diary, 7–8; Row (ed.), Life of Blair, 68–9. ¹⁸¹ Row (ed.), Life of Blair, 77: Ussher was, Blair, says, absent in England, and the visitation was undertaken by substitutes. There were triennial archiepiscopal visitations in Armagh province: Marsh’s Lib. MS Z3.1.3, p. 69; Ciaran Diamond, ‘Leslie, Henry (1580–1661)’, ODNB. Though he normally delegated the responsibility, Ussher conducted the 1629 visitation himself, which would suggest the date of 1626 for Blair’s sermon. UW, xv. 454; xvi. 510; Shuckburgh, Bedell, 28. ¹⁸² Row (ed.), Life of Blair, 77–8. ¹⁸³ Ibid. 78.

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his desire to cause ‘as litle noise as I could’.¹⁸⁴ There is little doubt that Echlin turned a blind eye to the nonconformity of Blair and others during the 1620s: of twenty ministers listed in 1634 as nonconformist, ten had been ordained by him—indeed the only thing that Henry Leslie and John Ridge agreed upon was Echlin’s timidity, both towards the ministers and, when the problem was brought to their attention, to the authorities in London and Dublin: as Ridge described him, he was ‘a Scottish man not malicious, yet willing to strike all rather than adventure himselfe to a blow’.¹⁸⁵ Interpreting Blair’s presbyterianism in the light of his willingness to serve under a bishop is far from straightforward.¹⁸⁶ Equally problematic is the attitude of Ussher towards the Scots clergy. His passive and cautious approach to dissent, waiting for others to bring the matter to his attention, and only acting when forced to, was a product both of his temperament, which preferred to avoid acrimonious confrontation, and the natural desire of the Church of Ireland to include and assimilate nonconformists rather than exclude and reject. But Ussher’s diffidence, or cautiousness, has made it difficult for contemporaries and, subsequently, historians to be sure about his response to the presbyterian challenge. As with his relationship to his puritan teachers in Trinity, there are sharply divergent interpretations of his position. To those of presbyterian or puritan persuasion, Ussher’s reluctance to act was viewed as a product of his tolerant, broad-minded, sympathetic Calvinist attitude to nonconformity. According to Blair, he was introduced to Ussher by his patron in March 1627, at the time of the great assembly in Dublin: then Blair had been reluctant to accept an invitation to visit Ussher because of his use of the Prayer Book liturgy in his house. ‘But he excused the matter by reason of the great confluence that was there; but he entreated me that I would be at the pains to come to Trodaff [Drogheda], where his ordinary residence was, where he would be more private’.¹⁸⁷ Hence they met again at Ussher’s home in Drogheda, where they had a long and friendly conversation. Unsurprisingly, they had no difficulty in agreeing about the nature of justification, but differed over liturgy and ceremonies. According to Blair, Ussher expressed his concern saying that he was afraid that our unsatisfiedness therein might endanger our ministry, and that ‘it would break my heart if that successful ministry in the north should be interrupted and marred. They think,’ said he, ‘to cause me to stretch out my hand against you; but all the world shall never move me to do so.’ When he had drawn forth my mind ¹⁸⁴ PRO, SP/63/253/39, fol. 147r–v (CSPI, 1625–32, 661–2). ¹⁸⁵ WWM, 20/179; Milsopp, ‘Diocese of Down and Connor, 303–4; J. B. Leslie and H. W. Love, Clergy of Connor: From Patrician Times to the Present Day (Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 1993); J. B. Leslie, Fred Rankin, and H. B. Swanzy, Clergy of Down and Dromore (Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 1996); NLI, MS 8014/i; SP 63/252/121 fol. 235r (CSPI, 1625–32, 629). ¹⁸⁶ Westerkamp, Triumph of the laity, 22f.; D. G. Mullan, Scottish Puritanism, 1590–1638 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 79. ¹⁸⁷ Row (ed.), Life of Blair, 80.

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thereanent, he said, ‘I perceive you will never be satisfied therein . . . I confess all these things you except against might, yea, ought to be removed, but that cannot be done.’¹⁸⁸

Blair recognized this argument as coming from John Sprint’s Cassander Anglicanus: shewing the necessity of conformitie to the prescribed ceremonies of our church in case of deprivation.¹⁸⁹ Sprint, a firm puritan who had nevertheless remained within the Church of England, argued that even if the nonconformist objections to the Prayer Book were valid, and he fully believed that they were, it was still better to conform than risk having to abandon one’s flock because of deprivation. Blair rejected these arguments, citing in opposition to Sprint a work by a friend of Lord Clandeboye, Sir James Sempill.¹⁹⁰ Despite their disagreement, Blair recalled that Ussher ‘dismissed me very kindly . . . and proved thereafter very friendly when trouble came on us.’¹⁹¹ Much depends upon what credence is given to Blair’s account. Defenders of Ussher’s orthodoxy and conformity have been sceptical. Reported speech in a memoir written over thirty years after the events recorded is, it can justifiably be claimed, closer to Thucydides than to Hansard. Thus for high churchmen such as Bishop Mant and Elrington, Blair’s narrative simply had to be ‘notoriously false’—it was inconceivable that the ‘Anglican’ Ussher could have spoken in such terms.¹⁹² But for later presbyterians, Blair was offering a true account, confirming their view of Ussher as ‘kind, candid, and courteous; not more singular in his day for his immense erudition, than for his tolerant spirit’.¹⁹³ Similarly for the standard eighteenth-century history of nonconformity by Daniel Neal, ‘there was a sort of comprehension between the two parties, by the countenance and approbation of the great archbishop Usher.’¹⁹⁴ Indeed, for the leading twentieth-century historian of English and Irish presbyterianism, A. F. S. Pearson, the narratives of Blair and Livingstone showed how the influx of Scots clergy into Ulster had helped to create a distinctive ecclesiastical polity in the Church of Ireland—a halfway house between episcopacy and presbyterianism that he labelled prescopalianism. This, he argued, had briefly offered a way forward to a more inclusive protestant church, and might even have provided ¹⁸⁸ Row (ed.), Life of Blair. Punctuation has been changed to follow Patrick Adair, A true narrative of the rise and progress of the Presbyterian church in Ireland 1623–70, ed. by W. D. Killen, (Belfast, 1866), 25. ¹⁸⁹ (London, 1618). ¹⁹⁰ Cassandra Scoticana to Cassander Anglicanus (Middleburg, 1618), as cited in Stephen Wright, ‘Sempill, Sir James (1566?–1626)’, ODNB —I have been unable to trace a copy of this work. ¹⁹¹ Row (ed.), Life of Blair, 80. ¹⁹² UW, i. 148–50; Richard Mant, History of the Church of Ireland, 2 vols. (London, 1840), i. 463. ¹⁹³ Reid, History of Presbyterian church, i. 137; and see the subsequent debate: C. R. Elrington, An answer to Dr Reid’s animadversions upon The life of Archbishop Ussher (Dublin, 1849); J. S. Reid, Seven letters to the Rev. C.R. Elrington, occasioned by his animadversions in his Life of Ussher, on certain passages in the History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland (Glasgow, 1849). ¹⁹⁴ Daniel Neal, The history of the puritans, 4 vols. (London, 1732–8), i. 475.

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the inspiration for Ussher’s later willingness to combine the two forms of church government.¹⁹⁵ In between these two extremes, Buick Knox argued that the ordination of Blair and other nonconforming ministers by Echlin and Knox was sufficiently ambiguous to satisfy both camps: the Scots could view themselves as having been ordained by their fellow presbyters, whilst from the conformist point of view the Prayer Book had always allowed for ministers present to join with the bishop in laying their hands on the ordinand.¹⁹⁶ But with regard to Ussher’s attitudes, Knox contended, rightly, that the Primate had nothing to do with the ordination of presbyterian ministers, and insisted, rather less convincingly, that he required that all others adhere to the Prayer Book.¹⁹⁷ A subsequent examination of the encounter again questioned the accuracy of Blair’s account, seeing it as a retrospective presbyterian creation of a mythical golden age of saintly Ussherian tolerance prior to the persecutions of the 1630s. In reality, it is claimed, Ussher’s conference with Blair was a private admonition, normal practice amongst English bishops when faced with nonconformity. There was thus no carefully planned accommodation between presbytery and prelacy. Ussher simply chose not to crack down on the Scots nonconformists because he made a calculated political judgement that the matter was best left to his old friend Hamilton and the local bishop to sort out, based on the statutory requirement of Church of Ireland clergy to adhere to the Prayer Book. ‘Therefore, instead of Ussher tenderly winking at Blair it seems a good deal more plausible to see him marking his cards and espousing a minimal conformity.’¹⁹⁸ This is plausible, but does not quite fit with the report of the interview between Blair and the Primate, or with what we know of the Irish church’s attitude to nonconformity, nor with the way in which events in Ulster unfolded in the late 1620s and early 1630s. First, the analogy with an English episcopal admonition does not fit. An English bishop, even a Calvinist bishop, when faced with Blair, would have felt compelled to demand subscription to the Prayer Book and Thirty-Nine Articles as required in the 1604 canons: this was a minister who was unacceptable to the Scottish, let alone the English church.¹⁹⁹ But subscription was not required in Ireland, giving Ussher far more flexibility in his conversation with Blair. Second, there was his use of Cassander Anglicanus. The standard episcopal approach to puritans reluctant to accept the ceremonies of the Church of England was to maintain that since these matters were adiaphora—things indifferent, not essential to salvation—that it ¹⁹⁵ A. F. S. Pearson, ‘Puritan and Presbyterian Settlements in Ireland 1560–1660’ (typescript in the Presbyterian Historical Society of Ireland, Belfast); see below, pp. 243–4. ¹⁹⁶ Knox, Ussher, 180–1. ¹⁹⁷ Ibid. ¹⁹⁸ John McCafferty, ‘When Reformations Collide’, in A. I. Macinnes and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds.), The Stuart Kingdoms in the Seventeenth Century (Dublin: Four Courts, 2002), 200–1. ¹⁹⁹ See, for example, Joseph Hall, Bishop of Exeter: Fincham and Lake, ‘Popularity, Prelacy and Puritanism’, 869.

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therefore did not matter if the Church insisted upon ministers performing them according to the Prayer Book.²⁰⁰ If we accept Blair’s claim that Ussher had used Sprint—and we know that he owned the work, having lent it to another Irish minister, Anthony Wainwright—then this places the encounter in a very different category from a discussion of things indifferent.²⁰¹ Sprint was more commonly used by moderate puritans than English bishops.²⁰² And it was a work which was particularly suited to the Church of Ireland, for the major objection to Sprint’s approach—that godly clergy who knuckled under and conformed would not then be left in peace to tend their flocks, but would be further required to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles and Prayer Book—simply did not apply in Ireland.²⁰³ Moreover, as became apparent in 1634, when an attempt was made to impose the 1604 English canons with their tighter enforcement of conformity, the Church of Ireland had indeed developed a strong attachment to its laxer approach to such matters.²⁰⁴ Second, there is the issue of Ussher’s strictness with regard to the use of Prayer Book and other ceremonies. Knox and Elrington defended Ussher strongly against claims that he was willing to take a flexible attitude towards liturgy or ceremonies.²⁰⁵ Here, again, the reality is more nuanced. That he used and esteemed the Prayer Book, and that he lamented its abolition by Parliament in 1645, can be taken as a given, but that he refused to entertain changes in it, or was inflexible in his insistence on its use, is far less clear.²⁰⁶ As he demonstrated in the early 1640s, when the Laudian regime was under attack, he was perfectly willing to consider amending the Prayer Book to take account of Calvinist and puritan concerns.²⁰⁷ He took a similarly accommodating stance towards those ministers ²⁰⁰ Again, Ussher’s approach contrasts with that of his predecessor, who used the standard adiaphorist argument: Christopher Hampton, An Inquisition of the true church and those that revolt from it (Dublin, 1622), sig. A3v–A4r. ²⁰¹ Bodl. Rawl. MS D 1290, fol. 2v; Al. Dub., s.v. Anthony Wainwright; Mun. P/1/127, Mun. P/1/130. ²⁰² Tom Webster, ‘Sprint, John (d. 1623)’, ODNB; see, for instance, the Ockley conference where godly conformists tried to persuade Cotton and Hooker to stay in England: Webster, Godly clergy, 157–8. For a different perspective on Sprint, see C. W. A. Prior, Defining the Jacobean Church: The Politics of Religious Controversy, 1603–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 188–90. ²⁰³ A briefe answere to the former discourse, in Sprint, Cassander Anglicanus, 213–14; hence the resort of Leslie and Echlin to the civil law to punish clergy for their failure to use the Prayer Book according to the Act of Uniformity: NLI, MS 8014/I; PRO, SP 63/252/121, fols. 235r–236r (CSPI, 1625–32, 629). ²⁰⁴ See below, pp. 184– 96. ²⁰⁵ Knox, Ussher, 183–4; UW, i. 283–4. ²⁰⁶ McNeill (ed.), Tanner Letters, 245; Parr, Life, 27; this is a difficult issue—Bernard, our most detailed source for Ussher’s views on this, shifted his emphasis according to whether he was portraying him as a firm Anglican (post-restoration) or moderate Calvinist (pre-restoration): for the conformist Ussher, see Bernard, Clavi, 47 ff.; for the godly fellow-traveller, see Bernard, Judgement (1658), 129 ff. ²⁰⁷ James Ussher, A copie of the proceedings of some worthy and learned divines (London, 1641).

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with sabbatarian principles who wished to evade reading the Book of Sports.²⁰⁸ He was also willing to entertain puritan concerns about bowing at the name of Jesus and set prayers, and differed markedly from Lord Deputy Wentworth in his approach to worship, particularly the centrality of the communion table.²⁰⁹ The key point about Ussher’s approach to the presbyterians is that he, like Echlin, believed in a policy of laissez-faire. This is not to say that he approved of their views, but merely that he saw no reason, given the constitution of the Church of Ireland, to inquire too minutely into the ceremonial practices of clergy who were unquestionably active and effective pastors. Doctrine was central, ceremony and liturgy less important.²¹⁰ Ussher’s predecessor, Archbishop Hampton, who, as has been noted, had from the very beginning of his primacy seen his task as being to bring the Irish church into line with the Church of England and stamp out nonconformity, had complained to Buckingham as early as 1621 about the ‘certaine factious and irregular puritanes’ in Down ‘interteyning the Scottish discipline and liturgie so stronglie, that they offer wrong to the churche government here established, and . . . the sacraments with extraordinarie contempt’.²¹¹ Things did not subsequently improve, yet Ussher chose not to raise the matter with the authorities in England, happy with an Irish solution to an Irish problem. Even Bishop Bedell complained of Ussher’s laxity when it came to discipline—his attitude to such matters was, Bedell claimed, ‘that he took them as he found them’.²¹² Indeed, such was Ussher’s reputation for leniency towards nonconformists, that it had even reached England, where his respectable espicopalian friend, Daniel Featley, when taxed in a debate with an Anabaptist in 1642 about the bishops’ predilection for hounding good men, immediately replied: ‘some of our bishops never persecuted any man; as namely, the Arch-bishop of Armagh.’²¹³ The Scots clergy survived his archiepiscopal visitations in 1626 and 1629 (not to mention the bishop’s annual visitations), and were confident of doing so again in 1632. As Ridge reported to an anonymous puritan correspondent in England: ‘our Primate is Dr Usher whom you know, and this is his triennial visitation; we all think that some small thing (small in respect of the whole course of conformity) would, at least for a while, give content.’²¹⁴ ²⁰⁸ William Brereton, Travels in Holland, the United Provinces, England, Scotland and Ireland, 1634–1635, ed. Edward Hawkins, Chetham Society (1844), 139–40; W. B. Wright, The Ussher memoirs; or genealogical memoirs of the Ussher families in Ireland (Dublin, 1889), 271. ²⁰⁹ Bernard, Judgement (1659), 149–50; SL, ii. 249; see below, pp. 205–6. ²¹⁰ UW, iv. 239. ²¹¹ Bodl., Carte MS 30, fol. 110r; see Hampton’s clash with Jones soon after he arrived from England: TCD MS 582, fol. 4r. For his effort to impose conformity, see Hampton, Inquisition of the true church, sig. A4. ²¹² Shuckburgh, Bedell, 117–18. ²¹³ Daniel Featley, Katabaptistai kataptüstoi: the dippers dipt (London, 1642), 12. ²¹⁴ NLI, MS 8014/i.

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What shattered the modus vivendi which the presbyterians and the established church had arrived at in Down and Connor was not Ussher, nor his old tutor at Trinity, but that new and increasingly powerful Laudian/Caroline axis, which in the early 1630s began its drive for tighter control of nonconformity in Ireland and Scotland. The key figure in Ireland was Henry Leslie, royal chaplain, and protégé of Hampton and Laud. It was after his appointment as Dean of Down in 1627 that the understanding between Echlin and the ministers began to break down.²¹⁵ As complaints were made to Dublin and London, and the extent of their nonconformity became more widely known, a tactful, concealing silence was no longer an option, and Echlin was finally forced to take action.²¹⁶ In 1631, Blair and Livingstone made the mistake of travelling across the Irish sea without license to preach to a revivalist meeting at the kirk of Shotts, which brought them to the attention of John Maxwell, Laud’s ‘chief acolyte’ in Scotland.²¹⁷ He delated them as dangerous enthusiasts to the King and to Henry Leslie, who seized the opportunity to put pressure on his ‘weak’ and ‘timorous’ bishop by involving the King and the Dublin authorities.²¹⁸ As a result, in 1631, Echlin suspended Blair and Livingstone. They appealed to Ussher, who, according to the ministers, ordered Echlin to reinstate them, or, according to Echlin, returned the case to him, giving the ministers till May 1632 to conform or leave the country.²¹⁹ When they failed to do either, on 4 May he deprived them. Further appeal to Ussher and the Dublin government proved useless.²²⁰ An approach in 1634 to the new Lord Deputy, Thomas Wentworth, brought a temporary relief, but when new canons were brought in for the Irish church in 1634, and when Leslie replaced Echlin as bishop in 1635, the writing was on the wall for all nonconformists in Down and Connor: in the end they tried (unsuccessfully) to sail to America.²²¹ What are we to make of the Church of Ireland’s relationship with the Scots clergy? We are here dealing with parallel narratives, each with their own coherence, covering the same events, but viewing them from sharply differing angles. Exactly the same ceremony seemed to Blair and Livingstone a satisfyingly presbyterian laying-on of hands, whilst to Echlin it was a thoroughly normal episcopal ordination.²²² To the Scots clergy, Ussher, Echlin, and Knox had loosened the discipline of the Church of Ireland sufficiently to let them follow ²¹⁵ Diamond, ‘Leslie, Henry’, ODNB. Following a sermon before the King in 1625, Leslie was made a royal chaplain: Henry Leslie, A warning for Israel (Dublin, 1625), title page, 1. As early as 1629, Ussher had remarked to Laud that Leslie was ‘one who acknowledgeth himself to be very much beholden unto your Lordship’: PRO, SP/63/249, fol. 197r (CSPI, 1625–32, 481). ²¹⁶ PRO, SP 63/253/39, fols. 147r–148r (CSPI, 1625–32, 661–2). ²¹⁷ Reid, History of Presbyterian church, i. 134–5; A. S. W. Pearce, ‘Maxwell, John (d. 1647)’, ODNB. ²¹⁸ PRO, SP 63/252/121, fols. 235r–236r (CSPI, 1625–32, 629); John Livingstone’s Diary, 10–11; Row (ed.), Life of Blair, 90–1. ²¹⁹ PRO, SP 63/253/39, fols. 147r–148r (CSPI, 1625–32, 661–2). ²²⁰ John Livingstone’s Diary, 11; Row (ed.), Life of Blair, 91. ²²¹ John Livingstone’s Diary, 12; Row (ed.), Life of Blair, 99–102, 140–6. ²²² Knox, Ussher¸178–81.

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a bastard form of presbyterian ministry; to Echlin, he had simply allowed some preachers to practice temporarily as curates when he was short of clergy. Blair’s report of his meeting with Ussher at Drogheda is similarly open to interpretation. One has, of course, to take account of Ussher’s scholarly discursiveness and dislike of open disagreement, and Blair’s desire to paint himself as a godly hero. But even allowing for the possible inadequacy of Blair’s memory and Ussher’s diffidence, two points can still be established. First, the general tenor of Ussher’s comments, as related by Blair, does not conflict with his known, relaxed, attitude to ceremonies. And, second, Ussher, like Echlin, was content to leave the curious compromise between presbyterianism and episcopacy undisturbed.²²³ In a pattern that was to recur repeatedly in the 1630s, it was Laud and Leslie who sought to rein in the pragmatic (or was it by now principled?) flexibility of the Church of Ireland on issues of discipline and conformity, a laxity which, as shall be seen, Ussher did his utmost to preserve.

C O N C LU S I O N The period from the appointment of the Lords Justices in August 1629 to Wentworth’s arrival as Lord Deputy in July 1633 was a revealing experiment in new English self-government. The graces had presented one of those rare opportunities to build up an Irish polity that was broadly based rather than founded upon an exclusive protestant access to power and influence. The protestant community, led by Ussher, had resoundingly rejected that possibility. Their motivation has been variously interpreted. Most have seen it as a cynical exercise in self-interest: ‘Their emphasis upon religious differences was due essentially to the realisation that only in this way could they hope to maintain their grip on the machinery of government.’²²⁴ The new English ‘parade of protestant devotion was . . . often a cover for making a private profit’.²²⁵ Even Wentworth shared this reductionist suspicion of protestant motives—his first impression of his new English privy councillors was that they were ‘a company of men the most intent upon their own ends that ever I met with’.²²⁶ No one, least of all Church of Ireland clergy who had suffered at their hands, would deny that their fellow new English were mercenary and ruthless when ²²³ Though Ussher did express concern to Falkland after Knox’s death in 1632 about the condition of the church in Raphoe, ‘in which for the present there is not so much as a face seen of the government of the Church of England’: UW, xvi. 511. ²²⁴ Hugh Kearney, Strafford in Ireland 1633–41: A Study in Absolutism, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 10. ²²⁵ C. V. Wedgwood, Thomas Wentworth, First Earl of Strafford, 1593–1641: A Revaluation (London: Jonathan Cape, 1964), 131. ²²⁶ SL, i. 96; C. V. Brownhill, ‘The Personal and Professional Relationship between Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, and his Closest Advisors’, PhD thesis, University of Sheffield, 2004, 137–9.

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it came to the pursuit of property and profit. But pragmatism and principle were in this case perfectly compatible. Self-interested protestant objections to the sharing of power were reinforced by a theological hostility to Catholicism which, articulated by clergy such as Ussher, Hamilton, and Downham, gave Irish protestantism a new scholarly foundation and an uncompromising outlook. The intellectual assertiveness of the Church of Ireland was evident in its confession of faith which, unlike the English Thirty-Nine Articles, was clear and unequivocal on the disputed topics of papal Antichristianity, grace, predestination, and perseverance, and was even held up as a model by envious English Calvinists. It was supported by Trinity College, a godly Calvinist seminary whose library provided the chief scholarly resource of Irish protestants and whose students were trained in the art of anti-papal polemic. From only being able to find a nineteen-year-old boy to confront the leading Irish Jesuit in 1600, thirty years later the Church of Ireland could as a result respond to another Jesuit challenge with over 1,200 printed pages. The confidence was most obvious in 1627, when the leading Irish bishops were able to challenge the very basis of royal policy in Ireland and engage in the kind of brazen public opposition which, if attempted in London, would have risked imprisonment. By the end of the 1620s the Church of Ireland was cited by the defenders of English Calvinism as a theological model for the English church to follow. At the very least, Irish protestant confidence and self-interest had been given a powerful ideological underpinning. There were, of course, areas of fragility. The established church was a minority church, surrounded by a buoyant counter-reformation Catholicism. It was in the process of making the awkward transition from viewing the penal legislation as a means of converting, to seeing it as a way of controlling Catholics. Its ministry was still weak in many of the lightly settled areas of the country, and was often incapable of communicating the protestant gospel to the people in their own language. Its finances continued to suffer from the illegal and semi-legal encroachment on church lands and income by avaricious landholders, a problem which Ussher and his fellow bishops found it difficult to resolve legally or politically, given that many of the judges and officials had themselves benefited from the spoils of the church. And finally, the pragmatic toleration towards those with puritan or presbyterian leanings, which had flourished in the relaxed, not to mention lax attitudes of the new plantation church in Ulster, had been challenged both by the extremism of the Scottish ministers, and by Henry Leslie, a minister with a very different mindset from the laissez-faire Ussher. And it was not Ussher but Leslie, with his close links to that rising star, William Laud, and his determination to bring the Church of Ireland into line with English norms, who was to provide the model for ecclesiastical policy in Ireland for the remainder of the 1630s.

8 Internal Exile: Ussher and Laudianism: 1633–40 In July 1634 Ussher preached a sermon, probably before the new Lord Deputy, Thomas Wentworth. His text was obscure, but pertinent, even prophetic: ‘But the former governors that had been before me were chargeable unto the people, and had taken of them bread and wine, beside forty shekels of silver; yea, even their servants bare rule over the people: but so did not I, because of the fear of God.’¹ Ussher, like his fellow Irish clergy, was looking for an independentminded Lord Deputy who, rather than listening to popular clamour, would act decisively to defend the interests of protestantism, restoring to the Church its property, clamping down hard on recusancy. The new Lord Deputy certainly fulfilled the hope that he would be different. His grasp on the reins of power, the thoroughness and ruthlessness with which he drove forward his policies, and his ability to manipulate the conflicting religious and political interests in Ireland whilst maintaining the support of the King all ensured that Wentworth’s seven years in Ireland saw a determined and unprecedented attempt to ‘redress the grievances and cure the distempers of the church and state’.² And, in one notable respect, Wentworth more than met Ussher’s expectations. The Lord Deputy was horrified by the condition of the Church of Ireland. As he told Laud, ‘it would make your haire stand on end, and make you beleeve that they were of the opinion of that Spanyarde, that said he thought Jesus Christ never dyed for the Irish’.³ Particularly concerned by its poverty—a ‘wofull face of a church’, ‘clouded under a palpable darknesse of impyety and rapine’—he launched what can only be termed a campaign of legal terror to ensure that the laity disgorged all the church property that they had detained.⁴ The shock to the lay protestants was profound. Perfectly capable of thinking of themselves as ¹ Nehemiah 5:15: Bodl. Rawlinson MS D 1290, fol. 72. Wentworth arrived in Ireland on 23 July 1633: R. G. Asch, ‘Wentworth, Thomas, First Earl of Strafford (1593–1641)’, ODNB. ² SL, i, sig. A2v; Hugh Kearney, Strafford in Ireland 1633–41: A Study in Absolutism, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); NHI, ch. 9. interpetations of Wentworths rule in Ireland, and in particular the question of whether he broke with the policies of previous governors, vary: J. P. Cooper, ‘Review of C. V. Wedgwood, Thomas Wentworth, First Earl of Strafford, 1593–1641: A Revaluation’, EHR, 79 (1964), 380; Kearney, Strafford in Ireland, pp. xi–xix. ³ WWM, 8, p. 45. ⁴ Ibid., 6, p. 11.

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protectors of protestantism at the very time they were devouring its means of support, Wentworth’s summary proceedings in the Court of Castle Chamber threw in their face the dubious means they had used to detain large numbers of advowsons, benefices, glebes, tithes, and church buildings. Wentworth and Laud took sadistic pleasure in making the reluctant patients ‘vomit up’ their ill-gotten gains—indeed the eructatory metaphor is pursued by them in their correspondence with a childish glee normally associated only with medical students.⁵ Ussher and his fellow clergy were, unlike the protestant laity, delighted with the dramatic change in attitude from the civil authorities. The Primate immediately obtained from Wentworth a commission to investigate see lands in Armagh, and within a year of the Lord Deputy’s arrival he was hailing him as ‘a new Zerubabbel raised by God, for the making up of the ruins of this decayed church’.⁶ Wentworth’s chaplain and ecclesiastical henchman, John Bramhall, who was made Bishop of Derry in May 1634, took personal charge of the administrative arrangements to identify and regain church property and increase rents, and was soon proudly compiling lists of the vast improvements made in church income as a result of his and his master’s efforts—for example, by 1639 he claimed that the improvement of revenue for the sees in the province of Armagh would amount to £14,621 6s. 8d.⁷ But Wentworth was not quite the fairy godmother for which Ussher had hoped, for not all his wishes came true. The Lord Deputy’s vigour and determination were wonderful to behold when applied to the previously intractable problem of ecclesiastical finances, but his enthusiasm stopped short of enforcing the laws against recusants and defending the independence of the Church of Ireland. Ussher and the leaders of the Church of Ireland, for strategic and financial, as well as theological reasons, wished the reform of the Church of Ireland and the reform of the Irish people to proceed in tandem—the enforcement of conformity and the imprisonment of recusants was, they believed, an essential complement to the preaching of the gospel by protestant clergy. Gentle policies, they thought, merely increased the strength of Catholicism.⁸ But Wentworth, to Ussher’s disappointment, refused to accept this, and separated the two aims.⁹ Even before ⁵ WWM, 8, p 34; SL, i. 255; LW, vi. 332, 375; vii. 53, 114. ⁶ UW, xv. 574, 571; HMC, Hastings, iv. 62–3, 71. ⁷ E. P. Shirley (ed.), Papers relating to the Church of Ireland (1631–9) (London and Dublin, [1874]), 5–24; see ibid. 2–5 and WWM, 6, p. 300 for earlier estimates. How much of this was realized is open to question: J. McCafferty, ‘John Bramhall and the Church of Ireland in the 1630s’, in Ford (ed.), As by Law Established, 108. ⁸ Alan Ford, ‘ ‘‘Force and fear of punishment’’: Protestants and Religious Coercion in Ireland, 1603–33’, in Elizabethanne Boran and Crawford Gribben (eds.), Enforcing Reformation in Ireland and Scotland, 1550–1700 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 91–130. ⁹ William Prynne, Hidden works of darkenes brought to publike light (London, 1645), 110; and Corresp. Ussher–Laud, 15–16.

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he arrived in Ireland he signalled to a disbelieving and stubbornly resistant Irish privy council that he did not wish it to press on with its policy of enforcing the 12d. fine.¹⁰ Initially his reasons were tactical. His preferred means of supporting the army was through parliamentary subsidy.¹¹ He therefore did not wish to alienate the Catholic interest before the 1634 parliament met and supply was granted. But even after the successful conclusion of parliament, Wentworth refused to act against recusants.¹² His discovery that the ‘livings are all so meane, as half a dozen of some of them are hardly able to buy a minister his clothes,’ and that ‘the conformists [are] soe few, that in those six, you shall not find six . . . that come to church,’ led him (and Laud) to the conclusion that it was pointless to make Catholics come to church until there were churches and clergy for them to go to.¹³ He was clear, though, that once the Church of Ireland was properly endowed, the next step was the reduction of Catholics to conformity. This was essential for the long-term security of the English interest in Ireland: ‘And surely when ever a reformation shall effectually be undertaken (till which the crowne of England will hardly be secure of this people without a mighty charge to containe them in their due allegiance) this must be the first stepp to lead us on in the business.’¹⁴ But it was also daunting. As he warned Laud in 1638: it will require the uttermost of their [the King’s ministers’] strength and the kings power to boote to carry it thorow when they are resolved of it. There is not any service to be done here, which lyes so neare my hart, as to bring this people to a conformity with the Churche of Englande. And I am persuaded it is feasible, yet hee that putts the bell about the catts neck may happen to be soundly scratched, if he looke not the better about him, and which is worse, lose the businesse allsoe. Soe soone as ever I find the opportunity for it your Lordship shall be sure to heare of me. In the meane tyme all I advise is altum silentium.¹⁵

Wentworth certainly maintained a lofty silence on the matter after the 1634 parliament, but there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of his intention to act eventually. Even Ussher, though he disagreed with Wentworth’s analysis, accepted that he intended to proceed to the imposition of uniformity once the material problems of the Church had been resolved.¹⁶ ¹⁰ For the Irish privy council’s enforcement of conformity, see WWM, 20, p. 111. ¹¹ ‘I must of necessity deal gently with them [the Catholics] till the revenews of this crowne be settled, as I hope they shall, by a parliament here’: Ibid., 8, p. 34. See the clear exposition of this point in his speech to both houses in July 1634: SL, i. 287. ¹² Though he did not rule out the exemplary punishment of those who were ‘insolent or give public scandal’: WWM, 7, fol. 104v. ¹³ Ibid., 6, p. 44. Laud noted that it was essential first to ensure ‘that there may be places to receive the people, and persons to instruct them’: LW, vii. 59. ¹⁴ WWM, 6, pp. 15–16. ¹⁵ Ibid., 7, fol. 130v. ¹⁶ See below, p. 232.

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‘ G O D B L E S S YO U R F R E E C H U RC H O F I R E L A N D ’ : 1 6 3 3 – 5¹⁷ The other area of disagreement between Ussher and Wentworth was much more troublesome, for it concerned the very nature of the Church of Ireland and its relationship with the Church of England. This issue was complex, ambiguous, and many-layered. Ultimately, it concerned the constitutional relationship between Ireland and England, both civil and ecclesiastical, in particular the question of whether Ireland was to be viewed as colony or kingdom: was it simply a part of the realm of England, or was it distinct and largely independent?¹⁸ Contemporaries were divided. For some, Ireland was an independent kingdom, ruled, coincidentally, by the same king as England, but with its own parliament and laws, an arrangement paralleled in the ecclesiastical sphere, where the same king was supreme governor of two separate churches, each with its own convocation and confession of faith. As expressed by the Anglo-Irish official Richard Hadsor, Ireland was ‘ruled by the kinges of England as a distinct Kingdome’.¹⁹ Many in Ireland, especially the Old English, sought to exploit and expand their independence within these constitutional arrangements, developing, in the course of the first half of the seventeenth century, a sophisticated justification for their claim that Ireland was not bound by the legislation of the English parliament.²⁰ Others, though, particularly those based in England or Scotland, or newly arrived in Ireland, took a very different view of the relationship between the two countries. The simple facts that the English parliament had in the past bound Ireland by its legislation, and that Irish litigants could appeal to English courts, suggested that Ireland was merely a subordinate part of the English realm, little better than a colony. As James VI and the Scottish privy council put it in 1601, ¹⁷ HMC, Hastings, iv. 67. ¹⁸ K. S. Bottigheimer, ‘Kingdom and Colony: Ireland in the Westward Enterprise, 1536–1660’, in K. R. Andrews et al. (eds.), The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic and America (Liverpool, 1978), 45–65; N. P. Canny, Kingdom and Colony: Ireland in the Atlantic World 1560–1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988); C. F. Brady and Raymond Gillespie (eds.), Natives and Newcomers. Essays on the Making of Irish Colonial Society (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1986), 17, 19–20; T. C. Barnard, ‘Crises of Identity among Irish Protestants 1641–1685’, Past & Present, 127 (1990), 40. ¹⁹ Joseph McLaughlin (ed.), ‘Richard Hadsor’s ‘‘Discourse’’ on the Irish State, 1604’, IHS, 30 (1997), 346. ²⁰ Aidan Clarke, ‘Colonial Constitutional Attitudes in Ireland, 1640–1660’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 90, Sect. C (1990), 357–75; idem, ‘Patrick Darcy and the Constitutional Relationship between Ireland and England’, in J. H. Ohlmeyer (ed.), Political Thought in SeventeenthCentury Ireland: Kingdom or Colony? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 35–55; L. L. Peck, ‘Beyond the Pale: John Cusacke and the Language of Abolutism in Early Stuart Britain’, HJ, 41 (1998), 121–49; N. P. Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 407 ff.

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Ireland was ‘a proper dependence on this haill Ile of Britane’.²¹ The same logic was applied to the ecclesiastical sphere. At the beginning of the Irish reformation, George Browne, Archbishop of Dublin, spoke happily and repeatedly of ‘the Church of England and Ireland’.²² Bramhall, on his arrival in Ireland, seized upon the decree of the very first Anglo-Norman church council in Ireland, called in 1172 by Henry II at Cashel, which required the Irish church to conform to the ceremonies and practices of the church in England, a precedent which he interpreted as meaning ‘that the Irish church should be in all points conformed to the English.’²³ Further support for this subordinate view of the Irish church came from the fact that appeals from its ecclesiastical courts were heard by the English High Court of Delegates.²⁴ There is a tendency sometimes to assume that there is a single ‘answer’ to the question of what relationship, civil or ecclesiastical, existed between the two countries in the early modern period. The standard account of the legal and constitutional position thus states unequivocally that the Irish parliament was subordinate to the English, suggesting that Ireland was annexed or united to the English realm.²⁵ But contemporaries, and later historians, have been less sure, as is evident from the rival interpretations of a phrase from the Irish Act of Faculties of 1536: ‘that this the king’s land of Ireland is his proper dominion and a member appending and rightfully belonging to the imperial crown of the said realm of England, and united to the same’.²⁶ Does ‘united to the same’ refer to the imperial Crown (suggesting that the kingdom of Ireland could be separate from England) or does it refer to the realm of England (making Ireland subordinate)? The essential difficulty here is that constitutional and legal theory was not an abstract entity, but a product of political and legal practice hardened into custom. And, in this area, political and legal practice, and the degree of subordination or freedom, varied depending upon time and circumstances. The ambiguity in the Act of Faculties is, therefore, a fairly accurate, if accidental, reflection of the reality over the following century. In times of crisis, when the English interest was threatened by native risings, the tendency was to accept ²¹ David Masson (ed.), The Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, 14 vols. (Edinburgh, 1877–98), vi. 304, quoted in McLoughlin (ed.), ‘Hadsor’s ‘‘Discourse’’ ’, 343. ²² Alan Ford, ‘Dependent or Independent: The Church of Ireland and Its Colonial Context, 1536–1647’, The Seventeenth Century, 10 (1995), 166. ²³ HMC, Hastings, iv. 61; Shirley (ed.), Papers Relating to the Church of Ireland, 44; BW, v. 82. In Of the first establishment of English laws and parliaments, Ussher refers to the same canon, but since he is dealing with the statutory relationship between the two kingdoms, does not discuss its ecclesiastical implications: UW, xi. 449. Historians have subsequently disputed whether the canon was a genuine product of the council of Cashel, or a gloss by Giraldus: Art Cosgrove (ed.), A New History of Ireland: II, Medieval Ireland 1169–1534 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 91–2. ²⁴ Return of all appeals in causes of doctrine or discipline made to the High Court of Delegates, House of Commons Sessional Papers, 57 (1867–8), 77, 98, 111, 122–3. ²⁵ A. G. Donaldson, ‘The Application in Ireland of English and British Legislation before 1801’, PhD thesis, Queen’s University Belfast, 1952. ²⁶ 28 Henry VIII c. 21 (Eng.); 28 Henry VIII c. 19 (Ire.).

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the protective blanket of English parliamentary authority; in times of peace, the Irish ruling class were more inclined to experiment with the possibilities of self-determination.²⁷ As the seventeenth century wore on, the tension between these two tendencies grew, as the Old English desire for some form of legislative autonomy clashed with the new English concern to control the troublesome and independentminded Irish parliament and polity.²⁸ Ussher’s stance is particularly interesting, given the way in which he, as an Anglo-Irish protestant, straddled the divide between the Old and new English. In the religious sphere, of course, Ussher had been almost single-handedly responsible for the development of the idea of Ireland as a separate ecclesiastical polity, with its own distinctive history, independent of the Church of England—a claim which, as we shall see, he was to defend with determination in the 1630s. But, perversely, his ‘Anglo-Irish’ or ‘Old English’ desire for ecclesiastical self-determination did not extend to the secular sphere. Ussher’s ‘new English’ view of the constitutional relationship between the two countries was spelled out in his short treatise, ‘Of the first establishment of English laws and parliaments’, a typically allusive (and therefore elusive) concatenation of quotations from primary sources. Here he accepts that, from the start of Anglo-Norman rule, legal appeals from Ireland had been heard by English courts, and that the Parliament in England could pass statutes which applied to Ireland. Though he flirted with the idea that by establishing an Irish parliament the English kings meant to ‘exempt the inhabitants of this realm from the power of the laws, which should be made in the mother kingdom’, an interpretation superficially supported by the fact that Poynings’ parliament in 1495 had to formally declare that all existing English statutes were to apply to Ireland, Ussher rejected the implication that this meant that statutes previously passed by English parliaments had not applied to Ireland. Legally, he believed, Ireland was indeed subject to English statutes, and he specifically quoted the excerpt from the Act of Faculties to support this.²⁹ But though Ussher conceded that the Irish parliament was legislatively subordinate to the English, he was much more reluctant to make a similar concession in the ecclesiastical sphere. The thrust of his academic scholarship in the early 1620s, which sought to legitimate an independent indigenous protestant church, had been translated after 1626–7 into the public sphere, when the Church of Ireland responded fiercely to the attempt by Charles to impose a policy of toleration, and, during the long interregnum of the Lords Justices, succeeded in putting its preferred policies into effect. But securing for ²⁷ M. P. Perceval-Maxwell, ‘Ireland and the Monarchy in the Early Stuart Multiple Kingdom’, HJ, 34 (1991), 279–85. ²⁸ Ibid.; Clarke, ‘Colonial Constitutional Attitudes’, 357–75. ²⁹ UW, xi. 449–63, quotation from p. 453. His conclusions are not dissimilar to those of S. G. Ellis, ‘Parliament and Community in Yorkist and Tudor Ireland’, Historical Studies, 14 (1983), 43–68.

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this nascent Irish protestant church the political space to grow and flourish was a delicate task, requiring not only the invention of a suitable origin myth, but also the manipulation of the ambiguities of the civil and constitutional relationship between the two countries to evade the efforts of those who wished to stamp on such independence and integrate Ireland more closely into English politics and patronage. The crunch came in the mid-1630s, following the appointment of Wentworth and Bramhall. Freshly arrived from England, the disjuncture between sameness and difference—familiar English structures placed in an unfamiliar Irish context—proved a profound shock. Wentworth and Bramhall both instinctively responded by seeking to bring the aberrant Irish church into closer conformity with what they saw as its English mother. In this, of course, they were little different from many Englishmen before and after.³⁰ But three things transformed these gut reactions into a major force for change and controversy: the Caroline and Laudian desire to impose a new vision of orthodoxy on the churches in the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland; the centralized power which Wentworth amassed in Ireland so that he could implement this policy; and, finally, Ussher’s and his fellow clergy’s strong belief that the Church of England and the Church of Ireland were engaged, not in a parent–child, but in a more equal, sisterly relationship, which entitled them to defend their own rather different version of ecclesiastical orthodoxy. For many contemporaries, and later historians, the approach of Charles and Archbishop Laud in the 1630s marked a change in ecclesiastical policy, moving away from the cautious consensus of James I and establishing a new definition of orthodox belief and behaviour. By attacking predestinarian theology and preventing public discussion of it through censorship, by castigating Calvinists as puritans and promoting anti-Calvinists and Arminians, by forcing parishes to move the communion table to the east end and conform more strictly to the established liturgy, they alienated both clergy and laity and created many of the fatal divisions which led to civil war.³¹ For Laud, however, and for some subsequent scholars, his efforts to impose conformity differed little from what his predecessors as Archbishop of Canterbury had always done—seeking to impose discipline, order, and good government on a Church of England which contained, in the 1630s as before, a wide range of theological views.³² Laud himself, it has been argued, was not so much anti-Calvinist as agnostic on the ³⁰ For an important exploration of this issue see Andrew Murphy, But the Irish Sea betwixt Us: Ireland, Colonialism, and Renaissance Literature (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999). ³¹ Nicholas Tyacke, ‘Puritanism, Arminianism and Counter-Revolution’, in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (eds.), The English Civil War (London: Arnold, 1997), 136–59; idem, Anti-Calvinists. The Rise of English Arminianism c. 1590–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Ann Hughes, The Causes of the English Civil War (London: Macmillan, 1991), 98 ff. ³² G. W. Bernard, ‘The Church of England c. 1529–c. 1642’, History, 75 (1990), 183–206; Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), ch. 6; Peter White, ‘The Rise of Arminianism Reconsidered’, Past & Present, 101 (1983), 34–54.

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question of predestination; where censorship was enforced (which wasn’t often), it was done in an even-handed fashion against both Calvinists and Arminians; and when it came to the positioning of altars and other ceremonial matters, he was relatively flexible.³³ Rather than blaming Laud for any difficulties, it has been argued that it was the inflexible Charles who was the real driving force behind ecclesiastical policy in the 1630s.³⁴ As particular issues—patronage, altar policy, and control of the press—have been explored in more depth, some patterns have begun to emerge. It may be granted that Laudian ideological concerns were not solely focused upon grace and predestination, that the complexities of implementing his policies sometimes forced compromise, and that there was often a contrast between the rather prosaic justifications used by Laud for what he did and the more extreme claims of the ‘Laudians’.³⁵ Yet ‘Laudianism’, or ‘English Arminianism’ still marked a significant change in theological, ceremonial, and political emphasis within the Church of England. Though not without its internal contradictions, the ‘Laudian style’ can be described in ideal-typical terms as a complex admixture of religious ideas: hostility to extreme predestinarian theology; a ceremonialist preference for sacramental over word-centred piety, supporting communion over preaching, individual over general confession; strong support for the rights and claims of the clerical and particularly the episcopal estate; a rejection of the puritan assumption that the pope was Antichrist and that this provided the key explanatory framework for church history; a much less aggressive attitude to the Roman Catholic Church and a much more hostile one to the Continental reformed churches.³⁶ Though, like his predecessors, Laud was deeply committed to the enforcement of discipline and order, he went considerably beyond them in how he defined his vision of orthodoxy, and was able to use his considerable influence with the King to ensure ³³ Sheila Lambert, ‘The Printers and the Government, 1604–37’, in Robin Myers and Michael Harris (eds.), Aspects of Printing from 1600 (Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic Press, 1987), 1–29; Peter White, Predestination, Policy and Polemic. Conflict and Concensus in the English Church from the Reformation to the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 287 ff.; Julian Davies, The Caroline Captivity of the Church. Charles I and the Remoulding of Anglicanism 1625–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992). ³⁴ Davies, Caroline Captivity; Sharpe, Personal Rule, 284 ff. ³⁵ Kenneth Fincham, ‘William Laud and the Exercise of Caroline Ecclesiastical Patronage’, JEH, 51 (2000), 69–93; idem, ‘The Restoration of Altars in the 1630s’, HJ, 44 (2001), 919–40; Anthony Milton,‘Licensing, Censorship, and Orthodoxy in Early Stuart England’, JEH, 41 (1998), 625–51; idem, ‘The Creation of Laudianism: A New Approach’, in Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust, and Peter Lake (eds.), Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 162–84; D. R. Como, ‘Predestination and Political Conflict in Laud’s London’, HJ, 46 (2003), 263–94. ³⁶ Peter Lake, ‘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 (London: Macmillan, 1993), 161–85; idem, ‘The Laudians and the Argument from authority’, in B. Y. Kunze and D. D. Brautigam (eds.), Court, Country and Culture (Rochester: Rochester University Press, 1992), 149–76; Milton, Catholic and Reformed. On the inconsistency and instability of Laudian orthodoxy see Milton, ‘Creation of Laudianism’, 180 ff.

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that his and Charles’s policies were implemented. Indeed, it has been rightly argued that Ireland provides crucial evidence for Laud’s primary role in driving forward royal ecclesiastical policy.³⁷ The question of whether Laudianism was indeed innovatory or simply about the rigorous enforcement of discipline is, to a certain extent, less relevant in the case of Ireland, since both Laudian ideological innovations and Laudian, even ‘normal’ English discipline were equally shocking for the Irish ecclesiastical polity. It is possible to debate in relation to the Church of England whether there ever really was a Calvinist consensus under James, and whether the Laudian reforms were drawing upon a broader English via media religious tradition. No such doubts arise for the Church of Ireland, which, as has been seen, had been steered in a firmly Calvinist direction from the 1590s onwards. As a result, Ussher—and most of the ministers of the Church of Ireland—were firmly and instinctively opposed to all of the Laudian concerns (bar the enhancement of the status—and especially the income—of the clergy). The Laudian interest in order was particularly alarming because of the way in which the Church of Ireland had avoided the creation of an elaborate system of ecclesiastical discipline to enforce conformity such as operated in England. Add to this lax latitudinarianism the further heady mixture of poverty, disorganization, Calvinism, and the Church of Ireland’s sense of its own independence, and it is hardly surprising that the advent of Wentworth and Bramhall in July stirred up confrontation and conflict. The question was to what extent would Laud and Charles insist on conformity, and how would they go about enforcing it? Rough answers soon began to emerge. On 10 August 1633 Bramhall reported to Laud that he doubted ‘whether the clergy be very orthodox, and could wish both the articles and canons of the Church of England were established here by act of parliament or state; that as we live under one king, so we might both in doctrine and discipline observe an uniformity’.³⁸ This was precisely what Laud wanted to hear. The campaign in England during the 1620s and 1630s to interpret the Thirty-Nine Articles by means of the Lambeth and Irish Articles had clearly identified the Irish confession as Calvinist, and alerted Laud and his allies to the dangerous implications of confessional pluralism.³⁹ And if Ireland was to be brought into line with England by adopting the Thirty-Nine Articles, then it would also be necessary to impose the 1604 canons, to provide the disciplinary structure to enforce doctrinal uniformity. This, then, was one strand to Wentworth, Laud, and Bramhall’s religious policy. The other major element was to transform the ecclesiastical and theological culture of the Church of Ireland by tackling its chief seminary. The role of Trinity as the driving force behind the aggressively Calvinist culture of ³⁷ Capern, ‘Caroline Church’. ³⁸ BW, i, p. lxxx; CSPI, 1633–47, 16–17; WWM, 20, p. 149, Item 6; on 31 January 1634 Wentworth endorsed the need for the English canons: SL, i. 188. ³⁹ In case they needed reminding, Francis Rous in 1633 restated the case that the English articles should be interpreted by the Irish: Francis Rous, The truth of three things (London, [1633]) 30–1.

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the Church of Ireland hardly needs stressing here. But by the early 1630s, it was suffering from internal political divisions and weak leadership. This gave the new regime in Ireland their opportunity. Trinity College, Wentworth reported, was ‘extreamly out of order’: ‘religion and civility in that kingdom will’, he judged, ‘much depend upon the reformation of that place.’⁴⁰

C O N VO C AT I O N : C O N F E S S I O N A N D C A N O N S When Parliament met in July 1634, convocation, consisting of an upper house of bishops and a lower house of clerical representatives, was summoned as well. Encouraged by his initial impression of Ussher—‘I have a great beleefe in the piety of that man’, and Ussher’s disavowal of the 1615 articles, the Lord Deputy was happy to ‘repose . . . secure upon the Primate’ to manage convocation and secure adoption of the English confession and canons.⁴¹ Laud was less sanguine, concerned that the new Lord Deputy’s policy of being ‘thorough . . . for the King and the church’ might alienate the Primate. As early as November 1633 he complained to Wentworth that his regular letters from Ussher had dried up ‘since your Lordship went thither’.⁴² Further tension with Ussher arose over the lengthy row with the earl of Cork over the positioning of the Boyle family tomb in St Patrick’s Cathedral. With its echoes of the altar controversy—Laud objected to the location of the tomb in the chancery as blocking the view of the altar—and its symbolic importance as an assertion of the Lord Deputy’s power not only over one of the leading new English Calvinist settlers, but also over the one who had accumulated the most church property, this was a complicated affair. Cork enlisted the support of Ussher and the Archbishop of Dublin in Ireland, and Lord Cottington, the Treasurer, in England, but in the end Wentworth’s power triumphed and he was forced to move the monument.⁴³ Typically, though, Ussher, when confronted by Wentworth over his support for Cork, gave way and, according to the Lord Deputy, admitted his error, attributing it to the pressure which Cork had applied.⁴⁴ Some hint of Ussher’s sensitivities was evident just before Parliament met in July 1634, when Ussher got Wentworth finally to settle the dispute over precedence between Armagh and Dublin, establishing once and for all that ⁴⁰ LW, vii. 248; SL, i. 188. ⁴¹ WWM, 6, p. 28; SL, i. 343; Laud replied: ‘I am glad the primate disavows those articles and likes the confirmation of ours’: LW, vii. 75. ⁴² LW, vi. 332; Laud was reassured by Ussher’s explanation that he had been away travelling in Ulster, and by Ussher’s insistance that Laud take on the position of chancellor of Trinity College: LW, vii. 57; UW, xv. 572, 574. ⁴³ Clodagh Tait, ‘Colonising Memory: Manipulations of Burial and Commemoration in the Career of the ‘‘Great’’ Earl of Cork’, PRIA, sect. C, 101 (2001), 126–32. ⁴⁴ WWM, 6, p. 37.

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the former was primate of all Ireland. That, however, was not the limit of his constitutional ambitions. As he explained to Laud the following August, he had also sought to establish that the Archbishop of Armagh had anciently been ¨ that ecclesiastical Ubermensch, a patriarch. Appealing to Laud’s vanity, but also buttressing the claims of the Irish church to independence, he suggested that it would be worth considering ‘whether it would not make somewhat for the dignity of his majesties kingdoms and the splendour of our church that we should have not only metropolitans, but patriarchs also within ourselves as in the daies of old.’⁴⁵ Laud’s fears about the Primate were confirmed on the last day of the first session when Bramhall discovered that it was proposed not just to establish the English Articles, but also to confirm the Irish without informing or consulting the Lord Deputy. After ‘some little trouble’, Bramhall reported that it had been agreed to ‘set up the English without any noise or show of retracting the former’—i.e. to leave the Irish Articles in limbo neither confirmed nor rescinded, and establish the Thirty-Nine as the Irish confession.⁴⁶ Ussher initially thought that this would be acceptable, but in December Wentworth reported that ‘upon our meeting againe this session he seemes to be more diffident, pretending that hee finds the lower house of convocation more averse then he had imagined, that they presse the articles of Irelande’.⁴⁷ Wentworth’s response was typical: first, he said he would ‘speake lowd amongst them’, and if this failed he would simply impose the English Articles by Act of State.⁴⁸ Tempers were evidently fraying: Bramhall and Wentworth felt there had been an attempt to catch them unawares and slip through confirmation of the Irish Articles, whilst the members of convocation were equally irritated at Bramhall and another recently arrived English minister, James Croxton, who were seen as responsible for trying to impose the English confession and canons.⁴⁹ Alerted by Ussher’s hesitancy, Wentworth again focused his attention on convocation, from which he had been distracted by parliamentary affairs. What he found horrified him. The lower house had set up a committee under Dean George Andrews of Limerick which had considered the second item on the Lord Deputy’s agenda, going through the English canons, marking each one as either ‘A’ (approbandi —for approval) or ‘D’ (deliberandi —for consideration). The committee had gone on to draft a set of Irish canons, including one that endorsed the Irish Articles, which it was to present to the House that afternoon. Wentworth stopped all further discussion, ordered convocation to leave aside the Irish and approve the Thirty-Nine Articles immediately, charging Ussher with the task of drafting a canon which committed the Irish church to the English formulary.⁵⁰ ⁴⁵ ⁴⁷ ⁴⁹ ⁵⁰

Corresp. Ussher–Laud, 16–17. ⁴⁶ HMC, Hastings, iv. 61. WWM, 6, p. 116. ⁴⁸ Ibid. SL, i. 298; Shirley (ed.), Papers Relating to the Church of Ireland, 43 f. SL, i. 342–4; WWM, 20, p. 173.

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Ussher’s draft was revealing: For the manifestation of our agreement with the Church of England in the confession of the same Christian faith . . . we do approve the book of articles of religion agreed . . . in . . . 1562, for the avoyding of diversityes of opinions and for the establishing of consent touching true religion. So that if hereafter any minister shall presume to teache anything contrary to the doctrine delivered therein; upon refusall of the correction of his errour, he shall be deprived of all such ecclesiastical benefices as he doth enjoye.⁵¹

At first sight this reads well. But it is not quite as formidable as it looks. First, it limply ‘approved’ the English Articles, but did not adopt them formally as the Irish confession, nor replace the Irish Articles, allowing the English Articles to be read in the light of the Irish. Second, though the punishment was clear, the crime was the rather general one of teaching contrary to their doctrine. This was a vital concession: it was specifically designed to appeal to the godly, with distinct echoes of the similar distinction in the 1571 English Act requiring subscription to the doctrine of the Thirty-Nine Articles, which puritans read as excluding those articles dealing with discipline and church government. Third, it made no provision at all for ministers formally to subscribe to the articles when ordained or admitted to a benefice—the crucial weapon against puritans in England.⁵² And finally and uncoincidentally, it was very similar to the decree of the previous convocation which enforced the 1615 articles.⁵³ In short, the draft preserved the essential difference between the Church of Ireland and its English counterpart—the disciplinary flexibility and inclusiveness which had enabled Travers and Temple to become provosts of Trinity, and the Scots presbyterians to be accommodated in Down and Connor. More than that, it suggested that what may have begun as a pragmatic solution to the shortage of clergy had, by 1634, become a principled tolerance, approved, by Ussher as part of the Church’s independent institutional identity. This suggests that Ussher masterminded or was complicit in a plot to secure the confirmation of the 1615 articles and preserve the disciplinary laxity of the Church of Ireland. Wentworth, though he accepted that the evidence pointed in this direction, was nevertheless reluctant to follow the obvious logical path of blaming the Primate. It is of course possible to argue that Ussher simply underestimated the scale of opposition in convocation, and overestimated his ⁵¹ WWM, 20, p. 172 (in Ussher’s hand); Ussher’s draft was, arguably, less draconian than that proposed by the committee working on the English canons: TCD MS 1038, fol. 112v. ⁵² 13 Eliz. C.12 § 1 [England]; Kenneth Fincham, ‘Clerica Conformity from Whitgift to Laud’, in Peter Lake and M. C. Questier (eds.), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560–1660 (Woodbridge Boydell Press, 2000), 131; E. J. Bicknell, A Theological Introduction to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, 2nd edn (London: Longmans, Green, 1947), 25–7; Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, 137; Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London: Methuen, 1967), 117. The distinction between doctrinal and disciplinary articles in confessions of faith was familiar to Ussher and his friends: UW, xv. 145. ⁵³ Articles of religion . . . 1615, sig. E3v.

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capacity to control it. His change of heart about ditching the Irish Articles, he explained to Wentworth, was because he ‘found the lower house of convocation more averse then he imagined’, whilst his conciliatory draft of the canon was designed to get it through a hostile convocation.⁵⁴ Alternatively it could be put down to the Primate’s accommodating nature—what Bedell had neatly described some years previously as Ussher’s tendency to be ‘too open eared to suggestions’.⁵⁵ Wentworth, ever-charitable towards what he saw as the saintly Ussher, supported this explanation, suggesting that the Primate had perhaps been led on by more radical clergy, or, more simply, was weak. The reality was, of course, that Wentworth had failed to understand the nature and depth of the Calvinist consensus in Ireland, which included both Ussher and those whom Laud would have dismissed as dangerous nonconformists. As a result, Wentworth was left with the idea of the Primate as being pressured by more radical fellow clergy: ‘the truth is’, he explained to Laud, ‘I find there are some puritan correspondents of his, that infuse these necessities into his head, beside a popular disposition, which inclines him to a desire of pleasing all, the sure way I think never to please a man’s self.’⁵⁶ Laud was more cynical (or realistic?), believing that from the beginning the untrustworthy Ussher, for all his reassurances to Wentworth, had been wedded to the Irish Articles, and had indeed intended to present the Lord Deputy with a fait accompli.⁵⁷ Wentworth half-agreed: ‘It is very true that for all the Primate’s silence, it was not possible but he knew how near they were to have brought in those articles of Ireland . . . and certainly would have been content I had been surprised. But he is so learned a prelate, and so good a man, as I do beseech your grace it may never be imputed unto him.’⁵⁸ In a significant indication of the importance of Ussher, Laud obliged his friend: ‘since you desire it, it shall not be imputed to the Primate.’⁵⁹ When informing the King about what had happened, Laud obediently concealed the role of Ussher.⁶⁰ Wentworth, having grasped the dangerous implications of Ussher’s draft, immediately rewrote it. Faced with a stentorian Lord Deputy, convocation caved in and passed his draft—which was to become the first of the Irish canons—with only two votes against.⁶¹ The new canon as drafted by the Lord Deputy received as well as approved the Thirty-Nine Articles, punished with excommunication anyone who held ‘that any of those articles are in any part superstitious or ⁵⁴ WWM 6, p.116; SL, i. 344. There was strong support in both houses for the Irish—according to Bernard, who was a member of convocation; all but two of the bishops were in favour of receiving the IA anew, whilst in the lower house, all agreed, bar seven: Bernard, Judgement (1658), 105–6. ⁵⁵ Charles McNeill (ed.), The Tanner Letters (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1993), 78. ⁵⁶ SL, i. 381. ⁵⁷ LW, vi. 396–7; vii. 98; SL, i. 329. ⁵⁸ SL, i. 343–4. ⁵⁹ LW, vii. 98. ⁶⁰ Ibid. 99. In response to further pressing from Laud, Wentworth did later confess that Ussher had been behind the effort to impose the Irish articles: LW, vii. 117–18; WWM 6, p. 179. ⁶¹ Shirley (ed.), Papers Relating to the Church of Ireland, 43–4.

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erroneous’, and, most importantly, insisted that ministers be willing to subscribe to all of the articles.⁶² The nature of the clash between the two Churches becomes more evident when the objections of the committee of the lower house to the English canons are examined in more detail.⁶³ The committee redrafted five English canons and marked twenty-eight others for further consideration.⁶⁴ Some of the canons to which the committee objected did indeed need to be looked at because they were inappropriate for the particular conditions in Ireland—the principle ‘that only such canons as were fitt to be transplanted and agreeable to the soyle should be removed hither’.⁶⁵ But in the vast majority of cases the reasons for the objections were that the Irish church wanted to retain its relaxed attitude towards conformity. Thus English canon 36—the key weapon of bishops against puritans, since it required ministers on ordination and institution to subscribe to the royal supremacy, Prayer Book, and Thirty-Nine Articles—was one of the ones noted for further consideration; what kind of reconsideration was indicated by the committee’s redraft of English canon 5 (‘Impugners of the articles of religion established in the Church of England censured’), which removed all reference to the need to subscribe to the articles. Laud concluded: ‘They are in no sort friends to subscription. It is a wonder what kind of acknowledgement of conformity they would have.’⁶⁶ The answer, of course, was as little as possible. Elsewhere, the committee’s concerns reflected other classic puritan issues: kneeling at communion and confession; the wearing of surplices and copes; the desire to keep the Sabbath in a godly manner; hostility to holy days, the litany, and the use of the cross in baptism; the legality of conventicles within the church; prescribed prayers before sermons; and finally, a subtle but very important change to English canon 13, where the requirement to follow the Prayer Book without either ‘diminishing . . . or adding’ to it was watered down by the simple but ⁶² Constitutions, and canons ecclesiasticall (Dublin, 1635), canon 1; Gerald Bray (ed.), The Anglican Canons 1529–1947 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998), 488. ⁶³ For editions and analyses of the canons, see: Constitutions, and canons ecclesiastical; Edward Bullingbrooke, Ecclesiastical law, 2 vols. (Dublin, 1770); Lancelot Studdert (ed.), Constitutions and canons ecclesiastical (Dublin, 1864); Bray (ed.), Anglican canons, pp. lxvi–lxviii, 485–531; John McCafferty, ‘ ‘‘God Bless your Free Church of Ireland’’: Wentworth, Laud, Bramhall and the Irish Convocation of 1634’, in J. F. Merritt (ed.), The Political World of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, 1621–1641 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 198 ff.; I am particularly indebted to the last mentioned in what follows. ⁶⁴ TCD MS 1038, fols. 112v–117r. ⁶⁵ John Vesey (ed.), The works of the most reverend father in God, John Bramhall (Dublin, 1676), sig. k1r. English canons 28 (which assumed that neighbouring parishes had ministers to administer communion) and 41 (seeking to stamp out pluralism for benefices with cure), both noted for further consideration by the committee ( TCD MS 1038, fols. 115v, 116v), were indeed problematic in Ireland: both were amended in the final Irish canons, nos. 63 and 36. The Irish canons as finally adopted also had new canons to deal with specific Irish problems: canons 23, 24, 25, 34; the need for separate canons to take account of Irish conditions was in the end accepted even by Laud: WWM, 6, p. 143; HMC, Hastings, iv. 66; LW, vii. 109–10. ⁶⁶ TCD 1038, fol. 116r.

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significant ploy of leaving out the word ‘diminishing’, thus giving Scots-Irish presbyterians the opportunity of continuing to edit the ordination service.⁶⁷ Again, Laud provided the apposite comment on the objections to canon 18, ‘reverence and attention to be used within the church in time of divine service’: ‘The rules of decency in this canon can disrelish none but Genevissing spirits.’⁶⁸ If Ussher had been ambiguous with Wentworth in his attitude to the Irish Articles, he was blunt in his resistance to the idea of imposing the English canons. The Primate, according to a bemused Wentworth, was ‘hugely against’ accepting them verbatim, threatening to resign his see rather than let the Church of Ireland ‘become subject to the Church of England, as the province of York is to that of Canterbury. Needs, forsooth, we must be a church of ourselves.’⁶⁹ Given Ussher’s normally deferential and self-effacing behaviour in the face of royal authority, his outright resistance to the King’s deputy is at first rather surprising. But, as with the toleration of Catholicism or the rise of Arminianism, there were certain issues of principle which inspired Ussher to public defiance: the independence of the Church of Ireland was clearly another such shibboleth. Though he got his way, it was not quite that straightforward. Laud and Bramhall were also happy to draft new Irish canons, since they wanted to improve on the English ones.⁷⁰ The separate Irish canons were only composed ‘with much adoe’, as Bramhall and Laud fought a tense and intricate battle with Ussher and the Irish convocation to shape them and ensure that they reflected their respective preferences.⁷¹ The final product can best be described as a closely fought draw: ‘some . . . canons have in some things mended the English, as well as in some others fallen short’.⁷² Laud and Bramhall secured some of their theological and disciplinary agenda, even using the opportunity of drafting new canons to improve on those of 1604. Thus clergy were warned against the public airing of controversial theological points, whilst the Laudian preference for the sacraments over the word was reflected in the removal of the requirement to place the Ten Commandments on the east wall and the insistence that a silver chalice be used for communion, with—a significant Laudian concern—the table placed at the east end.⁷³ Their major achievement was to get through the addition to English canon 22, which reinstated (alongside general public) the possibility of private auricular confession, ⁶⁷ English canons 18 and 27, TCD MS 1038, fols. 114v, 115r; canons 24 and 25, TCD MS 1038, fols. 114v, 115r; canon 13, TCD MS 1038, fol. 113r; canon 17, TCD MS 1038, fol. 113r; canon 15, TCD MS 1038, fol. 14v; canon 30, TCD MS 1038, fol. 115v; canon 11, TCD MS 1038, fol. 114r; canon 55, TCD MS 1038, fol. 117r; canon 14, TCD MS 1038, fol. 113r. For a typical list of puritan objections to the English canons, see [Cornelius Burgess], Reasons shewing the necessity of reformation (London, 1660), 57–63. ⁶⁸ TCD MS 1038, fol. 114v. ⁶⁹ SL, i. 381; WWM, 6, p. 163. ⁷⁰ HMC, Hastings, iv. 66; Huntington Library, San Marino, MS HA 14048. ⁷¹ WWM, 6, p. 163. ⁷² HMC, Hastings, iv. 67–8. ⁷³ Addition to English canon 45 in Irish canon 9, and the new Irish canon 12; compare English canon 82 with Irish canon 94.

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a surprising achievement given the strongly Calvinist assembly with which they were dealing.⁷⁴ On other issues, though, they failed to get their way. English canon 18, that bˆete noire of nonconformists, required two things which convocation refused to accept—bowing at the name of Jesus and kneeling for prayers, litany, and confession (‘they have no more joints in their knees for that then an elephant’, was Wentworth’s quaint zoological explanation). English canon 30, concerning the use of the sign of the cross in baptism, a notable concern of the puritans at the Hampton Court conference in 1604, did not appear in the Irish canons.⁷⁵ The requirements for university students and fellows to wear the surplice, and for cathedral clergy to wear copes when celebrating communion, were also dropped. Nor did Bramhall and Laud prevent (or notice?) a few other minor concessions to puritan concerns.⁷⁶ The fact that the Irish Articles had not been rescinded in Irish canon 1 was seen by Ussher as a significant concession. As he explained to Ward after the end of convocation: ‘the articles of religion agreed upon in our former synod, anno 1615, we lett stand as they did before; but for the manifesting of our agreement with the Church of England, we have receaved and approved your articles also.’⁷⁷ Ussher had no objection to the English Articles—in his speech to Parliament in 1621, and his response to Malone’s challenge in 1624, he had happily endorsed them.⁷⁸ But, as Parr delicately put it, Ussher believed that Irish Articles ‘did only contain the doctrine of the Church of England more fully’.⁷⁹ In fact, of course, as Pym and Prynne realized, the English Articles had a rather different meaning when read in conjunction with the Irish.⁸⁰ And Ussher was determined that they should be read in that way, since, according to both ⁷⁴ Irish canon 19; for Ussher’s views, see TCD MS 793, fol. 139r. Compare Ussher’s verdict on auricular confession as ‘a mere babble; it were better to cry out our sins at the high cross, than to confess in a priest’s ear’, with those of Bramhall on general confession: ‘it cannot be denied that our protestant confessions are for the most part too general’: UW, xiii. 221; BW, v. 160. On the contrasting emphases of Calvinists and Laudians in relation to confession, see Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 69–70. ⁷⁵ S. B. Babbage, Puritanism and Richard Bancroft (London: SPCK, 1962), 81–6. ⁷⁶ LW, vii. 132; WWM 6, p. 163; English canons 16 and 17, regulating universities, were both omitted, though Laud remedied the situation when he drafted new statutes for Trinity; English canon 24 refers to copes, the nearest Irish equivalent, canon 7, only to surplices. Amongst the minor provisions: Irish canon 7 omits the references to celebrating on Sunday and holy day evenings from English canon 14; the defence of the use of the cross in baptism in English canon 30 was dropped (for puritan objections to these provisions, see [Burgess], Reasons, 59–60). ⁷⁷ McNeill (ed.), Tanner Letters, 113; UW, xvi. 9. ⁷⁸ UW, ii. 421; ‘The doctrine that here I take upon me to defend . . . is that which by public authority is professed in the Church of England, and comprised in the book of articles agreed upon in the synod held at London in the year MDLXII’: UW, iii, p. xii. Bernard, Clavi, 61–2, confuses Ussher’s and Wentworth’s drafts of canon 1. ⁷⁹ Parr, Life, 42. ⁸⁰ See above, pp. 137–8. The Laudians in England regularly resorted to the argument that their doctrinal or liturgical innovations were lawful because they were not specifically excluded by the Thirty-Nine Articles: Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 72; retaining the Irish Articles would have severely limited their room for manoeuvre.

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his chaplain biographers, after the 1634 convocation he required that clergy on ordination should subscribe to both formularies, a practice they claimed was also followed by other Irish bishops up to 1641.⁸¹ How are we to characterize these disputes? Simple dichotomies by themselves will not suffice. Wentworth sought to portray it as a battle between orthodoxy and extreme nonconformity. The Irish convocation, he complained, was driven by ‘a contradictory spirit of puritanisme’; its behaviour over the canons, he claimed, smacked of ‘the fraternities and conventicles of Amsterdam’.⁸² Wentworth and Laud both worried that the dispute would be turned into a cause célèbre by English puritans. ‘My stirring herein will be strangely reported,’ he joked uneasily to Laud, especially amongst the ‘Prynns, Pyms and Bens, with the rest of that generation’.⁸³ Laud was concerned that his religious policies in Ireland would be used against him in any future English parliament—a fear that was, as it turned out, thoroughly justified.⁸⁴ Godly principles were undoubtedly one element behind the opposition which Wentworth and Bramhall ran into—as was apparent when the canons were enforced in Down and Connor after 1634, the Church of Ireland contained not just puritans but fully fledged presbyterians.⁸⁵ But, as Ussher and his friends had repeatedly complained, the English authorities also used the accusation of puritanism to tar even their conformist adversaries. In fact, to portray the Church of Ireland as simply puritan confuses a willingness to tolerate with the thing tolerated.⁸⁶ The strength of the opposition to the English Articles and canons in convocation cannot be put down solely to extreme puritanism or separatism as Wentworth suggested; rather, it also drew on more mainstream concerns amongst conformist Calvinist clergy about the ecclesiology and the independence of the Irish church which, it is true, allowed puritans to be seamlessly incorporated, but did not make those using such arguments ipso facto puritan. Thus the two leading defenders of the Irish Articles were the only Irish-born and Trinity-educated members of the episcopal bench in 1634, Ussher and his successor in Meath, Anthony Martin: Calvinists, but not in an English sense puritans or separatists.⁸⁷ ⁸¹ Parr, Life, 42; Bernard (ed.), Judgement (1658), 120–2; Vesey (ed.), Works of Bramhall, sig. i2v; but see BW, v. 81, where Bramhall claims that if anyone had been caught doing this they would have bene punished. Ultimately, the Irish Articles fell into disuse; though pedantic Free Presbyterians enjoy claiming that the Church of Ireland still believes that the pope is Antichrist. ⁸² WWM, 6, p. 123; SL, i. 343. ⁸³ SL, i. 344; Bens = Sir Benjamin Rudyerd; LW, vii. 118; see the comments of Prynne and Baillie below, p. 229. ⁸⁴ LW, vii. 280; see Julia Merritt, ‘Power and Communication: Thomas Wentworth and Government at a Distance during the Personal Rule, 1629–1635’, in eadem (ed.), Political World of Wentworth, 125. ⁸⁵ Alan Ford, ‘The Origins of Irish Dissent’, in Kevin Herlihy (ed.), The Religion of Irish Dissent 1650–1800 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1996), 23. ⁸⁶ Alan Ford, ‘Church of Ireland 1558–1641: A Puritan Church?’, in Ford (ed.), As by Law Established, 68. ⁸⁷ BW, v. 80–1.

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But the fact that a new English cleric such as George Andrews, defender of the Irish Articles and chair of the committee that vetted the English canons, who had first arrived in Ireland in the early seventeenth century, had become committed to preserving the independence of the Church of Ireland was even more suggestive.⁸⁸ The strength of feeling amongst the Irish clergy, and the degree to which they had assimilated Ussher’s ecclesiastical vision of an independent Irish church is apparent in the later account of convocation given by Bramhall’s first biographer, the Irish-born Bishop of Limerick (and later Archbishop of Tuam), John Vesey. When Bramhall proposed the adoption of the English canons, To this the Primate opposed himself with great earnestness, and some think he had reason of his side; for it lookt like betraying the privileges of a nationall church, which his Grace was by his place to defend . . . And if this which was proposed, were allowed, we might fear in time to have a canon obtained in the church, like Poynings Act . . . in the state, giving the Church of England such a superintendence over us, that nothing should be made law here that were not first allowed there . . . that it was convenient some discrepancy should appear, if it were but to declare our αὐταρχια, and to express our sense of rites and ceremonies, that there is no necessity of the same in all churches that are independent, as these are, one of another: that Rome and Millan might have different canons . . . yet the same faith, and charity and communion . . . The Bishop of Derry not easily moved from what he had undertaken, said, they would not more resigne their privileges and authority in receiving of their canons, than their faith in the articles . . . this discourse is said to have caused some heate, but the lower house having debated the same subject and desiring to be admitted to a conference gave some time to a conference gave some time of reflexion and consideration. When they were admitted, the Primate desired them to divide as they stood affected, and the paucity of those that appeared for the English canons, giving his grace some inward contentment, which he could not choose but express by a smile, the Bishop of Derry perceiving him pleased with the disproportion, said, non aestimandi sunt numero sed pondere.⁸⁹

Though Ussher had the weight of numbers, Bramhall, whatever about the weight of argument, had something much more crucial, the backing of the Lord Deputy. Wentworth was now no longer relying upon Ussher but on his former chaplain to see business through convocation.⁹⁰ December 1634 thus marks a turning point, when de facto responsibility for running the Church of Ireland passed from Ussher to Bramhall, who ‘was now primate in everything but name’.⁹¹ ⁸⁸ Wentworth, unsurprisingly, had a low opinion of Andrews: WWM, 6, p. 100. ⁸⁹ Vesey (ed.), Works of Bramhall, sig. k1r: Vesey gained his information about what went on in convocation from a member of the lower house, Archdeacon Price of Kilmore: ibid., sig. i2v. ⁹⁰ BW, v. As Vesey put it: ‘the business [of drawing up the canons] was chiefly committed to the Bishop of Derry . . . his hand being generally imployed in drawing up every thing, wherein any knot or difficulty gave opposition’: Vesey (ed.), Works of Bramhall, sig. k1r. ⁹¹ Jack Cunningham, ‘The Levitical Candle: A Comparison of the Theology and Politics of Two Leading Ecclesiastics, James Usher (1581–1656) and John Bramhall (1594–1663)’, PhD thesis, University of Ulster, 2003, 452.

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When Ussher, exhausted by convocation, retired to his episcopal residence at Termonfeckin near Drogheda in 1635, Wentworth worried that he had left in a huff. ‘My Lord Primate retired to Drogheda with a resolution, they say, to come noe more at [sic] Dublin as I believe he hath not digested the receaving the articles of England.’⁹² Ussher fuelled the suspicion by asking Bramhall to draw up the new ecclesiastical high commission so that his presence was not essential.⁹³ By October, Bishop Bedell of Kilmore had already noted that Bramhall ‘seemed to some to overtop my L. Primate here, although some think that was by direction from others’.⁹⁴ Laud was concerned but unrepentant. In November 1635 he wrote to Wentworth: I have likewise acquainted his Majesty with the primate’s retiring to Drogheda. He likes it not. I have since spoken with his agent here, and do not find that it is with any resolution to come no more at Dublin. And God forbid it should; for you want not friends that would say you had driven him away from the King’s service . . . The king hath commanded me to write unto him, which I have now done. And if the Articles of England be the cause of it I had rather loose him than them.⁹⁵

By January of the following year, Wentworth was able to tell Laud that the report of Ussher’s retirement was just a rumour spread by the Irish friars—the Primate was simply economizing by remaining in Termonfeckin after a long and expensive stay in Dublin.⁹⁶ Laud was relieved and, once reassured about the Primate’s motivation, not unhappy that Ussher was out of the way in Louth.⁹⁷ Ussher too was content, happy to be back amongst those old friends, his books, and his manuscripts.⁹⁸ He resumed his interrupted correspondence with the European republic of letters, and took up again his researches into the history of the Christian church in Britain and Ireland which was to produce in 1639 his Britannicarum ecclesiarum antiquitates.⁹⁹ The 1634 Convocation has been described as ‘a key moment in the history of the Church of Ireland’ which ‘helped determine its future and the future of the Protestant reformation in Ireland’.¹⁰⁰ It has been seen as part of an official ecclesiastical policy in the 1630s which sought to ‘achieve one uniform order of religion within the three kingdoms’ through the exercise of English hegemony.¹⁰¹ Though some of the statements of Laud and Wentworth would seem to support ⁹² UW, xvi. 9; WWM, 6, pp. 271–2. ⁹³ HMC, Hastings, iv. 70; Huntington Library, San Marino, MS HA 15950. ⁹⁴ McNeill (ed.), Tanner Letters, 115; Shuckburgh, Bedell, 338. ⁹⁵ LW, vii. 212–13. ⁹⁶ WWM, 6, p. 296. By February 1636 Ussher had another reason to stay away from Dublin—he was sick and confined to his house until further notice: Huntington Library, San Marino, MS HA 15954, briefly calendared in HMC, Hastings, iv. 71. ⁹⁷ LW, vii. 121, 235. ⁹⁸ UW, xvi. 9; McNeill (ed.), Tanner Letters, 113. ⁹⁹ UW, xvi. 9; see his letters to Ludovic de Dieu and Constantine L’Empereur, both of whom had written to him enclosing a book two years previously and not had a reply: UW, xv. 589–90; xvi, 11–21. ¹⁰⁰ McCafferty, ‘ ‘‘God Bless Your Free Church of Ireland’ ’’, 205. ¹⁰¹ Conrad Russell, ‘The British Problem and the English Civil War’, History, 72 (1987), 399.

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the idea that they were looking to integrate the two Churches—‘I will publikly procure a conformity in all to the Church of England’, Wentworth claimed in 1636—reality, however, was rather different and somewhat less momentous.¹⁰² As we have seen, Wentworth and Laud worked, albeit often unwillingly and ungraciously, through the independent Irish convocation, and had, as a result, to compromise on numerous issues. They may have set out looking for uniformity, but they soon pragmatically settled for something less—‘congruity’ may be a more accurate description.¹⁰³ But even if elements of Irish individuality remained, the effect, it has been claimed, was little different from uniformity. This, it is argued, was the end of the ‘free’ Church of Ireland: the terms Church of Ireland and Church of England were now used interchangeably, as both were subsumed into an Anglican via media. Ussher was the last of his kind—his ‘nightmare had come true—the identification with the Church of England became increasingly complete, culminating in the obliteration of all but the faintest marks of autonomy in the Act of Union of 1800’.¹⁰⁴ It is, though, important to note what had actually happened in 1634–5. The independence of the Church of Ireland had not been overthrown. Laud and Wentworth worked within the existing framework: they did not seek to subject the Church of Ireland to Canterbury or impose an ecclesiastical Poynings’ law. What they did was subtler but no less effective: they forced the Church to exercise its independence to bring itself into closer alignment with the Church of England. They were able to do this because they had identified and refocused the key sources of authority and thereby reined in its freedom of action. Power, in the Church of Ireland, ultimately came from the supreme governor, the English monarch. In the past, that power had often been exercised indirectly, through the Lord Deputy and his privy council, and through the episcopal leadership of the Church of Ireland, or had been diffused across a range of interests, such as the various English and Irish patronage networks which competed to influence the appointment of bishops. As a result there was a considerable scope for royal instructions and intentions to be deflected and moulded to suit the interests of those exercising power in the Irish polity. In addition, the simple facts of ignorance and distance had often insulated the Church of Ireland from overly close English scrutiny. As Ussher spotted in 1613, when warning Trinity not to allow its new statutes to be drafted in England, the key point was to retain power in Ireland by keeping English decision-makers in the dark. This was not as implausible an aim in the early seventeenth century as it is now, when ¹⁰² WWM 7, p. 2. ¹⁰³ J. S. Morrill, ‘A British Patriarchy? Ecclesiastical Imperialism under the Early Stuarts’, in Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (eds.), Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 236; McCafferty, ‘ ‘‘God Bless Your Free Church of Ireland’’ ’, 207. ¹⁰⁴ McCafferty, ‘ ‘‘God Bless Your Free Church of Ireland’’ ’, 207.

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communication across the Irish Sea is almost instant. Instructions sent from London could take days, in bad weather weeks to arrive in Dublin.¹⁰⁵ As late as 1629 William Bedell had still not encountered the Irish Articles of 1615.¹⁰⁶ Other English bishops and MPs only discovered their existence as a result of their featuring in parliamentary discussions in the later 1620s. Blair and Livingstone survived in Down and Connor through the 1620s despite their nonconformity. It was only discovered some ten years later when Leslie began to feed information about them to Dublin and London and the Church of Ireland was finally forced to take action. All this was ended by Wentworth and Laud, who not only managed to divert and concentrate power over the Church of Ireland into their hands, they were able to ensure, by their comprehensive interchange of information, that Irish freedom of manoeuvre based on English distance and ignorance was largely eliminated. At every stage in the decision-making process, outside influence, and, most especially, Irish influence, was excluded. Wentworth fed information directly to Laud; but ecclesiastical affairs did not then go to the Irish committee of the English privy council; instead Laud took them straight to the King, often in private. He then relayed royal decisions to Wentworth, who entrusted them for implementation to Bramhall, the ‘under instrument’.¹⁰⁷ Crucial to the maintenance and extension of this newly concentrated power over the Church of Ireland was control over episcopal appointments. When Ussher first began corresponding with Laud, they, together with Lord Deputy Falkland, cooperated as equals in filling important positions often with clergy who had lengthy experience of the Irish church.¹⁰⁸ The appointment of Wentworth, and the focusing of power in the hands of himself and Laud, effectively removed Ussher from the equation. He still occasionally proposed candidates, but his suggestions were increasingly ignored, until eventually he gave up making them.¹⁰⁹ The extent to which Ussher had become an outsider to the process of appointment was evident when Laud and the Lord Deputy punished Dean Andrews for his role in criticizing the English canons by appointing him to the miserably small see of Kildare.¹¹⁰ Unaware of the subtext, Ussher, who had ¹⁰⁵ Bríd McGrath, ‘The Irish Elections of 1640–1641’, in C. F. Brady and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds.), British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 190. ¹⁰⁶ McNeill (ed.), Tanner Letters, 89. ¹⁰⁷ LW, vii. 65–6; WWM, 8, p. 17 (the phrase is Wentworth’s). Even when Bramhall became Bishop of Derry in 1634, it was made clear that he would continue to live in Dublin and serve as administrator of the Church: LW, vi. 375–6. Laud too was clear that the Irish church was now in the hands of the King, himself, and Wentworth: LW, vi. 376. ¹⁰⁸ See the appointments of Randolph Barlow to Tuam, John Richardson to Ardagh, and the candidacy of Archibald Adair and Lewis Jones (Ussher’s brother-in-law) for various sees; Falkland continued to play an important role even after he returned to England in 1629: UW, xv. 423–4, 450, 527; Corresp. Ussher–Laud, 9–10, 12; National Archives of Ireland, 1A/36/37 (M 2445), pp. 54, 224, 227, 278, 312; BL Add. MS 3827, fol. 151r. ¹⁰⁹ SP 63/252/86, fol. 168r (CSPI, 1625–32, 618), UW, xvi. 36–7. ¹¹⁰ WWM 6, pp. 100, 135; SL, i. 343–4; LW, vi. 98–9; HMC, Hastings, iv. 65.

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supported Andrews’ candidature, was, Wentworth laughingly reported, delighted with the appointment.¹¹¹ As Ussher’s influence declined, the nature of candidates appointed to the bench altered. Wentworth and Charles both had strong views about episcopal appointments. Even before he came over to Ireland, the Lord Deputy had discussed the criteria for appointment with his royal master, and when he arrived he insisted that Laud should consult with him first before discussing episcopal appointments with the King.¹¹² Laud responded: ‘For your Lordships desire that I would not offer to ingage his Majesty for such bishoprickes as may fall there till I heare from you, I shall be ready to doe your Lordship all the offices of a frend.’¹¹³ But Laud and Charles clearly preferred candidates from England: as Laud put it, the doctors who must cure the ills of the Irish church ‘are on this side of the sea’; whilst Charles insisted that he would only promote those whom he knew personally and, ideally, had served as his chaplains.¹¹⁴ Given the limited pool of such candidates already serving in the Irish church, the inevitable result of this royal diktat was to decrease the number of bishops with experience of Ireland and increase those appointed fresh from the England who would naturally view the Church of England as normative.¹¹⁵ At the lower levels of the Church, where royal patronage was in the hands of the Lord Dseputy, a similar policy operated: as Strafford explained it at his trial: most of the men he appointed he ‘sent for out of England . . . that being a means, under Gods blessing, to conform that kingdom to the Church of England’.¹¹⁶ This, then, is one of the lasting legacies of Wentworth and Laud’s focus upon the concentration of power over the Church of Ireland: whatever form the constitutional relationship between the Church of Ireland and the Church of England took over the next two hundred years, this simple expedient, of appointing Englishmen without experience of Ireland to Irish sees, was to prove a highly effective method of controlling the danger posed by any independent indigenous ideas. The fact that the English authorities were able to exert such control over the Church of Ireland either directly or indirectly did not, however, mean that the Church’s sense of its distinctiveness disappeared, subsumed into the Hookerian via media. The ecclesiastical relationship between Ireland and England was indeed complex, ambiguous, and many-layered. But throughout the twists and turns, from relative independence in the early seventeenth century, to dependence in the 1630s, to union with the Church of England after 1800, and finally (and very reluctantly) to a complete independence in 1869, Ussher’s historical vision of the Church of Ireland with its Patrician roots persisted and continued to form the basis not only for numerous protestant histories of the Church of Ireland, ¹¹¹ SL, i. 378; Andrews was also oblivious to why he had been promoted, thinking his see as a reward rather than a punishment: ibid. 380. ¹¹² TCD MS 853, fol. 139r. ¹¹³ WWM 8, p. 16. ¹¹⁴ LW, vi. 544; WWM 6, p. 138. ¹¹⁵ Kearney, Strafford in Ireland, 113–15. ¹¹⁶ John Rushworth (ed.), The tryal of Thomas Earl of Strafford (London, 1700), 124.

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but also for a distinct sense of Irish protestant identity and independence.¹¹⁷ For all the efforts of the Crown and the English authorities to control the Irish church through the appointment of bishops, the simple fact that an increasing number of Irish clergy were born in Ireland and educated at Trinity, and that very few bishops were promoted from Irish to English sees, meant that there was always a significant number of the clergy of the Church of Ireland who, whether Irish-born or long-serving Englishmen, saw themselves as more Irish than English, and were determined to defend the distinctiveness of the Church of Ireland against the assumption that it was merely an extension of the Church of England. Hence we have the symbolic significance of figures such as William King, the Irish-born Archbishop of Dublin who was such a dominant intellectual and, for the governing authorities, such an irritating political presence in earlyeighteenth-century Ireland, or, in the nineteenth century, of George Salmon, provost of Trinity College, mathematician, and anti-Catholic controversialist, who did so much to shape the newly independent Church of Ireland.¹¹⁸ Ussher, it turned out, was most decidedly not the last of his kind.

‘ T H AT G R E AT BU G B E A R . . . A R M I N I A N I S M ’ Ussher’s peaceful retirement in Drogheda did not last long. He was soon sucked in to a major dispute in Trinity College, which began innocently, even trivially, in January 1636 as an argument over precedence in the election of fellows, but soon became the focus for an ever-widening series of personal, constitutional, political, and theological battles. The story of the conflict is an immensely complex one, only half-told in the surviving sources.¹¹⁹ Briefly, it derived from the efforts of ¹¹⁷ See below, pp. 277–9. ¹¹⁸ Philip O’Regan, Archbishop William King of Dublin (1650–1729) and the Constitution in Church and State (Dublin: Four Courts, 2000), 301, 309–10; C. J. Fauske, ‘ ‘‘The Angle of St Patrick’s Is Now the Guardian of the Kingdom’’ ’, in idem (ed.), Archbishop William King and the Anglican Irish Context, 1688–1729 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), 11–29; P. McNally, ‘ ‘‘Irish and English Interests’’: National Conflict within the Church of Ireland Episcopate in the Reign of George I’, IHS (1995), 295–314; J. H. Bernard, ‘Dr George Salmon’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 1 (1903–4), 311–15; Julia Tompson, ‘Salmon, George (1819–1904)’, ODNB. ¹¹⁹ The main sources for the dispute are the letters of Wentworth and Laud, and the accounts of the proceedings and petitions in the PRO, SP 63/256/6, fols. 10r–31v (CSPI, 1633–47, 145 fol., but inadequately transcribed), some of which is duplicated in TCD Mun. V/5/1, pp. 51–3. It should be noted that the narrative account at the conclusion of PRO, SP 63/256/6, fols. 27r–30v, though written in the third person, is in fact based very largely upon an account of the dispute written by Chappell, ibid., fols. 24v–26r. What the sources lack is an account of the affair from the perspective of Ussher and the visitors—Ussher’s ‘three sides of a paper in his small, close hand’ detailing the affair to Laud have not survived; The Works of . . . William Laud, ed. James Bliss and William Scott, 7 vols. (London, 1847–60), vi. 464. For a detailed analysis of the dispute, see Alan Ford, ‘ ‘‘That Bugbear Arminianism’’: Archbishop Laud and Trinity College, Dublin’, in C. F. Brady and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds.), British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 135–60.

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Provost Chappell, recently appointed by Laud to Trinity to weed out puritanism and instil discipline, to promote one of his protégés, Arthur Ware, over the heads of three of the junior fellows, Nathaniel Hoyle, Thomas Feasant, and Charles Cullen. Their failure to attend chapel and, in Hoyle’s case, refusal to wear the surplice suggested at the least religious laxity, but, more likely, precisely the puritan principles which Laud and Bramhall had been trying to tackle in the Irish canons.¹²⁰ The three junior fellows resisted Chappell’s efforts to impose Ware, and appealed to the College visitors, prominent Dublin officials and churchmen, led by two bishops, Ussher and Martin.¹²¹ On 18 May 1636 the visitors met the provost and fellows in an acrimonious meeting and decided the issue of precedence in favour of the three petitioners.¹²² Chappell made it quite clear that he had no intention of accepting their decision, while the visitors were equally adamant that their ruling must be enforced. Ussher threatened to have Chappell removed from his position. Chappell pointedly warned that he would appeal to the chancellor.¹²³ There followed a lengthy impasse, as the matter was appealed to ever-higher authorities, the privy council, the Lord Deputy, and finally the King, who referred the matter back to Laud. During August 1636 he examined the case in detail.¹²⁴ Having read a full account by Ussher, he was concerned that the provost was ‘much to blame’.¹²⁵ But Chappell’s faith in his patron was not misplaced. By the end of August, having received representations from Chappell, Laud was convinced that the business was no more than an attempt to discredit the provost.¹²⁶ Arriving at a settlement proved difficult, however. Passions were so high that to vindicate one side would seriously offend the other, and Laud and Wentworth could afford to do neither: Chappell was their carefully chosen agent for the reform of Trinity, whose authority they had to preserve; but, equally, Ussher was the widely respected primate of the Church of Ireland whom they could not afford to alienate. Laud asked Wentworth to broker a settlement, which he managed to do, with difficulty, by April 1637. Each side could claim victory. Cullen was to be made a senior fellow, and the provost promised not to question the decisions of the visitors. On the other hand, Chappell’s protégé, Ware, was admitted senior to Cullen, Feasant was expelled, and the provost was left free to take action against refractory fellows.¹²⁷ Though apparently a compromise, in fact the balance of power had shifted firmly towards Chappell, as he was now free to carry on with the twin thrusts of the reform programme, replacement of personnel and the revision of the College’s statutes. The latter task was taken up by Laud, who revised and rewrote the statutes, and also procured from the King ¹²⁰ ¹²¹ ¹²³ ¹²⁵ ¹²⁷

PRO, SP 63/256/6, fols. 10r–11r, 24v, 27r; TCD Mun. V/5/1, p. 53. PRO, SP 63/256/6, fols. 11r, 24v, 27r. ¹²² Ibid., fol. 13r. Ibid., fols. 12r–15v, 24v–27v. ¹²⁴ LW, vi. 469–70; vii. 267; UW, xvi. 22–3. LW, vi. 464. ¹²⁶ Ibid., vii. 275. HMC, Hastings, iv, 73; WWM, 7, fol. 35r.

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a new charter, both of which were formally accepted by the College on 5 June 1637.¹²⁸ As with the battles in convocation, there is to the Trinity dispute both a personal and an ideological element. From the beginning there were tensions between Ussher, who saw himself as the protector of Trinity’s ethos, and Chappell, chosen to change it, between the Primate, the defender of the Irish Articles, and the provost, one of the strongest advocates of the Thirty-Nine Articles in convocation.¹²⁹ Ussher reportedly labelled Chappell as wilful and his writings childish, and on another occasion was roused to a ‘great passion’ when Chappell appeared before him.¹³⁰ As Wentworth summed it up, ‘It is most sure the Provost is not beloved of Archbishop Usher.’¹³¹ In Laud’s eyes, it had become a ‘grievous and a violent business’, which had generated such heat and passion that it had ‘fallen into a fever’.¹³² He was convinced that the senior fellows of the college (who had been reluctant to elect Chappell in the first place) were now being encouraged by Ussher to block his reforms.¹³³ Wentworth, writing to Laud in August 1636, was reluctant to accept that the fault was Ussher’s. He thought that the violence had more likely come from the Bishop Martin of Meath ‘than from the mild and gentle disposition of the Primate’.¹³⁴ Laud disagreed: ‘howsoever the eagerness of the bishop of Meath may be a moving cause, yet the mild man himself . . . is as warm in this cause as another.’¹³⁵ There were, Laud thought, three main causes of Ussher’s resentment: in the new statutes, Laud had made the visitors subject to the chancellor, thus diminishing their power of independent action; Chappell, when he entered College chapel, bowed before the altar; and ‘the third is, that the provost inclines to Arminianism’.¹³⁶ The spectre of Arminianism had been haunting the Laudian regime in Ireland ever since it had started to implement its policies in convocation and Trinity. As early as November 1634, Laud was informed that Ussher’s brother-in-law, Theophilus Buckworth, the Bishop of Dromore, had complained when on a visit to England that the Archbishop of Canterbury intended to ‘spoile the Colledg’ and ‘had sett up men to maintaine Arminianisme’ in the recent parliament.¹³⁷ Chappell certainly did little to dispel the idea that Laudianism and Arminianism were closely allied. The redoubtable Joshua Hoyle, Professor of Theology at Trinity College and one of the two members of convocation who had voted against the English Articles, gave evidence at Laud’s trial that Chappell was ‘a great Arminian’ who had preached justification by works in Christ Church

¹²⁸ TCD Mun. V/5/1, p. 58. For the text of the Laudian statutes see TCD Mun. V/2, printed in H. H. G. MacDonnell (ed.), Chartae et statuta Collegi . . . Trinitatis . . . juxta Dublin (Dublin, 1844), 29 –30. ¹²⁹ WWM, 6, p. 356. ¹³⁰ PRO SP 63/256/6, fols. 23v, 18r. ¹³¹ WWM, 6, p. 271. ¹³² LW, vii. 279–80. ¹³³ WWM, 6, p. 126; LW, vii. 184. ¹³⁴ SL, ii. 26. ¹³⁵ LW, vii. 275. ¹³⁶ Ibid. 280. ¹³⁷ Ibid. 94–5; WWM 6, pp. 114–15.

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Cathedral in Dublin.¹³⁸ Eventually, even Laud had to admit that his choice as Provost was, in the strict Dutch sense of the term, an Arminian.¹³⁹ Chappell was not the only one of Laud’s Irish protégés who managed to irritate Irish Calvinists. James Croxton, a graduate of Laud’s old Oxford College, St John’s, had come over to Ireland as chaplain to Lord Mountnorris, and, at Laud’s prompting, was generously rewarded by Wentworth with several valuable livings.¹⁴⁰ Outspoken and impulsive, Croxton severely tried the tempers of both his patron and the Lord Deputy. He also aroused considerable hostility by his firm opposition to the Irish Articles at convocation. As his theatrical account put it: ‘Soe unbidden, soe unled did I once protest against that right horrible decree obtruded (as it was received from Calvine) by the Archbishop of Armagh and the whole bodye of this kingdomes clergye then assembled at the convocation at Dublin . . . I stood then alone . . . when I made that protestation.’¹⁴¹ Croxton’s preaching also disquieted Ussher. As Wentworth related to Laud, Croxton never came to the pulpit ‘but the Primate is mightily scandalized withall, speaking publikly that hee preaches Arminianisme and that it ought not to be indured.’ Wentworth, typically, absolved himself from judgment because of his theological ignorance: ‘for I must confesse his discourses are soe cabalisticall, soe deep in the controversyes, as I could never get conjecture what it was he would persuade me, or what it was he would be at himselfe’.¹⁴² For Ussher, though, no such indifference was possible. By the mid-1630s, he was increasingly concerned that the spread of Arminianism from England was having two dangerous effects. It was, first, attacking the Irish Calvinist consensus, most notably the Irish Articles; and, second, the Laudian labelling of Calvinists as puritans was playing directly into the hands of those Irish Catholics who, like Ussher’s old foe, Henry Fitzsimon, claimed that Irish protestants were extremists who deviated not only from Catholic, but even from protestant orthodoxy. The publication in 1635 of Five pious and learned discourses by a Suffolk cleric, Robert Shelford, encapsulated Ussher’s fears.¹⁴³ The five sermons combined the concerns of the Dutch and English Arminians in a way which directly contradicted, on almost every page, many of the Primate’s, and the Calvinist Church of Ireland’s, most basic convictions and beliefs.¹⁴⁴ Shelford was concerned with kneeling, bowing, the wearing of appropriate ecclesiastical vestments, always anxious that due reverence be accorded to God in his own house. The beauty of holiness and the power of the sacraments were emphasized over the power of preaching, the ¹³⁸ Shirley (ed.), Papers Relating to the Church of Ireland, 44; The Manuscripts of the House of Lords, 15 vols. (London: Historical Manuscripts Commission, 1962), xi. 440. ¹³⁹ As Laud put it in 1644, Chappell had ‘studied so long the 5 pointes of Arminianism that he came round himselfe at last’: Manuscripts of the House of Lords, xi. 440. ¹⁴⁰ SP 63/254/116 (CSPI, 1633–47, 47); WWM 6, pp. 71, 210; LW vii. 71. ¹⁴¹ SP 63/256/84 (CSPI, 1633–47, 186); HMC, Hastings, iv. 66; SL, i. 298. ¹⁴² WWM, 6, p. 210. ¹⁴³ Robert Shelford, Five pious and learned discourses ([Cambridge], 1635). ¹⁴⁴ Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, 53–7.

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doers of the law over the hearers of the word; charity over faith, good works over grace. It was in the last of Shelford’s five sermons that the contrast with Ussher’s worldview became most evident. Taking his text from 2 Thessalonians 2, that favourite of Ussher’s, he went on not only to reject the English Calvinist conviction that the papacy was occupied by Antichrist, but also to strip away the whole historical basis of Ussher’s apocalyptic anti-popery, by insisting first that the great Antichrist had not yet come, and second that the Antichrist and the whore of Babylon referred to the ‘Mahometicall empire’ which at the end of the world would capture Rome and persecute the Christians.¹⁴⁵ As a result Ussher’s application of 2 Thessalonians 2:11—‘God shall send them a strong delusion, that they should believe a lie’—to the Catholic Irish was ruled out: the text referred to an Antichrist whom Shelford located firmly in the future.¹⁴⁶ Ussher first encountered the book soon after publication, when the English Jesuits sent copies to their Irish brethren so that they could taunt protestants with it. Writing to Sam Ward, Ussher linked it directly to the defence of the Irish Articles in the recently concluded convocation: ‘while we strive here to maintain the purity of our ancient truth, how cometh it to pass that you in Cambridge do cast such stumbling blocks in our way by publishing unto the world such rotten stuff as Shelford hath vented in his five discourses’.¹⁴⁷ The difficult question, of course, is the extent to which Laud shared the views of his Irish protégés and of avant-garde conformists such as Shelford. Laud was much more cautious in print than many of the ‘Laudians’. Like most of his allies, he was always careful to dissociate himself from Dutch Arminianism.¹⁴⁸ At his trial in 1644, the archbishop, not unnaturally, distanced himself from protégés such as Chappell, saying that he had not been aware of their theological predilections when he appointed them.¹⁴⁹ But in the case of Chappell it is possible to test the truth of Laud’s claims by examining his earlier correspondence with Wentworth and his reaction to the Lord Deputy’s report that Chappell was indeed an Arminian. This in itself, of course, was not an offence, but preaching or publicly discussing such contentious issues was. As we have seen, he insisted that Ussher implement it in relation to Downham. What, precisely, happened in relation to Chappell? When, in August 1636, Laud suggested that one of the underlying causes of the hostility to Chappell was ‘that great bugbear called Arminianism’, he explained his views on the five points to Wentworth: ‘And yet, God knows, truth, whate’er it be, is not determinable by any human reason in this life. And therefore it were far better (had men that moderation) to be referred up to the next general ¹⁴⁵ Ibid. 229 ff. ¹⁴⁶ Ibid. 317; UW, iv. 238. For another example of the contrast between Ussher’s outlook and that of the Laudians, see Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 67. ¹⁴⁷ UW, xvi. 9. ¹⁴⁸ Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 435–9. ¹⁴⁹ Ford, ‘ ‘‘That Bugbear Arminianism’’ ’, 155–6.

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known truth in which men might rest, than to distract their consciences and the peace of the church by descending into interminable particulars.’¹⁵⁰ Confirming his statement at his trial, Laud told Wentworth that he never heard Chappell discuss Arminianism. He was recommended to Laud as ‘a sober man and a good governor, and that was all the knowledge I had of him, or acquaintance with him, when I recommended him to that place.’ If the provost had failed to obey the royal declaration, Laud went on, ‘let him be punished, on God’s name, as a man that attempts to break the peace of the church. And neither he nor his Arminianism (if any he have) shall have any protection from me.’¹⁵¹ This is clear enough. As at Oxford, Chancellor Laud was insisting that the ban on discussion of controversial issues be enforced impartially.¹⁵² But the subsequent correspondence is more ambiguous. Wentworth wrote back saying that though he found the provost an excellent preacher, he was unable to say whether his sermons had been Arminian ‘because I understand not the points’, and concluded: ‘Your grace saith he never declared himself to you, and by my troth he shall never be asked the question by me.’¹⁵³ Replying, Laud was certain that Chappell was an Arminian, but was happy to conspire with Wentworth in his ignorant leniency: ‘Come, say no more, she shall be guilty of whatsoever you will have her.’¹⁵⁴ Unsurprisingly, Chappell escaped unpunished. There are also doubts about the extent of Laud’s earlier ignorance of Chappell’s theological outlook. He had in fact first met him at least as early as 1629, and had personally persuaded him to go to Ireland as Dean of Cashel, so he was not quite as unknown to the archbishop when appointed provost in 1634 as Laud had later claimed.¹⁵⁵ In short, Laud’s claims at his trial, were, understandably, economical with the truth. Trinity was in many respects a perfect example of the complexity of the motivations behind Laudian reform. It started out with Wentworth’s concern over poor government, a verdict fully backed up by Ussher, who even shared the Lord Deputy’s low opinion of his cousin’s abilities as provost. Both urged Laud (whom Ussher had pressed to accept the chancellorship) to reform the statutes. But Laud went rather further than Ussher had perhaps envisaged, rewriting the statutes, the charter, and coming up with William Chapell as the new provost. He indeed proved to be a strong governor. But also proved to be an Arminian. Though Laud claimed to be agnostic when it came to the contentious issues concerning predestination and perseverance which were at stake between the Remonstrants and the Contra-Remonstrants in the Netherlands, he nevertheless sought to punish Downham for contravening the royal ban on public discussion of predestination, whilst tolerating the preaching of the Arminian Chappell. His own ideological convictions, as revealed in the Trinity statutes and the Irish ¹⁵⁰ LW, vii. 275. ¹⁵¹ Ibid. 280–1. ¹⁵² LW, v. 48. ¹⁵³ WWM, 6, p. 357. ¹⁵⁴ LW, vii. 287–8; female pronouns are used occasionally by Laud and Wentworth to disguise the identity of those to whom they are referring. ¹⁵⁵ Ussher, of course, had known of Chappell’s Arminianism since 1619: see above, pp. 199–200.

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canons of 1634, reflected the much broader theological concerns of ‘English Arminians’.¹⁵⁶ Moreover, the monopoly of power and influence which he and Wentworth exercised enabled Laud, rather than the King, effectively to control the formulation and implementation of ecclesiastical policy in Ireland. And this leads us to our final point, that though these policies were anathema to Ussher, and he was deeply reluctant to be associated with them, he nevertheless, as a result of his deep-seated respect for the power of the King and his deputy, acquiesced in their implementation.

C O N C LU S I O N The disputes between Wentworth, Laud, and Ussher over the Church of Ireland and Trinity in the 1630s have both personal and political dimensions. The latter, as has been noted, were considerable. Laud and Wentworth brought the Irish church into much closer alignment with its English sister. In the process they destroyed the alternative Irish ecclesiological experiment which had emerged during the early seventeenth century, and provided the means by which subsequent governors of the Church of Ireland could ensure that it remained in step with the Church of England. But they did not alter the constitutional relationship between the two Churches, nor eliminate the belief amongst many Irish churchmen that their church had independent Irish roots. The personal aspects to the disputes, though of less long-term importance, have, unsurprisingly, interested scholars more. For some, Ussher and Laud, and/or Ussher and Wentworth, were bitter enemies, for others, good friends. Thus Amanda Capern claims that relations between the Primate and the Lord Deputy were ‘generally cool and often tense’, and ‘proceeded to disintegrate almost completely’ during parliament and convocation in 1634–5, leaving Laud’s opinion of Ussher ‘permanently poisoned’.¹⁵⁷ But Parr portrayed relations between Ussher and Laud as harmonious.¹⁵⁸ And for W. Ball Wright Ussher’s early correspondence with Laud ‘ripened into a deep friendship’, while according to W. B. Marshall the two maintained ‘friendly’ relations.¹⁵⁹ The truth, inasmuch as it can be discovered, seems to have been less straightforward. In the early years of their relationship, when Ussher and Laud were corresponding regularly, with Ussher as the dominant Irish Primate, and Laud as the ¹⁵⁶ Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 437–8. ¹⁵⁷ Amanda Capern, ‘ ‘‘Slipperye Times and Dangerous Dayes’’: James Ussher and the Calvinist Reformation of Britain, 1560–1660’, PhD thesis, University of New South Wales, 1991, 194; eadem, ‘Caroline Church’, 70. ¹⁵⁸ Parr, Life, 40–1. ¹⁵⁹ W. B. Wright, The Ussher Memoirs; or, Genealogical Memoirs of the Ussher Families in Ireland (Dublin, 1889), 95; W. M. Marshall, ‘Ussher, James’, in The Oxford Companion to British history, ed. John Cannon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

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rising star in England, their common interest in defending the church meant that they were working towards the same end. Hence Laud was Ussher’s choice as chancellor of Trinity. But as tensions arose over the Irish canons, Trinity College, and Laud’s clients in Ireland, and the frequency of their letters diminished, the Archbishop of Canterbury grew increasingly concerned about Ussher. There is little doubt that they were theologically poles apart: Laud’s rejection both of the invisible succession of the church through the mediaeval heretics and of the confident protestant identification of the pope with Antichrist, and his preference for the sacraments over sermons, contrasted pointedly with Ussher’s episcopal motto in both Meath and Armagh: Vae mihi si non evangelizavero.¹⁶⁰ Though second-hand, Cornelius Burgess’ claim, that Laud had labelled Ussher ‘that preaching cox-comb . . . for his frequent preaching’, is believable.¹⁶¹ The advancement of Arminianism in the persons of Chappell and Croxton and the hostility to the Calvinism and independence of the Church of Ireland clearly horrified Ussher. But, and this is the crucial point, on which Wentworth repeatedly assured Laud, Ussher did not personalize his concerns and transfer the blame to Canterbury. In short, things looked very different from Dublin and London. In the former, Wentworth met Ussher regularly, saw his mien, and knew of his gentle character and lack of animosity. But in London, Laud, with only the bare correspondence to rely upon, found it impossible to believe—perhaps here projecting his own insecurities onto the Irish Primate—that Ussher had not been embittered by the various disputes and translated ideological differences into personal antipathy and antagonism. Hence one of the repeated themes in the correspondence between Wentworth and Laud was Ussher’s attitude and bearing.¹⁶² Indeed, this remarkably frank exchange of views affords one of the most revealing portraits of Ussher’s character, with, generally, Laud questioning and Wentworth defending the Primate.¹⁶³ For Laud, Ussher was ‘content to sacrifice honest men for their humor, and to lose any frend to be revenged upon, not an enemy, but an opinion. Is this’, he asked Wentworth, ‘your saint?’¹⁶⁴ The Lord Deputy replied: ¹⁶⁰ 1 Cor: 9:16: ‘woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel!’: Nicholas Bernard, The penitent death of a woefull sinner (Dublin, 1641), Dedication; Wright, Ussher memoirs, 98. ¹⁶¹ Cornelius Burgess, No sacrilege nor sin to alienate or purchase cathedral lands (London, 1660), 60. ¹⁶² WWM, 7, fols. 84r, 106r, 123r, 131v; SL, ii. 156; LW, vi. 551–2; and see their concerns over William Hilton, Ussher’s brother-in-law: LW, vii. 142–3; WWM, 6, 181; Huntington Library, San Marino, MS HA 15952. ¹⁶³ So frank, indeed, that its Victorian editor felt compelled to leave out one of the crude jokes about William Steere, Bishop of ‘Ardfart’ being ‘not worth the last syllable of his name’: WWM, 6, p. 53; LW, vii. 69. The possibility of self-censorship cannot be ruled out—Laud and Wentworth were aware of the dangers of open discussion and the threat that their letters might be misused by their enemies, and resorted to the use of cipher and ‘side-letters’ which they agreed to burn. Some portions of the letters were also written for Laud to read out to the King: Merritt, ‘Wentworth and Government at a distance’, 118. But the abiding tenor of the correspondence is not public or rhetorical, but private and business-like. ¹⁶⁴ LW, vii. 281.

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As for the opinion Laud may have of the Primate, Wentworth wills me to tell you he conceives her a very weake passionate woman, where she takes, but no wayes malicious, and the easiest to be persuaded that is to be imagined, only she is very chast and pure, cannot abide or away with any idolatrous service. Nay as other ladyes doe, is proud now and then to be held immovable to those inchantments. In summe this brings all to the old tenet, that your honestest women are not always the quietest wives.¹⁶⁵

Laud concurred: ‘And truly it agrees as right with that opinion I ever had of her ladyship as is possible, with this, that varium et mutabile semper foemina. And so ‘tis in her, saving those points to which she is married.’¹⁶⁶ It was a shrewd evaluation up to a point: Ussher was indeed, as we have seen, very clear about what he disapproved when it came to ideas. But as Wentworth realized, Ussher was no scheming politician, maliciously harbouring grudges against those who had opposed him—his odium theologicum was not an odium theologorum. This can be seen in his invitation to Vossius, with whom he disagreed on Pelagianism, to join him in Armagh, in the gift of his work on Gottschalk to Laud, and also in his attitude towards Bramhall. Given that Bramhall had usurped much of Ussher’s role as Primate, and determinedly pushed through the English Articles and canons, resentment, even hostility, might have been excusable. But the predominant tone of their relationship is one of affability. To quote Bramhall’s Victorian biographer: ‘there ever existed between them a most friendly and even affectionate intercourse.’¹⁶⁷ A typical conclusion of a 1635 letter from Ussher to Bramhall reads: ‘And so beseechinge God to blesse the settlement of those important affayres of the church wherein you have the honour to be so happilye employed . . . Your most assured loving friende and brother.’¹⁶⁸ Even after the differences during convocation, Ussher was deferring to Bramhall’s judgement with apparent good grace: ‘whatever is done by you, I shall most willingly give mine assent to.’¹⁶⁹ The ultimate test of the genuineness of Ussher’s words came in 1641, when Bramhall was imprisoned in Dublin, and Ussher did his best to ensure that he was released, interceding with the King on his behalf.¹⁷⁰ Ussher’s personal relationship with the Lord Deputy was equally good, despite Laud’s suspicions and a rather worrying list of differences: they had, first, sharply contrasting approaches to liturgy and ceremonies—as Wentworth put it to Laud in November 1637, the Primate favours ‘a more domestic way of serving God . . . then I like of ’.¹⁷¹ When he visited Ussher in Drogheda, Wentworth was surprised to find that the Primate had no communion table in his personal chapel.¹⁷² They also disagreed over bowing at the name of Jesus: Wentworth ¹⁶⁵ WWM, 6, pp. 357–8. ¹⁶⁶ LW, vii. 288. ¹⁶⁷ BW, i, p. xxi. ¹⁶⁸ Huntington Library, San Marino, MS HA 15951. ¹⁶⁹ Ibid.; and see TCD MS 1073/2, loose sheet of paper between pp. 10 and 11: letter from Ussher to William Hilton, 3 November 1635. ¹⁷⁰ BW, i, p. ix. ¹⁷¹ WWM, 7, fol. 55r. ¹⁷² SL, ii. 249; LW, vi. 551; this is confirmed by William Brereton, who visited Ussher during his travels through Ireland in 1635, and reported that in the parish church in Drogheda where Ussher

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pledged that he would continue to do so, ‘despite the all the pamphletts of Amsterdam, and their snivelling whines notwithstanding’, and further noted that ‘now and then the primate, good man, gives a gentle touch against it in his sermons before the state.’¹⁷³ They also differed over their attitude to plays. Wentworth helped to establish a theatre in Dublin.¹⁷⁴ Ussher preached publicly against the danger of going to plays, and further tested the Lord Deputy’s patience in 1637 when, with Wentworth away in England, he took the unusually brave and decisive action of closing down the theatre. ¹⁷⁵ All this would normally lead to the conclusion that the two men were sworn enemies. In fact, as Wentworth reported to an obviously sceptical Laud in November 1638, Ussher ‘has been well, is well, and shall be well with us all on this side’.¹⁷⁶ That the Primate had not taken any of the disagreements personally was confirmed in 1638, when he chose not only to dedicate his work Immanuel, or, The mystery of the incarnation of the Son of God to Wentworth, but also to present it to him as a New Year’s gift.¹⁷⁷ As with Bramhall, the final confirmation of their continued affection for each other came after Wentworth’s fortunes turned, and Ussher served as his confessor during his last days in 1641.¹⁷⁸ It is, of course, perfectly possible to argue that the external friendliness and respect that Ussher accorded to Wentworth, Bramhall, and Laud was merely the minimum he was required to offer a trusted servant of the King and fellow bishops, and that underneath he was burning with hostility and resentment. In contrast to his continuing closeness to Wentworth and Bramhall, we have no record of Ussher visiting or associating with Laud after his downfall, except when Strafford asked Ussher to take a final message to the imprisoned archbishop.¹⁷⁹ It may be that his claim that his illness, and his claim that Termonfeckin was cheaper than Dublin, were merely diplomatic excuses to conceal a thorough disillusionment with the machinations and bullying of the Lord Deputy and Bramhall. Certainly this is what one contemporary, Peter Heylyn—that high-church apologist who was more Laudian than Laud himself—thought.¹⁸⁰ And, one sometimes feels, later commentators struggle against a similar ingrained cynicism. But the evidence of Ussher’s character and Wentworth’s and Bramhall’s letters weigh strongly against preached every Sunday the communion table was placed lengthways in the aisle, over against the pulpit: Sir William Brereton, Travels in Holland, the United Provinces, England, Scotland and Ireland, 1634–1635, ed. Edward Hawkins, Chetham Society, i (1844), 135. See also Ussher’s scholarly disquisition on the various orientations of the altar in the history of Christianity: UW, xv. 175–6. ¹⁷³ WWM, 6, 201. ¹⁷⁴ A. J. Fletcher, Drama, Performance, and Polity in Pre-Cromwellian Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 2000), 261. ¹⁷⁵ Ibid. 262: Fletcher mistakes Wentworth’s reference to ‘the Primate’ as meaning Archbishop Bulkeley of Dublin; for Ussher’s preaching against plays, see the diary of the earl of Cork’s daughter, Mary, countess of Warwick: ‘by my Lord Primate of Irelandes preaching against playes I was many yeares before resolved to leave seeing them’: BL, Add. MS 27,357, fol. 23v. ¹⁷⁶ WWM, 7, fol. 146r. ¹⁷⁷ Shuckburgh, Bedell, 157; later editions dropped the dedication. ¹⁷⁸ See below, p. 234. ¹⁷⁹ Wedgwood, Wentworth, 384. ¹⁸⁰ See below, p. 233.

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such suspicions. For all the undoubted firmness, even fierceness of his theological beliefs, he refused to personalize ideological differences. He therefore remained, much to Laud’s incomprehension, and the confusion of historians, personally calm, gentle, and unresentful, despite the arguments and conflicts with which he was surrounded.

9 Ussher and Irish History: Britannicarum ecclesiarum antiquitates By the end of the 1630s Ussher had learnt some melancholy lessons. Not only was Arminianism flourishing in England, it had even invaded the pulpits of Dublin and his beloved Trinity College. The Irish Calvinist redoubt which he had attempted to shore up, and the distinctive ecclesiology which had allowed it to flourish, had been dismantled. His capacity to shape and influence events had vanished: power was firmly in the hands of Bramhall, Wentworth, and Laud. The contrast with 1626 was stark: then he had spoken out hoping to change the King’s mind; now with royal policy fixed, Ussher had little choice but to opt for his own altum silentium and hope for the favourable unfolding of Harold Macmillan’s inevitable ‘events’. Yet he was not wholly powerless. Wentworth and Laud’s constant enquiries about his humour bore witness to a real worry on their part of the danger which public opposition from Ussher might pose to the Laudian enterprise. It was not just that he was still the Primate of the Church of Ireland, and a scholar of international renown, or that his academic reputation was buttressed by a personal reputation for piety and self-effacement. Ussher, and other establishment figures such as Davenant, Ward, Hall, and Morton, still represented a substantive theological and ecclesiological challenge to the Laudians, for they occupied the shrinking but still important middle ground between English Arminians on the one hand, and, on the other, hard-line Calvinists such as Twisse and extreme puritans such as Prynne and Bastwick.¹ The very moderation of Ussher and his friends posed a dilemma for the authorities. Radicals could easily be dismissed as dangerous extremists, tried and branded, but men such as Davenant and Ward, though ‘displaced and not entirely trusted’ by the King and Laud, were more troublesome: hostile to Laudianism’s fundamental assumptions, but safe from open punishment because of their position, discretion, and theological moderation.² As far as Ussher was concerned, he and his friends were the upholders of the orthodoxy of the Churches of England and Ireland. This, it can be argued, ¹ UW, xv. 559, 584. ² Anthony Milton, ‘Licensing, Censorship, and Orthodoxy in Early Stuart England’, JEH, 41(1998), 642–3, 646–7.

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was a hetorical tactic used by Calvinists and Arminians alike, but in this case it was more than rhetoric.³ Ministers such as Ussher, Davenant, and Ward had in the 1620s forged a theological and ecclesiological position which they saw as representative of the distinctive position of the early-seventeenth-century English church, for which they had argued strenuously at Dort.⁴ They believed in predestination, but in a moderate sublapsarian, hypothetical universalist form; they believed in bishops, but not in the high, divine-right vision of episcopacy of the Laudians; and they believed in due order and ceremonies, but not at what they saw as Laudian additions such as bowing at the name of Jesus.⁵ Much of their resentment at their treatment during the 1630s sprang from this conviction that they were the mainstream and moderate Church of England.⁶ Thus Ussher was clear that the definitive theological response to the Arminian challenge had been provided by Davenant and Ward. As he wrote to the latter in 1631: ‘For the Arminian questions I desire never to read more than my lord of Salisbury’s letters touching predestination, and Christ’s death, and your’s concerning grace and free will, together with the determination of the question of perseverance, which you showed unto me.’⁷ The problem was that censorship meant that it was very difficult for the moderate Calvinists to gain a public hearing. As John Prideaux, the Master of Exeter College in Oxford, warned Ussher, it was pointless sending his writings to Oxford to be printed as the presses were so ‘strictly overseen’ that it was impossible to get ‘true divinity’ published there.⁸ There were two ways round this. First there was that much less public, but nevertheless highly important means of circulating ideas—through manuscripts and scribal publication.⁹ Here Ussher took on the role as the curator of Calvinist orthodoxy in the 1630s, seeking to ensure that the key unprinted works were copied, circulated, and preserved, gathering them together in the safer colonial outposts where Calvinism was strongest.¹⁰ Thus he repeatedly urged Ward to make sure that his Cambridge lectures on grace were not lost, and also begged him to send copies of Bishop ³ Peter Lake, ‘Joseph Hall, Robert Skinner and the Rhetoric of Moderation at the Early Stuart Court’, in L. A. Ferrell and Peter McCullough (eds.), The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History 1600–1750 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 167–87. ⁴ Anthony Milton (ed.), The British Delegation and the Synod of Dort (1618–1619) (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005). ⁵ Anthony Milton, ‘ ‘‘The Unchanged Peacemaker’’? John Dury and the Politics of Irenicism in England, 1628–1643’, in Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie, and Timothy Raylor (eds.), Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation. Studies in Intellectual Communication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 104–5; and see below, p. 248. ⁶ See Ussher’s comments on the rigidity of the Calvinist William Twisse’s position: UW, xv. 584. ⁷ Ibid. 542. ⁸ Ibid. 419. ⁹ Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); H. R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). ¹⁰ UW, xv. 542, 578.

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Davenant’s writings.¹¹ When the latter finally arrived in Ireland, just after the exhausting events of convocation, Ussher expressed the hope that they would ‘do much good here for the establishing of our young divines in the present truth’.¹² The Primate’s concern even extended to securing a safe home for the manuscripts across the Atlantic. The puritan minister Thomas Goodwin claimed that Ussher had proposed that ‘all good books . . . be bought up and sent into some part of America for preservation’, for fear that the authorities would ‘labour to root out all the godly men and their books’.¹³ The other means of securing a hearing was through disguising his theological concerns as ancient history. Just as Ussher had begun the decade with Gottschalk, he finished it with his 1196-page historical magnum opus of 1639, Britannicarum ecclesiarum antiquitates: quibus inserta est pestiferae adversus Dei gratiam a Pelagio Britanno in ecclesiam inductae haereseos historia. In both cases he used his scholarly standing and the Latin language to launch covert broadsides against the new theological orthodoxy. The main purpose of this latter work was, as we shall see, to provide the first detailed critical account of one of the major historical issues confronting church historians at the time—the origins of Christianity in Britain and Ireland. But, as the title explained, it had a typically Ussherian addition: his ‘history of the pestilential heresy against the grace of God, brought into the church by the Briton Pelagius’. Its presence in a book on the British and Irish churches was perfectly natural, given Pelagius’s origin, the supposed Irish nationality of his ally Celestius, and the hold which Pelagianism gained in Britain before it was suppressed by the twin fifth-century visits of Germanus.¹⁴ But the ‘insert’, at almost 300 pages, was not exactly short, nor did it confine itself to the British and Irish dimensions of the dispute. In fact Ussher provided almost a full history of the arguments between Augustine and Pelagius, the continuing attacks on Augustine by Julian of Eclanum, ‘that most insolent of heretics’, and of the later defence of Augustinianism against semi-Pelagians such as Faustus.¹⁵ His purpose was plain: to emphasize the perniciousness of ‘this fatal plague of the church’, to demonstrate the vigour and determination with which Augustine, the early church, and the Roman emperors eliminated its ‘poison’, and to show its powers of resurgence and the continuing need to suppress it.¹⁶ Indeed, Ussher went so far as to point directly to the possible parallel between ancient and present events, explaining the destruction of Christianity by the invading Saxons as a divine warning that widespread sinfulness could shake and ‘almost completely overthrow’ the foundations of the British state and church, and stressing, should an obtuse reader have missed the point, that he had dealt with this topic at length because ‘we should be very worried that it will be ¹¹ UW, xv. 540. ¹² UW, xvi. 10. ¹³ The Hartlib Papers: A Complete Text and Image Database of the Papers of Samuel Hartlib, 2nd edn (Sheffield: Humanities Research Institute), 29/2/54A. ¹⁴ UW, vi. 562. ¹⁵ Ibid. 355; v. 1–7. ¹⁶ UW, vi. 263, 308, 212.

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our turn next’.¹⁷ Ussher’s friends and foes both got the message: Prideaux felt, optimistically, that the book would ‘put a period, I trust, to the troublesome fancies which of late have been set on foot’;¹⁸ while Peter Heylyn complained that the Pelagian insert was ‘much extolled’ by another Calvinist, William Twisse.¹⁹ The main thrust of Ussher’s work, though, was to produce an account of the origins of Christianity in Britain and Ireland. He began with the earliest references, detailing how contemporary and later authors had linked figures such as Simon Peter, Simon the Zealot, James son of Zebedee, even St Paul himself to the arrival of Christianity in Britain and Ireland as early as the first century. He investigated the mediaeval accounts, which brought the first Christian funeral director, Joseph of Arimathea, to England as the founder of the church at Glastonbury. He examined at length the story of how, at the request of King Lucius, the late second-century king of Britain, Pope Eleutherius (ad 174–89) sent two missionaries, Faganus and Damianus, to win over the British people. With their help a Christian kingdom was established, and the 28 flamens and arch-flamens, the leaders of the pagan priesthood, converted into bishops and archbishops. He showed how Christianity had prospered, surviving the early fourth-century persecution of Diocletian, discussed the possibility that Constantine’s mother may have been British, and, more factually, how British bishops had attended the Council of Arles in 314. He then traced the decline of the church, as it fell under the spell of the Pelagian heresy, and suffered under the pagan Anglo-Saxons. The recovery of English Christianity under Augustine after 597 Ussher left to Bede to relate.²⁰ His final three chapters looked at the origins of Scottish and Irish Christianity, with Ussher devoting most of his efforts to untangling the history of St Patrick’s conversion of the Irish. The chief scholarly challenges here were threefold: first, to identify and bring together the disparate printed and, even more problematic, manuscript resources; then, having done this, to sift fact from fiction, to prune away the lush mediaeval undergrowth of myth and invention which pious chroniclers had added to the scant early records; and finally to bring out the historical and religious themes and conclusions which emerged from this distilled essence. There can be no doubt that Ussher’s strength lies in tackling the first. The enormity of this challenge should not be underestimated: Ussher’s Herculean labours in the private and public libraries of Ireland and Britain and his own efforts to collect manuscripts enabled him to bring order to the chaotic field of early Christian sources. As a result, rather like his two earlier Latin historical works, De successione and Gotteschalci historia, Ussher’s Antiquitates often reads like an edited collection of primary texts. Hence in his account of the first arrival of Christianity in England, ¹⁷ UW, vi. 75; see Bernard, Life, 87–8. ¹⁸ UW, xv. 419. ¹⁹ Peter Heylyn, Cyprianus anglicus (London, 1671), 215–16; Trevor-Roper, Ussher, 144–7. ²⁰ UW, vi. 600.

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Ussher gathers together the late classical and early and mediaeval Christian authors, and simply records what they said. He quotes Gildas, the (probably) fifth-century historian, as suggesting that England received Christianity as early as the reign of Tiberius (ad 14–37), and cites vague references from late classical authors to Christianity as spreading across the whole Roman empire in the second century, to support its presence in Britain. Then he went on to explore a wide range of candidates whom contemporary and later sources claimed had been responsible for bringing Christianity to Britain, from Simon Peter to St Paul. Names were plucked from Paul’s letters and provided with elaborate histories linking them to Britain: thus the otherwise anonymous Aristobulus (mentioned in Romans 16:10) became the first British bishop, ordained by Paul.²¹ Nor did Ussher neglect Ireland: the earliest reference he could find to Christianity there was the missionary work of James son of Zebedee amongst the Irish.²² Ussher’s treatment of these sources is cautious. He usually simply quotes them and leaves it for the reader to decide on their accuracy. He is, in other words, much more interested in the primary task of collection, rather than the second challenge of scholarly interpretation. Sometimes, it is true, his scholarly suspicions peep through, and he calls into question the accuracy of a particular reference, as in the case of James, whose mission to the Spanish (ad Hiberos) he noted, could easily with the flick of a pen have been transliterated into a mission to the Irish (ad Hibernos).²³ More usually, he gently distances himself by his cautious use of language: Simon the Zealot ‘is said to have preached’ in Britain; Aristobulus ‘is said to have been’ martyred in Britain; St Paul, ‘it is related’, brought the gospel of Christ to our island; Joseph of Arimathea, ‘it is believed’, built a church at Glastonbury.²⁴ The legends associated with Glastonbury, with their crude desire to bolster the claims to precedence of the eponymous abbot by turning his church into the oldest in Britain, are perhaps the most obvious of the later mediaeval frauds that he includes. But even these receive only a gentle Ussherian health-warning: they were, he pointed out, ‘for what they are worth’ [‘qualescunque sunt’], and he went on to note that the earliest references date only from the time of the Normans, and ‘are clearly redolent of the superstition of later times’.²⁵ Many subsequent historians have fallen into the trap of assuming that what Ussher quotes he also approves of.²⁶ But his relation to his sources is more nuanced and careful than simple endorsement of their veracity. He specifically ²¹ UW, v, ch. 1. ²² UW, v. 16–18; vi. 290–1. ²³ UW, v. 15–18. ²⁴ UW, vi. 551. ²⁵ UW, v. 25. ²⁶ Robert Henry, The history of Great Britain, from the first invasion of it by the Romans, 6 vols. (London, 1771–93), i. 128–36; Philip Morant, The history and antiquities of Colchester, in the county of Essex (Colchester, 1789), 39; Edward Stillingfleet, Origines Britannicae (London, 1710), 18. See the confusion over Ussher’s attitude to the Roman coins seen as confirming the existence of King Lucius: UW, v. 58; Stillingfleet, Origines Britannicae, 39; George Smith, The Britons and Saxons not converted to popery; or the faith of our ancestors shewn to have been corrupted by the Romish Church (London, 1748), 277–8.

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warned readers that the key to wisdom lay ‘in not believing rashly’.²⁷ Much of what he included in the book was qualified by the dedication and preface, where he explained that what he set out to do was to gather together materials which others could pass judgement on, and use to write history.²⁸ He was even, he admitted, prepared to include dross, just in case it contained some elements of truth—hence his inclusion of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s fanciful Historia regum Britannia in the ‘hope that it is possible to stumble upon jewels in a dunghill’.²⁹ The result, as he admitted, was often ‘an indiscriminate mixture, taken from all writers’, or as a more hostile critic loosely translated it, an ‘undigested and formless lump of all writers, good and bad’.³⁰ Nevertheless, there is no doubt that, for all his caveats, Ussher includes, and apparently believes, much material in Britannicarum ecclesiarum antiquitates which later historians dismissed as inventions. For instance, he accepted as genuine the ‘charter of Henry II’, cited by the Catholic historian Nicholas Harpsfield as proof of the priority of Glastonbury, which Stillingfleet some seventy years later demonstrated to be a forgery.³¹ He recounted the stories concerning Constantine’s mother.³² More importantly, he believed the wholly fictitious tale of King Lucius which provided reformation protestants with a host of convenient ‘facts’, ranging from a foundation date for the English state church which was closer to the sources of earlier purity (and therefore further away from the later and clearly Roman missioner St Augustine), to the implicit endorsement of both royal supremacy and episcopacy.³³ The imbalance between credulity and fact is, to the modern eye, most notable in Ussher’s chapters dealing with St Patrick. Here again, he gathers together all the texts he can find, and acknowledges that they were not without their defects—thus he notes the inadequacies of Probus’ life of Patrick, and of the account of the saint found in the early ninth-century Historia Brittonum, with the comment: ‘from which fictitious old wives tales we wish that the rest of those writings on the same subject were likewise free’.³⁴ But his essential aim was to bring together the various accounts and seek out an agreed story. Hence his detailed discussion of the age at which St Patrick died, where he struggled with the wildly differing accounts from the annals and saints lives, before tentatively coming down in favour of the biblical but improbable age of 120.³⁵ Hence his synthesis of the Irish annals, the Book of Armagh, Jocelin, and other saints lives ²⁷ UW, v. 2: Cicero, quoting Epicharmus. ²⁸ Ibid. 7. ²⁹ Ibid. 3. Ussher made an exception for the Scot Thomas Dempster, whom he accuses, inter alia, of being a saint-stealer, everlastingly stupid, barbarous, dishonest, scurrilous and a forger: UW, xvii. 54. ³⁰ UW, v. 7; George Mackenzie, A defence of the antiquity of the royal line of Scotland (London, 1685), 11; William Nicolson, The English historical library (London 1696), 14. ³¹ Stillingfleet, Origines Britannicae, 18. ³² UW, iv. 180. ³³ UW, v, chs. 3–5; Felicity Heal, ‘What Can King Lucius Do for You? The Reformation and the Early British Church’, English Historical Review, 120 (2005), 593–614. ³⁴ UW, vi. 374. ³⁵ Ibid. 447–8.

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to trace Patrick’s wanderings from Britain, to Ireland to Europe, and finally back to Ireland again. What Ussher was doing was initiating the long, honourable, and ultimately fruitless quest for a syncretic life of Patrick, which reached its apogee in 1961 with James Carney’s delightfully exact claim that St Patrick landed in Ireland on Maundy Thursday 5 April 456.³⁶ To more sceptical modern scholars, attuned to the utterly minimalist approach to Patrick following Binchy’s ‘St Patrick and His Biographers’, such precision is laughable: the only firm date is Prosper of Aquitaine’s 431 for Palladius, and the only worthwhile contemporary sources are Patrick’s Confession and Letter to Coroticus.³⁷ Viewed from this perspective, Ussher’s work did little to clarify what we know of St Patrick. But it would of course be utterly anachronistic to judge Ussher by such inappropriate standards, to mock him for his failure to anticipate Binchy’s modern scepticism.³⁸ Far better to see him through the eyes of contemporaries and immediate successors. As far as they were concerned, his work on Patrick was a remarkable achievement, providing for the first time a comprehensive account of the texts dealing with his life, integrating manuscript and printed sources, and beginning the process of comparison and synthetic evaluation. The obvious benchmark consists of previous biographies. Ussher was rightly dismissive of William Thirry’s 1617 work as mere panegyric, but Ussher’s range of sources far outstripped even the most thorough previous account by his uncle Richard Stanihurst.³⁹ In fact Ussher, along with the Irish Franciscans in Louvain, and the Bollandists in Antwerp, played a leading role in rescuing the Irish and Latin mediaeval saints’ lives from obscurity, even destruction, enabling him to bring together a range of manuscript sources far wider than that of any previous historian, including the Book of Armagh, and the lives of Patrick by Muirchú and Tírechán.⁴⁰ Seen from within this tradition, Ussher’s achievement was to bring order and coherence to the study of Patrick: or, as one Irish eighteenth-century Irish bibliographer summed it up, he rescued St Patrick ‘from a load of seeming contradictions and absurdities in the numberless writers of his life’.⁴¹ Having begun the tasks of collating the primary sources and sorting fact from fiction, there was one remaining challenge which Ussher had to tackle in Britannicarum ecclesiarum antiquitates —that of constructing an overarching ³⁶ D. A. Binchy, ‘Patrick and His Biographers: Ancient and Modern’, Studia Hibernica, 2 (1962), 97–8. ³⁷ Ibid. 7–173. ³⁸ David Womersley, ‘Against the Teleology of Technique’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 68 (2005), 95–108. ³⁹ William Thyraeus, Discursus panegyrici de nominibus, tribulationibus et miraculis S. Patricii Ibernorum apostoli (Douai, 1617); UW, vi. 416; Richard Stanihurst, De vita S. Patricii libro duo (Antwerp, 1587). ⁴⁰ Richard Sharpe, Medieval Irish Saints’ Lives. An Introduction to the Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 40, 61–7, 98–104; Grosjean, ‘Quelques sources des Antiquitates’, 154–87; Nollaig Ó Muraíle, The Celebrated Antiquary Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh (c.1600–1671) (Maynooth: An Sagart, 1996), 193–4, 248. ⁴¹ William Nicolson, The English, Scotch and Irish historical libraries (London, 1776), part iii, 25.

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explanatory framework from his disparate texts. Given his focus upon the sources, and his predilection for extensive quotation over authorial intervention, it is true to say that the Antiquitates lack a strong expository thrust. Indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of the work is the way in which it marks a departure from the framework which had underpinned both De successione and A discourse of the religion anciently professed by the Irish and Brittish. No longer was his narrative driven by the desire to demonstrate the outworking of the papal Antichrist in history. Instead, he offered a far more neutral, almost Rankean accumulation of facts and information. Indeed, far from attacking and demonizing Catholic scholars, Ussher actively cooperates with them, engaging in a common enterprize to sort out the chronology of the early Christian church in Ireland. Hence he quotes approvingly from ‘my uncle Richard Stanihurst’, acknowledges the help of the leading Catholic bishop David Rothe, with whom he had engaged in extensive correspondence on historical matters, and praises another prominent Catholic historian, the Jesuit Stephen White, as ‘an expert in the antiquities not only of his own nation Ireland but also of other peoples’.⁴² This is not to say that the Antiquitates is wholly neutral in the battle between reformation and counter-reformation. Historiographically, it fits into a tradition of protestant scholarship which tried to demonstrate the purity of the national churches before they were overwhelmed by papal darkness. Thus one of the purposes of the book was to defend the independence of British and Irish Christianity, by showing that it had arrived in these islands early, and had done so largely independent of Peter and his successors. Ussher was not above continuing some of the point-scoring he had engaged in previously in his Discourse: there, he had stressed the independence of the Irish church as symbolized by the fact that the first archiepiscopal palls did not arrive from Rome till the twelfth century.⁴³ Rothe, following Jocelin’s life of Patrick, unsurprisingly looked to date their arrival much earlier, to Patrick himself, who had, he claimed, been given his pall by the pope when on a visit to Rome.⁴⁴ Ussher took the opportunity in Antiquitates to discount any idea that Patrick had received such papal endorsement as archbishop and stuck with the later date.⁴⁵ The fact that Ussher’s tone and approach in the 1630s was much less strident than in 1613 or 1622 was not missed by his protestant contemporaries. Just before the publication of Antiquitates, two of Ussher’s acquaintances, Joseph Mede and ⁴² UW, v. 458; vi. 269, 274, 284, 286–7, 374, 377; William O’Sullivan (ed.), ‘Correspendence of David Rothe and James Ussher, 1619–23’, Collectanea Hibernica, 36–7 (1994–5), 7–49. Ussher had contact with a wide range of Catholic scholars: Aubrey Gwynn, ‘Archbishop Ussher and Fr Brendan O’Connor’, in Franciscan Fathers (ed.), Father Luke Wadding (Dublin: Clonmore and Reynolds, 1957), 263–83; Brendan Jennings, Michael Ó Cleirigh, Chief of the Four Masters, and His Associates (Dublin, 1936), 55; Joseph Leerssen, ‘Archbishop Ussher and Gaelic Culture’, Studia Hibernica, 22–3 (1982–3), 52–3; Bernadette Cunningham and Raymond Gillespie, ‘James Ussher and His Irish Manuscripts’, Studia Hibernica, 33 (2004–5), 81–99. ⁴³ See above, p. 125. ⁴⁴ O’Sullivan (ed.), ‘Correspendence of Rothe and Ussher’, 7–49. ⁴⁵ UW, vi. 431–2.

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William Twisse, were wondering whether he still stuck by his millennial views of the early seventeenth century. Even after Mede had discussed the matter with the Primate, he was, thanks to Ussher’s instinctive prudence and discretion, still unable to work out what the mature Ussher thought on the subject.⁴⁶ The calmer tone of Antiquitates also reflected the changing character of Irish historiography in the 1630s. As the violence of the Nine Years War faded into the past, and the apocalyptic fears of Irish protestants that they were indeed living in the last times slowly subsided, the polemical tone of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries diminished. The change was most evident in the work of Ussher’s antiquarian colleague, the Irish-born auditor-general Sir James Ware, in his carefully factual account of the Irish bishops from the early church to the present day. Though identifiably protestant, in that the episcopal lists after the Reformation continued with the royally appointed bishops, it nevertheless sought to avoid polemic and religious controversy.⁴⁷ The irenic, inclusive tone is even more evident in Spenser’s A view of Ireland, written around 1596, but not published until Ware edited it in 1633. Here he subtly amended the text to tone down some offensive descriptions of the Irish as ‘the most barbarous nation in Christendom’, and to remove the apocalyptic reference to the Irish Catholics as misled by ‘the purple harlot’.⁴⁸ Increasingly, Ussher, Ware, and their fellow Catholic historians were bound together by their love of their native land—‘the honour of my country’, as Ussher put it—and their desire to defend its reputation against those ‘outsiders’, such as Giraldus or Dempster, who sought to denigrate its past as barbaric or unworthy of investigation.⁴⁹ The logic of A discourse of the religion anciently professed was inescapable and was confirmed by the Antiquitates: Ireland had a noble and heroic history, which Ussher and Ware identified with and took as their own. Hence both historians referred to ‘Hibernia nostra’, ‘our Ireland’.⁵⁰ Ussher related with pride Camden’s account of how Ireland had attracted Saxon scholars on account of its fame as a centre of learning.⁵¹ He treasured his Irish manuscripts, and language in which they were written. The Irish tongue, he ⁴⁶ See above, pp. 215–6; The works of the pious and profoundly-learned Joseph Mede, ed. J. D. D. Worthington (London, 1672), 845, 851. For the impact of the events of the early 1640s on Ussher’s view of apocalyptic, see below, p. 239. ⁴⁷ James Ware, Archiepiscoporum Casseliensium & Tuamensium vitae. Duobus expressae commentariolis (Dublin, 1626); idem, De praesulibus Lageniae (Dublin, 1628); idem, De praesulibus hiberniae commentarius (Dublin, 1665). ⁴⁸ James Ware (ed.), The historie of Ireland, collected by M. Hanmer . . . E. Campion . . . and E. Spenser (Dublin, 1633); Edmund Spenser, A view of the state of Ireland, ed. Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley (Oxford: Blackwells, 1997), 170–6; Alan Ford, ‘The Irish Historical Renaissance and the Shaping of Irish Protestant History’, in Alan Ford and John McCafferty (eds.), The Origins of Sectarianism in Early-Modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 154. ⁴⁹ UW, iv. 370. ⁵⁰ UW, vi. 103; James Ware, De scriptoribus Hiberniae (Dublin, 1639), sig. A3v. ⁵¹ UW, iv. 393.

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explained to the scholar Ludovicus de Dieu, was ‘both elegant and rich’.⁵² He clearly had a basic reading and writing knowledge of Irish, though he did employ native speakers for more complex tasks.⁵³ Ussher’s endorsement of the civility and sophistication of Ireland’s Gaelic cultural heritage was, of course, in marked contrast to the dismissive attitude which had been exhibited by his Anglo-Irish forebears and, more recently, by some of the new English settlers in Ireland. More than that, it also cut across the essentially anglicizing thrust of the Irish reformation. From the Henrician Act for English order habit and language in 1537 down to the debate in convocation almost a hundred years later over whether it was permissible to encourage the use of Irish versions of the Bible and Prayer Book, there was a strong belief that the spread of the reformation and the use of English should go hand in hand.⁵⁴ Thus someone like William Bedell, who saw Irish as a ‘learned and exact language’, and who, as Bishop of Kilmore, sought to encourage preaching and teaching in Irish, was viewed by many within the Church of Ireland as a dangerous maverick who had ‘gone native’.⁵⁵ Indeed, such was the depth of feeling within the Church of Ireland on this issue that it was for a long time thought that Ussher shared it, thanks to a reference in one of Ussher’s letters which Elrington misinterpreted in 1848 as criticizing Bedell for his willingness to evangelize in Irish. Hence the historian of Trinity, J. P. Mahaffy, claimed that Ussher had no Irish and saw Gaelic culture as barbaric, while Douglas Hyde claimed that Ussher sought only ‘to see the Irish and their language crushed’.⁵⁶ Indeed, as late as 1995 it was suggested that he may have been ‘ignorant of the native tongue of his own country’ and was ‘adamant against the translation of the gospels into Irish’.⁵⁷ In fact, William O’Sullivan exploded this misconception as early as 1968: Ussher was not hostile to Bedell’s heroic efforts to translate the Old Testament, nor was he antipathetic to the Irish language. Hartlib reported Ussher’s verdict on Irish literature: ‘They have writings excellent for general and particular histories and poetrie in which they singularly excel.’⁵⁸ There were, nevertheless, subtle differences between Bedell and Ussher in their attitude ⁵² UW, xvi. 25. ⁵³ See the copy, in Ussher’s hand, of his Of the original of termons and erenaghs in TCD MS 786, fol. 123v, 129v for examples of Ussher’s Irish script; for his use of a native speaker, see UW, vi. 428; for his apparent testing of a minister’s ability to speak Irish, see Parr, Life, 91. ⁵⁴ Robert Boyle, The works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, 5 vols. (London, 1744), 116; T. C. Barnard, ‘Protestants and the Irish Language, c. 1675–1725’, JEH, 44 (1993), 243–72. ⁵⁵ Shuckburgh, Bedell, 28–9, 41, 295. ⁵⁶ J. P. Mahaffy, An Epoch in Irish History. Trinity College, Dublin: Its Foundation and Early Fortunes, 1591–1660 (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1970), 97; Douglas Hyde, A literary history of Ireland, 2nd edn (London: Benn, 1967), 619–20, cited in Leerssen, ‘Ussher and Gaelic Culture’, 50. ⁵⁷ Graham Parry, Trophies of Time; English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 151. ⁵⁸ Hartlib papers, 28/1/33B.

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towards the vernacular.⁵⁹ Whilst both were ad idem in their scholarly interest in, and respect for the language, their use of it differed: whereas Bedell was a determined and active evangelist, Ussher is not recorded as ever preaching in or speaking Irish—rather he saw it in more academic terms, as part of Ireland’s ancient heritage. Nevertheless, even if it was confined to the sphere of scholarship, Ussher’s interest in Ireland’s heritage was of considerable importance in pointing protestant scholars towards serious study of the early Irish church. In his willingness to take seriously what others had dismissed as barbaric, Ussher prepared the way for the many eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish protestant writers.⁶⁰ He marked a turning point—the founder of ‘the new school of Anglo-Irish students of the Irish past’, as Robin Flower put it, or, as Joep Leerssen argued: ‘Ussher was among the very first scholars outside the living tradition of native Gaelic culture to whom some of its riches were beginning to spread: and, as such, his position was one of crucial importance.’⁶¹ Ussher’s affection for his native land and its culture was manifested in other ways in his 1639 masterpiece. One of its subtle subtexts was the conviction that though they had much in common, the British and Irish churches were nevertheless separate. This was most obviously indicated by the choice of title: whereas Ussher’s most obvious model—the 1572 volume by that other archiepiscopal historian Matthew Parker—had been about ‘the British church’, Ussher pointedly dealt with the history of ‘the British churches’, anticipating by over three hundred years the discovery by historians that the history of these islands did not have to centre on England.⁶² Similarly, he righteously (and rightfully) insisted that the name Scoti up to the end of the first millennium referred not to the Scots but the Irish.⁶³ But the real depth of his feeling on the independence of the Irish church is most apparent in a private exchange between Ussher and his fellow antiquary Sir Henry Spelman. The latter, like Ussher, was working on the ecclesiastical history of Britain and Ireland, and was to publish his lengthy Concilia, decreta, leges, constitutiones, in re ecclesiarum orbis Britannici in the same year as Ussher’s Antiquitates.⁶⁴ Spelman sent Ussher a draft of his work in 1638, and in the following year asked for further assistance ⁵⁹ W. S. O’Sullivan, ‘Review of R. B. Knox, James Ussher Archbishop of Armagh’, Irish Historical Studies, 16 (1968), 215–19; Leerssen, ‘Ussher and Gaelic Culture’. ⁶⁰ Clare O’Halloran, Golden Ages and Barbarous Nations: Antiquarian Debate and Cultural Politics in Ireland, c.1750–1800 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2004). ⁶¹ Robin Flower (ed.), Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts in the British Museum, vol. iii (London: British Museum, 1953), 7, cited in Ó Muraíle, Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh, 248; Leerssen, ‘Ussher and Gaelic Culture’, 53. ⁶² Matthew Parker, De antiquitate Britannicae ecclesiae . . . historia (London, 1572). ⁶³ UW, vi. 269–82; Bede, Historiam ecclesiasticam gentis Anglorum, ed. Charles Plummer, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), ii. 11. ⁶⁴ Henry Spelman, Concilia, decreta, leges, constitutiones, in re ecclesiarum orbis Brittanici (London, 1639).

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following an enquiry from the French protestant canonist Christophe Justel, whose researches on the ancient patriarchies of the church showed ‘our Britaine churches to be one of them by itself ’.⁶⁵ Spelman’s casual assumption that there had been a single ancient British patriarchate, as proved by the consecration of Irish Viking bishops in the eleventh century by the Archbishop of Canterbury, provoked a lengthy and determined response by Ussher.⁶⁶ Rehashing his earlier investigations in A discourse and Sylloge, he insisted that the ordinations of the Ostmen were aberrations. He was, he emphasized, ‘fullye of the minde it would be farr better to lay down the Irishe and Scottishe hierarchye aparte, without and subordination unto or dependence upon the Brittish or Englishe archbishops, seing therebye you shall not only avoyde the offence of bothe the nations, but doo right also unto the truth itselfe.’⁶⁷ Ussher’s Britannicarum ecclesiarum antiquitates marks a milestone both in the progress of British and Irish historiography in the early modern period and in Ussher’s own intellectual development. In British terms, it stood clearly in the tradition inaugurated by Archbishop Matthew Parker, of merging the highest academic standards to a clear ecclesio-historical purpose—gathering together the essential ecclesiastical texts ‘in the service of national religious doctrine’.⁶⁸ And it was also an important stepping stone to the next masterpiece of early British ecclesiastical history, Stillingfleet’s Origines Britannicae, first published in 1685. Indeed, Stillingfleet’s constant references to ‘the learned Primate’ amply confirm David Douglas’s judgement that Origines could never have been produced without the benefit of Ussher’s earlier labours.⁶⁹ In the context of Irish historiography, Ussher offered an approach to Irish history and culture startlingly different from that adopted by many of his English and Anglo-Irish contemporaries and predecessors. By embracing the Gaelic past he helped to reshape protestant Anglo-Irish attitudes towards their own history and identity, and inaugurated a more inclusive investigation of early Irish history which ultimately led to the development of an eighteenth-century protestant Anglo-Irish patriotism which gloried in Ireland’s past. More personally, the Antiquitates was a turning point in his research. It is true that it was, like his earlier works, not without its polemical thrust—from the ⁶⁵ Bodleian, MS Add. C 301, fols. 48r–51v; Royal Irish Academy MS SR 3.D.8.30 (3192) (I owe this reference to Elizabethanne Boran); BL MS 34,600, fol. 172r. ⁶⁶ Charles McNeill (ed.), The Tanner Letters (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1943), 125; The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, MS MA 2162 (consulted as photostat, TCD MS 3659). Spelman translated the letter into Latin for forwarding to Justel: BL, MS 34600, fols. 179r-180v, 186r. ⁶⁷ The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, MS MA 2162. ⁶⁸ B. S. Robinson, ‘ ‘‘Darke Speech’’: Matthew Parker and the Reforming of History’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 29 (1998), 1063; F. J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino: Huntingdon Library, 1967), 122. ⁶⁹ Stillingfleet, Origines Britannicae, 5, 18, 22, 43, 48, 120, 122, 130, 174, 185, 186, 193; D. C. Douglas, English Scholars 1660–1730, 2nd edn (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1951).

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veiled but sharp criticism of the spread of Pelagio-Armininism in the Churches of England and Ireland in the 1630s, to the less obvious, but no less heartfelt subtext which sought to establish the independence of the Irish church—but the controversial edge was now turned inwards, on his fellow protestants, rather than directed outwards at Antichristian Catholics. More obviously, it also marked Ussher’s abandonment of religious polemic and apocalyptic, and the development of a more neutral, scholarly approach to the British churches. This was to be confirmed and reinforced by his experiences in exile in England in the 1640s, when he saw, and came to dread, the results of apocalyptic fervour.

PART I I USSHER IN ENGLAND

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10 Ussher and the Defence of Episcopacy In May 1640, Ussher came to England. According to Richard Parr it was primarily a personal visit: he brought his family over with him ‘intending to stay here about a year or two, about his private affairs’.¹ He certainly had one or two pressing matters to attend to—there were, after all, fourteen years of references to look up in the libraries of Oxford and Cambridge. And, indeed, we soon find him reverting to the pattern of his earlier visits, dividing his time between London, Cambridge, and Oxford.² By the summer of 1640 he was already ensconced—buried under his books, according to one correspondent—in the Bodleian Library.³ Looked at closely, though, Ussher’s journey across the Irish Sea was rather more purposeful. He was, though he did not know it, going into permanent exile. The Irish Rising of 1641 would deprive him of his see revenues and prevent him ever returning home. Even without the benefit of hindsight, however, the very fact that Ussher in 1640 felt that he could now travel to England was noteworthy. Why, after fourteen long years in Ireland, latterly in self-imposed internal exile in Termonfeckin, did he feel he could finally return? What had changed? The answer lies in seismic shifts in the political landscape, not just in Ireland, but across the two islands, which transformed Ussher’s marginal standing. Though he might attempt to hide away in libraries, he became as a result of these changes a political and religious figure of some significance, closely involved in national politics as a newly popular symbol of moderate Calvinism. Ussher’s transition from exile to centre stage was a direct result of the increasing difficulties which the King encountered in the later 1630s. The effort by Charles and Laud to impose their ‘new programme of British uniformity’ on all three kingdoms in the 1630s had had a paradoxical result.⁴ Far from bringing them together in harmony, it had increasingly alienated regional power groups and ¹ Parr, Life, 44. ² Ibid. 11; Bernard, Life, 42. ³ Constantine Adams to Hartlib, The Hartlib Papers: A Complete Text and Image Database of the Papers of Samuel Hartlib, 2nd edn (Sheffield: Humanities Research Institute) 15/8/3A–4B; J. A. F. Bekkers (ed.), Correspondence of John Morris with Johannes de Laet, 1634–1649 ([Assen]: Van Gorcum, 1970), 43. By 9 June, Twisse was already expecting Ussher to go to Oxford: Bodl. MS Tanner 65, fol. 83r; Ussher also preached a number of sermons whilst in Oxford: James Ussher, Eighteen sermons preached in Oxford 1640, 1st edn (London, 1659). ⁴ Conrad Russell, ‘The British Problem and the English Civil War’, History, 72 (1987), 399.

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religious interests. As local hostility and sensitivities led to growing opposition, Charles and his advisers expended considerable energy in trying to ensure that the three kingdoms moved along parallel but separate lines, seeking to prevent their adversaries making common cause by restricting travel between Ireland and England, and imposing the ‘black oath’ on Ulster Scots to detach them from the covenant.⁵ Despite these efforts (and mathematics), in the early 1640s the parallel lines met, as the tensions in the three polities fused to produce the dramatic crisis that transformed church and state in each country. The catalyst was the determination of the Scots in the later 1630s to reject the new Prayer Book and abolish episcopacy. Charles’ failure to impose his military will on them in the first Bishops’ War of 1639 led him, on Wentworth’s advice, to call a parliament, first in Ireland (16 March–17 June) and then in England (13 April–5 May). Charles fondly imagined that this would give him the money to fight the Scots again: in fact, it provided the perfect platform to all those opponents of the King and his ministers who, resentful and sidelined during the 1630s, had been waiting for their chance to regain the initiative. Even before 1640, there had been signs that the threat posed by the Scots to the Laudian and Caroline experiment was leading some to re-evaluate Ussher’s importance as a unifying or restraining figure. Joseph Hall, another prelate whom Laud suspected of favouring puritans, had grown increasingly concerned at the destabilizing impact of the Scots’ determination to get rid of bishops on the church settlements in all three kingdoms. He wrote to Laud in 1639 urging him to convene a synod of the two islands, where prominent figures such as Ussher could be called on to defend episcopacy.⁶ Laud sensibly ignored this suggestion, and instead pressed (even bullied) Hall into writing a book supporting the divine origins of episcopacy.⁷ Privately, however, Hall persisted in his effort to gain the support of Ussher, begging him to write ‘one sheet of paper’ proving the apostolical origin of bishops. In a revealing allusion to Ussher’s rising star as the respectable face of episcopacy, he added ‘Every line of it coming from your Graces hand, would be . . . more worth than volumes from us.’⁸ Suddenly, Ussher was in demand in Dublin, too. Sir George Radcliffe, Wentworth’s right-hand-man, sought to exploit Ussher’s authoritative status by getting a written opinion from him in 1639 on ‘those unhappy commotions in ⁵ J. S. Morrill, ‘A British Patriarchy? Ecclesiastical Imperialism under the Early Stuarts’, in Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (eds.), Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 209–37; see Wentworth’s determination to control travel to England: John Rushworth (ed.), The tryal of Thomas Earl of Strafford (London, 1700), 13; Hugh Kearney, Strafford in Ireland 1633–41: A Study in Absolutism, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 84; NHI, 267–8. ⁶ CSPD 1639, 526–7; William Prynne, Canterburies doome (London, 1646), 228–9. ⁷ CSPD, 1639–40, 30–1; Prynne, Canterburies doome, 229–35; the resultant book, Joseph Hall, Episcopacie by divine right (London, 1640), was read by Ussher as soon as it came out: Huntington Library, MS HA 15,958. ⁸ Bernard, Judgement (1658), 174–5.

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Scotland’—trying, in other words, to recruit Ussher on the side of obedience by getting him to condemn the covenant.⁹ Recognizing the value of such support, the Lord Deputy asked Ussher to preach two sermons in Dublin on the duties of the subject, on the text ‘I counsel thee to keep the king’s commandment, and that in regard of the oath of God’—a topical text, given that in the summer of 1639 Wentworth was seeking to impose the ‘black oath’ on the Ulster Scots.¹⁰ Subsequently, he encouraged Ussher to expand and publish the sermons, and the Primate wrote them up as The power communicated by God to the prince, and the obedience required of the subject, which he reportedly brought over in 1640 to present to the King.¹¹ At first sight this seems rather surprising—Ussher, who had led the opposition of the Irish bishops in 1626–7, being asked to teach respect for authority. In fact, Radcliffe, like Strafford and Falkland before him, knew well that Ussher’s political instincts were based upon a very deep respect for the God-given power of the monarch. For, in terms of political theory, Ussher was, somewhat surprisingly, an extremist. As he explained in one of his two sermons, he had no interest in a mixed monarchy of king, lords, and commons: Yet are we not to imagine that ours is a mixt government, but an absolute monarchye, because the supreme authoritye resteth neither in the one [the commons] nor in the other [the lords] but solely in the person of the soveraigne by whose power they are both assembled and dissolved and all their acts at his pleasure either allowed or disallowed.¹²

His absolutist stance was amply confirmed by The power communicated by God to the prince, which contains the clearest statement of Ussher’s political philosophy. Royal power came directly from God, to whom the king was solely responsible. The Bible commands us to be subject to principalities and powers. Hence no man can actively resist the authority of the king: ‘whosoever resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God’.¹³ ‘That which the king doth, although unjustly, we are patiently to tolerate; and either to expect amends from his successor, or else the correction of the heavenly judge.’¹⁴ Monarchs were legibus soluti ‘loosed from the laws . . . that is, they are free from all coactive obedience to them’. Not only can they dispense people from observing statutes, they can even suspend such laws if they wish.¹⁵ ⁹ Radcliffe’s views on political theory were similar to those of Ussher, who possessed a copy of the former’s ‘The original of government’: unpaginated MS in possession of Mr and Mrs M. A. McLaggan, Merthyr Mawr House, Bridgend [consulted on microfilm in TCD Library, Manuscripts Room]. ¹⁰ Ussher’s notes for the sermons are in Bodl. MS Rawlinson D 1290, fol. 74v–77v. ¹¹ Bernard, Clavi, 47–8: Bernard gets the citation slightly wrong: the text is from Eccles. 8:2; UW, xi. 229. ¹² Bodl. MS Rawlinson D 1290, fol. 77r. Slightly altered version appears in The power communicated by God to the prince, UW, xi. 278. ¹³ Ibid. 359 (Rom. 13:2). ¹⁴ Ibid. 335. ¹⁵ Ibid. 300, 306; the printed version is an expansion of the sermon.

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The Primate’s treatise places him in interesting company. It is as clear-cut an exposition of the divine right of kings as that other almost exactly contemporary apologia for absolutism—‘perhaps the most sophisticated defence of the policies of the personal rule’—Thomas Hobbes’s The elements of law natural and politic.¹⁶ This shared vision places him at odds with the majority of his fellow Anglo-Irish constitutionalists, but closer to the views of the maverick Old English theorist, John Cusack.¹⁷ Generally speaking, the strength of Ussher’s absolutism suggests that political discourse in Ireland and England before the English civil war was perhaps not as consensual as has been suggested.¹⁸ More specifically, Ussher’s sermon provides a very important contextualization of, even antidote to, his public opposition to the graces in 1627. The strength and vigour of the denunciation of royal policy in 1626–7 led many to assume in the 1640s that Ussher’s concern over the issue of toleration was such that he would go one step further and actively oppose the monarch. But The power communicated by God to the prince made it quite clear that this was a serious misreading of Ussher’s position: godly ministers, he agreed, had a responsibility to remind monarchs of their Christian duty—as he and the Irish bishops had forcefully done—but that was as far as he was prepared to go. The next step, active resistance to the royal power, was utterly unacceptable.¹⁹ Ussher had, it is true, given a hint of his ultimate acceptance of royal authority as early as 1622, when he insisted that monarchs could if they wished suspend laws against recusants.²⁰ Crucially, though, it was the Ussher of 1626–7, the godly bishop and opponent of toleration, that came to dominate the public memory, aided by the fact that, despite Wentworth’s request, Ussher’s 1639 sermons were not published until five years after his death, in the very different atmosphere of Restoration England.²¹ Ussher’s return to public life was confirmed when convocation again met in tandem with parliament, and the Primate came to Dublin to preside over its opening in St Patrick’s Cathedral on 23 March 1640.²² On 26 March a bill for ¹⁶ Anthony Milton, ‘Thomas Wentworth and the Political Thought of the Personal Rule’, in J. F. Merritt (ed.), The Political World of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, 1621–1641 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 133–56; Thomas Hobbes, The elements of law; natural and politic, ed. Ferdinand Tönnies, 2nd edn (London: Cass, 1969). ¹⁷ L. L. Peck, ‘Beyond the Pale: John Cusacke and the Language of Abolutism in Early Stuart Britain’, HJ, 41 (1998), 121–49. ¹⁸ Glenn Burgess, Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); J. P. Sommerville, Royalists and Patriots: Politics and Ideology in England 1603–1640, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 1999); idem, ‘English and European Political Ideas in the Early Seventeenth Century: Revisionism and the Case of Absolutism, Journal of British Studies, 35 (1996), 168–94. ¹⁹ For a discussion of Ussher’s political thought, see Jack Cunningham,‘The Levitical Candle: A Comparison of the Theology and Politics of Two Leading Ecclesiastics, James Ussher (1581–1656) and John Bramhall (1594–1663)’, PhD thesis, University of Ulster, 2003, ch. 6. ²⁰ UW, xv. 180–1. ²¹ James Ussher, The power communicated by God to the prince, and the obedience required of the subject (London, 1661). ²² PRONI, DIO/4/10/2/1, p. 109; TCD MS 1038, fol. 94r.

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four subsidies, with the promise of more, was passed in the Irish parliament, and on 30 March convocation followed with its six, assessed at a new and much higher rate.²³ Wentworth left for England on 3 April to advise the King and apprise the English parliament of its Irish sister’s good example.²⁴ The following month Ussher departed for England, entrusted formally with the task of presenting the King with the clerical subsidies granted by convocation, and perhaps also with the informal role of reprising the task with which James had entrusted him in his sermon to the 1621 parliament.²⁵ In short: given Ussher’s renewed political activity and importance, it is unlikely that his visit was, as Parr claimed, a purely personal one. Nicholas Bernard certainly didn’t think so: the Primate had, he stated, ‘been invited over by some eminent persons, upon the occasion of the then differences between the late king and parliament’.²⁶ This fascinating suggestion is unproveable—there is no documentary evidence of an invitation from either side—but a close examination of his movements in 1640–1, and, less concretely but no less pertinently, an analysis of how Ussher was viewed, suggests that Bernard’s claim is highly plausible. It is true that Parr, anxious in the 1680s to distance Ussher from the dangerous politics of the 1640s, claimed that the Primate left London as soon as he could and went to Oxford in order to avoid ‘those heats and differences, which then happened in that Short Parliament’.²⁷ The reality, though, is rather different. Ussher did not reach the capital until after the end of the parliament, and remained during May, June, and most of July and was there for the conclusion of that swansong of the Laudian Church of England, the 1640 convocation (noting prophetically that the controversial etcetera oath would cause ‘great trouble’).²⁸ On 8 July he made a visit to Cambridge, where there was a public oration in his honour at Great St Mary’s.²⁹ And by August he was, as we have seen, researching in Oxford, where he remained through October, preaching a number of sermons.³⁰ But even there, he was still kept abreast of political developments—in fact, the ‘eminent persons’ pursued him. At the end of August Ussher had ‘a long conference’ with the earl of Warwick, who had travelled to Oxford specially in the coach of the earl of Hertford. Both these had signed the petition of the twelve peers which urged Charles to recall parliament, and Warwick was already a leading figure in the opposition to the King.³¹ Just ²³ PRONI, DIO/4/10/2/1, p. 113; TCD MS 1038, fol. 96v. ²⁴ NHI, 274. ²⁵ Above, p. 112; though he arrived after the end of the Short Parliament, the visit was planned before the conclusion of the parliament: Huntington Library, MS HA 15,958; HMC, Hastings, iv. 88. ²⁶ Bernard, Life, 93; WW, i. 108–9. ²⁷ Parr, Life, 44. ²⁸ Huntington Library, MS HA 15,959; HMC, Hastings, iv. 89. ²⁹ HMC, Hastings, iv. 89. ³⁰ CSPD, 1640, 550; Hartlib Papers, 15/8/3A–4B; Bekkers (ed.), Correspondence of Morris with de Laet, 43; Ussher, Eighteen sermons. ³¹ Bodl., MS Radcliffe Trust c. 32, fol. 2r; F. J. Routledge (ed.), Calendar of the Clarendon State Papers Preserved in the Bodleian Library (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), v. 722–3; I am grateful to John Adamson for this reference.

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before the Long Parliament was due to meet on 3 November, Ussher made arrangements to return to London, where he remained till at least July 1641, ensuring his presence during the key debates about Strafford’s impeachment and the government of the church. In sum, pace Parr, Ussher was at the very centre of the ‘heats and differences’. Closer examination of what he actually did in London confirms that the Primate continued to keep company with ‘eminent persons’. As always, his first priority was to resume his preaching. But even here there was a political context, not in the content of the sermons, which were, with one notable exception, straightforwardly theological and pastoral, but in the places he chose to preach.³² He began with weekly sermons at Cheam which, according to one well-placed observer, attracted a significant following.³³ Here the minister was John Hacket, a moderate protestant churchman and a close ally of the Bishop of Lincoln, John Williams. Though disgraced and currently imprisoned in the Tower of London, as a fierce opponent of Laud Williams’ star rose as the archbishop’s fell, and after his release in November 1640 he played a leading role as Charles’ religious adviser.³⁴ Subsequently, from February 1641 to November 1642, Ussher preached regularly at Covent Garden, the church built and still controlled by another leading parliamentarian, the earl of Bedford, where he was supported by contributions from the congregation.³⁵ Later still, Ussher would be nominated as a lecturer at Lincoln’s Inn by Oliver St John.³⁶ Ussher’s close connections with godly parliamentarians are confirmed by the fact that whilst in London he stayed with the earl of Warwick, apparently had regular meetings with another key political figure, John Pym, and was also in touch with Sir Simonds D’Ewes and Sir Edward Dering.³⁷ There was, in a sense, nothing unusual in this, since Ussher had normally moved in the circles of the godly during his previous visits to England. But there are two significant ³² A lengthy selection of Ussher’s preaching in London can be found in CUL, MS MM.6.55. ³³ Charles McNeill (ed.), The Tanner Letters (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1943), 142; PRONI, T415, fol. 21r; Edward Bewick (ed.), The Rawdon Papers (London, 1819), 78–9. ³⁴ John Hacket, Scrinia reserata ([London], 1693); Brian Quintrell, ‘Williams, John (1582– 1650)’, ODNB. ³⁵ Russell, Monarchies, 239; Verney Papers, Claydon House, Buckinghamshire (consulted on microfilm: BL M635/5): list of subscriptions 27 Dec. 1642 to pay Ussher (I am grateful to Jason Peacey for this reference); F. P. Verney and M. M. Verney, Memoirs of the Verney Family during the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. (London, 1904), i. 63. ³⁶ N. R. N. Tyacke, ‘Puritanism, Arminianism and Counter-revolution’, in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (eds.), The English Civil War (London: Arnold, 1997), 152. ³⁷ Barbara Donagan, ‘The Clerical Patronage of Robert Rich, Second Earl of Warwick, 1619–1642’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 120 (1976), 388–419; PRONI, T415, fol. 21r; Bewick (ed.), Rawdon papers, 78–9 both have ‘Pryn’, but since Prinne did not return from Jersey until November 1640, the suggestion that it should read Pym is highly plausible: Trevor-Roper, ‘Ussher’, 148, 290. For D’Ewes: UW, xvi. 60–1; BL Harleian MS 378, fol. 53r; A. G. Watson, The Library of Sir Simonds D’Ewes (London: British Museum, 1966), 8; Edward Dering, A collection of speeches made by Sir Edward Dering (London, 1642), 48.

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facts about his activities in 1640–1: first, those with whom he was associating were all major politicians closely involved in organizing the opposition to the King in the Long Parliament; and second, Ussher himself was now seen as an important and influential figure. With his scholarly reputation, his Calvinism, his moderation, and his devotion to preaching, he was a role model for the non-Laudian bishop—living proof of Falkland’s claim in 1641 ‘that bishops may bee good men’.³⁸ Moreover, his treatment at the hands of Wentworth and Laud was (just as they had feared) seen as a kind of godly martyrdom: Baillie in 1643 complained of how Laud had held ‘down the head of that orthodox Primat’, and how ‘that worthy Primate Usher’ had often prophesied to his friends ‘his expectation, to be sent over sea, to die a pedant teaching boys for his bread, by the persecution of this faction whose ways he avows to many, doth tend to manifest Arminianisme, and Popery’.³⁹ ‘That excellent learned antiquary’, as Prynne termed him, was thus welcomed by the godly on his coming to England in 1641 almost as a saviour.⁴⁰ Even before he arrived, rumours were circulating in London about his belated return.⁴¹ One puritan minister from Cheshire, John Ley, who like so many others had waited in sullen silence during the Laudian era before bursting into print in 1641, dedicated his book on the Sabbath to the Primate: ‘Gods providence (which doth nothing in vaine) may well bee thought (after so long absence, and so great distance of your ordinary residence) to have brought you hither at this time for so great, so good a purpose,’ namely, to ‘helpe forward the casting of all scandals out of the church’.⁴² The Calvinist medic Louis du Moulin, anticipating the Westminster assembly, suggested in 1641 that a meeting of clergy be called by Parliament, including ten Scots, eight foreign reformed ministers, and ‘40 or 50 English divines . . . unpartiall, learned and uncorrupt in their lives and doctrine, such as D. Usher, Arch B. of Armach, D. Prideaux, D. Twisse and the like’, and described Ussher as ‘a rare ornament not only of Great Britain and Ireland, but of the whole Christian world’.⁴³ ³⁸ Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, A speech made to the House of Commons concerning episcopacy (London, 1641), 12. ³⁹ Robert Baillie, The life of William now Lord Arch-bishop of Canterbury, examined (London, 1643), 15, 21. ⁴⁰ William Prynne, The antipathie of the English lordly prelacie (London, 1641), 493. ⁴¹ CSPD, 1640, 117. ⁴² John Ley, Sunday a Sabbath (London, 1641), sig. C1v; Ley had first made contact with Ussher in 1619 and corresponded with him over the issue of the Sabbath: UW, xii. 589–90; xvi. 364–9; Wood, Athenae, iii. 569 ff.; C. P. Lewis and A. T. Thacker (eds), A History of the County of Chester: Early Modern Chester 1550–1762: Religion, 1550–1642, Victoria History of the Counties of England, vol. v (i) (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2003), 111–12; N. R. N. Tyacke, The History of the University of Oxford: vol. iv, Seventeenth-Century Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 579; Anthony Milton, ‘Licensing, Censorship, and Religious Orthodoxy’, JEH, 41 (1998), 642. ⁴³ [Lewis Du Moulin], Vox populi ([London], 1641), 2; idem, Irenaei Philadelphi epistola ad Renatum Veridœum (‘Eleutheropoli’, 1641), sig. (l)1r–v.

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It is tempting to see Ussher, then, as many contemporary puritans and parliamentarians (and even some royalists) undoubtedly did, as a fully paid-up member of the godly opposition to Laud and Charles, bitterly dwelling on the treatment he had received from Wentworth in the 1630s, and waiting for the opportunity to revenge himself.⁴⁴ But it would be wrong. For all his commitment to Calvinism and hatred of Catholicism—decidedly unroyalist characteristics—Ussher’s primary political loyalty remained to his king: Radcliffe’s instincts in inviting Ussher to preach loyalty in 1639 had been sound. Nor did he harbour thoughts of retribution, for Ussher was not really a politician or a member of parties or factions, scheming for the advancement of himself or his own preferred policies, remembering slights and revenging insults. As the much more politically involved Bramhall put it, ‘God had given him more of the innocence of the dove, than of the prudence of the serpent.’⁴⁵ Ussher was a minister, preacher, and scholar who was happy to put his knowledge and pastoral skills at the disposal of a wide range of friends and acquaintances, including the King and the King’s opponents. As a result, in addition to the history of ‘Ussher the godly parliamentarian’ which has been outlined above, one can also construct a parallel narrative of ‘Ussher the loyal royalist’. Against Bernard one has to set Parr. The latter emphasized his close contacts with the King—soon after Ussher’s arrival in England, he was received by Charles ‘with his wonted favour’.⁴⁶ Ussher’s popularity at court is attested by contemporary sources too: Sir George Wentworth, Strafford’s younger brother, reported as early as June 1640 that the Primate ‘hath been often with His Majesty and well used’.⁴⁷ Ussher was entrusted by the King with the task of looking after the welfare of the episcopalian ministers who had fled from Scotland.⁴⁸ He also retained cordial relations with Bramhall, interceding with the King on the latter’s behalf when he was imprisoned in Ireland.⁴⁹ Equally, he remained a trusted friend of the earl of Strafford, and even visited Laud in prison in the tower.⁵⁰ Thus, just as Ussher could be seen as an adviser to those at Warwick House, he was also equally at home amongst the King and his courtiers. What this suggests is that, even though he was popularly seen as the victim of Wentworth and Bramhall, and therefore the natural ally of Bedford, Warwick, and Pym, Ussher’s place in English politics in 1640 was in fact much more nuanced. The godly fellow-traveller was also loyal subject of Charles; the critic of royal tolerance was also a divine right absolutist. This, together with his intellectual stature, his wide circle of friends, and the ease with which he moved in both parliamentary and ⁴⁴ For an example of these attitudes, see Ussher’s successor as Professor in Trinity, Joshua Hoyle, who fled to England in 1641 and became a strong opponent of Laud, denouncing his policies in a bitter sermon after his execution: J[oshua] H[oyle] Jehojadahs justice against Mattan, Baals priest: or the covenanters justice against idolaters (London, 1645. ⁴⁵ BW, v. 85. ⁴⁶ Parr, Life, 44. ⁴⁷ PRONI, T415, fol. 20r; Bewick (ed.), Rawdon papers, 78–9. ⁴⁸ PRONI, T415, fol. 23r. ⁴⁹ HMC, Hastings, iv. 88, 92–3. ⁵⁰ LW, iv. 3

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royal circles, mean that it is difficult, indeed inappropriate, to ‘place’ Ussher politically in the early stages of the Long Parliament. This Janus-like quality meant, of course, that Ussher was ideally positioned to mediate between the opposing sides. The respect in which he was held gave him a fund of goodwill, and the fact that he was an Irish bishop, distinct from the English bench, and not a member of the House of Lords, worked strongly in his favour, since he, unlike his English counterparts, was neither tainted by the Laudian regime nor forced to take a stand and vote on controversial issues likely to alienate the Commons. At the same time, though, the difficulties of this role should not be underestimated. One observer prophetically warned Ussher in March 1641: ‘it is like, with men who run to extremes on either hand, you may suffer on both sides; on the one as a bishop, on the other, as too gracious with such as mislike, or admit not of episcopall government.’⁵¹ And indeed, as divisions deepened between King and Parliament, and as moderation was continually outflanked by extremism, the middle ground which Ussher occupied shrank alarmingly, leaving him with difficult choices. The ability of Ussher to gain support from both sides was put to the test in the Long Parliament. When it met on 3 November, there was an inchoate but powerful determination amongst MPs to gain redress for their considerable grievances. Attacks were launched against a whole range of people, policies, and practices, but two primary targets quickly emerged: the hated Strafford, seen as the embodiment of all the abuses and impositions of arbitrary rule; and episcopacy, tarred with the excesses of the Laudian bishops. In both cases, Ussher was sucked into the maelstrom, and a close examination of how he responded on these two issues enables us to identify more precisely both how others perceived him and where he stood.

U S S H E R A N D T H E AT TA I N D E R O F S T R A F F O R D Driven on both by popular fervour and their desperate desire to rid themselves of their most dangerous opponent, the parliamentary leaders launched impeachment proceedings against Strafford as soon as they could, on 11 November. Since his behaviour in Ireland formed a large part of the accusations against him, Ussher—leader of the Church of Ireland, a member of the Irish privy council, widely respected, and, conveniently, already in England—was naturally called as a witness.⁵² He was examined twice, first in January, and again (at Strafford’s request) in March, when he was the subject of a procedural squabble between ⁵¹ Ley, Sabbath, sig. [a4r]. ⁵² On the centrality of the Irish Articles to the prosecution case, see D. A. Orr, Treason and the State: Law, Politics, and Ideology in the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 72 ff.

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Commons and Lords over who should be present at his deposition.⁵³ On 2 April 1641, Pym specifically requested his presence at the trial.⁵⁴ Lurking behind this was probably the conviction that Ussher, smarting at his treatment by Strafford in 1634–5, would provide evidence against the Lord Lieutenant. Certainly Wentworth’s parliamentary opponents did their best to rake over the embers of the 1634 Irish convocation—coming up with the interesting allegation that ‘When the Primate of Ireland did press a new ratification of the [Irish] articles . . . for barring . . . novations in religion, he boldly menassed him with the burninge by the hands of the hangman of that confession.’⁵⁵ But if the parliamentary leaders laboured under the misapprehension that Ussher would prove a usefully hostile witness, they were disappointed, since he offered judicious responses to the queries, most helpful, some unhelpful to the Lord Lieutenant. Thus on the issue of what his opponents saw as Strafford’s culpable refusal to punish recusancy, Ussher told of their private conversations, where the Lord Deputy had reassured him that he intended to use the full rigour of the law against the Irish Catholics to reclaim them for protestantism ‘so soon as he should finde himselfe enabled to undergoe so great a businesse’.⁵⁶ Strafford was also able to use Ussher’s knowledge of precedent in the Church of Ireland to defend himself against the ninth article.⁵⁷ But Ussher’s evidence was used by the prosecution to open its case in the twenty-second article, citing a private conversation with Strafford just before they both came to England in 1640 in which he told Ussher that in a case of imminent necessity, if Parliament refused to supply the King with money, he could raise it himself on the basis of his royal prerogative.⁵⁸ In the end, when the prosecution abandoned the impeachment in favour of attainder and the Lords finally passed the bill on 8 May, the King was left with this most ‘unhappy conjuncture of affaires’: having to decide whether to sign the attainder, and abandon his friend and counsellor, ignoring not only his own conviction of his innocence, but his promise to Strafford that he would not suffer with his life; or to refuse to sign it, and risk popular violence and political ⁵³ Rushworth (ed.), Tryal of Strafford, 207, 239, 535; LJ, iv. 129; BL Add. MS 34,253, fol. 3r (in Ussher’s hand); Maija Jansson, Two Diaries of the Long Parliament (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1984), 114. ⁵⁴ CJ, ii. 115: 2 April 1641. ⁵⁵ Bodl., Rawlinson MS D 921, fol. 20r, printed in Charles McNeill (ed.), ‘Report on Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, Oxford’, Analecta Hibernica, 2 (1931), 78. ⁵⁶ BL, Add. MS 34,253, fol. 3r; Strafford’s private correspondence confirms this commitment: see above, p. 177—though, of course, the cynically minded could question his sincerity. ⁵⁷ And tried to use it also to defend himself against the sixth article: Rushworth (ed.), Tryal of Strafford, 206, 236; J. H. Timmis, Thine is the Kingdom: The Trial for Treason of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1974), 85; Orr, Treason and the State, 81. ⁵⁸ Rushworth (ed.), Tryal of Strafford, 535–6; Orr, Treason and the State, 91; Timmis, Thine is the Kingdom, 109–10.

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disaster.⁵⁹ On Sunday morning, 9 May, Charles’s privy council urged him to give his assent, but he was still unhappy. The councillors asked him to consult with his spiritual advisers, to see ‘how the tenderness of his conscience might safely wade through this insuperable difficulty’.⁶⁰ After talking with his bishops, Charles agreed to the attainder, and Strafford was executed on 12 May. The identity of those he consulted, and the advice they gave, is both unclear and the subject of controversy. In Eἰκων βασιλικη Charles deeply regretted acting on the bishops’ advice, though he noted that one of them had told him ‘not to consent against the vote of my owne conscience’.⁶¹ In 1650 James Howell, writer and minor diplomat, in a rather dense (not to mention tedious) allegorical work where the main actors are disguised as trees, first identified the Primate of Lurana (Ireland) as the bishop who justified the royal oak’s betrayal of his friend by arguing that the King had ‘two consciences, one personal, the other political, and though the first resisted, he might do it by the second’.⁶² In his life of Williams, written c.1652, John Hacket said that all the prelates told Charles that he could agree to the attainder by distinguishing between his private conscience, which believed that Strafford was innocent, and the public decision of the judges to convict. If he endorsed the latter, and Strafford was indeed innocent, then the blame lay with the judges, not Charles.⁶³ In 1656 Peter Heylyn entered the fray, claiming that the King had consulted Ussher, Williams, Morton, Bishop of Durham, and Barnabas Potter, Bishop of Carlisle. It was the first two who were responsible for what Heylyn viewed as the scandalous advice to assent to the attainder, and they did so, Heylyn alleged, because they ‘carried a sharp tooth towards the Lord Lieutenant upon former grudges’, Williams for his imprisonment, Ussher for the replacement of the Irish Articles in 1634.⁶⁴ Stung by the criticism, Hamon L’Estrange, a royalist historian, and Nicholas Bernard both sprang to Ussher’s defence, giving detailed accounts of events on 9 May, based, Bernard claimed, on Ussher’s own version. According to the Primate, the King summoned five bishops to meet him on the morning: Ussher, Juxon of London, Morton, Potter, and Williams. Ussher, however, was preaching in Covent Garden that morning.⁶⁵ It wasn’t till the evening that the Primate ⁵⁹ Charles I, Eἰκων βασιλικη : the pourtraicture of his sacred Majestie in his solitudes and sufferings (London, 1648), 6; S. R. Gardiner, History of England from the Accession of James I to the Outbreak of the Civil War 1602–1642, 10 vols. (London, 1886), ix. 365–7. ⁶⁰ Hacket, Scrinia reserata, ii. 161. ⁶¹ Charles I, Eἰκων βασιλικη, 8. ⁶² Daniel Woolf, ‘Conscience, constancy, and ambition in the career and writings of James Howell’, in John Morrill, Paul Slack, and Daniel Woolf (eds.), Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 261. ⁶³ Hacket, Scrinia reserata, ii. 161. ⁶⁴ [Peter Heylyn], Observations on the historie of the reign of King Charles (London, 1656); 240–1; a response to [Hamon L’Estrange], The reign of King Charles: an history faithfully and importially delivered and disposed into annals (London, 1655). ⁶⁵ This is not confirmed by the sermon transcripts of the sermon in CUL, MS MM.6.55, where there is a gap between the sermons of 21 Feb. and 16 May.

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was able to see the King with the other bishops. The discussion centred upon whether it was possible to distinguish between a matter of fact, where the King, having heard the evidence when it was given in the Lords, could judge as to whether the allegations were true, and a matter of law, concerning what was and was not treason. With regard to the latter the King confessed to being confused by the refusal of the prosecution to identify precisely which articles constituted treason. During the meeting, Juxon said nothing, unlike Williams, who not only spoke but also, towards the end, put a note into the King’s hand. What it contained none of the other bishops knew.⁶⁶ Parr also asked Ussher whether he had recommended to the King that he pass the attainder: Ussher told him he had told Charles that if he was satisfied by what he had heard at the trial that Strafford was not guilty, then he could not give his assent.⁶⁷ Heylyn’s account of the meeting is inaccurate about whom the King consulted, and does not fit with what we know of Ussher’s character—as Bramhall observed, Ussher was not ‘of such a vindictive disposition . . . as to write discontents in marble, and . . . give bloody counsel upon private disgusts’.⁶⁸ But, on the other hand, Ussher’s hint that it was Williams who gave the fatal advice conflicts with Charles’, or at least with the author of Eἰκων βασιλικη’s, claim that there was more than one advocating assent, and that only one bishop disagreed. Though a clear resolution of this issue is not possible, Williams would certainly fill the role of unprincipled pragmatist far better than Ussher.⁶⁹ The subsequent historiography of this affair is split: some state straightforwardly with Howell and Heylyn that Ussher advised that the King could in conscience agree to the attainder; others, often biographers more favourably disposed to Ussher, accept his word that he did not.⁷⁰ What mattered in 1641, though, was that Ussher was now clearly trusted by, and on intimate terms with the King and his advisers. This is confirmed by his closeness to Strafford in his last days. He was entrusted with messages to him from the King, ministered to the Lord Lieutenant on the evening before his execution, and, finally, accompanying him to the scaffold—it was Ussher whom ⁶⁶ Bernard, Life, 96–8; Hamon L’Estrange, The reign of King Charles: An history disposed into annals. The second edition revised, and somewhat enlarged (London, 1656), 265–7; [idem], The observator observed (London, 1656), 41–3. ⁶⁷ Parr, Life, 61. ⁶⁸ BW, v. 83; see also Sanderson’s comment: ‘they are strangers to that holy man that can believe he could smother a grudge so many years’: William Sanderson, A compleat history of the life and raigne of King Charles from his cradle to his grave (London, 1658), 412. ⁶⁹ For Williams’ historiographical reputation see the the index entry in Trevor-Roper, Ussher, 316: ‘Williams, John . . . a serpentine politician’. ⁷⁰ Peregrinus, ‘Lord Strafford and Archbishop Ussher’, Notes and Queries, 1st ser., 4 (18 Oct. 1851), 290–1; Russell, Monarchies, 299; UW, i. 210–17; J. A. Carr, The Life and Times of James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh (London: Gardner, Darton, 1895), 331–3; Gardiner, History of England, ix. 365; C. V. Wedgwood, Thomas Wentworth, First Earl of Strafford, 1593–1641: A Reevaluation (London: Jonathan Cape, 1964), 377; Alexander Gordon, ‘Ussher, James (1581–1656)’, Dictionary of National Biography (London, 1899);. F. F. Blok, Isaac Vossius and His Circle: His Life until His Farewell to Queen Christina of Sweden 1618–1655 (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 2000), 87.

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Strafford addressed first in his final speech.⁷¹ The Primate was deeply moved by the experience.⁷² According to Lady Falkland, My Lord Primate of Armagh by his [Strafford’s] own desire was with him the day before he died; they continued in prayer the whole day; he professes he never heard any man pray like him. His particular confession he made to his own chaplain, what he said to my Lord Primate was in general of those things in his nature that we found the effects of: pride, ambition and revenge, but that now God had graciously answered his prayers in making a strange and sudden alteration in him, that he found not so much as a displeasing thought against his worst enemy, which he took for an earnest of His further mercy to him, and that he found great peace upon his humiliation in prayer; such as he never felt in all his life.⁷³

But Ussher’s very public involvement with Strafford on the scaffold, and his willingness to attest to his ‘good death’ must have surprised those of his godly friends who viewed Strafford as little less than Antichrist. Lady Falkland noted that ‘believing his salvation possible is almost a heresy here. My Lord Primate suffers in opinion for giving this testimony of him, which he could not deny with truth.’⁷⁴ It was the first public hint to the godly that Ussher might not be one of them.

U S S H E R A N D E PI S C O PAC Y The Commons was also under pressure to move swiftly to demolish the Caroline religious settlement. On 11 December a petition from London to the Commons attacked ‘the government of archbishops and lord bishops’ and their claim that they had their calling ‘directly from the Lord Jesus Christ’, and demanded ‘that the said government, with all its dependencies, roots and branches, may be abolished’ and that ‘the government according to God’s word may be rightly placed among us’.⁷⁵ On 16 December the Commons called for the 1640 canons to be nullified.⁷⁶ Two days later, impeachment proceedings against Laud began, followed by two further Arminian bishops. As the personnel of the Laudian church were weeded out, the Calvinist clergy emerged from the shadows to replace them, older bishops such as Williams, Potter, and Morton, and senior Cambridge academics, like Samuel Ward, Professor of Divinity and Master of Sidney Sussex College, Richard Holdsworth, Master of Emmanuel College, and Ralph Brownrigg, Master of St Catherine’s Hall—and, of course, Ussher.⁷⁷ ⁷¹ Rushworth (ed.), Tryal of Strafford, 759–62; LW, iii, 442, 444–5; BW, v. 84. ⁷² PRONI, 415, fol. 25r. ⁷³ HMC, Hastings, ii. 82. ⁷⁴ Ibid. ⁷⁵ S. R. Gardiner, The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution 1625–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), 138. ⁷⁶ CJ, ii. 51–2. ⁷⁷ Kenneth Fincham, ‘William Laud and the Exercise of Caroline Ecclesiastical Patronage’, JEH, 51 (2000), 89–91, notes the fate of many of these Calvinist divines during the 1630s.

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Dismantling the Laudian regime was easily achieved. But the task of deciding what structures should replace it was much slower and more difficult. Consideration of the London root and branch petition was repeatedly postponed in the Commons.⁷⁸ The problem was partly tactical—parliamentary leaders wished to focus upon the case against Strafford.⁷⁹ But their reluctance to press ahead with consideration of church government was also a product of the very serious strategic concern that it would fatally divide the fragile parliamentary alliance. At one extreme there were those who backed the root and branch petition. The Scots commissioners, determined to ensure that the gains they had made by defeating Charles were not squandered by their parliamentary allies, insisted that the English should unite with Scotland in a presbyterian settlement.⁸⁰ Many of their English allies shared the desire to get rid of episcopacy, but not all of them wanted it to be replaced by presbyterianism: some favoured congregationalism, whilst others looked for an Erastian settlement, with Parliament and the laity having a leading role in running the Church. At the opposite end of the spectrum were the defenders of episcopacy jure divino who saw it as not only laid down by the word of God but also perpetually required as the only form of government in the Church. Apart from Joseph Hall and some bishops currently residing in the Tower of London, there were few willing to defend this position.⁸¹ In between these two extremes lay a sizeable but not always very vocal part of the population which opposed Laudianism and Arminianism, but supported episcopacy and wished for it to be reformed.⁸² Some wanted to return to the Calvinist episcopate of Elizabeth’s or James’s reign. Others, however, in the best protestant tradition, looked rather further back, seeking to return to episcopacy ‘in statu puro, as it was in the primitive times’.⁸³ This last option was the one behind which Ussher threw all his scholarly learning. While Hall continued to fight yesterday’s battle with his Smectymnuan opponents, Ussher not only quietly shifted the ground, but also gathered a significant following for his new position.⁸⁴ As early as December 1640, Baillie ⁷⁸ CJ, ii. 49: 11 Dec. 1640; ii. 67: 13 Jan. 1641; ii. 81: 8 Feb 1641; ii. 81: 9 Feb. 1641. ⁷⁹ Austin Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 170. ⁸⁰ Russell, Monarchies, 168 ff. ⁸¹ Even Hall came round to a modified synodal government in the end: Joseph Hall, The shaking of the olive-tree (London, 1660), 342–3. ⁸² J. D. Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). ⁸³ Edward Bagshaw, Mr Bagshaw’s speech in parliament Feb. 9th 1640 concerning episcopacy and the London petition (London, 1641), 1–2; John Rushworth, Historical collections: the second part (London, 1686), 1342. ⁸⁴ Joseph Hall, An humble remonstrance to the High Court of Parliament (London, 1641); idem, A short answer to the tedious vindication of Smectymnuus (London, 1641); idem, A modest confutation (London, 1642); idem, A defense of the humble remonstrance (London, 1641); Smectymnuus, An answer to a booke entituled, An humble remonstrance (London, 1641); idem, A vindication of the Answer to the humble remonstance ([London], 1641).

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had identified Ussher ‘and a great faction with him’ as being in favour of ‘a calked [limited] episcopacy’.⁸⁵ On 21 January, together with Holdsworth and Brownrigg, he had an audience with the King, at which he argued strongly that bishops should be ‘moulded into the auncient primitive way, and . . . reduced into that same state where they continewed many hundred yeares after Christ’. Distancing himself from earlier attempts to defend episcopacy, Ussher pledged himself to developing this alternative approach which, he said ‘hath bin very little understood of late by any of our divines’.⁸⁶ This is precisely what Ussher set out to do over the following months: to lay down ‘the original of bishops and metropolitans’, so that the Church of England, rather than cutting episcopacy down ‘root and branch’, could, by ‘purging and pruning’, restore it to its original purity.⁸⁷ It was an enormously difficult scholarly and political challenge: first, to disentangle from the Bible and the fragmentary history of the early church just how first- and second-century Christianity had governed itself; second, to draw up a clear template for applying that model to the contemporary Church of England; and finally, the politics—was it possible to forge a broad coalition which was prepared to agree on one model of episcopal government, and, crucially, was it possible to win over the King? Ussher, as it turned out, was highly successful in meeting the first test; more equivocally passed the second; but both these achievements were vitiated by failure at the last hurdle. In terms of scholarly skills, it is difficult to identify anyone in England better equipped to tackle the first challenge. From the late 1620s, he had been working on one of the key sources for the history of episcopacy—the letters of Ignatius.⁸⁸ Ignatius (c.35–c.107), as one of the earliest fathers known in the seventeenth century, offered crucial evidence of the predominant role of bishops in church government during that seminal period which linked the Bible, the Apostles, and the primitive church. The difficulty was that it was far from clear whether his twelve surviving letters were authentic, and even those thought genuine seemed to have later interpolations. The dispute between Thomas Cartwright and Archbishop Whitgift in the 1570s set the pattern for the use of Ignatius in controversy: conformists cited the letters as proof of the early, indeed apostolic origins of episcopacy, while puritans, unhappy with their hierarchical implications, denounced them as forgeries.⁸⁹ It was Ussher who ⁸⁵ David Laing (ed.), The letters and journals of Robert Baillie, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1841–3), i. 287. ⁸⁶ Report on the manuscripts of the Right Honourable Viscount De L’Isle & Dudley, 6 vols. (London: Historical Manuscripts Commission, 1925–66), vi. 368. ⁸⁷ [James Ussher] (ed.), Certain briefe treatises written by diverse learned men concerning the ancient and moderne government of the church: wherein both the primitive institution of episcopacie is maintained, and the lawfulnesse of the ordination of protestant ministers beyond the seas likewise defended (Oxford, 1641), 54. ⁸⁸ UW, xv. 419, 482, 504, 542; xvi. 34, 53, 64; Bodl MS Cherry 23, fols. 177r–179v. ⁸⁹ Hugh de Quehen, ‘Politics and Scholarship in the Ignatian Controversy’, Seventeenth Century, 13 (1998), 69–84; ‘Ignatius is favoured more by the bishops’: Lewis Du Moulin, Apologia pro

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provided the solution to this textual problem: demonstrating the ‘highest critical genius’, he tracked down two manuscripts, Latin and Greek, which contained accurate texts, and published the former in 1644.⁹⁰ Though designed for a small and learned audience, Ussher’s edition of the letters had much wider implications, for it confirmed the existence of episcopacy early in the Christian church, and suggested that the primacy of bishops over presbyters was an early rather than a late development. The first popular foretaste of his work came in late May 1641, when he produced The judgement of Doctor Rainoldes touching the originall of episcopacy: more largely confirmed out of antiquity, by James Archbishop of Armagh; this was expanded and republished later in 1641 as The originall of bishops in Certain briefe treatises, a collection of pieces on episcopacy; and enlarged yet again in 1642 when it appeared in a further collection, Confessions and proofes.⁹¹ The first two tracts began with a brief excerpt from the writings of John Rainolds, the Elizabethan puritan leader, which noted that the elders ordained by the Apostles to govern the early church had chosen a president from amongst themselves, as in the church of Ephesus, where there was located one of the ‘angels’ referred to in Revelation. epistola (London, 1641), 76; Robert Greville, Lord Brooke, A discourse opening the nature of that episcopacie which is exercised in England (London, 1641), 67. ⁹⁰ James Ussher, Polycarpi et Ignatii epistolae (Oxford, 1644); idem, The editio princeps of the Epistle of Barnabas, ed. J. H. Backhouse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1883), pp. xiii ff. His only mistake was to reduce the corpus too far, to six, by rejecting one genuine letter (to Polycarp) as spurious. Best account is still J. B. Lightfoot (ed.), The Apostolic Fathers, 2 vols. (London, 1885), vol. i, part 2, pp. 76–84, 223–34, quotations from ibid. 232, and Henry Chadwick, The Church in Ancient Society: From Galilee to Gregory the Great (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 66. Critics have challenged Ussher’s solution and his dating of the letters but failing an alternative scholarly consensus, Ussher’s remains the standard approach: W. R. Schoedel, ‘Are the Letters of Ignatius of Antioch Authentic?’, Religious Studies Review (1980), 196–201; Allen Brent, ‘The Enigma of Ignatius of Antioch’, JEH, 57 (2006), 429–56. ⁹¹ James Ussher, The judgement of Doctor Rainoldes (London, 1641)—on dating, see John Milton, Complete Prose Works, ed. D. M. Wolfe, vol. i, 1624–1642 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), 104; [James Ussher] (ed.), Certain briefe treatises; [idem] (ed.), Confessions and proofes of protestant divines of reformed churches, that episcopacy is in respect of the office according to the word of God, and in respect of the use the best: together with a briefe treatise touching The originall of bishops and metropolitans ([London: s.n.], 1642). It is highly probable that Ussher was responsible for putting together Certain briefe treatises: he had two pieces in the collection; all the other authors bar John Dury were dead; Ussher is known to have access to Hooker’s papers (A. S. McGrade, ‘Hooker, Richard (1554–1600)’, ODNB); and the printer, Leonard Lichfield, also published three other works by Ussher—his edition of the Ignatian epistles; Immanuel, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1643); and Examen quotidianum Ymboliad beunyddiol ([Oxford], 1658). The version of The originall of bishops in UW, vii. 41–85, though dated 1641, is in fact from the Confessions and proofes: to avoid confusion citations are from the original editions, rather than UW. Though Bernard on one occasion ( James Ussher, The reduction of episcopacie (London, 1658), 173) denies that Ussher was the author of Confessions and proofes, on another he acknowledges it as his (list of Ussher’s English works: Bernard, Life, at end (unpag.)): it is clear that Ussher both contributed to it himself, and edited the other pieces in the collection, since he had close contacts with all the contributors: Hartlib Papers, 17/17/4B; John Barwick, Hieronikes, or the fight, victory, and triumph of S. Paul . . . together, with the life of the said bishop (London, 1660), 137; Pierre Desmaizeaux, An historical and critical account of the life and writings of W. Chillingworth (London, [1725?]), 304 ff.

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These in due course became known as bishops, who governed with the advice of the elders, and when these bishops met together they chose a metropolitan to preside. Ussher then developed this theme, by showing that the ‘ground’ of episcopacy was the ‘patterne prescribed by God in the Old Testament’, and ‘the imitation thereof brought in by the apostles, and confirmed by Christ himself in the time of the New’.⁹² Taking another step away from his younger interest in apocalyptic and Antichrist, he then launched an attack against those wanted to root out episcopacy: With what shew of reason then can any man imagin, that what was instituted by God in the law . . . should now be rejected in the gospel, as a device of Antichrist? . . . But nothing so familiar now a dayes, as to father upon Antichrist, whatsoever in church matters we doe not find to suite with our owne humours: the safest way will be, to consult with Christ himself herein, and heare what he delivereth in the cause.⁹³

His chief proof text was Revelation, and the letters which John writes to the seven ‘angels’ of the seven Asian churches. Those in favour of an equality of clergy saw these letters as being addressed to all the ministers in each church rather than one particular leader. Ussher attacked this interpretation, especially as advanced by Calvin’s successor, Beza, and by Thomas Brightman, arguing that the seven angels of the seven churches whom John addresses are not just presbyters, but bishops.⁹⁴ Then he turned to Ignatius, and to the equally early letter of Clement, recently published by Patrick Young, in order to show that, at the very time that John was writing Revelation, the early church was developing an episcopal polity.⁹⁵ The model he finds in Ignatius is one where the churches do nothing without the consent of their bishop, but the bishops and clergy cooperate closely in the government of the church—the presbyters at Ephesus were, Ignatius stated, ‘so conjoined . . . with their bishop, as the strings are with the harp.’⁹⁶ Having shown the central, but cooperative role of bishops in the early church, Ussher then traced the episcopal succession down through the ages, even engaging in a little dubious ecclesiastical genealogy to link the episcopate in England to its original institution by St Peter.⁹⁷ Thus, he concluded ‘we have deduced episcopacy from the apostolic times.’⁹⁸ Ussher went on to show that the seven churches mentioned in Revelation were, as befitted their status in Roman Asia, in fact metropolitical, governing other smaller churches in their regions.⁹⁹ As a parting shot, Ussher cheekily invoked Calvin’s support, urging his readers to ‘retaine that reverend opinion of the primitive bishops . . . (who so willingly ⁹² [Ussher] (ed.), Certain briefe treatises, 51–2. ⁹³ Ibid. 54–5. ⁹⁴ Ibid. 54–6. ⁹⁵ Patrick Young (ed.), Clementis ad Corinthios epistola prior (Oxford, 1633); the reference to Clement was not in either The judgement of Doctor Rainoldes or Certain briefe treatises, but was a 1642 addition to The originall of bishops in Confessions and proofs, 63. ⁹⁶ [Ussher] (ed.), Certain briefe treatises, 58–9. ⁹⁷ Ibid. 61–2. ⁹⁸ Ibid. 65. ⁹⁹ Ibid. 74; to the second 1641 edition of The originall of bishops Ussher added a lengthy and typically learned geographical analysis of the development of Asia to provide the secular background to this ‘subordination of many bishops unto one chiefe’: ibid. 76–96.

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submitted themselves, not only to the archiepiscopall, but also to the patriarchall government) which Calvin professed he did: that in all this, they were farre from having thought ‘‘to devise another forme of church government, then that which God had prescribed in his word.’’ ’¹⁰⁰

R E D U C I N G E PI S C O PAC Y The second test facing Ussher was to translate ancient history into present practice: this produced his most famous work on this subject, the Reduction of episcopacy. Probably produced around March 1641, this set out in simple form how Ussher’s ideal of primitive episcopacy would be implemented in the English context.¹⁰¹ He began with the ordinal of the Church of England which quoted Paul’s exhortation to the church at Ephesus from Acts 20:17–35, and went on, via Revelation and the church fathers, to outline how the early church functioned, with a bishop presiding over the presbyters ‘in the common government of the church’. He stressed that bishops operated with their clergy, even, in typical Ussherian fashion, citing an obscure Saxon law that if a bishop heard any man’s case without the presence of the clergy his decision was void.¹⁰² Recognizing the radical nature of what he was doing, Ussher acknowledged that the present structures of the Church of England were somewhat different: ‘true it is, that in our church this kind of presbyterial government hath been long disused’.¹⁰³ But, casually discarding Laudian episcopacy, Ussher argued that this was merely a product of law and custom, which could be changed by statute. And how easily this ancient form of government by the united suffrages of the clergy might be revived again, and with what little shew of alteration the synodical conventions of the pastors of every parish might be accorded with the presidency of the bishops of each diocese and province, the indifferent reader may quickly perceive by the perusal of the ensuing propositions.¹⁰⁴

There followed a tiered model structure for this new church, rising from parish to national synod. The rector, church wardens, and sidesmen of each parish would meet weekly and have the power to admonish sinners and refer unrepentant ones to a monthly deanery synod. Over this a suffragan bishop would preside, together with all the rectors in the deanery. It would have the power to excommunicate, and to deal with any issues concerning the doctrine or behaviour of ministers. Appeals could be made to an annual or biannual diocesan synod, comprising of ¹⁰⁰ [Ussher] (ed.), Certain briefe treatises, 75; Ussher’s interpretation of Calvin was somewhat stretched—see John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (London: S.C.M. Press, 1961), IV.4.4; and also T. B. Chandler, The appeal defended: or, the proposed American episcopate vindicated (New York, 1769), 238. ¹⁰¹ Dating and publication details are complex: see below, n. 137. ¹⁰² UW, xii. 531–3. ¹⁰³ Ibid. 533. ¹⁰⁴ Ibid.

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the suffragans, the rest of the rectors, and ‘the bishop, or superintendent, call him whether you will’. ‘Here all matters of greater moment might be taken into consideration, and the orders of the monthly synods revised.’ Difficult issues could be referred from this level to that of the two provincial synods, consisting of all the suffragans and bishops, and elected clergy from every diocese, with the archbishop as moderator. These would be held every third year: if they met in conjunction with parliament then the two provincial synods could meet as a national synod.¹⁰⁵ In one respect, Ussher was retreating from the high ground of Laudian prelacy to the more moderate model of Calvinist episcopacy mapped out by Francis Mason and other Elizabethan and Jacobean divines over a generation before.¹⁰⁶ For where Laud had sought to widen the gap between the Church of England and the foreign reformed churches, Ussher narrowed it. Laud had cast doubt on the status of those churches who did not have bishops and the validity of non-episcopal ordination, and had laid great stress upon the distinctness and superiority of bishops over clergy. But one of the purposes of the various collections of treatises that Ussher edited in 1641 and 1642 was to defend the soundness of the ordination of reformed ministers in Europe and show how similar the Church of England was to its Continental sisters. Privately, Ussher made it quite plain that he thought the difference between a bishop and a minister was merely one of degree—they were not separate orders.¹⁰⁷ This, of course, made it much easier for prelates and priests to work together in church government and administer jointly powers which Laud had insisted were the preserve only of the episcopate. Yet Ussher was going much, much further than returning to mainstream Calvinist episcopacy. He was in fact engaged in a dramatic reinterpretation of the ecclesiology of the English church, a recasting of the Elizabethan settlement which would fundamentally change the nature of the relationship between monarchy, bishops, clergy, and laity. Where did Ussher’s radicalism come from? Though difficult precisely to weigh the relative importance of each one, it is nevertheless possible to identify a number of features of Ussher’s character and background which help to explain why he was prepared to go so much farther than most English royalists. There was, first of all, his conviction that it was possible, through the exercise of academic acumen, to identify a form of church government which had been handed down to the early church from the Apostles. Ussher had a simple if un-postmodern belief in the possibility of establishing historical truth, and, as he showed in his work on the Ignatian epistles, possessed the scholarly skills to aspire to this aim. Once one conceded the additional principle that the early Christians provided the purest model for the contemporary church, then the power of Ussher’s calm and methodical scholarship was considerable. ¹⁰⁵ Ibid. 534–6. ¹⁰⁶ Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 466 ff. ¹⁰⁷ van Prinsterer (ed.), Archives de la maison d’Orange-Nassau, iii, 2nd ser. (1625–42), 439; Bernard (ed.), Clavi trabales, 55–7.

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But the distinctiveness and independence of Ussher’s viewpoint was more than simply a product of his erudition, it also sprang, secondly, from his perspective as an outsider. For Ussher was someone who was able to see the Church of England not only from the viewpoint of the Church of Ireland, but also from the wider perspectives of British and European protestantism. One of the themes of our examination of Ussher’s developing senses of history, theology, and identity has been the way in which the protestant reformation initially followed a different path in Ireland than it did in England, embracing a broader range of clergy, enabling puritans to serve with conformists without fear of official persecution. This Irish protestant perspective, episcopal, yet Calvinist and anti-Catholic, both provided Ussher with his sense of what was ‘normal’ and offered a welcome alternative to those in the early 1640s who were seeking to defend the bishops whilst distancing them from the excesses of Laudianism and allegations of popery. This required the editing and recasting of recent history to redress the balance between the Irish and the Laudian models of episcopacy, exposing the value of the former and the disastrous results of the latter. Two pieces of propaganda precisely designed to fulfil this role appeared in 1641. One was a product of the conviction and execution in 1640 of an Irish bishop, John Atherton of Waterford and Lismore, on charges of sodomy. At first sight, this was a somewhat unlikely, not to mention bizarre, way of recommending Irish episcopacy to the English church. But, encouraged by Ussher, his former chaplain Nicholas Bernard took on the challenge and, with a deftness that can only be admired, spun the story into not only a moral tale, but a tale with a highly convenient moral. Atherton had been Wentworth’s personal pit bull terrier, appointed to Waterford and Lismore to claw back the ecclesiastical lands detained by the Lord Deputy’s enemy, the earl of Cork, and viewed with some distaste even by his patron.¹⁰⁸ Bernard had seen Atherton through his last hours and accompanied him to the scaffold, publishing a popular account of this notable scandal. By not mentioning Atherton’s crime, but at the same time stressing his contrition, Bernard was able to leave the impression that Atherton was repenting not just for his own offence, but for all the crimes of all the Laudian bishops in Ireland. Atherton thus, according to Bernard, confessed that he had persecuted people too fiercely in the high commission, resorted to law too frequently, had not preached or catechized sufficiently, and had been too zealous in opposing the Irish Articles in the 1634 convocation.¹⁰⁹ In the week before his execution, he even, under Bernard’s tutelage, abandoned Arminianism, discovering for the first time the joys of reading those good Calvinists, Preston and Downham.¹¹⁰ The contrast with what had gone before, and the link to the debate over ¹⁰⁸ Aidan Clarke, ‘The Atherton File’, Decies, 9 (1979), 45–55; Peter Marshall, Mother Leakey and the Bishop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 59–85. ¹⁰⁹ Nicholas Bernard, The penitent death of a woefull sinner (London, 1641), 15–16. ¹¹⁰ Bernard rammed home the point by naming the Downham book as The covenant of grace ‘which had been call’d in’: ibid. 17.

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episcopacy, was provided by Bernard’s dedication to Ussher, where he argued that if others had only followed the Primate’s example ‘I believe, the office had never been so much as questioned.’¹¹¹ Bernard’s account, in other words, represented ‘the revenge of . . . ‘‘old’’ Church of Ireland over ‘‘new’’ Church of Ireland’.¹¹² Much more obviously inspiring was the rediscovery of that high point of Irish episcopal independence—the 1626 declaration against toleration. Previously circulating in manuscript copies, this was published for the first time in 1641, and used to prove that the old Irish bishops had been zealous and clear-sighted enough to direct their fire against the real enemy: This declaration of the bishops of Ireland against poperie, howsoever fifteene yeares agoe, is now thought fit to be further published. If thou shalt hear the whole order taxed with a continual complying with the times, here thou shalt find them labouring against the streame; nay like such prophets as God once sought for standing in the gap. If accused of court pleasing; here thou seest them hazarding the contrary. If Laodicean like, of lukewarmnesse in religion; here thou findest their zeal burning. Art thou hot against idolatrie? these are enflamed. Art thou pulling it down? these are razing the foundation thereof. Doest thou account it erroneous? these heresie. Thou superstition? these abomination. Thou abhorrest the practice; they the toleration. Poperie and episcopacie thou maiest see were here farre asunder. Let not the ornament thereof be wholy cast by, for a few spots that may be washed out. Separate the religious from the vile, and thou shalt be as God’s mouth.¹¹³

A third, but less self-evident influence upon Ussher was that of English and Scottish presbyterianism, to which Ussher was exposed at an early age through teachers such as Travers, Holmes, and Hamilton. The extent to which Ussher’s education inclined him to a more, or less, positive attitude towards Calvinist forms of church government is, as has been noted, impossible to establish. The most that can be said is that he was fully aware of the arguments over church government from an early age.¹¹⁴ But his knowledge was not merely theoretical, for the influx of Scots such as Blair and Livingston into Ulster in the 1610s and 1620s posed a particular challenge of how to deal with clearly presbyterian clergy who were willing to serve within the Church of Ireland but sought to establish a form of presbyterian discipline inside its episcopal structures. Under Ussher’s primacy it initially proved possible to accommodate them and create an accidental compromise. It was only in the 1630s, thanks to the determination of Leslie and Bramhall, with their very different views of the relation between episcopacy and presbytery, that this arrangement was shattered. Arguably (and it is a matter for argument), Ussher’s unwillingness to act against such clergy ¹¹¹ Ibid., Dedication. ¹¹² Marshall, Mother Leakey and the Bishop, 142. ¹¹³ The protestation of the archbishops and bishops of Ireland against the toleration of popery, 2 edns (London, 1641). ¹¹⁴ See above, pp. 41–55.

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takes on a new significance when seen in the context of what he was proposing in 1641.¹¹⁵ Finally, Ussher was also tapping into an underestimated but not insignificant English tradition of reformed episcopacy—those ‘plots for reformation’ repeatedly and unsuccessfully proposed during the reigns of Elizabeth and James by churchmen delicately poised between conformity and puritanism, which, in many respects, anticipated Ussher’s proposals.¹¹⁶ Indeed, Ussher went even further back, to that early, neglected prophet of compromise, the Strasbourg reformer and Cambridge Regius Professor of Divinity, Martin Bucer, whose dying gift to the English church, De regno Christi, had mapped out an alternative vision of a simplified primitive episcopacy, which Ussher quoted in his 1641 collection of moderate tracts, Certain briefe treatises.¹¹⁷ THE POLITICS OF THE REDUCTION The most difficult challenge facing Ussher in 1641 was to gain the necessary political support for his new vision of episcopal government. The contest over the government of the Church in England was one of the dominant issues in 1641–2, in parliamentary debates and petitions, in pamphlets and treatises, both popular and academic, and even on the streets of London. Initially, primitive episcopacy seemed to offer a way forward, attracting, as Baillie fearfully noted, widespread support.¹¹⁸ As early as 11 December 1640, when the root and branch petition was presented, that parliamentary paragon, Sir Simonds D’Ewes, Ussher’s friend and fellow antiquary, had contrasted the worldly modern prelates with the ‘ancient and godly bishops’.¹¹⁹ Ussher’s proposal to the King on 21 ¹¹⁵ One of the Scottish commissioners’ chaplains in London in the early 1640s was none other than Robert Blair: William Row (ed.), The life of Mr. Robert Blair, Minister of St Andrews, containing his autobiography from 1593 to 1636 (s. l., 1848), 163; ODNB, Dave Stevenson, ‘Blair, Robert (1593–1666)’. ¹¹⁶ Michael Mendle, Dangerous Positions: Mixed Government, the Estates of the Realm, and the Making of the Answer to the Xix Propositions (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1985), 141; Patrick Collinson, ‘Episcopacy and Reform in England in the Later Sixteenth Century’, in idem, Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (London: The Hambledon Press, 1983), 155–89, details numerous proposals for increasing the number of suffragan bishops, joining bishops and clergy together in synods, and for bishops and clergy administering discipline jointly. ¹¹⁷ Certain briefe treatises, 45–8; Ussher translated the text from Conrad Hubert (ed.), Scripta Anglicana (Basel, 1577); for a modern translation of part of De regno, see Wilhelm Pauck (ed.), Melanchthon and Bucer (London: SCM Press, 1969), 174—Ussher’s text begins p. 284; Patrick Collinson, ‘The Reformer and the Archbishop: Martin Bucer and an English Bucerian’, in idem, Godly People, 25–7; M. E. VanderSchaaf, ‘Archbishop Parker’s Efforts toward a Bucerian Discipline in the Church of England’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 8 (1977), 85–103; Tom Webster, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England: The Caroline Puritan Movement c. 1620–1643 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 314. ¹¹⁸ Baillie, Letters and journals, 287. ¹¹⁹ Jansson, Long parliament, i. 567; ‘I have a most intimate and deare familiarity with the Archbishop of Armagh, whome I have promised to take lodgings by him in Covent Garden’:

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January marked a major step forward, offering as it did a way of resolving the ecclesiastical problem at precisely the same time as Charles was seeking to reach a political settlement involving the admission to key offices of state of Bedford, Pym, and St John and other opponents.¹²⁰ Indeed, Conrad Russell sees Ussher’s role at this stage as that of a scholarly consultant to Bedford and those other godly parliamentarians for whom a return to ancient bishops was a satisfactory way of resolving the problem of ecclesiastical government.¹²¹ Ussher’s compromise certainly attracted support in the parliamentary debates on the root and branch petition which took place on 8 and 9 February. Future royalists and future parliamentarians alike endorsed it: ‘Let us not destroy bishops, but make them such as they were in primitive times . . . Let them be brought to govern . . . by assemblies of their clergy.’ ‘Let them be reduced according to the usage of ancient churches in the best times.’¹²² Even someone such as Sir John Wray, usually thought of as a presbyterian, contrasted the worldly Wolsey with the saintly Cranmer, and hinted at a willingness to countenance the second.¹²³ Ussher’s status as the leading advocate of primitive episcopacy was confirmed in early 1641 when he was paid the compliment of a counterfeit publication. Ephraim Udall, a moderate episcopalian, published around early February 1641 an anonymous pamphlet, Directions propounded and humbly presented to the high court of parliament concerning the Book of Common Prayer and episcopal government written by a learned an reverend divine, now resident in this city.¹²⁴ Ussher was clearly the alleged author, since on 9 February, immediately after the end of the debate on the root and branch petition, the House of Commons, at his request, issued an order suppressing the book as having been ‘most injuriously fathered upon him’.¹²⁵ Much of the material in the pamphlet is indeed mangled, and the style of writing is not Ussher’s, but some of the contents are close enough to Ussher’s known views for the Directions to be seen at the very least as a useful indication of what people thought he was doing in early 1641, and, more probably, as a garbled account of his actual concerns. Thus the section of the Prayer Book partly overlaps with proposals made by Ussher and other members of the House of Lords committee on religion in March–April 1641, whilst the treatment of J. O. Halliwell (ed.), The autobiography and correspondence of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, 2 vols. (1845), ii. 252–3. ¹²⁰ Russell, Monarchies, ch. 6. ¹²¹ Ibid. 238–40, 249–50. ¹²² John Rushworth, Historical collections, 6 vols. (London, 1703–8), iii. 356–73; Sir Beniamin Rudyerds speech; concerning bishops deanes and chapters (London, 1641), sig. A3r. ¹²³ John Wray, Eight occasionall speeches: made in the House of Commons this parliament, 1641 (London, 1641), 7. ¹²⁴ (London, 1641); in the second edition (London 1642), Ussher was named as the reverend divine; a third edition followed (London, 1660); there are manuscript copies of Udall’s work in the Shaftesbury papers, PRO 30/24//33/9, and in CUL Add. MS 44/6. ¹²⁵ Jansson, Long parliament, ii. 397; Michael Mendle, ‘De Facto Freedom, de Facto Authority: Press and Parliament, 1640–1643’, HJ, 38 (1995), 318.

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episcopal government begins with a scriptural and historical justification which bears a clear, if skeletal, relation to Ussher’s argument in The Judgement of Doctor Rainoldes, published the following May.¹²⁶ Udall also includes an outline of the structure of the English church reduced to primitive form which bears a much more slender resemblance to the Reduction of episcopacy.¹²⁷ Whether stimulated by Udall or not, Ussher produced his own version of the Reduction. It is difficult to be sure of the status of this proposal in 1641, since it was not printed until fifteen years later. It has been subject to a wide, not to mention bewildering, variety of claims: that it was published in 1641; that it was not published but circulated privately by Ussher; that it was submitted to a House of Lords committee, that it was proposed by Ussher then withdrawn because of royal disapproval; that it did not circulate at all in 1641, but rather made its first public appearance in 1648, when it was part of the attempt to agree a settlement at the Isle of Wight; that it was kept secret till after his death.¹²⁸ The balance of the evidence suggests that Ussher informally and privately circulated the proposals in the form we have them sometime after mid-February 1641.¹²⁹ Ussher’s Cheshire acquaintance, John Ley, who was visiting London during February–March, gave an account on 19 March of how ‘hearty and forward’ the Primate had been to ‘project a forme of ecclesiasticall government, wherein you might be but as one of us in a sociable participation of ordination and jurisdiction with the rest of your brethren, the incumbent pastors and preachers of particular churches’—a pretty good summary of the Reduction.¹³⁰ But if, as Conrad Russell suggested, the Reduction was indeed part and product of the settlement negotiations between the King and the parliamentary leaders, then its shelf-life proved exceptionally short, scuppered on either side by the Scottish commissioners and the King. The former, determined to extirpate ¹²⁶ On the Prayer Book, compare Directions propounded, p. 2 nos. 1 & 2, p. 3 nos. 4 & 6, and Copie of the proceedings of some worthy divines, p. 4 nos. 1 & 2, p. 4 no. 4, p. 5 no. 10, p. 7 nos. 34 & 35. ¹²⁷ The faint resemblance of the second section of the proposals on episcopacy have led some scholars to mistakenly assume that this pamphlet contains a published version of Ussher’s Reduction: Mendle, ‘Press and Parliament’, 318; Simonds D’Ewes, The journal of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, ed. Wallace Notestein (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1923), 343 n. 22. Russell, Monarchies, 191, mistakes a MS version of Udall’s Directions propounded in CUL Add. MS 44/6 for the Reduction. ¹²⁸ J. C. Spalding and M. F. Brass, ‘Reduction of the Episcopacy as a Means to Unity in England, 1640–1662’, Church History, 30 (1961), 417; Elizabethanne Boran, ‘ ‘‘Propagating Religion and Endeavoring the Reformation of the Whole World’’: Irish Bishops and the Hartlib Circle in the Mid Seventeenth Century’, in V. P. Carey and Ute Lotz-Heumann (eds.), Taking Sides? Colonial and Confessional Mentalities in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2003), 181; W. M. Abbott, ‘James Ussher and ‘‘Ussherian’’ Episcopacy, 1640–1656: The Primate and His Reduction Manuscript’, Albion, 22 (1990), 237–59; Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696), i. 238; Carr, Ussher, 271; Trevor-Roper, Ussher, 151. ¹²⁹ The Reduction refers to the Triennial Act which was passed by Parliament on 15 Feb. 1641: UW, xii. 536; Bernard’s claim, Clavi, 54, that Ussher presented it to the King in 1641 is supported, though not proved, by Temple’s account of the meeting between Ussher and Charles on 21 January. ¹³⁰ Ley, Sabbath, sig. [a4v], c2r; John Ley, A case of conscience (London, 1641), sig. a2v.

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bishops, saw Ussher’s scheme as a serious threat.¹³¹ In January and February 1641, they launched three broadsides specifically directed against ‘this petite episcopacy’: George Gillespie’s title summed up their position: Certaine reasons tending to prove the unlawfulnesse and inexpediencie of all diocesan episcopacy (even the most moderate).¹³² Baillie openly scorned the sudden change in tactics from Hall’s jure divino defence to the ‘calmenes and moderation’ of Ussher’s primitive episcopacy: ‘Who yesterday did rage like lyons, today take upon them the skin of meekest lambs.’¹³³ The Scots then came out with an uncompromising statement on 24 February reiterating their demand for the abolition of episcopacy.¹³⁴ This left the parliamentary leaders in the difficult position of having to decide between their Scottish allies on the one hand and a settlement with the King, including limited episcopacy, on the other. When pressed in Parliament, they chose the former, ending immediate hopes of a settlement.¹³⁵ In any case, the King had already clearly hinted that Ussher’s model undermined the constitution which he was determined to protect. It is true that in his speech to Parliament on 23 January 1641 he committed himself to reducing ‘all thinges to the purest tymes’, but any radical intentions were immediately limited by the following clause: ‘as they were in the time queene Elizabeth’. He went on to warn the houses to eschew ‘those petitions . . . against the present established government of the church; and of the great threats that are given out, that bishops shall be no better than cyphers if not clean done away’—which would seem to include not only root and branch, but also Ussher’s Reduction.¹³⁶ This was bad news for Ussher and may well explain his reluctance to publish the Reduction in the 1640s.¹³⁷ But even if we accept that he ceased circulating the Reduction because of lack of royal enthusiasm, it is far from clear when he did so. Russell assumes that he gave up after the collapse of the settlement negotiations in February. But Ley still thinks of his proposals as current in March, and as late as May 1641 Ussher is still discussing the reduction with the Dutch Ambassador as a viable plan, suggesting that it was capable of surviving the collapse of the settlement negotiations, and had a rather longer shelf-life.¹³⁸ Whatever the fate of his Reduction, Ussher’s personal involvement in the search for a settlement certainly continued. On 1 March the House of Lords belatedly ¹³¹ Baillie, Letters and journals, 287. ¹³² ([London?], 1641), 12. ¹³³ Robert Baillie, The unlawfulnesse and danger of limited episcopacie (London, 1641), 2; see also Alexander Henderson, The unlawfullnes and danger of limited prelacie ([London?], 1641). ¹³⁴ Russell, Monarchies, 197–9, 268. ¹³⁵ Ibid. 270. ¹³⁶ PRO 30/24//33/9, fol. 11v; LJ, iv. 142. ¹³⁷ Gardiner, History of England, ix. 268; D. L. Smith, Constitutional Royalism and the Search for Settlement, c. 1640–1649 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 143–4; Peter Lake, ‘Puritans, Popularity and Petitions: Local Politics in National Context, Cheshire, 1641’, in Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust, and Peter Lake (eds.), Politics, Religion, and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 275–6; McNeill (ed.), Tanner Letters, 172. ¹³⁸ G. Groen van Prinsterer (ed.), Archives ou correspondance inédite de la maison d’Orange-Nassau, vol. iii, 2nd ser., 1625–1642 (Utrecht, 1859), 439.

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sought to tackle church reform, setting up a committee under Bishop Williams, which was on 10 March empowered to consult with advisers such ‘as the Lord Archbishop of Armagh, Dr. Prideaux, Dr. Warde, Dr. Twisse, Dr. Hacket’.¹³⁹ Described by Ussher as a mixture of moderates and extremists, the committee eventually included a roll call of his friends and acquaintances, Sam Ward, John Prideaux, Daniel Featley, Brownrigg, Holdsworth, Hacket, and Robert Sanderson, whilst ‘extremists’ included three of the five Smectymnuans.¹⁴⁰ According to Hacket, the committee met six times ‘in all which time all passages of discourse were very friendly between part and part’.¹⁴¹ A copy of some ‘considerations’ attributed to Ussher, together with Williams, Featley, Ward, Brownrigg, Hacket, and Prideaux, laid down the moderate position: they condemned ‘the whole grosse substance of Arminianisme’, defended Calvinist orthodoxy, and made a number of detailed concessions to puritan objections to the Prayer Book.¹⁴² The key issue, however, remained ecclesiastical government. Some have speculated that Ussher submitted his scheme for the reduction of episcopacy to the committee, but there is no evidence for this.¹⁴³ The mantle of drawing up detailed schemes had in fact passed to others. According to Hacket, Williams ‘had undertaken a draft for regulating the government ecclesiastical’ but had not finished it when the committee ceased working in May.¹⁴⁴ As tension rose in May over Strafford’s attainder, the propaganda war over church government intensified. ‘If ever there were a season to write, or speake, in defence of episcopacy, it is now, or never,’ one anonymous defender announced at the end of the month.¹⁴⁵ Ussher by this stage was growing increasingly pessimistic about the threat to church and state. The Dutch Ambassador found him in early May ‘perplexed and fearful of terrible disorder’, and even talking of fleeing to the Netherlands if matters deteriorated.¹⁴⁶ But he was still intimately involved in the struggle to preserve some form of episcopacy—he wrote to Bramhall about his work on the House of Lords committee and of his fraught efforts to defend episcopal government ‘for which I can tell you we are put to our utmost’.¹⁴⁷ The main pressure came from the Commons, which, frustrated and disillusioned with the lack of progress on church reform in the Lords, proposed a more radical agenda, including the exclusion of bishops from Parliament and the ¹³⁹ LJ, iv. 174, 180. ¹⁴⁰ Calamy, Marshall, and Young: Abbott, ‘Ussher and ‘‘Ussherian’’ episcopacy’, 241. ¹⁴¹ Hacket, Scrinia reserata, ii. 147. ¹⁴² Copie of the proceedings of some worthy divines. ¹⁴³ W. A. Shaw, A History of the English Church during the Civil Wars and under the Commonwealth 1640–1660, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1900), i. 69–70; Knox, Ussher, 59; Spalding and Brass, ‘Reduction of episcopacy’, 417; N. W. S. Cranfield, ‘Early 17th Century Developments and Change in the Doctrine of ἐπισκoπη’ and understanding of the office of ἐπισκoπoς in the Church of England, 1603–1645’, DPhil thesis, Oxford University, 1988, 382 ff. ¹⁴⁴ Hacket, Scrinia reserata, ii. 147. ¹⁴⁵ Peloni Almoni, A compendious discourse, proving episcopacy to be of apostolicall, and conseqvently of divine, institution (London, 1641), sig. A2r. ¹⁴⁶ Van Prinsterer (ed.), Correspondance d’Orange-Nassau, vol. iii, 2nd ser., 1625–1642, 439. ¹⁴⁷ PRONI, 415, fol. 25r.

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abolition of deaneries and chapters. On 25 May the Lords stubbornly voted for the bishops to continue sitting with them and finally on 27 May the Commons’ patience snapped, and the root and branch bill was introduced, giving formal voice to the growing demands for the utter abolition of episcopacy.¹⁴⁸ The last week of May saw the publication of two major defences of primitive episcopacy. Ussher led the way with The judgement of Doctor Rainoldes, and was followed by the Cheshire MP Sir Thomas Aston’s A remonstrance, against presbitery.¹⁴⁹ There is no evidence that the publications were coordinated, but Aston and Ussher were both in London during spring 1641.¹⁵⁰ Taken together their works constitute a powerful scholarly defence of ancient episcopacy based upon the familiar combination of scriptural and patristic sources. Whereas Ussher’s work was shorter and more magisterial, Aston’s was far longer and more comprehensive, the product of impressively wide reading in theology and church history, and dealing, unlike Ussher, with contemporary issues concerning the political and legal context of episcopacy in England. Aston was a learned country gentleman, a classical moderate defender of the Prayer Book. For him, Ussher was both an authority—he cited his Britannicarum ecclesiarum antiquitates —and a model—he included him in his list of ideal bishops.¹⁵¹ As always in early modern paper wars, challenge produced response, as Milton responded to Ussher’s defence of episcopacy in what was, for him, a remarkably restrained and polite style.¹⁵² The stakes rose over the summer of 1641 as the debates on the root and branch bill between 11 June and 3 August showed that many MPs who had previously been in favour of the reform of episcopacy were now prepared seriously to consider its abolition.¹⁵³ Opponents of the bill offered as an alternative ‘such a government in our church as may have Gods word for the rule, and the first and purest times for our example.’¹⁵⁴ They were led by the vacillating Kent MP Edward Dering, who, bizarrely, had originally introduced the root and branch bill, yet soon afterwards drew up a detailed scheme for primitive-style episcopacy, with a diocesan organization based on counties and a tiered synodical structure from parish to national triennial synod.¹⁵⁵ Though it had a more Erastian tinge than Ussher’s scheme, Dering’s proposal was still clearly indebted to ‘the learned, ¹⁴⁸ Gardiner, History of England, ix. 378 ff; Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, 183; Anthony Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English civil war (London: Edward Arnold, 1981), 101. ¹⁴⁹ Thomas Aston, A remonstrance, against presbitery ([London], 1641). ¹⁵⁰ Lake, ‘Puritans, Popularity and Petitions’, 280. ¹⁵¹ Aston, A remonstrance, sig. b1r–b2r; Maltby, Prayer Book and People, 144. ¹⁵² John Milton, Of prelatical episcopacy, and whether it may be deduced from the apostolical times (London, 1641). ¹⁵³ Fletcher, Outbreak of the English Civil War, 100. ¹⁵⁴ A speech when Master Hide was in the chayre upon the bill concerning episcopacie (1641), 5. ¹⁵⁵ Dering, Collection of speeches, 48, 155–61; the contemporary printings may be a more accurate reflection of his 1641 proposal: Derek Hirst, ‘The Defection of Sir Edward Dering, 1640–1641’, HJ 15 (1972), 205 n. 54; for a list of contemporary editions of Dering’s proposal, see Mendle, Dangerous Positions, 218 n. 38.

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pious, and painefull Primate’, as he called him.¹⁵⁶ As Dering rather optimistically argued on 21 June 1641 ‘If the right forme of primitive episcopacy were truly stated forth unto us, it would (questionlesse) take and lead our judgements along therewith.’¹⁵⁷ One of the difficulties was that there was little or no leadership from the King or his bishops. Williams did eventually introduce a bill in the Lords in July, but it was far too conservative a measure, seeking to preserve the royal choice of bishops and episcopal power at the expense of twelve suffragans in each county, who were to share in ordination and the administration of the church courts and have a say in the nomination of bishops. Unsurprisingly, it sank without trace after its second reading.¹⁵⁸ If this was the best that the King and his advisers could produce, then episcopacy was indeed doomed.¹⁵⁹ As relations between Commons and Lords, and King and Parliament worsened in 1641, Ussher’s hopes of a via media slipped away. The Commons moved slowly towards the abolition of bishops and an essentially Erastian reform of church government based on lay commissioners, while the King identified the maintenance of the Church of England as one of his rallying cries. In October he drew another line in the sand: ‘I am constant for the doctrine & discepline of the Churche of England as it was established by Queene Elis. & my father’—ruling out Ussher’s vision of primitive episcopacy.¹⁶⁰ Ussher did, it is true, continue to publish accounts of bishops in the early church. Certain briefe treatises probably came out in September–October 1641, and Confessions and proofes in 1642, fanning the dying embers of a once-heated debate.¹⁶¹ Another of Ussher’s learned parliamentary friends, John Selden, published in 1642 a key primary source on the early church in Alexandria, suggesting that it had had a hybrid form of episcopal and presbyterian government.¹⁶² But it was too late to rescue even the most attenuated form of episcopacy. As Ussher realized, he was faced with a dilemma in 1641–2. Confident that he had identified the form of government of the early church, he tentatively introduced into the public domain his contemporary implementation of that model, but proved reluctant to put his full weight behind the task of securing political support for a Reduction-style settlement. Ussher himself acknowledged, ¹⁵⁶ Dering, Collection of speeches, 48, 114; for Dering’s scholarly interests, see the catalogue of his library, Folger Library MS V.b.297, cited in J. P. Rosenblatt, ‘Sir Edward Dering’s Milton’, Modern Philology, 79 (1982), 376–85. ¹⁵⁷ Dering, Collection of speeches, 70. ¹⁵⁸ Gardiner, Constitutional documents, 167–79. ¹⁵⁹ The lack of clear leadership by the bishops in defending their own order has been noted by some historians: W. A. Abbott, ‘The Issue of Episcopacy in the Long Parliament: The Reasons for Abolition’, DPhil thesis, Oxford University, 1981, 134–8; Maltby, Prayer Book and People, 157. ¹⁶⁰ John Evelyn, Diary and Correspondence of John Evelyn, ed. William Bray, 4 vols. (London, 1859–62), iv. 88. ¹⁶¹ Between 1640 and 1644 there were, roughly, 97 works published in England and Scotland categorized as dealing with episcopacy: 3 in 1640; 65 in 1641; 19 in 1642; 3 in 1643; 7 in 1644: based on an online keyword and title search in RLG, English Short Title Catalogue. ¹⁶² John Selden (ed.), Eutychii Aegyptii, patriarchae orthodoxorum Alexandrini, scriptoris (London, 1642); Cranfield, ‘Doctrine of ἐπισκoπη’, 382 ff.

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in typically Delphic fashion, the contradiction between suppressing the Reduction whilst at the same time publishing The originall of bishops: the saying of Augustine came into my mind: ‘He that concealeth a truth, and he that teacheth a falsehood, are both guilty: the first because he will not profit; the other, because he intendeth to hurt and delude.’ Which I apprehended as a double caution, both of not publishing any utopian ecclesiasticall forme of government of mine owne forging, as also, of not stifling, by my silence, a forme truly apostolicall.¹⁶³

EVA LUAT I N G T H E REDUCTION Ussher’s Reduction has not had a good press. As early as 1648, that stout royalist Sir Edward Hyde denounced such plans as naïve—as little better than the abolition of bishops: Moderate episcopacy is a new word to cozen men into a consent for extirpation. They would moderate their number by new nonsense, double or treble them; and they would moderate their revenue, that is take three parts from them; and they would moderate their jurisdiction, that is leave them no more authority or power than the parson of the parish; besides, I must tell you, these prudent men, who desire to moderate episcopacy, will nullify deans and chapters; and, on those righteous terms, they will be content that some men shall be called bishops.¹⁶⁴

Subsequent evaluations have not improved. A battery of distinguished historians have denounced the Reduction as little better than an ephemeral curiosity. Even the judicious Gardiner saw it as unrealistic: though it ‘had an excellent appearance on paper. It was not quite so clear what would be its practical result, if bishops like Wren and Montagu found themselves face to face with a council consisting of ministers like Burgess and Marshall.’¹⁶⁵ As Trevor-Roper put it, the Reduction was ‘a purely clerical compromise’ which had little chance of working in the real world.¹⁶⁶ It sought, according to Patrick Collinson, to accommodate two incompatible positions, and ‘suffered the common fate of most such mediating formulae at a time of intense ecclesiastical and political strife’.¹⁶⁷ And, indeed, it is undeniable that Ussher’s Reduction of episcopacy raised a whole host of unanswered practical questions, such as the role of clergy in ordination and the king in selecting bishops, the fate of the church courts, and the precise location of authority within the new structures.¹⁶⁸ Hence there was damning indictment ¹⁶³ Ussher, Confessions and proofes, sig. A2r. ¹⁶⁴ Quoted in R. W. Harris, Clarendon and the English Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), 185. ¹⁶⁵ Gardiner, History of England, ix. 387. ¹⁶⁶ Trevor-Roper, Ussher, 152. ¹⁶⁷ Collinson, ‘Episcopacy and Reform’, 189. ¹⁶⁸ Baxter raised this last-mentioned issue with Ussher in the 1650s: ‘he told me confidently that synods are not properly for government, but for agreement among the pastors; and a synod

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that it ‘failed as much through its inherent defects as through the pressure of political circumstances’.¹⁶⁹ But it would be wrong to assume that the Reduction was wholly naïve in its conception. It actually served a very shrewd purpose both at the time and subsequently.¹⁷⁰ Ussher was, of course, uninterested in creating a system which could accommodate a Wren or a Montague—they were already yesterday’s men. Instead, he wanted to find common cause, or at least a halfway compromise, between, on the one hand, himself, Holdsworth, Brownrigg, and the other Calvinist bishops, and, on the other, the likes of Burgess and Marshall. Rather than giving way bit by bit to the critics of episcopacy, seeking always to preserve as much of the status quo as possible, he was trying, by conceding more, to create a larger, firmer middle ground, upon which he hoped all moderate defenders of prelacy could stand. Or, to change the metaphor, it was ‘a brilliant attempt at squaring the circle’.¹⁷¹ Ussher was trying to marry what in England had been previously irreconcilable, episcopacy and presbytery, primarily in an effort to appeal to those puritans and gentry who were having doubts about the Scots insistence that the English adopt their form of presbyterianism.¹⁷² He may even have been going further, seeking to win over moderate Scots.¹⁷³ of bishops are not the governors of any one bishop there present. Though no doubt but every pastor out of the synod, being a ruler of his flock, a synod of such pastors may there exercise acts of government over their flocks, though they be but acts of agreement or contract for concord one towards another. Quere, if the whole synod have no governing power over its members, hath the president of that synod any qua talis?’: Baxter, Reliquiae, ii. 206. ¹⁶⁹ Trevor-Roper, Ussher, 151. ¹⁷⁰ For its subsequent importance see the publishing history, with further editions in 1657 (London), 1658 (London), 1660 (London), 1661 (Utrecht), 1679 (London), 1680, 1689, 1703, 1706 (all Edinburgh); Roger Morrice, Entring book, Dr Williams Library, London, Vol. Q, p. 626 (I owe this reference to Jason McElligott); and Spalding and Brass, ‘Reduction of the episcopacy’, 425 ff. The episcopal and synodical structure of the Church of England today is, of course, somewhat closer to Ussher’s proposal: D. C. Reinken, ‘Archbishop Ussher’s Proposal for Synodical Government (1641): Its Scriptural and Patristic Origins and Its Relevance for Today’: (accessed 5 July 2003). ¹⁷¹ Russell, Monarchies, 250. ¹⁷² See the similar intention of Sir Thomas Aston: Lake, ‘Puritans, Popularity and Petitions’, 276. ¹⁷³ There is in one of the pre-Restoration Lauderdale papers in BL Add. MS 23,113, fols. 18–23 a manuscript copy of the Reduction with marginalia by Ussher designed to show its compatibility with Scottish presbyterianism. Unfortunately it is difficult to date, since the young Viscount Maitland (earl of Lauderdale from 1645) was closely involved in events in London from as early as 1641: it might therefore be an early redraft by Ussher, or a later version, prompted by the King’s belated recognition of the Reduction in 1648. Amanda Capern, ‘ ‘‘Slippery Times and Dangerous Dayes’’: James Ussher and the Calvinist Reformation of Britain’, PhD thesis, University of New South Wales, 1991, 313, mistakenly claims that it is in Ussher’s hand; Ronald Hutton, ‘Maitland, John, duke of Lauderdale (1616–1682)’, ODNB: Julia Buckroyd, The Life of James Sharp Archbishop of St Andrews 1618–1679 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1987), 56; J. M. Lloyd Thomas (ed.), The Autobiography of Richard Baxter Being the Reliquiae Baxterianae (London: Dent, 1925), 142; Russell, Monarchies, 249. For confirmation of the authenticity of the marginalia in James Ussher, The reduction of episcopacie (London, 1656), see James Ussher, The reduction of episcopacie, ed. Nicholas Bernard (London: R. Royston, 1656), sig. A3v.

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Nor should the extent of potential political support for Ussher’s proposal be underestimated. Many of the moderate petitions presented to Parliament in 1641–2, whilst they generally distanced themselves from divine right episcopacy, stressed the apostolicity and ancientness of bishops in a way that was perfectly consonant with Ussher’s Reduction.¹⁷⁴ Independently minded moderates such as George Morley and John Hales were happy to consider primitive episcopacy, with Hales openly endorsing Ussher’s arguments.¹⁷⁵ As one Thomas Cooke put it in 1641, ‘the originals of bishops and their antiquity’ was sufficiently proved by ‘many and sundry learned divines, both bishops and doctors’.¹⁷⁶ John Dury was by January 1641 convinced of the need to return to a reduced episcopacy, warning of the danger of ‘inflicting a punishment on all for the fault of some’.¹⁷⁷ Ussher’s more radical friends, Thomas Gataker and William Twisse, and his former chaplain, Stanley Gower, all saw it as a reasonable compromise.¹⁷⁸ Even the English presbyterians were far from united. It might be assumed that the opponents of Bishop Hall—the acronymic Smectymnuans—would fall into the category of hard-line abolitionists. But even here, though happy to attack Hall’s jure divino episcopacy, they were much more cautious when it came to specifying what should replace the Laudian system, and did not rule out primitive episcopacy.¹⁷⁹ Indeed, leading parliamentary figures such as Denzil Holles and even Pym himself, though they formally supported root and branch in the summer of 1641, may have done so out of tactical necessity—to appease the Scots—rather than a real desire to abolish episcopacy.¹⁸⁰ ‘Clearly, Holles did not like bishops, but he may have been satisfied with a godly, primitive episcopate.’¹⁸¹ Certainly, the enigmatic Selden was prepared to investigate the ¹⁷⁴ Judith Maltby (ed.), ‘Petitions for episcopacy and the Book of Common Prayer on the Eve of the Civil War 1641–1642’, in Stephen Taylor (ed.), From Cranmer to Davidson: A Church of England Miscellany (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1999), 103–67. Ussher’s work could also, of course, be used to support divine right episcopacy—see Francis Wortley, ‘Eλευθερωσιs τηs ἀληθειαs, truth asserted by the doctrine and practice of the apostles (London, 1641), 8–9, though Wortley relies upon the false Ignatian letter to the Antiochians, ibid., 15. ¹⁷⁵ George Morley, A modest advertisement (London, 1641), 12; John Hales, The way towards the finding of a decision (London, 1641), 40; Mendle, Dangerous Positions, 144. ¹⁷⁶ Thomas Cooke, Episcopacie asserted: as it now stands established in our church and commonwealth (London, 1641), 1. ¹⁷⁷ Hartlib Papers, 6/4/103B–104A; Ussher, having been courted by Dury in the 1650s, and having used his description of the various types of church government in his Certain briefe treatises was irritated by Dury’s subsequent expedient rejection of episcopacy. When Dury approached him in the 1650s, Ussher reportedly responded ‘with some indignation’ bidding him ‘seek another to make a fool of: did they go to reconcile foreign churches who had divided their own and put down episcopacy here?’ McNeill (ed.), Tanner Letters, 388. ¹⁷⁸ Thomas Gataker, A discours apologetical (London, 1654), 24; ODNB, E. C.Vernon, ‘Twisse, William (1577/8 –1646)’; Webster, Godly clergy, 326. ¹⁷⁹ Webster, Godly clergy, 319 ff.; Tai Liu, ‘Burges, Cornelius (d.1665)’, ODNB. ¹⁸⁰ Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England Begun in the Year 1641, ed. W. D. Macray, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), i. 309. ¹⁸¹ Patricia Crawford, Denzil Holles 1598–1680: A Study of His Political Career (London: Royal Historical Society, 1979), 51.

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mixed polity of the early church as a model for the Church of England.¹⁸² In sum, not only a sizeable body of moderate opinion, but also a large number of leading parliamentarians ‘may well have favoured the retention of bishops as diocesan co-ordinators within a system of church government that lay somewhere between ‘‘primitive’’ episcopacy and Scottish-style presbyterianism’.¹⁸³ Certainly, the general tenor of Ussher’s work in 1641–2 was designed to appeal to the protestant ‘left wing’. One of the main purposes of the authorities gathered together in Certain briefe treatises and Confessions and proofes of Protestant divines of reformed churches was to show that primitive episcopacy was compatible with reformed protestantism. Ussher sought to prove that the majority of protestant churches still held to episcopacy in some shape or form ‘under these two divers names of episcopacy and superintendency’.¹⁸⁴ In his own works, Ussher trod a delicate line between refuting the arguments of Calvin and Beza and using, even twisting, them to support primitive episcopacy. This is most obvious in relation to ‘that reverend doctor’ Rainolds, where Ussher’s attempt to claim his posthumous endorsement was strenuously (and rightfully) resisted by those who pointed out that he in fact believed in parity of ministers.¹⁸⁵ But Ussher went further than simply using puritan authorities, he also sought to commandeer their sola scriptura methodology. Hence he expressed his desire in Of the originall of bishops ‘to consult with Christ herein’, or in Confessions and proofes to use ‘the authenticall texts of scripture . . . to demonstrate Christ his own approbation of episcopall prelacy’.¹⁸⁶ In this, of course, Ussher was doing no different to Hall, Laud, Whitgift, and all those who cited scripture in opposition to Calvinist claims that they had, rather belatedly, discerned God’s plan for church government. But he was engaged in something much more exciting than defending the contemporary church hierarchy from the Bible: he was trying to show moderate puritans that, by their own methodology, the purest and most biblical form of church government was neither Laudianism nor presbyterianism but primitive prelacy. He was using the puritan methodology to attack both the established religious settlement and presbyterianism. But he was also doing something more. Where the puritans tended to prefer the Bible to the church fathers, the time of the Apostles to the early church, Ussher was taking a much more inclusive approach, using Ignatius to link all ¹⁸² Cranfield, ‘The doctrine of ἐπισκoπη’, 382 ff. ¹⁸³ David Scott, ‘Wray, Sir John, Second Baronet (bap. 1586, d.1655)’, ODNB; see also R. S. Paul, The Assembly of the Lord: Politics and Religion in the Westminster Assembly and the ‘Grand Debate’ (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1985), 105–10. ¹⁸⁴ Confessions, sig. A2v. ¹⁸⁵ Ussher, Judgement of Doctor Rainoldes, 4; quotation from Rainolds expanded in Certain briefe treatises, 50–1 (Ussher took his quotations from John Rainolds, The summe of the conference betwene John Rainoldes and John Hart (London, 1584), 535–6, 621–2); John Rainolds, Dr Reignolds his letter to Sir Francis Knollis (London, 1641); idem, The iudgement of Doctor Reignolds concerning episcopacy (London, 1641). ¹⁸⁶ Ussher, Certain briefe treatises, 54; idem, Confessions and proofes, sig. A2v.

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these elements together, to try to demonstrate that the polity of the primitive church was not only endorsed by Christ and the Apostles, but both had its roots in the Old Testament and also had a continuous existence in the church down to the present—something which the presbyterian system signally lacked.¹⁸⁷ With Ussher, then, ‘primitive episcopacy entered into competition with presbyterianism and independency for the right to be called the only true and original church polity.’¹⁸⁸

C O N C LU S I O N The debate on episcopacy had sucked Ussher into the centre of British politics in 1641. His initial proposal, which sought to unite all parties around an episcopal minimum, had the crucial endorsement of being the policy most feared by the Scots, and was later adopted as an alternative to root and branch by Dering.¹⁸⁹ And indeed, for a brief period in late 1640 and early 1641 it succeeded in gaining a remarkably wide range of English protestant support. But for the loyal Ussher, the crucial endorsement was the King’s. And here, royal stubbournness and political ineptitude meant that, when Ussher’s proposal had the best opportunity for widespread acceptance, in 1641, Charles rejected it, and when it had little hope of success, in 1648, he endorsed it. Or, as Baxter put it rather more pithily: ‘as he would not when others would, so others would not when he would.’¹⁹⁰ Charles instead opted in 1641–3 for an episcopal minimum which, as Williams’ plan had demonstrated, was far in excess of what Ussher had proposed and far short of what the Commons was prepared to accept.¹⁹¹ As so often with the King, he had missed a crucial opportunity for occupying the middle ground, ground which Ussher, with his wide range of contacts and considerable learning, had helped to construct in 1640–1. It is difficult to dissent from the conclusion that, for the scrupulous Ussher, the lack of royal support barred him from publishing the Reduction. He did, however, discuss it with friends and acquaintances, and it had a shadowy existence until it was published after his death in 1656. But it was clear by the end of 1641 that the opportunity for a settlement based on primitive episcopacy was lost—the ¹⁸⁷ D. G. Mullan, Scottish Puritanism, 1590–1638 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 236–8; T. D. Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Division in Puritanism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). ¹⁸⁸ George Every, The High Church Party, 1688–1718 (London: SPCK 1956), 6. Wallace Benn, Usher on Bishops: A Reforming Ecclesiology (Sheffield: St Antholin’s Trust, 2002), 23, describes Ussher’s approach to episcopacy as ‘Reformed Catholicism’. ¹⁸⁹ George Yule (ed.), Puritans in Politics: The Religious Legislation of the Long Parliament, 1640–1647 ([Abingdon]: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1981), 112–13. ¹⁹⁰ Baxter, Reliquiae, i. 62, § 93. ¹⁹¹ See the fate of Aston’s interest in primitive episcopacy: Lake, ‘Puritans, Popularity and Petitions’, 278 ff.

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London mob was screaming at the doors of Parliament calling for bishops to be excluded from the Lords, and the Commons had imprisoned the twelve bishops for treason. Ussher’s role as a mediator between Parliament and King had ended. On 10 January 1642 the King left London, and the fateful slide towards civil war had begun.¹⁹² ¹⁹² Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, 210–15.

11 ‘No Man Can Serve Two Masters’: The Civil War and After The breakdown of relations between King and Parliament and the formal outbreak of Civil War in August 1642 left people with the dilemma of having to choose sides. Though many sought to avoid the necessity by retreating to their estates, King and Parliament pressed them repeatedly to commit, issuing rival commands to contribute militarily and financially. For someone like Ussher, unable to retire to his country house in Ireland, the simple fact of where he remained constituted choice by default. Indeed, once the King established himself at Oxford at the end of October 1642, Ussher’s two favourite haunts had become the locations of the rival camps. Like so many others, Ussher’s initial response was to avoid a decision. In his case he simply tried to get back to normal after the tumults of 1641, preaching regularly in St Paul’s Covent Garden, and returning to his studies ‘as much as the present storm allows’, as he phased it.¹ Despite his defence of episcopacy and his deference to the King, Ussher had managed to preserve his bona fides with Parliament during 1641. Thus Lord Brooke, one of the more intelligent defenders of presbyterianism, praised Ussher as a ‘most reverend man, famous for learning (especially for that learning which is not open to every eye)’, and expressed surprise that Ussher had defended bishops with such vigour. He read the Primate’s Of the originall of bishops ‘with some wonder, that a person of his profession, piety, and known learning, should doe that, which might in any sense, seeme to impose on those whom hee loveth.’² Henry Parker thought it worthwhile dedicating a defence of presbyterianism to Ussher in the hope (whether real or rhetorical) of winning him over.³ Unlike Williams and the English bishops in the House of Lords, Ussher was not seen as an enemy: the Commons still sought his advice about the dangers of popery as late as 1642.⁴ In fact, both sides continued to court him, engaging ¹ UW, xvi. 69; the recording of Ussher’s sermons at Covent Garden resumes on 23 January 1642, following a gap since 4 July 1641: CUL MM.6.55, fols. 9r–10r. ² Robert Greville, Lord Brooke, A discourse opening the nature of that episcopacie which is exercised in England (London, 1641), 69. ³ Henry Parker, The question concerning the divine right of episcopacie truly stated (London, 1641), sig. A2r. ⁴ CJ, ii. 425, 427.

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in competitive generosity as they sought to compensate him for the loss of his income in the rising: in February 1642, after the death of Bishop Potter, the King conferred the see of Carlisle on Ussher in commendam; while on 20 October the Commons ordered that Ussher be paid the sum of £200 ‘for his present relief; in consideration of his great piety and learning’.⁵ The next test for Ussher’s loyalties came with the plans early in 1642 for a synod ‘to settle the church in doctrine and discipline’—what eventually became the Westminster Assembly.⁶ On 20 April, the Commons began proposing names, and on the same day Serjeant Wilde, one of the more active and godly members of the House, was deputed ‘to be of counsel with the Bishop of Armagh, in the House of Peers’. Five days later Ussher was nominated as a member of the Assembly for Oxford University by the Commons. That he was chosen by the lower house suggests that they still had confidence in his ideological soundness, in contrast to some of those more ‘Anglican’ divines proposed by the House of Lords.⁷ Thus far Ussher has been conforming to type—the pious, modest scholar and spiritual adviser, deferential to his prince and respectful of the authority of Parliament. But fears were growing within the Primate, as he struggled to remain loyal to two masters, and as he saw the institution of episcopacy and the consensual basis of the religious and civil polity increasingly under threat from what he viewed as ‘extremists’.⁸ As had happened on four previous occasions—in 1602, 1622, and 1627 over the toleration of Catholicism, and in 1626 over the threat of Arminianism—Ussher’s inner tensions led to a dramatic public outburst. His regular Sunday sermons at Covent Garden had so far been models of sober scriptural exegesis applied to the pastoral needs of individual Christians, but on 12 July 1642 he felt compelled to tackle the divisions between King and Parliament. The text was 1 Peter 5:8: ‘Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.’ ‘To overthrow a state,’ Ussher warned, ‘the devill bringes sinne into it.’ He cited the example of 1 Chronicles 21—where David, at the Devil’s urging, numbers the people of Israel. ‘When the kinge is in an error this strikes at the whole kingdome: to rayse the kinge against the people, and to rayse the people against the kinge, as that will bring all to ruine.’ The obvious relevance of this text proved too much for Ussher: ‘I meant not to apply these thinges. But the word of God must passe freely, that wee may see, that the devill works, and has a hand in all these thinges.’ ⁵ CJ, ii, 817; confirmed by Lords on 1 November: LJ, v. 425. ⁶ Chad van Dixhoorn, ‘Reforming the Reformation: Theological Debate at the Westminster Assembly 1643–1652’, PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2004, 7 ff.; V. F. Snow and A. S. Young, The Private Journals of the Long Parliament: 7 March–1 June 1642 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 126. ⁷ CJ, ii. 535, 540; Russell, Monarchies, 521; Snow and Young (ed.) Private Journals of the Long Parliament, 490–2; Diurnall occurrences in Parliament, from the thirtieth of May to the sixth of June 1642, 2–3. ⁸ G. Groen van Prinsterer (ed.), Archives ou correspondance inédite de la maison d’Orange-Nassau, vol. iii, 2nd ser., 1625–1642 (Utrecht, 1859), 439.

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He went on to give the example of Judges 9:23, which tells how God sent an evil spirit between Abimelech, the King of Israel, and the men of Shechem, leading to war, death, and destruction. In that case, Ussher said, there was a difference betweene the kinge and people. Here betweene the kinge, and the parliament. Tis playne, this is the devils worke: an evill spirit walks amongst them. This difference continuinge will proove a ruine to both, as appears there in Abimelech and the people. In this worke the devill is his crafts master. In all great dissentions, there is workinge of both sides: malignant parties there are on both sides, and those that are possessed with the devill: they that stirr up the kinge against his people, and they that alienate the peoples affections from their kinge, are malignant parties, and guilty of [sic] both sides, and fall into the condemnation of the devill.⁹

The consequences were both dangerous and unstoppable: ‘Now, all mischeife and wickednes is afloate. And when these fludgates are let up, you cannot stop the water when you would: 17 Prov. 14 and 19 . . . therefore ere the contention be medled with, leave of: he loveth transgression, that loveth strife. But 3 James 17: The wisedome that is from above, is first pure, then peaceable, gentle.’ Both these texts had, in a neat and wholly conscious parallel, been used by Ussher in 1626, in what he had termed his farewell sermon before Charles, prior to his long exile in Ireland.¹⁰ But there was a major difference between the two sermons. Whereas in 1626 Ussher had been condemning, very firmly, the failure of Charles to suppress the Arminians, and warning of the dangers to come, by 1642 he was more even-handed, claiming that there were people inspired by the Devil on both sides. Previously he had identified himself firmly with the Calvinist majority in opposition to the royal policy; now he was condemning both, positioning himself in the middle. Ussher was fully aware of the shift, and its implications: I spake of this very point 16 yeares ago before his majesty at Greenewich, upon the dissolution of the parliament: I was blam’d by one side then: I know not whether I shall be so, of both sides now. I make no application nor charge any: but speake the word of God, and that must passe freely. If any finde that plague within his owne heart, and that uncleane spirit within himselfe, that I have opened unto you, hees the man that I speake to.¹¹

Even-handedness, as Ussher realized, was not what his friends in Parliament expected from him. He was indeed blamed. On 13 June, the Commons, as it happened, was discussing seditious sermons, and the presbyterian Sir Walter Long intervened to report that the previous day ‘he had heard something from the Archbishop of Armagh that was very offensive.’¹² ⁹ CUL MS MM.6.55, fol. 19r. ¹⁰ UW, xiii. 339–40; see above, pp. 140–4. ¹¹ CUL MS MM.6.55, fol. 19v. ¹² V. F. Snow and A. S. Young, The Private Journals of the Long Parliament: 2 June to 17 September 1642 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 72; This echoed a complaint made the previous week to Parliament about Ussher’s preaching: ‘My Ld Primate has given the more distaste they say in a sermon of late which hee preached before divers parliament men’: BL, Sloane MS 1467, fol. 94r.

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CHOOSING SIDES Condemning both sides was impartial and disinterested, but hardly a practical long-term policy. As civil war moved inexorably closer, Ussher was forced to decide. On 1 September 1642 his battle to convince the Commons to preserve episcopacy formally failed, as they voted to abolish it as ‘a great impediment to the perfect reformation and growth of religion, and very prejudicial to the state and government of this kingdom’.¹³ Parr claimed that Ussher ‘having now no more satisfaction in abiding longer at London, he resolved to remove thence for Oxford, not long before his Majesty’s coming thither.’¹⁴ Again, though, Parr is trying to emphasize Ussher’s royalism. The reality is that he arrived in Oxford after the King, and even sought the permission of Parliament, first on 17 November for his books and papers to be sent there, and second on 10 January 1643 for his wife to join him.¹⁵ He preached his last sermon at Covent Garden on 6 November, and his next before the King in Oxford on 20 November.¹⁶ Ussher, as always, had good scholarly reasons for going to Oxford—as was evident when he settled into a house near the Bodleian lent to him by his friend Dr Prideaux, and began researching and publishing.¹⁷ But to move to Oxford was also, by this stage, a political statement—an indication that he had publicly thrown in his lot with the King. The decisive public breach happened in June 1643 when Parliament ordered and the King forbade the Westminster Assembly to meet. Ussher refused to attend, and in October the Commons nominated a new member in his place.¹⁸ The Irish Primate was a useful recruit for the royalist side, as became apparent in numerous ways over the next two years. When Charles wished to publicize his commitment to the Elizabethan settlement, he chose to do so by making a public statement when receiving communion from Ussher’s hands in Christ Church—a somewhat ironic choice, given the Primate’s lack of commitment to the same settlement.¹⁹ Ussher’s credit with the other side was further exploited in the summer of 1643, when the royalist commander, Sir Ralph Hopton, proposed ¹³ CJ, ii. 748. ¹⁴ Parr, Life, 48; Charles arrived in Oxford on 29 October: S. R. Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War 1642–1649, 4 vols. (London: Windrush Press, 1987), i. 51. ¹⁵ LJ, v. 449, 542; Bernard, Life, 100; Parr, Life, 64. ¹⁶ Parr, Life, 49, states that Ussher preached before Charles the Sunday after the battle of Brainford [Turnham Green/Brentford], which took place on 13 November 1642. ¹⁷ Parr, Life, 48. ¹⁸ CJ, iii. 273. ¹⁹ His Majesties late protestation before his receiving of the sacrament, 1st edn (London, 1643), 2nd edn (London, 1648); Charles McNeill (ed.), The Tanner letters (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1943), 172. This was presumably made on 6 July when Ussher preached before the King at the public thanksgiving for the recent northern victory: Andrew Clark (ed.), The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1891–1900), i. 102. Falconer Madan, Oxford Books: A Bibliography of Printed Works Relating to the University and City of Oxford, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1895–1931), ii. 277, doubts that the statement as printed was actually made,

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the Primate as the man most likely to win over the parliamentarian Edmund Ludlow when he was imprisoned at Oxford.²⁰ An indication of parliamentary hostility to Ussher came in September 1643, when his friend Daniel Featley, a rare episcopalian who had accepted a place in the Assembly, was caught corresponding with Ussher in Oxford, and the Commons chose to make an example of Featley for betraying secrets to the enemy.²¹ The reasons for Ussher’s choice of sides were spelt out in a sermon he preached in Oxford on 3 March 1644 on The soveraignes power, and the subjects duty. Taking that classic text, Romans 13:1, ‘Let every soul be subject to the higher powers: for there is no power but of God,’ Ussher’s conclusion was straightforward and uncompromising: ‘no subjects may upon any occasion take armes or use any violence against the supreame power, no not in defence of religion.’²² Ussher was aware of the tensions within the Calvinist tradition on this issue: while he happily attacked the Jesuits for their justification of resistance, he then noted: ‘And yet, (I can not, but with griefe speak it) we finde even in some reformed bookes the Jesuites penne.’ He was willing to concede that ‘priests should tell their princes their faults’—very much what he had done in 1627—and even that ‘bishops and pastors may and ought to resist their unjust magistrates’ but they were to do this ‘not with the sword but the word of God’.²³ Ussher was here arriving at the same position as divineright royalists such as Peter Heylyn, Henry Ferne, and John Bramhall, but, as his regretful reference to Calvinism indicated, by a somewhat different route.²⁴ The first published indication of his views on this crucial subject, Ussher’s sermon provided a clear public statement of why he had abandoned the godly colleagues with whom he had associated for most of his previous career. The decisive event, for Ussher as for so many moderate royalists, was Parliament’s decision to fight. As soon as Parliament took up arms against the King it had put itself in the wrong by flouting a clear biblical injunction, leaving Ussher with a personally agonizing, but ideologically straightforward choice between his godly parliamentarian friends and his royal master. By February 1644, the parliamentarians had finally accepted that Ussher was a delinquent, ordering that the books and goods he had left behind in London at Chelsea College be seized and sold.²⁵ but given that the circumstances fit, I see no reason to question its genuineness. A parliamentary newsletter complained about the pamphlet being distributed round London, especially Whitehall and Westminster: Mercurius civicus, no. 10 (27 July–3 Aug. 1643), 80. ²⁰ Edmund Ludlow, Memoirs (London, 1698), 104–5. ²¹ Ibid. 259; CSPD, 1641–3, 489; Daniel Featley, The gentle lash (London, 1644), sig. A3r; idem, Sacra nemesis (Oxford [i.e. London], 1644). ²² James Ussher, The soveraignes power, and the subjects duty (Oxford, 1644), 20; though see the doubts of Madan, Oxford Books, ii. 321, on place of publication. ²³ Ussher, The soveraignes power, 17–18. ²⁴ Compare, for example, Heylyn’s treatment of the Calvinist tradition: Peter Heylyn, The rebels catechism (Oxford?, 1643), 15–16. ²⁵ CJ, iii. 394: for a discussion of the meaning of the term ‘delinquent’, see D. L. Smith, Constitutional Royalism and the Search for Settlement, c. 1640–1649 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 198.

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OX F O R D , 1 6 4 3 – 5 The most that Ussher in his sermon allowed for those faced with unreasonable princely demands were those familiar resorts of absolutists, ‘preces et lachrymae’ —prayers and tears.²⁶ He felt the need for both over the following years in Oxford. As early as August 1643, Ussher was exploring the possibility of securing a position abroad.²⁷ Subsequently, the King tested his unconditional loyalty to the full, as Charles engaged in a series of ever-more-hopeless schemes, trying to play off Parliament, the Scots, and the Irish, havering between negotiation and concession, on the one hand, and, on the other, the hope that greater military force, however acquired, might bring outright victory. Ussher was involved in two of these manoeuvres: first in 1643–5, when Charles sought an alliance with the Confederation of Kilkenny, the Irish Catholic forces; and then again in 1648 when, marooned on the Isle of Wight and faced with an ever more powerful Roundhead army, in a last throw of the dice, he tried to negotiate a settlement with Parliament. Since much of Ireland was in the hands of the Confederate Catholics in 1643, Charles was sorely tempted to negotiate their support and, using the military strength of their and his Irish forces, suppress opposition in England. Though superficially attractive, the policy had a number of severe drawbacks. It fuelled the accusations of his enemies that the royalists were closet Catholics, part of a wider conspiracy to restore popery to England. It risked alienating his more protestant Irish allies, unable to stomach an alliance, not just with Catholics, but with Catholic rebels whom they saw as personally responsible for the murder of their friends and relatives. And finally there was the more practical difficulty, or rather impossibility, of negotiating terms that would satisfy both the Catholic Irish need for guarantees that they would have the free exercise for their religion, and the Irish protestant dual determination to preserve their monopoly of power in Irish church and state and to punish the Catholics for rebellion. Charles engaged in tortuous manoeuvres from 1643 in order to gain Catholic support. The commander of the royal forces in Ireland, the Duke of Ormond, opened negotiations with the Confederacy in June 1643, which led in September to a cessation of hostilities. Attention then switched to negotiations between Charles and the Irish Catholics and protestants. In the spring of 1644, a Confederate delegation arrived in Oxford, to be followed by two Irish protestant ones, the first representing the royal administration there, the other, unofficial one, linked to the Irish parliament.²⁸ From the treatment of the delegations, it ²⁶ Ussher, The Soveraignes power, 27. ²⁷ The Hartlib Papers: A Complete Text and Image Database of the Papers of Samuel Hartlib, 2nd edn (Sheffield: Humanities Research Institute) 2/10/10A. ²⁸ R. M. Armstrong, ‘Protestant Ireland and the English Parliament, 1641–1647’, PhD thesis, Dublin University, 1995, ch. 5; idem, Protestant War: The ‘British’ of Ireland and the Wars of the Two

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was quite clear that Charles was primarily concerned with agreeing terms with the confederates, offering them assurances on religion, land, and political power in return for military support. This placed the representatives of the Irish protestants in a difficult position. Even the official delegation (which included Sir Philip Perceval, married to Ussher’s kinswoman Katharine Ussher) were unhappy at the cessation and resistant to the very concept of negotiating with the Irish ‘for their perfidiousness was such that they could not be trusted’.²⁹ In particular they vigorously rejected the demand for a repeal of all the penal legislation against Catholics and showed that they had internalized the apocalyptic language to which Ussher and Trinity had introduced Irish protestants by urging ‘that a strict course be taken against those Babylonish and Antichristian sects of Jesuits, seminary priests, monks, friars, nuns and their confederates.’³⁰ The unofficial delegates simply sought the renewal of the war and called on the King to make peace with the English parliament so that they could join forces in defeating the rebellious Irish.³¹ Their instincts were perhaps best summed up by the historian Edmund Borlase, when writing of Michael Jones, the commander of the parliamentary forces in Ireland: ‘nothing so much steer’d him in the service of Ireland, as a just reflection on the murthers and insolencies committed by the Irish on the protestants, not otherwise to be pacified than by a due revenge.’³² Ussher observed events with trepidation. He naturally identified with the official Irish protestant delegation, and lamented their tardy arrival at Oxford in March 1644—‘so slow are our men in the prosecution of that wherein they and we are so highly concerned’.³³ They, like Ussher, strongly disagreed with the King over his attitude towards the Irish Confederates—indeed, one of them, Sir Philip Perceval, was so shocked that he went over to the parliamentarian side.³⁴ There is little direct evidence, though, of the extent to which Ussher made clear his hostility to royal policy. All we have are a few near-contemporary references and the parliamentarian newsletters, which, with their usual combination of imaginative propaganda, shrewd guesses and hard knowledge of what was going on in Oxford, seized upon these tensions between Ussher and the King and claimed that the Primate had publicly attacked the concessions. As early as January 1643, The Scottish Dove reported ‘that the once good Dr Usher, and once bad Bishop Armah, either for feare or conscience, begins to deale plainly, and speake truthes, as becomes a preacher: for not long since in his sermon he said that his Kingdoms (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), ch. 5; idem, ‘Ormond, the Confederate Peace Talks, and Protestant Royalism’, in Micheál Ó Siochrú (ed.), Kingdoms in Crisis: Ireland in the 1640s (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001), 122–40. ²⁹ Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, The history of the rebellion and civil wars in England begun in the year 1641, ed. W. D. Macray, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958) iii. 447. ³⁰ HMC, Egmont, i, pt 1, 216. ³¹ Armstrong, ‘Protestant Ireland’, 140. ³² Edmund Borlase, History of the execrable Irish rebellion (London, 1680), 230. ³³ Huntington Library, MS HA 15,960; HMC, Hastings, iv. 92–3. ³⁴ Patrick Little, ‘Perceval, Sir Philip (1605–1647)’, ODNB; when Perceval died, Ussher preached his funeral sermon: HMC, Egmont, i, pt 1, 482–3.

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Majestie is bound in conscience to reveale that councell who put him upon the cessation of armes, with the Irish rebells: for (saith he) it was councell from hell, devilish and damnable.’³⁵ Mercurius civicus also referred to dissension in the royal camp at Oxford with Ussher ‘being much out of favour there (especially amongst the Irish and more Jesuiticall party) by reason that in a late sermon he declared his dislike of the bringing over the forces out of Ireland’.³⁶ The spie confirmed that there were many present at Ussher’s sermon ‘whose gauled consciences could not endure such hard rubbing’, including the King. Ussher was seen as a counterbalance to those ultra-royalists such as Lord George Digby who were fully prepared to consider alliance with the Irish Catholics. The spie suggested that Ussher’s intervention had warned Charles off other ‘exorbitant courses’ which the ‘Jesuited party’ had been advocating ‘which makes them starke mad against the bishop’.³⁷ In July 1643, Mercurius civicus offered a pointed reminder of the ways in which Charles had favoured the Irish Catholics since he had come to the throne, and noted the objections raised by Ussher and the Irish bishops to the proposal to grant toleration in 1626.³⁸ Another parliamentarian propagandist, William Prynne, in 1646 printed a statement by Sir Charles Coote, a member of the unofficial protestant delegation at Oxford, which related how he had approached Ussher, ‘conceiving him to have some power with his Majesty’ and asked him to intercede on behalf of the Irish protestants, ‘for if the Irish agents obtained their desires, the protestants in Ireland were destroyed and popery would be introduced: to which the Archbishop replyed: That was the intention, which he knew better then I did, and said, WE MUST SUBMIT.’³⁹ Whilst entirely consistent both with his belief in the absolute power of the King and with his passive response to policies he abhorred, it is far from clear whether Ussher actually uttered these words. When examined about it by parliamentary commissioners when he returned to London in 1646, the Primate, according to Parr, denied the story, and gave the following account of his role in the negotiations: As soon as he heard of the Irish agents coming to Oxford, he went to the King, and beseeched his Majesty not to do anything with the Irish, in point of religion, without his knowledge; which his Majesty promised he would not; and when the point of toleration came to be debated at the council-board, the King, with all the lords there, absolutely denyed it; and he professed for his part, that he was ever against it, as a thing dangerous to the protestant religion.⁴⁰

Strictly speaking, this was true, in that the King, faced with such starkly opposing demands, prevaricated and rather than openly recommend toleration, had passed ³⁵ ³⁶ ³⁷ ³⁸ ³⁹

The Scottish Dove, sent out, and returning, no. 14, 12–19 Jan. 1644, 110 [= 111]. Mercurius civicus, no. 34 (11–18 Jan. 1644), 366–7. The spie, no. 1 (23–30 Jan. 1644), 4–5. Mercurius civicus, no. 9 (20–28 July 1643), 67. William Prynne, Canterburies doome (London, 1646), sig. [b3r]. ⁴⁰ Parr, Life, 64.

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over negotiations to Ormond in Ireland.⁴¹ But Charles, and some of his closest courtiers such as the Queen and Lord Digby, remained committed to the ‘Irish option’ as an alternative to making concessions to Parliament or the Scots. They were opposed by advisers such as Sir Edward Hyde and Sir John Culpepper, who sought instead to bring about a settlement by negotiation.⁴² We know little of Ussher’s views from his own pen during this period. The nearest we get to his own words is Bernard’s report of the Primate’s sermon before the King on 5 November 1644. Moderation is not generally associated with sermons on this date and Ussher’s was no exception. Launching an attack upon the very notion of treating with the Confederates, he chose as his text Nehemiah 4:11: ‘And our adversaries said, They shall not know, neither see, till we come in the midst among them, and slay them, and cause the work to cease.’ Such was the vigour with which he attacked the Catholics and urged his auditors ‘not to pose any trust in them, that upon the first opportunity they will serve us here, as they did the poor protestants in Ireland’, that some in the audience were offended.⁴³ The Uxbridge negotiations of November 1644 were seen by Ussher and Charles’s moderate advisers as yet another chance for the King to settle with Parliament and present a united front against the Irish Catholics. Ussher chose to preach before the King on the familiar text of James 3:18: ‘And the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace of them that make peace.’⁴⁴ But after the talks broke down, Charles turned again to the Irish option. By early 1645 parliamentary commentators were beginning to lose hope in Ussher. The scurrilous but enjoyable Character of an Oxford incendiary portrayed him as ‘Mistris novelties gentleman-usher clad in robes of antiquity’, part of that royal court at Oxford which has ‘fought so long that there is now not a rebel left in Ireland’—i.e. they had accepted the Catholics as allies.⁴⁵ The anonymous author recognized that Ussher did not quite fit in royalist circles: But I wonder how it comes to passe that Armagh should be ranked here. The case stood otherwise once; nay, he ebb’d so far from his archiepiscopall dignity, as to turne lecturer [in Covent Garden], and so brought himselfe into a possibility of heaven, till the old man began to dote upon the world again. I cannot tell to what I might attribute his apostacy; to his climate, or his conscience, his country, or his religion, or both; yet we have found him a right Irish-man, and a second Spalato . . . It is a rare mystery, that this pageant, should be so persecuted by the rebels, as to fly for his life out of Ireland, and yet be able ⁴¹ Micheál Ó Siochrú, Confederate Ireland 1642–1649: A Constitutional and Political Analysis (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999), 72. ⁴² For analyses of the various ‘parties’ surrounding the King, see Smith, Constitutional royalism; Ronald Hutton, ‘The Structure of the Royalist Party, 1642–46’, HJ, 24 (1981), 553–69; James Daly, ‘The Implications of Royalist Politics, 1642–1646’, HJ, 27 (1984), 745–55; A. B. Sumner, ‘The Political Career of Lord George Digby until the end of the First Civil War’, PhD. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1986, 183 ff. ⁴³ Bernard, Life, 100; C. E. Long, Diary of the Marches of the Royal Army, ed. by Richard Symonds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 147. ⁴⁴ Parr, Life, 57. ⁴⁵ The character of an Oxford incendiary (London, 1645), 7.

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to digest them and their counsels at Oxford. But was it ever seen, that a bishop would be out with any that were in at court?⁴⁶

U S S H E R A N D T H E PA R L I A M E N TA R I A N S Indeed, as peace receded and the counsel of Digby and Henrietta Maria gained the upper hand, Ussher himself may have lost hope. In February 1645 Culpepper and Hyde were squeezed out of power, as they were sent with the Prince of Wales to the West Country.⁴⁷ Ussher decided to go with them, making his way to Cardiff which was being held for the King by Sir Timothy Tyrrell, Ussher’s son-in-law. Yet again, as in 1640–1, Ussher’s movements can be viewed both in personal and in political terms. He had, according to Parr, been invited by Tyrrell and was, of course, making a perfectly prudent decision to secure his safety by leaving Oxford before it fell. But his departure can also be seen as an acknowledgement of political defeat, abandoning Oxford with two of the leading moderates, and leaving the King free to pursue the hateful Irish alliance. That is certainly the way in which it was seen from the parliamentary camp: ‘the Primate of Armagh is so much discontented that he will not come there [Oxford] again but is gone to live with his son who has a government in Wales. His excuse was to wait on the Prince who, I hear, he has already left.’⁴⁸ An anonymous pamphleteer, his hopes raised by the fact ‘that you have of late gone out from them’, and inspired by his memory of ‘what evident demonstrations you have formerly given to the truly godly and religious party in these kingdoms (both by your life and doctrine) that you are one of them’, hoped that he might repent of his recent apostasy and help convince the King that the parliamentarians were ‘regenerate men, such as truly know Christ’, unlike many of the royalists.⁴⁹ The die, though, was already cast. Ussher had a miserable year in Wales. Forced to abandon Cardiff when the royalists were no longer able to hold it, he was offered refuge by the staunchly royalist Stradlings at St Donates Castle in Glamorgan. On his way there, though, he was ambushed by the ‘rude Welsh’ (Ussher’s term), who stole, fortunately only temporarily, many of his manuscripts and papers.⁵⁰ St Donates offered him rest and, much more importantly for Ussher, a fine library, but he then fell seriously ill, a parliamentary newsletter pronouncing him ⁴⁶ The character of an Oxford incendiary (London, 1645), 4; and see the portrait of Ussher as ‘Ignatius holy-water, an archbishop’, in The malignants inquest (London, 1646). ⁴⁷ David Scott, Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms, 1637–49 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 92. ⁴⁸ H. G. Tibbutt (ed.), The Letter Books, 1644–45, of Sir Samuel Luke, Parliamentary Governor of Newport Pagnell (London: HMC, 1963), 199. ⁴⁹ The copy of a most pithy and pious letter written (London, [1645]), 1–2. ⁵⁰ Bernard, Life, 100–1; Parr, Life, 58–63; LW, iv. 3–4.

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dead.⁵¹ Though he recovered, the net was now closing on him. In December the Commons issued orders for the Primate to be seized and sent to London.⁵² Forced to leave Lady Stradling’s, he considered exile—Bernard claimed that Ussher had had offers from Leyden University in the Netherland and even from Richelieu in France—but the parliamentary admiral, when asked if he would allow Ussher to depart, threatened to arrest him.⁵³ With no alternative, Ussher set for London, and the house of his old friend, the dowager Countess of Peterborough.⁵⁴ Ussher was by now clearly marked as an enemy. On 11 June 1646 the Commons again instructed the authorities in Wales to arrest him and others ‘dangerous or ill-affected to the Parliament’.⁵⁵ On the same day, though, Ussher voluntarily arrived back in London.⁵⁶ He had then to engage in a delicate process of negotiation with the authorities in London, as he sought to meet his basic financial needs so that he could get back to his beloved research. He could still rely upon old friends like Selden, and some of his former godly allies; equally, however, Ussher encountered considerable hostility, as someone who had so unequivocally thrown in his lot with the King. And, indeed, Ussher was still a royal adviser. In August the following year, when Charles was offered the ‘unique and fleeting opportunity’ of a settlement endorsed by the army—the Heads of the Proposals—Ussher was one of the eight bishops he asked about the central religious proposal. This involved the removal of ‘all coercive power, authority, and jurisdiction’ from the bishops—in effect, toleration.⁵⁷ Once again Ussher was faced with the familiar tension between his horror at toleration for Catholicism and his respect for the power of the King. Though in the case of Ussher’s friend Thomas Morton, the former won out, there was never any doubt that Ussher would opt for the latter. He had already covered precisely this issue in the still unpublished The power communicated by God to the prince.⁵⁸ He wrote back to indicate that in his opinion the King did have power to grant toleration.⁵⁹ Ussher’s standing with Parliament at this stage is subject to conflicting signals. On 25 December 1646, in a gesture of goodwill, the Commons let him have ⁵¹ He was granted the double-edged encomium of having been ‘one of ten thousand: but ambition and temeritie lost his nobilitie, and his good name went to the grave before him’: The Scottish Dove, no. 113, 10–17 Dec 1645. ⁵² CJ, iv. 378. ⁵³ Parr, Life, 63; Bernard, Life, 98; there is, though, no other confirmation of these offers. The records of the city and university of Leiden, which are comprehensive for this period, do not contain any offer to Ussher: I would like to thank Peter van Rooden for this information. Bernard’s claim may stem from Dury’s suggestion in 1643 that he might be able to secure a professorship for Ussher in Leiden: Hartlib Papers, 2/10/10A. ⁵⁴ Parr, Life, 63; Bernard, Life, 101. ⁵⁵ CJ, iv. 572. ⁵⁶ Bernard, Life, 101. ⁵⁷ Austin Woolrych, Britain in Revolution 1625–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 378; Peter King, ‘The Episcopate during the Civil Wars, 1642–1649’, EHR, 83 (1968), 536. ⁵⁸ Henry Cary (ed.), Memorials of the Great Civil War in England from 1646 to 1652, 2 vols. (London, 1842), i. 335–6, 332–4; UW, xi. 306. ⁵⁹ Cary (ed.), Memorials of the Civil War, i. 334–5.

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his books back.⁶⁰ On 5 October 1647, the House agreed that ‘in respect of his great worth and learning; of his fame abroad; and that be hath written much, and is still in writing, in defence of our religion’, Ussher be granted £100 quarterly from government funds for a year, or until he gained an alternative source of income.⁶¹ A newsletter supplied the additional information that what had swayed Parliament was the fact that Ussher was at work on his massive biblical chronology—what turned into his Annals of 1650–4 which, famously, dated the creation of the world to 4004 bc.⁶² His subsequent appointment as lecturer at Lincoln’s Inn in 1647, with the princely annual stipend of £200, finally secured Ussher financially.⁶³ He preached his first sermon there on 31 October.⁶⁴ But all was not sweetness and light. His employment was politically contentious. Complaints were made in the Commons that he had ‘formerly adhered to the enemy’, and a ‘great debate’ was held on 20 December 1647. In the end the House voted to allow the appointment, on the proviso that he took the negative oath, a matter referred to the Committee at Goldsmiths Hall.⁶⁵ According to Parr, Ussher appeared before the committee where he was questioned about his movements since he left London, and his alleged meeting with Sir Charles Coote. He was asked to take the negative oath, submitting to the authority of Parliament and swearing not to help the King.⁶⁶ Ussher demurred, thereby indicating his continued loyalty to Charles. The Committee gave him time to consider, and, following the intervention of Ussher’s good friend, John Selden, the matter was not pursued.⁶⁷ The fact that Ussher’s appointment was thought worth a formal ordinance, and that the House divided almost evenly on it, is an interesting indication of both his standing and the conflicting views of his loyalty. However, just over a fortnight later, on 8 January, his petition to the House that he could ⁶⁰ CJ, v. 28: it is not clear whether this refers to the books and papers confiscated in Feb. 1644 (see above, n. 25), or his library rescued from the Irish rising which a year later came into Parliament’s hands (CJ, iv. 429), The Lord Byrons first articles presented to Sir William Brereton before the surrender of the city of Chester (London, 1646), 5. ⁶¹ CJ, v. 326–7. ⁶² Perfect occurrences of every daie journall in parliament (London, 1647–9), 40 (5 Oct. 1647), p. 277. ⁶³ P. S. Seaver, The Puritan Lectureships: The Politics of Religious Dissent, 1560–1662 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970) 149. ⁶⁴ CUL, MS MM.6.55, fol. 46r. ⁶⁵ CJ, v. 392; John Rushworth, Historical collections the fourth and last part . . . containing the principal matters which happened from . . . 1645, to . . . 1648, 2 vols. (London, 1701), ii. 937; vote was 92 in favour, 88 against his appointment, and 76–73 for his taking of the oath; the Committee for Compounding noted the Commons motion, but there is no record that he took the oath: Calendar of the Proceedings of the Committee for Compounding, 1643–1660, 5 vols. (London, 1889–93), i. 75. ⁶⁶ S. R. Gardiner (ed.), The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution 1625–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), 289–90. ⁶⁷ Parr, Life, 64.

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take up the position of preacher at Lincoln’s Inn was granted.⁶⁸ At the same time, the Commons, in a rather surprising—even baffling—addendum, granted him leave to sit with the Assembly of Divines, subject to the agreement of the Lords.⁶⁹ Though Ussher never took up the offer, the willingness to forgive and forget his past transgressions suggests a positive attitude on the parliamentary side and a willingness to view him, theologically at least, as still ‘one of them’, a sentiment which could only have been reinforced by the fact that Ussher was often mentioned ‘with great honour and respect’ during the Assembly debates, and by the way in which the Westminster Confession took as its starting point the Irish Articles of 1615.⁷⁰ But, just to complete a confusing picture, in March 1648 the Committee for Sequestrations sequestered the goods of Ussher for delinquency.⁷¹ Ussher did though, make his one last public appearances as royal adviser towards the end of the civil war drama, when Parliament made a desperate attempt to make an agreement with the King on the Isle of Wight in September–November 1648. Charles asked for permission to consult about how far he could in conscience go in making concessions on church government, and on 3 November Ussher and five other ministers were allowed to go to the Isle of Wight.⁷² The Primate arrived on 7 November and left just over three weeks later.⁷³ Again the Reduction made a shadowy appearance. According to Baxter ‘the king asked him [Ussher] at the Isle of Wight, wherever he found in antiquity that presbyters alone ordained any, and that he answered, I can shew your majesty more, even where presbyters alone successively ordained bishops.’⁷⁴ Charles’ reluctance to ditch episcopacy elicited a response from four parliamentary ministers, who, inter alia, took issue with Ussher’s use of Ignatius to defend episcopacy.⁷⁵ A response, which may have been drafted by Ussher (though it predates his arrival at Newport and is not obviously in Ussher’s style), restated the Primate’s case for primitive episcopacy, and implicitly endorsed the approach in the Reduction.⁷⁶ In the end, the most that the King would concede ⁶⁸ CJ, v. 423. ⁶⁹ Ibid.; Arnold Boate was surprised, too: Hartlib Papers, 58/4A. ⁷⁰ Featley, Sacra nemesis, 10; van Dixhoorn, ‘Westminster Assembly’, 213, 228; R. L. Wallace, ‘The Articles of the Church of Ireland of 1615’, PhD thesis, Edinburgh University, 1949, ch. 8; Crawford Gribben, ‘Rhetoric, Fiction and Theology: James Ussher and the Death of Jesus Christ’, The Seventeenth Century, 20 (2005), 62–3. ⁷¹ Calendar of the proceedings of the committee for compounding 1643–1660, i. 91. ⁷² His majesties last message to the parliament (London, 1648), 5; CJ, vi. 68. ⁷³ CUL, MS MM.6.55 fol. 100v; he was probably instrumental in delivering a letter of 14 November from the King to the clergy of London on behalf of the Bishop of Kilmore: PRO C115/47/3140. ⁷⁴ Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae, ed. Sylvester (London, 1696), Bk 1, part II, § 63. ⁷⁵ His Majesties paper containing severall questions propounded to the commissioners divines touching episcopacy: with an humble answer returned to his Majestie by Mr. Marshall, Mr. Vines, Mr. Carill and Mr. Seaman, 4. October 1648 (London, 1648), 8. ⁷⁶ The kings majesties answer to the paper delivered in by the reverend divines (London, 1648), 13; see also Parr’s notes on the negotiations: Bodl. MS Rawlinson D 1290, fol. 113v.

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was a three-year suspension of episcopacy. But though terms were agreed with Parliament, Pride’s purge ended hopes of a settlement. Again, though, Ussher’s role as mediator exposed him to controversy, demonstrating, first, that he was still a firm royalist, and second, the continuing difficulty which Charles’s opponents had in accepting that fact because of the offsetting strength of his godly reputation. According to the army version of events, published late in November, they had hoped that the Calvinist Ussher would have acted as a moderating force, but instead found that his influence was wholly mischievous. In particular he had preached a sermon on the King’s birthday, 19 November, in which he ‘did so fawne upon the king’ that even Charles was embarrassed. Worse than that, he urged the King to remain strong and not give away his ‘birth-right of might and power’, and generally widened the breach between King and Parliament.⁷⁷ A reply to this ‘lying and scandalous’ pamphlet was published almost immediately, which not only defended Ussher, but in doing so provided a valedictory gloss on his repeated efforts to act as a conciliator during the civil war, by insisting upon his widely accepted integrity and utter dedication to peace.⁷⁸ In fact, we have the text of Ussher’s sermon on this occasion: though indeed the army account is inaccurate in many respects, the central charge that Ussher’s contribution was not exactly helpful is confirmed by its content, which reasserts Charles’ divine and hereditary right to rule, echoing ideas expressed at length in The power communicated by God to the prince, and condemns unequivocally those who rebel against their monarch.⁷⁹ The final tragedy, the execution of the King in January 1649, left Ussher bereft and depressed. Watching from the roof of Lady Peterborough’s house, he fainted at the sight of the divinely ordained monarch being beheaded. As he lamented to his old friend Vossius in a letter written, poignantly, the day before Vossius’ death: ‘I am still alive, my Vossius! If it can be called living, forced, as I am, daily to observe such disastrous and shameful events that the mind shudders at the memory and flees from the grief.’⁸⁰

R E T I R E M E N T A N D D E AT H Ussher continued to preach in Lincoln’s Inn as long as he was physically able, right up to 1655, the year before his death. His sermons were popular—a report of January 1648 spoke of ten coaches drawn up outside the church—but resolutely pastoral, resisting any temptation to apply texts to contemporary events.⁸¹ His ⁷⁷ A message from the Isle of Wight (London, 1648), 1–2 (dated by Thomason on E.473[32]). ⁷⁸ A detection of the falsehood in a pamphlet intituled, a message from the Isle of Wight (London, 1648), 1; published 3 Dec. according to Thomason: E.475[15]. ⁷⁹ James Ussher, The rights of primogeniture (London, 1648), 6. ⁸⁰ UW, xvi. 134; see Virgil, Aeneid, bk 2, 1n 12. ⁸¹ The kingdom’s weekly intelligencer, 18–25 Jan 1648; CUL, MS MM.6.55.

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social circle at the Inn can be partially reconstructed from the detailed references in the diary of John Harrington. It was, typically, broadly based, including Independents and Presbyterians such as Oliver St John, Sir Harbottle Grimston, and Sir Ralph Assheton.⁸² By now, though, he was in semi-retirement, focusing upon his last great works of biblical and patristic scholarship.⁸³ These works, themselves worthy of a scholarly monograph, cannot concern us directly here, written, as they were, well away from the clash of war and politics. But they did secure both his scholarly reputation amongst scholars of the Bible and the church fathers, and his modern status as the father of creationism. Ussher meanwhile lived quietly with his friend, the dowager Countess of Peterborough in her house in Reigate. On 20 March 1656 he complained of a violent pain in his side at supper. He took to his bed and, having prayed with the countess’s chaplain, took leave of his hostess, thanking her for her long hospitality. He died of an internal haemorrhage about one o’clock in the afternoon of 21 March, his last words being ‘O Lord forgive me, especially my sins of omission.’⁸⁴ His friends wanted to bury him privately at Reigate, but Cromwell intervened, offering to pay for a state funeral. Ussher’s former chaplain Nicholas Bernard organized the service, and Ussher was buried before a large congregation in St Erasmus’s Chapel in Westminster Abbey on 17 April 1656. ⁸² M. F. Stieg (ed.), The Diary of John Harington, M.P., 1646–53 (Somerset Record Society, 74 (1977)), 61–85; David Underdown, ‘The Independents Again’, Journal of British Studies, 8 (1968), 92. ⁸³ James Ussher, De Romanæ ecclesiæ symbolo apostolico (London, 1647); James Ussher, Annales veteris et novi testamenti (London, 1650); James Ussher, Annalium pars posterior (London, 1654). ⁸⁴ UW, i. 277.

12 Conclusion: History, Theology, and Politics in Ireland and Britain To end where we began: the confrontation between Ussher and Henry Fitzsimon in Dublin Castle in 1600 was indeed a fitting symbol of the new realities of early modern Ireland. Two members of the same Anglo-Irish community—two relatives—were now fundamentally divided by religion. And, in a neat mirror image, each proceeded to reinforce that division both in print and in person in their subsequent careers. Having helped secure Catholicism in Ireland, Fitzsimon produced in 1614 a detailed defence of Irish Catholic theology and history, and went on to participate in the ruthless and rather effective rooting out of Protestantism in Bohemia.¹ Ussher repeatedly pressed, albeit less effectively, for a similar rigour to be used to impose religious uniformity in Ireland, and, in his first publication in 1613, used the full force of his scholarship to prove historically his youthful theological contention that the pope was Antichrist. As Ussher expanded his academic interests during the Irish part of his career, he provided for protestants a comprehensive ideological statement which, whilst deriving from both English and international Calvinism, was also original in the way that it was applied to Ireland. Thus, where his first published work examined how apocalyptic could be used to explain the history of the mediaeval church, in his third book, ten years later, he showed how the history of the early Irish church could fit (and be made to fit) this same model. Similarly, Ussher also helped rewrite the Thirty-Nine Articles so that they reflected the theological and ecclesiological concerns of early-seventeenth-century Calvinism in its Irish context. Finally, he reworked the anti-Catholicism of protestant theology and applied it determinedly to the policies of the Irish church and state. The obvious criticism of the theological concerns of Ussher and his fellow Trinity academics is that they were rather, well . . . ‘academic’—remote from the real concerns of ordinary Irish Christians. There is here, first, the broader issue of the role of religion in early modern society. We must be wary of the modern tendency to disconnect theology from religion and religion from politics, to ¹ Henry Fitzsimon, Britannomachia ministrorum in plerisque et fidei fundamentis et fidei articulis dissidentium (Douai, 1614); M. J. Lilley, ‘An Irish View of the White Mountain: The Praelio Pragensis of Henry Fitzsimon, S.J.’, in Helga Robinson-Hammerstein (ed.), Migrating Scholars: Lines of Contact between Ireland and Bohemia (Dublin, 1998), 1–10.

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write civil or military history as if it is separate from ecclesiastical affairs, to limit ‘recondite’ theology to the rarified worlds of academe or personal belief and treat it as a mere rhetorical device or intellectual exercise. The compartmentalization of theology was unnatural for those living in an early modern world where everything that happened was seen in providential terms, where God shaped history on an everyday basis. Theology, particularly for the godly, was therefore not something which could be left in the study, or confined to the university: ‘the puritan turned to the theological aspects of a question as naturally as the modern man turns to the economic.’² But even if it is accepted that religion played a central role in all aspects of life, a second issue arises: to what extent was the abstract theology of the Reformation, and more particularly the apocalyptic anti-Catholicism of Ussher, a dominant and pervasive feature of Irish society after 1600? Some historians would argue that it would be wrong to see that society as rigorously divided along denominational lines. The standard account of popular religion in Ireland placed controversial theology and the divisions of the reformation to one side, and focused instead upon the wide range of religious attitudes and values which protestants and Catholics shared.³ For all the sporadic sectarian violence of the early modern period, it is still possible to look beyond this ‘vortex of antagonism’, and point to the ability of people to live together on an everyday basis.⁴ The interaction of theology, history, and politics which we have traced in Ussher’s career does indeed provide some support for this more consensual or ‘ecumenical’ approach to seventeenth-century Irish history. As has been noted, the apocalyptic underpinnings of Ussher’s earlier works have largely disappeared by the 1650s, perhaps as a result of the radical millenarian excesses of the 1640s. Equally, his willingness to cooperate with Catholic scholars in rescuing and exchanging the manuscript sources of Gaelic culture suggests a common enterprise which transcended any religious divisions. But even here, there was an underlying element of suspicion and even fear.⁵ It would be misleading to see cooperation as the dominant motif, or to downplay Ussher’s role in developing a strongly sectarian protestant mindset. There was in the Primate’s case, as in those of so many of his godly friends, a determination to put their religious ideas into practice, to see that their lives were governed by their beliefs. Not for them an artificial distinction between study and pulpit, between university and parliament. For someone such as Henry Brouncker, the President of Munster at ² A. P. S. Woodhouse (ed.), Puritanism and liberty, 2nd edn (London: Dent, 1974), 39. ³ Raymond Gillespie, Devoted People: Belief and Religion in Early Modern Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). ⁴ Alan Ford, ‘Living Together, Living Apart: Sectarianism in Early-Modern Ireland’, in Alan Ford and John McCafferty (eds.), The Origins of Sectarianism in Early-Modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 11–17. ⁵ See below, pp. 276–7.

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the start of the seventeenth century, driven by a fervent zeal to impose uniformity on the Catholic population, politics was merely the pursuit of religious ends by other means.⁶ Ussher had a similarly clear vision. It was expressed most obviously in his anti-Catholic works, his sermons exposing Roman erros, his massive tomes of controversial theology, and, on a more popular level, in the catechism he complied from Calvinist sources. The driving force behind this activism was his conviction that Catholics were Antichristian. The power of apocalyptic, and the way that it fundamentally altered the way in which protestants saw diplomacy, politics, even their Catholic neighbours, is something which has largely eluded historians of early modern Ireland. From the late sixteenth century onwards, protestants came to see events in Ireland as part of a much wider cosmic battle between the forces of good and evil, with the reformation firmly identified with the former, the counterreformation with the latter. Contemporary history was rewritten so that it could be understood, and experienced, in apocalyptic terms. Toleration for Catholics was, in this new framework of cause and effect, inevitably followed by divine punishment. Rebellions were not the work of over-mighty subjects, but the papal Antichrist. Thus for Ussher, the Desmond rising of 1579 ‘was raised by the sollicitation of Sanders the popes legat, and set forward by divers seditious priests and friars and other malcontents. Not long after Sanders coming the pope sent certain forces into Ireland, that openly displaied his banners against her Majestye and the English nation. (Peter never did the like)’,⁷ The conflict between light and darkness was therefore not something which could be left in the study: it provided an imperative to action. As Ussher insisted in his sermon in the Temple church in 1620, ‘the hower of the judgement of popery is come’. However unpalatable the implications for those in power, this required all protestants to join with Christ and ‘conquerr another enemy worse then heathenisme which is popery and Antichristanisme’.⁸ For godly ministers and officials such as Ussher, Sibthorp, or Brouncker, theological principle translated directly into public policy. Anti-Catholicism was not an option, it was a necessity. It is true that such hostility became less marked as the early seventeenth century progressed. But the moderation was only temporary: the Irish rising of 1641 provided further proof of Catholic perfidy, and it was inevitably explained in apocalyptic terms.⁹ Ussher’s popular posthumous alter ego, as a Cassandra warning against the dangers of Romanism, served to keep his apocalyptic antiCatholicism before the public eye through the seventeenth and even into the ⁶ Alan Ford, ‘Reforming the Holy Isle: Parr Lane and the Conversion of the Irish’, in T. C. Barnard, Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, and Katharine Simms (eds.), ‘A miracle of Learning’: Studies in Manuscripts and Irish Learning (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 147–56. ⁷ TCD MS 578, pp. 142, 144–6. ⁸ Bodl. MS Perrot 9, fols. 22v, 7r. ⁹ Ford, Protestant Reformation, 219–21.

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eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.¹⁰ As late as 1840, J. H. Todd, an Irish high churchman (and co-editor of Ussher’s works), felt the need to publish a detailed refutation of the contemporary conviction that the pope was Antichrist, a conviction reinforced by a further publication of Ussher’s prophecies in 1843.¹¹ The editor of the prophecies, a Church of Ireland curate, expressed the hope that the horrors of 1641 which ‘cannot be paralleled in the history of mankind’, might ‘prove salutary to recreant protestants, and even to papists themselves, as showing the fruits of popery, when triumphant’.¹² Though many of Ussher’s ideological concerns may justly be described as ‘academic’, in both the good and bad senses of the term, they were far from recondite or remote from contemporary events in Ireland. Society in the early seventeenth century was indeed being divided into Catholic and protestant, and the relative merits of the two religions was a matter for popular discussion—controversial theology was, as we have seen, not just a matter for debate in print and in manuscript, it was a subject of Dublin dinner-party conversation. What Ussher provided was the intellectual rigour and confidence to resist and reject the claims of Bellarmine and Fitzsimon, or our two Drogheda aldermen, Thomas Flemming and Stephen Duffe, that Catholicism was the true, ancient, and only Christian faith. The central reformation quarrels over ecclesiology, the nature of salvation, and the sacraments thus had a significant impact upon the ordinary beliefs and religious practice which lay at the heart of early modern religious life.¹³ In short, Ussher’s encounter with Fitzsimon in 1600 does indeed mark the birth of a new and lengthy era of religious disputation, laying down a template for argument and accusation which survived in many respects unchanged down into the nineteenth and even twentieth centuries.¹⁴

U S S H E R A N D I R I S H P ROT E S TA N T I D E N T I T Y Perhaps Ussher’s most notable achievement in an Irish context was his reshaping of the way that protestants viewed themselves and their position in Ireland. One ¹⁰ Ute Lotz-Heumann, ‘ ‘‘The Spirit of Prophecy Has Not Wholly Left the World’’: The Stylization of Archbishop Ussher as Prophet’, in Helen Parish and W. G. Naphy (eds.), Religion and Superstition in Reformation Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 119–32. ¹¹ Discourses on the prophecies relating to antichrist in Daniel and St Paul (Dublin, 1840). ¹² James Ussher, Opinions concerning the return of popery (Dublin, 1843), p. iv. ¹³ See the reviews of Raymond Gillespie, Devoted People: Belief and Religion in Early Modern Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997) by John McCafferty, IHS, 31 (1998), 280–3, and by Alan Ford, JEH, 50 (1999), 164–6, and the discussion in Ford and McCafferty (eds.), Origins of sectarianism, ch. 1. ¹⁴ To take just two examples: T. D. Gregg and Thomas Maguire, Authenticated report of the discussion which took place . . . in the round room of the Rotundo on the 29th May, 1838, 30th, 31st, June 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th (Dublin, 1839); W. S. Kerr, A Handbook on the Papacy (London, 1950).

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of the frustrating aspects of modern Irish history is the ‘difficulty of finding a clear and unambiguous relationship between communal ancestry and identity’. The ‘undisputed reality of ethnic division and hostility is fuelled . . . by a large measure of invention’.¹⁵ Ussher was the person who effectively invented a new protestant ideology. Using the powerful solvent of apocalyptic, he first deconstructed his own Anglo-Irish identity, abandoning all aspects of popery, and then combined what was left with the salient points of Calvinist orthodoxy and standard new English attitudes to create an ‘Irish protestant’ standpoint. The resultant brew was a heady mixture of consistent and conflicting concepts at one and the same time appealing to and repelling the different racial groups that made up the Church of Ireland. Thus the condemnation of pope as Antichristian, and the requirement that good protestants reject Catholicism, was fairly easy for the new English to accept, given their existing antipathy to the Irish population. For Anglo-Irish protestants, though, it was highly problematic, requiring them to reject their Catholic kin and abandon tolerance and half-measures. On the other hand, the claim that the early Irish church had been effectively protestant was much more difficult for the new English to swallow: rather than writing off the mediaeval and early Irish churches as pagan, Irish, and Catholic, and simply assuming that protestantism came to Ireland with the reformation and the completion of the English conquest, they were faced with the more difficult idea that the reformation had Irish, rather than English roots. For the Anglo-Irish, of course, such an ancestry was a welcome development, in that it justified their Irish roots, their love of their native country. But it also, in turn, created tensions, by making the Anglo-Irish endorse what they had historically rejected—the native culture of Ireland. As a result, Ussher’s attitude towards Irish culture and language has been the subject of starkly differing interpretations. For one commentator, he was simply a propagandist for ‘new English attitudes’. But for another, his position was more ambiguous: Ussher ‘held in finally unresolved tension the multiple identities of the Irish writer, Irish, British and European’.¹⁶ Take his important work in collecting and preserving Irish manuscripts. Here Ussher was at the centre of a network of loans, copies, and transcripts that enabled scholars of all persuasions to pursue the ancient history of Ireland. Even here, though, there are important nuances. Yes, Ussher had ‘an ongoing and fruitful scholarly collaboration that embraced like-minded scholars both within the world of Gaelic scholarship and beyond it’. But there lurked behind this academic cooperation an acute consciousness of the religious divide, and different agendas which each side could bring to their histories. The common commitment to Ireland’s past did not quite ¹⁵ Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 146. ¹⁶ Seamus Deane and Norman Vance, cited in Ford, ‘Ussher and Irish Identity’, 211.

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offset the depth of the growing sectarian hostility between the two religions.¹⁷ And indeed, the hopes of Sir James Ware in the 1630s that the enmities of the 1590s had been left behind were sadly disproved by the sectarian violence of the 1641 rising and the Cromwellian invasion. Equally complex were the twin issues of loyalty and independence. Ussher joined together Anglo-Irish and new English instincts in an absolute and unswerving loyalty to the English monarch, and insisted (in contrast with normal Anglo-Irish preferences) on the subservience of the Irish civil polity to the English; but, unlike most of the new English, he added a distinctively Anglo-Irish desire to maintain a degree of freedom of manoeuvre in the ecclesiastical sphere, insisting that the Church of Ireland was the sister, rather than the daughter of the Church of England. The ambiguities of this position became evident in the 1630s, when realities of secular power ensured that the Church of Ireland was forced to exercise its independence to conform more closely to the norms of the Church of England, and again in the 1640s when the 1641 rising demonstrated the harsh truth that Irish protestants were ultimately entirely dependent upon English power for their survival. The tension between reliance on Britain in times of crisis and a desire for limited independence in more favourable circumstances was a lasting dilemma for Irish protestants, and took centuries to resolve. Despite its ambiguities and tensions, Ussher’s vision of an Irish church which was linked to and in happy alliance with but nevertheless distinct from the Church of England proved to be a seductive and powerful one for those protestants who put down roots in Ireland. It is true that political events led to the erosion of the independence of the Church of Ireland and, following 1800, its elimination as it was united to the Church of England, and that rather different political realities led in 1869 to its disestablishment. Though the loss of its established status proved to be an enormous shock, one thread—the Ussherian view of its Irish roots—sustained the Church of Ireland throughout the changing political circumstances and remained constant, resurfacing in the nineteenth century to provide the church with a sustaining sense of its Irishness. This was, in fact, one of Ussher’s most powerful and persistent legacies to the Church of Ireland—his basic insistence that it was both ancient and Irish, that, whatever the mathematical realities of religious allegiance in Ireland, however blind the Catholics were to the self-evident truths of the reformation, protestants could at least claim to be the original Irish Christians. A brief glance at the subsequent course of Irish protestant historiography amply confirms the continuing potency of Ussher’s origin myth. Sir Richard Cox (1650–1733), who went on to become Lord Chancellor of Ireland, was born of a Munster planter family, but forced to flee to England in 1687, ¹⁷ Bernadette Cunningham and Raymond Gillespie, ‘Ussher and His Irish Manuscripts’, Studia Hibernica, 33 (2004–5), 99, 83–4.

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where he wrote his history of Ireland.¹⁸ The first chapter of this book consisted of an ‘Introductory discourse’ dealing with Ireland before the Norman conquest: here Cox’s treatment of the country’s ecclesiastical history consisted of little more than a lengthy summary of Ussher’s Discourse on the religious anciently professed.¹⁹ Some hundred years later, another protestant historian, the Trinity fellow Thomas Leland, sought to provide a new enlightenment history of Ireland, but even he struggled to escape from the Ussherian assumption that the early Irish church was largely independent of Rome.²⁰ By the nineteenth century, Ussher’s account had become the standard for numerous popular and academic protestant ecclesiastical histories of Ireland.²¹ For Irish evangelicals in particular: ‘the Protestant Church of Ireland’s lineal continuity with a ‘‘biblical’’ early church of St Patrick, largely independent of Rome’ was an unquestioned assumption.²² For Irish Catholics, of course, it was a protestant shibboleth which had to be demolished.²³ Even in the twentieth century, the newly disestablished Church of Ireland saw Ussher’s origin story as an essential part of its identity.²⁴ The officially endorsed, multi-volume history of the church, published in 1933, like the more popular single-volume account published some twenty years later, began with ¹⁸ Richard Cox, Hibernia Anglicana, 2nd edn (London, 1692); S. J. Connolly, ‘Cox, Sir Richard, First Baronet (1650–1733)’, ODNB. ¹⁹ Cox, Hibernia Anglicana, sig. [h1v]–[k2v]. ²⁰ Joseph Liechty, ‘Testing the Depth of Catholic/Protestant Conflict: The Case of Thomas Leland’s ‘‘History of Ireland’’, 1773’, Archivium Hibernicum, 42 (1987), 13–28; W. D. Love, ‘Charles O’Conor of Belanagare and Thomas Leland’s ‘‘Philosophical History’’ of Ireland’, IHS, 13 (1962), 1–25; Thomas Leland, The History of Ireland from the invasion of Henry I, 3 vols. (London, 1773), ii. 160. ²¹ James Gaffney, The Ancient Irish Church: Was it Catholic or Protestant? (Dublin, 1863); R. J. Gainsford, The Religion of St. Patrick and the Ancient Irish (Dublin, 1869); James Godkin, The Religious History of Ireland: Primitive, Papal, and Protestant (London, 1873); John Healy, The Ancient Irish Church (London, 1892); James Heron, The Celtic Church in Ireland (London, 1898); Robert King, A Primer of the History of the Holy Catholic Church in Ireland, 2nd edn (Dublin, 1843); H. J. M. Mason, The Catholic Religion of St. Patrick, 2nd edn (Dublin, 1823); Thomas Olden, The Church of Ireland (London, 1892); Daniel Rock, Did the Early Church in Ireland Acknowledge the Pope’s Supremacy? (London, 1844); T. W. Roe, The Church of Ireland before the Reformation, 3rd edn (Dublin, 1868). For a tabular summary of the Ussherian position, see A. E. Gayer (ed.), Supplement to the Catholic Layman (Dublin, 1862), p. xiv; for a scholarly Catholic response, see John Lanigan, An Ecclesiastical History of Ireland, 4 vols. (Dublin, 1822). ²² Peter Nockles, ‘Church or Protestant Sect? The Church of Ireland, High Churchmanship, and the Oxford Movement, 1822–1869’, HJ, 41 (1998), 462. ²³ Lanigan, Ecclesiastical History of Ireland; Kevin Collins, Catholic Churchmen and the Celtic Revival in Ireland, 1848–1916 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2002), 15. ²⁴ John Macbeth, The Story of Ireland and Her Church from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (Dublin: Association for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1899); William Bell and N. D. Emerson (eds.), The Church of Ireland A.D. 432–1932 (Dublin: Church of Ireland, 1932); J. W. Camier, The Representative of the Church of St Patrick, the Church of Ireland or the Church of Rome in Ireland—Which? (Dublin: Church of Ireland Printing Co, 1937); Members of the Church of Ireland, The Truth Has Made Us Free: A Reply by Members of the Church of Ireland to the Most Reverend Dr. Cohalan’s Pamphlet ‘Should I join the Church of Rome?’ (Dublin: Church of Ireland Publishing Co Ltd, 1945); W. S. Kerr, The Independence of the Celtic Church in Ireland (London: SPCK, 1931); C. M. Stack, The Heritage of St Patrick (Dublin: Church of Ireland Printing Co, 1938).

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the early Celtic church, and proceeded ineluctably through the reformation to its natural successor, the modern Church of Ireland.²⁵ An anecdotal indication of the continuity with Ussher’s original vision is provided by the author of the reformation volume, Canon G. V. Jourdan, Canon of St Patrick’s and Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Trinity College, whose students in the 1940s could usually rely on relieving the tedium of lectures by asking him to explain why he thought that the pope was Antichrist.²⁶ It was not till the latter more ecumenical decades of the twentieth century, as the polemical need to combat Catholicism declined in significance, that the Church of Ireland began to reconsider whether it actually needed Ussher’s exclusive origin myth. The official Historiographer of the Church of Ireland, Dr Kenneth Milne, reflected this new questioning in 1999: Many members of the Church of Ireland were taught, inaccurately, that it was only with the coming of the Anglo-Normans, later the English, to Ireland that the bishop of Rome related to the Irish church. This clearly influenced how we saw ourselves, we alone were the original Irish church, free from Roman control, and it produced an ill-founded sense of triumphalism.²⁷

Ussher, in sum, helped to create an Irish protestant sense of history that sustained them down to the twentieth century.²⁸ In the process of doing so, he also contributed many of the attributes and ambiguities which have characterized that tradition; strongly evangelical and hostile to Arminianism or high churchmanship; politically loyal to the English Crown, but proud of the independence of the Church of Ireland; English in culture, but tracing their religious roots back to the Gaelic church, and fiercely anti-Catholic, but living in a Catholic country.

U S S H E R ’ S B R I T I S H A N D I R I S H C O N T E X TS The difficulty in locating the right viewpoint from which to examine Irish and Anglo-Irish, British and English identities is not confined to those who are studying Ussher. One of the major discoveries of historians in the latter part of the twentieth century was the concept of ‘British’ history—the idea of breaking free from the dominant perspective, which was only interested in events in Ireland, ²⁵ W. A. Phillips (ed.), History of the Church of Ireland from the Earliest Times to the Present Day, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933); T. J. Johnston, J. L. Robinson, and R. W. Jackson (eds.), A History of the Church of Ireland (Dublin: Association for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1953). ²⁶ Personal information from the late Canon Professor James Hartin. ²⁷ Kenneth Milne, ‘A Faith for the Third Millennium: Lay Thoughts’, address, 5 Dec. 1999, Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin: accessed 3 Jan. 2006. ²⁸ Alan Ford, ‘ ‘‘Standing One’s Ground’’: Religion, Polemic and Irish History since the Reformation’, in Ford (ed.), As by Law Established, 1–14.

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Scotland, or Wales in as much as they impinged on the master-narrative of English history, and analysing the complex way in which events in one kingdom interacted with and were shaped by what was going on in the others. Historians have, however, struggled to find the right alternative vantage point from which to view events across Britain and Ireland. Pioneers such as Conrad Russell set out to write a ‘genuinely British history’ of the events leading up to the English civil war, only to run into criticism that their work, whilst more sensitive to events in the other kingdoms, nevertheless still conceals a subterranean ‘colonial impulse’.²⁹ One of a succession of protestant Anglo-Irishmen who made their way to, and in, England, Ussher, with his ‘spiritually hyphenated’ ability to straddle the Irish Sea, provides a useful case study in ‘British’ ecclesiastical and political history. Like his fellow Anglo-Irish protestant, the earl of Ormond, Ussher deftly avoided categorization in England. Most significant from our point of view, though, was the way in which he illuminated the ecclesiastical relationship between the three kingdoms—a topic greatly neglected by ‘British’ historians.³⁰ One of the difficulties which many later writers have had in placing Ussher stem from the tendency to impose upon him, and the early-seventeenth-century Church of Ireland, primarily anglocentric dichotomies between puritan and conformist. The idea that the English church polity constituted the norm, the others an aberration is understandable in the case of Ireland, given the clearly derivative nature of its Elizabethan ecclesiastical settlement. As we have seen, though, the Irish church managed to create a subtly different structure and outlook, founded on a firmly Calvinist confession, but within an episcopal framework, which focused less upon exclusion of nonconformity by the imposition of internal discipline and more on the unity of all protestants in the face of the rather obvious and overwhelming Catholic threat. The exercise of viceregal power succeeded in 1634 in imposing English disciplinary norms, and reining in the Calvinist consensus, but the longer term legacy of the Irish ecclesiastical experiment was evident in the continuing hostility of Irish protestants to Catholicism, and, theologically, in the classic Calvinist Westminster confession of 1647. The different perspective which the Church of Ireland gave to Ussher became evident when he came to England in 1640, and showed how he could view ²⁹ Russell, Monarchies, p. vii; Willy Maley, review of Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill (eds.), The British Problem, 1534–1707 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996) cited in J. H. Ohlmeyer, ‘Seventeenth-Century Ireland and the New British and Atlantic Histories’, American Historical Review, 104 (1999), 446; see also Nicholas Canny, ‘The Attempted Anglicization of Ireland in the Seventeenth Century: An Exemplar of ‘‘British history’’ ’, in J.F. Merritt (ed.), The Political World of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, 1621–1641 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 157–86; for a summary of the large literature on this topic, see Ohlmeyer, ‘British and Atlantic Histories’. ³⁰ Notable exceptions are J. S. Morrill, ‘A British Patriarchy? Ecclesiastical Imperialism under the Early Stuarts’, in Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (eds.), Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 209–37, and Ian Hazlett, The Reformation in Britain and Ireland: An Introduction (London: T&T Clark, 2003).

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the problems of the Church of England from the outside, relate to a broad sweep of protestant opinion, and provide a fresh perspective on the intractable problem of church government after Laud. As that discerning observer, Lord Brooke, recognized in 1641, it was possible for the English church to learn from the Irish.³¹ Hence the result was Ussher’s Reduction, combining the best of the Irish, Scottish, and English models, unpicking and recasting the previously unchallengeable Elizabethan settlement in a way which the English episcopate found impossible. The problem, of course, was that the King in 1641, with his usual gift for political miscalculation, threw away the broadly based support which Ussher’s compromise had gained by refusing to envisage a settlement based on anything other than the English, ‘Jacobethan’ model. Ussher’s experience also offers broader insights into the political as well as the ecclesiastical relationships across the Irish Sea. It points to the delicate balance between distance and nearness as a shaping factor in relations between Ireland and England. Broadly speaking, during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the distance, both literal and cultural, between the two islands provided the civil and ecclesiastical polities in Ireland with certain degree of latitude and freedom for manoeuvre. There was the simple fact that instructions could take a week or more to reach Ireland, that they could be, if not ignored, at least subtly subverted to serve the interests of those entrusted with carrying them out. This was not, of course, unlike the relationship between centre and periphery in England. But in Ireland the existence of a separate layer of government and officialdom greatly enhanced the scope for independent action. Chief governors were the representatives of the King, and were provided with detailed instructions from England; but they, not to mention their privy councillors in Dublin, also had their own agendas. The results were evident in various ways, in the freedom of English settlers and Lord Deputies to indulge in rapacious and often illegal self-enrichment at the expense of native landholders, in Trinity’s independence from royal control, in the ability of the Irish church to pass a new set of Calvinist articles, and in the opportunity that distance provided to criticize the King’s policies in public in a way that would have earned imprisonment in England. Such distinctiveness was, however, repeatedly undermined by the simple fact of propinquity: Ireland was not Massachusetts, safely tucked away on the far side of the Atlantic. Regular and rapid interchange of people and information bound the two kingdoms together. As émigré clergy and officials made the short journey from England to Ireland they inevitably brought with them the English standards of conformity with which they were familiar. Equally, the first instinct of any Irish administrator or Anglo-Irish magnate when faced with difficulties in Ireland was to go to England to complain to king and court, providing a litany of self-interested but informative complaints which ³¹ Robert Greville, Lord Brooke, A discourse opening the nature of that episcopacie which is exercised in England (London, 1641), 48.

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exposed the extent of irregularities in the conduct of government and exercise of power in Ireland. Closer political relations between the two countries—such as the acquiring of Irish titles and interests by leading members of the English nobility, and increasing interest on the part of the English Parliament in Irish affairs—increasingly bound the two countries together from the 1620s onwards. As a result the flow of information from Ireland to England grew: the excesses of Scottish puritans in Ulster were retailed by Hampton to Buckingham, the peccadilloes of Trinity College were exposed to the disapproving gaze of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The integration of Ireland into the English political system was, of course, completed by Wentworth and Laud, as the remarkably detailed flow of information ensured that Laud was fully au fait with, and in control of ecclesiastical affairs in Ireland, and could eliminate the dangerous tendencies towards independence which distance had previously allowed. But even here, as we have seen, the tension between distance and nearness did not disappear. In some respects, Wentworth too exploited the separateness of the Irish kingdom in order to develop his own policies and interests. He was, as a result, constantly wary about the flow of hostile information, and informers, back to England. Equally, Wentworth’s and Laud’s opponents could exploit their closeness to Scotland and England to build alliances dedicated to frustrating conformist ambitions. Someone such as Ussher, or Sir John Jephson, or Sir John Clotworthy could in the first part of the seventeenth century move with ease in godly circles on either side of the Irish Sea. Puritans in England, with their links to America, Scotland, and the Netherlands, were naturally attuned to think not so much in terms of national identity, but rather of the international Calvinist community—the invisible church of the godly.³² This was the reformed public sphere in which Ussher saw himself operating, which he sought to preserve from the threat of Arminianism.

TENSIONS AND AMBIGUITIES In 1658, the episcopalian apologist Thomas Pierce made a startling claim: that Ussher, a little before his death two years earlier, had professed ‘his utter dislike to the whole doctrine of Geneva’. In this he was, Pierce claimed, like many other famous theologians who had believed in predestination ‘in their ignorance and childhood’, but ‘growing to riper understandings . . . discerned those fallacies wherewith (before) they have been blinded’.³³ The claim was supported by Henry Hammond and several other proto-Anglicans, such as ³² David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 303. ³³ Thomas Pierce, The divine philanthropie defended (London, 1658), part I, p. 77.

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Herbert Thorndike, and was later enthusiastically endorsed by that high-church author of the definitive nineteenth-century life of Ussher, Charles Elrington, and also by some more recent writers.³⁴ It was of course immediately refuted by Nicholas Bernard, whose judgement is strongly supported by the evidence of Ussher’s later sermons in Lincoln’s Inn in the years before his death.³⁵ Whether Pierce’s claims were simply a product of Anglican, anti-Calvinist wish-fulfilment, or whether they were a result of their misunderstanding the nature of Ussher’s hypothetical universalism, need not concern us here.³⁶ What is clear, though, is that almost as soon as he died Ussher’s reputation was fought over, as rival camps—from puritans, dissenters, royalists, evangelicals, high churchmen, even Catholics—sought his posthumous support. As was evident from the promiscuous variety of endorsements which Ussher secured from posterity, Ussher’s life and writings could be—and were—read in a bewildering number of ways.³⁷ The varying interpretations of Ussher can be explained partly by the inevitable tendency of writers to appropriate the famous Primate in support of their own prejudices and preferences. But this was, as has already been suggested, accentuated by Ussher’s personal mildness, and by his often indirect and cautious preference for printing not his opinions but dauntingly large excerpts from primary texts.³⁸ Not all the responsibility, though, can be laid at the door of the reader or interpreter of Ussher. Many of the ambiguities surrounding him also spring from the complex historical, theological, and political problems which he encountered, and the internal strains and contradictions which lay at the heart of Ussher’s personality and ideas. He was, at one and the same time, a pious, modest, self-effacing scholar, beloved of those who met him, yet also a fierce anti-Catholic prepared to berate kings to their faces. He was a favourite of Wentworth, yet also of Wentworth’s sworn enemy William Prynne. He was Irish, yet espoused many of the views and attributes of the new English. He cooperated with Catholic scholars, yet viewed their religion as little short of satanic. He was a firm opponent of toleration for Catholics, yet supported the right of the King to suspend the laws against recusancy. He was a firm Calvinist, yet proposed ³⁴ Francis Peek (ed.), Nineteen letters of . . . Henry Hammond (London, 1739), 17–19; UW, i. 295; Graham Parry, Trophies of Time. English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 140 n. 10; J. A. Carr, The Life and Times of James Ussher Archbishop of Armagh (London: Gardner, Darton, 1895), 203; Elizabethanne Boran, ‘An Early Friendship Network of James Ussher, Archbisop of Armagh, 1626–1656’, in H. H. W. Robinson-Hammerstein (ed.), European Universities in the Age of Reformation (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1998), 131, 134; see also Crawford Gribben, ‘Rhetoric, Fiction and Theology: James Ussher and the Death of Jesus Christ’, Seventeenth Century, 20 (2005), 61–2. ³⁵ Bernard, Judgement (1659), 359–80; CUL MS MM.6.55. ³⁶ I intend to return to the subject of Ussher’s posthumous reputation in more detail at a later date. ³⁷ See above, Introduction. ³⁸ See above, pp. 212–13.

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a fundamental amendment to one of the key Calvinist theological tenets. He mixed with the godly, yet preserved the papers of their great theological opponent, Richard Hooker.³⁹ He believed that the Irish parliament was subservient to the English one, but yet insisted on the independence of the Church of Ireland from the Church of England. He was utterly loyal to the principle of divineright monarchy, yet in the early 1640s was seen as a natural ally of the parliamentarians. Perhaps the most significant tension of all for Ussher was that between his political and religious loyalties. Ussher was a believer in royal absolutism, convinced that it was wrong actively to resist God’s chosen ruler. And his experience as an Irish protestant, a minority in a Catholic country, fearful always of Spanish invasion and native rebellion, ultimately reliant for their power and influence upon royal military might, provided a powerful existential underpinning to his reliance on the godly prince. But there was a difficulty here: so long as the godly prince behaved in a godly manner, taking the advice of Parliament and defending church and state, then Ussher and his fellow-travellers had little to fear. But as the seventeenth century progressed, and as the twists and turns of royal policy became apparent, Ussher had to come to terms with what appeared to him and his friends as decidedly ungodly policies: James’s reluctance to defend Bohemia against the forces of Catholicism, embracing instead Catholic Spain; the promotion of Arminian bishops; dispensing with parliamentary advice altogether; and the suppression of Calvinist publications, all these policies tested to the full Ussher’s loyalty. The Primate’s periodic outbursts condemning toleration and Arminianism gained him a reputation as a defender of godly interests and a critic of royal policy. But behind the public facade it was made perfectly clear by Ussher that he would go no further than complaint: his loyalty to the King remained absolute. During his time in Ireland, Ussher never had to choose. Even as Wentworth and Bramhall were dismantling the Calvinist Church of Ireland, he did not resist. It was not till the 1640s, as England split into two camps, that he was finally forced to come to terms with the irreconcilable contradiction between the godly parliamentarians and God’s anointed king, and eventually choose the latter over the former. As he soon discovered when Charles began negotiations with the Irish Catholic rebels, his choice of loyalty over religious principle left him with little but preces et lacrimae. And as Irish protestants were subsequently to discover, combining the various loyalties which Ussher had bequeathed to them was to prove a continuing challenge. ³⁹ Ussher preserved the MSS of the later books of Hooker’s Of the laws of ecclesiastical polity, and was responsible for the publication in 1648 of books 6 and 8: McCullough, ‘Andrewes, Lancelot’, ODNB; A. S. McGrade, ‘Hooker, Richard (1554–1600)’, ODNB.

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P O RTA I TS O F U S S H E R The scholarly difficulty in drawing an intellectual portrait of James Ussher is, as it happens, neatly paralleled by the artistic challenge of constructing a physical likeness. Numerous portraits survive, all dating from after his arrival in England in 1640. Indeed, the extent to which Ussher had become a public figure is indicated by the demand for engravings, met by craftsmen such as William Marshall and George Glover, who in the 1640s also provided portraits of figures such as Strafford, Dering, Pym, the earl of Bedford, John Lilburne, the earl of Essex, and Ussher. Equally important, he was also the subject of paintings during the 1640s and 1650s, including one by Sir Peter Lely, the distinguished Dutch artist, which was much copied.⁴⁰ Ussher’s appearance is usually that of a bishop, dressed in rochet and chimere with a black skull cap, his face dominated by a straight Roman nose, penetrating eyes, with a trimmed beard and moustache, all set against a dark background. The difficulty with these portraits, according to the Primate’s chaplain, was that ‘the air of his face was so hard to hit’ that ‘I never saw but one that was like him’.⁴¹ Even Parr’s single exception—the Lely portrait—which does indeed provide the most subtle portrayal of the Primate, has a calm but guarded and veiled quality which, appropriately, conceals as much as it reveals. ⁴⁰ James Granger, A biographical history of England, 2nd edn (London, 1775), 162–3; David Piper, Catalogue of Seventeenth-Century Portraits in the National Portrait Gallery 1625–1714 (Cambridge, 1963), 355–6; R. L. Poole, Catalogue of Portraits in the Possession of the University, Colleges, City, and County of Oxford (Oxford, 1926), i. 51; Anne Crookshank et al., Paintings and Sculptures in Trinity College Dublin (Dublin, 1990), 136; Alastair Laing, Clerics and Connoisseurs (London, 2001), 300–1; a further copy of the Lely portrait is in the Armagh Synod House. ⁴¹ Parr, Life, 79.

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Index Abbot, George 51, 54, 74, 105, 111, 150, 163 act of supremacy 28, 53 act of uniformity 17, 28, 53, 149, 152, Adrian VII, pope 18 Alvey, Henry 27, 42, 44 Ambrose 72 Andrewes, Lancelot 4 Andrews, George 185, 192, 195–6 Anglo-Irish historiography 119, 131, 218 religious allegiance and identity 15–31, 36–7, 54, 61, 130–2, 148–50, 180, 217–9 Annesley, Sir Francis 139, 151 anti-Catholicism 77, 84, 93–4 see also Ussher, James, anti-Catholicism antichrist pope as 12, 29, 50, 65, 73–84, 112, 122, 124–7, 263, 276, 279 pope not 136, 182, 201, 204, 275 in Irish articles 89–93, 99 apocalyptic application to Ireland 117–8, 263, 274 protestant interpretation of Revelation 76–7, 201 in Ireland 12, 77–84 Ussher and 77–84, 111–2, 239, 272 see also antichrist Aristobulus 212 Armagh, archdiocese of archbishops of, see Fitzralph, Hampton, Loftus, Ussher, Henry, Ussher, James growth in importance 134 increased income 176 primacy 126, 184–5 Arminianism in England 86, 94, 106–10, 136–44, 181–2, 209, 248, 258–9 in Ireland 154–5, 162–3, 197–204 in Netherlands 86, 106–8, 113 Arminius, Jacobus 106–7, 136, 162 articles of faith 12 articles (1567) 17, 85 comparison of Irish and English articles 89–100 Irish articles (1615) 85–103, 137–40, 155, 183, 200, 233, 242, 269 Irish articles in 1634 convocation 185–92, 195, 199

Lambeth articles 137, 183 thirty nine articles 17, 53, 58, 85–103, 137, 154, 161, 169, 185, 186 Westminster confession 97, 269, 280 Assheton, Sir Ralph 271 Aston, Sir Thomas 249 Atherton, John 242–3 Bacon, Francis 71 Baillie, Robert 229, 236–7, 244, 247 Bale, John 15, 120 Ball, John 53 Ball, Nicholas 25 Baltinglass rising 20, 21 Barlow, Ralph 86 Baronius, Caesar 70 Barrington, Sir Francis 112, 136 Baxter, Richard 109, 255, 269 Bede 123, 211, Bedell, William alleged Arminianism 162 and Irish articles 99, 101, 195 and Irish language 217–8 as censor 161 controversial theology 63 provost of Trinity 27, 42, 56, 163 view of Ussher 171, 187, 193, 217 Bellarmine, Robert 12, 69–60, 66, 70, 78, 84, 155, 275 Berengar of Tours 76 Bernard, Nicholas, 82 and Atherton 242–3 biography of Ussher 5, 31, 34–8, 82, 105 organizes funeral 271 puritan background 154 reliability 35–6 shaping Ussher’s reputation 36, 38, 43, 105–6, 242–3, 283 on Ussher’s education 36–8, 67 on Ussher and Irish articles 86, 88, 100 on Ussher in 1640s 227, 230, 233, 242–3, 265, 267 Ussher as prophet 31, 139 Ussher as preacher 140, 265 Beza, Theodore 57, 58, 239, 254 Binchy, D.A. 214 Bingham, Sir Richard 41 bishops, see episcopacy Blair Robert 164–73, 195, 243 Book of Common Prayer see prayer book

308

Index

Borlase, Edmund 263 Bradwardine, Thomas 69 Bramhall, John ecclesiastical policy of 179–83 imposition of conformity 183–207 made bishop of Derry 176 Brampton Bryan 154 Briggs, Henry 48, 104 Brightman, Thomas 239 Brinsley, John 2 Brodley, John 49 Brook, Lord, see Greville Browne, George 18, 179 Brownrigg, Ralph 235 Bryan, William Jennings 4 Bucer, Martin 244 Buckingham, George Villiers 1st duke of 136, 139–40, 144, 171, 282 Buckworth, Theophilus 131 Bulkeley, Lancelot 151, 161–2, 184 Burgess, Cornelius 204, 251, 252 Burghley, William Cecil, 1st baron 42 Burnet, Gilbert 3 Calvin, John 15, 35, 45, 57–8, 72, 95–7, 157, 239–40, 254 Calvinism and anti-Catholicism 146 and Arminianism 106–10, 136–44, 154–5, 162–3 and Ramism 39–40 atonement 58, 107–10 in England 58, 107, 208–10, 235, 252 in Geneva 57–8 in Ireland 57–84, 88–103, 150, 154–9, 167–74, 200, 272, 280 in Netherlands 58, 107 in Scotland 58 in Trinity 41–6, 174 see also Ussher, James and Calvinism Cambridge University and Trinity College 27, 39, 163 controversial theology at 66, 209 Emmanuel College 25, 49, 55, 108, 131, 154 Magdalen College 25 St John’s College 42 Sidney Sussex College 48, 49 source of protestant clergy 23, 25, 27, 55, 131, 154, 163 Ussher and 33, 139, 201, 223, 227 Camden, William 104, 120, 216 Campion, Edmund 70, 72, 74 Canny, Nicholas 15 Capern, Amanda 86, 203 Carleton, George 137

Carney, James 214 Carpenter, Nathanael 154–5, 157 Carr, James 44 Cartwright, Thomas anti-papal writings 47 in Ireland 24, 54 in Geneva 58 presbyterian leader 42, 45, 47, 48 Cashel, archdiocese of archbishop of, see Hamilton, Malcolm dean of, see Chappell Cassian 157 Catholic church historiography 120–2, 214–6 and reformation 11–30, 200 theology 60–1, 65–67, 70–6 and Trinity 26–7 see also Jesuits see also counter-reformation Cecil, William 23 Celestine I, pope 125 Celestius 210 Chaderton, Laurence 42–3, 108 Challoner, Luke 12, 25–6, 29, 37, 48, 54–5, 61, Chappell, William appointed provost of Trinity 163–4 Arminianism 157, 160, 199–204 dispute with fellows 197–203 Ramism 39 and Ussher 199 Charles I appointment of bishops 196 attainder of Strafford 232–4 attitude to episcopacy 255 bishops’ wars 224 ecclesiastical policy 181–3, 223–4 the Graces 145–8 and parliament 140, 245 Spanish match 110, 116, 136, 145 and Ussher 140–3, 150, 230–4, 258–70 Charles II 5 Chichester, Sir Arthur 54, 60, 86, 89, 100, 121 Christ Church cathedral, Dublin 26, 30, 33, 39, 33, 54, 147, 162, 199 Church of England confession, see articles, thirty nine divisions within, see Arminianism and Calvinism episcopacy in 235–56 and nonconformity 45–6, 54–5, 168–71, 181–2 relationship with Church of Ireland, see Church of Ireland, dependence and independence

Index Church of Ireland appointment of bishops 195–6 convocation (1615) 86–9, 91, 94, 100–1 convocation (1634) 184–94, 199–205, 217, 242 convocation (1640) 226–7 dependence on England 24, 50–1, 59, 85–103, 138–40, 181–97 independence 53–55, 85–103, 164–70, 178–97, 203, 275–9 provision of clergy 22–4, 26–7 reformation policy 22–31 Clandeboye, James Hamilton, 1st viscount and presbyterian clergy 165, 169 education 58, recommends Ussher 105 schoolteacher 25, 37 theology 41 at Trinity 37, 243 Clarke, Samuel 36, 43–4, 53 Claudius Scotus 123–4, 128, 138 Clement, 239 Colgan, John 121 Collinson, Patrick 52, 251 Como, David 109 Confederation of Kilkenny 262 confessions, see articles of faith Constance, Council of 126 controversial theology 13–14, 47, 59–63, 273–4 Catholic 59–60 church fathers 66–70 legitimacy of descent 70–6 purgatory 153 scripture 64–66 see also apocalyptic convocation, see Church of Ireland Conway, Sir Edward 134 Cooke, Alexander 48 Cooke, Robert 48–9 Cooke, Thomas 253 Coote, Sir Charles 264, 268 Cork, diocese of Arminianism in 162 bishops of, see Lyon recusancy in 22 Cork, Richard Boyle, 1st earl of 150–1, 162, 184, 242, Cotton, Sir Robert 33, 104 Counter-Reformation 14–15, 20–2, 25, 28, 31, 34, 37, 59–60, 104, 119, 174, 215, 274 covenant theology 57, 96–7, 155 Covent Garden, see St Paul’s church Cox, Sir Richard 277–8 Crashaw, William 48 Creef, Thomas 18, 21

309

Cromwell, Oliver 2, 271 Crosby, Sir Piers 61 Croxton, James 185, 200, 204 Cullen, Charles 198 Culpepper, Sir John 265 Culverwell, Ezekiel 48, 108 Cusack, Thomas 17, 19 D’Ewes, Sir Symonds 228 Damianus 211 Daniel, William 27, 30, 41, 55, 65 Davenant, John 108–9, 144, 160, 208–10 Dawson, Edward, 130 de Dieu, Ludovicus 217 Dering, Sir Edward 228, 249–50, 255 Derry, bishops of, see Bramhall, Downham, George Desmond rising 20, 80, 274 Desmond, earls of 16 Digby, George, second earl of Bristol 264–6 Dillon, Lucas 19, 21 Disney, Henry 3, 275 Dod, John 48 Donatists 117 Dorchester, Dudley Carleton, viscount 150 Dort, Synod of 107–9, 137, 140, 209 Douai 12, 13, 20–1 Down and Connor, dioceses of bihsops of, see Echlin, Leslie dean of, see Leslie nonconformity in 164–73 Downham, George 79, 147–8, 155, 160, 174, 201–2, 242 Downing, Emmanuel 50 Dromore, bishop of, see Buckworth Dryden, John 3 du Moulin, Pierre 1, 229 Dublin University, see Trinity College Dublin, archdiocese of archbishops of, see Jones, Thomas, Loftus, Adam, cathedrals of, see Christ Church and St Patrick’s reformation in 15–31 Duffe, Stephen 71 Dunn, Charles 27 Dury, John 253 Dyke, Daniel 48 Dyke, Jeremiah 48 Echlin, Robert 165–73 Edward VI 17 Eleutherius, Pope 211 Elizabeth I 17–19, 24, 45, 45, 63, 99, 100, 156, 236, 244, 247, Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia 110, 113

310 Elizabethan religious settlement in England 45, 241, 260, 281 in Ireland 16–17, 28 Elphin, diocese of dean of, see Hill Elrington, Charles early and late Ussher 56 high-church view of Ussher 6, 43–4, 88–90, 168, 170, 282–3 on Irish articles 98 publishes Ussher’s works 5 on Ussher’s attitude to Irish language 217 Ephesus 238–40 episcopacy divine right 209, 224 in England 45, 160, 224, 235–56 in Ireland 56, 90–1, 172–3 presbyterian attitude to 164–5 in Scotland 51 Ussher and 1, 224, 235–56 Erastus, Thomas 47 Essex, Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of 42 Essex, Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of 285 Eustace, Christopher 11, 14, 20, 31 Eyre, William 131 Faganus 211 Falkland, Henry Cary, 1st viscount 115, 148, 150–2, 195, 225 Falkland, Lady Lettice 235 Falkland, Lucius, 2nd viscount 229 Feasant, Thomas 198 Featley, Daniel 74, 171, 248, 261 Felsted 139 Fenn, Humphrey 42, 44, 46, 53, 54 Fenner, Dudley 39, 97 Fenton, Sir Geoffrey 46 Ferne, Henry 261 Firmicus Maternus 116 Fitzgerald, James Fitzmaurice 19 Fitzralph, Richard 124 Fitzsimon, Henry debate with Ussher 2, 11–14, 59–61, 65, 77–8, 272 debate with Rider 13, 61, 65, 120 as historian 21, 120–1 and Trinity College 26, 49 protestants as puritans 49–50, 120, 200 theological controversy 59–72 Fitzsimon, Michael 21 Fitzsimon, William 21 Flacius Illyricus, Matthias 71 Flemming, Thomas 71 Flower, Robin 218 Foxe, John 71, 74, 120 Frankfurt 15

Index Frederick V, King of Bohemia 110–12 Fulke, William 66 Fullerton, Sir James 25 Galway city 65 Gataker, Thomas 48, 253 Gauden, John 2 Geneva 1, 15, 50, 57–8, 65, 282 Geoffrey of Monmouth 213 Germanus of Auxerre 210 Gildas 212 Giraldus Cambrensis 119, 122, 216 Glastonbury 125, 211–3 Glover, George 285 Goodman, Christopher 24, 48, 54 Goodwin, Thomas 210 Gottschalk of Orbais 155–61 Gower, Stanley 38, 154, 253 Green, Ian 81 Greenwood, John 47 Greville, Robert, second Baron Brooke of Beauchamps Court 281 Gribben, Crawford 6–7, 43 Grimston, Sir Harbottle 271 Hacket, John 228, 233, 248 Hall, Joseph 139, 208, 224, 236, 247, 253 Hamilton, James, see Clandeboye Hamilton, Malcolm 147–8, 174 Hammond, William 282 Hampton Court conference 95, 100, 190, Hampton, Christopher and nonconformity 51, 54, 171, 172, 282 appointment as bishop 134 reproves Ussher 116 death 133 Hanmer, Meredith 12, 54–5, 120–2, 153 Harding, Thomas 68 Harley, Sir Robert 154 Harrington, John 271 Harris, Paul 63 Hartlib, Samuel 87, 217 Hayward, Sir John 156 Henrietta Maria, Queen 266 Henry II 127, 179, 213 Henry VIII 17–18, 156 Hertford, William Seymour, 1st marquess of 227 Heylyn, Peter Irish articles 86, 88–91 and Trinity 43 and Ussher 2, 43, 98, 206, 211, 233–4, 261 Hildersham, Arthur 48, 53 Hill, John 49, 145–6 Hilton, William 131 Hincmar, archbishop of Reims 155, 159

Index Hobbes, Thomas 226 Hobsbawm, Eric 129 Holdsworth, Richard 235 Holles, Denzil 253 Holmes, Matthias 41–47, 58, 66, 166, 243 Holywood, Christopher 66 Hooker, John 80 Hooker, Richard 196, 284 Hooker, Thomas 43 Hopton, Sir Ralph 260 Howell, James 233–4 Hoyle, Joshua 43, 60, 62, 130–1, 162, 164, 199 Hoyle, Nathaniel 198 Huntington, John 3 Hyde, Douglas 217 Hyde, Sir Edward 251, 265–6 hypothetical universalism 107–10, 156, 209, 282–3 Ignatius 4, 237–41, 254–5, 269 Irish language 16, 216–8 James I agents in Dublin 25 appointment of bishops 51, 105–6, 114–5 bible translation 65 endows Trinity 27 exploitation of his memory 142, 161 foreign policy 110–4 and Irish articles 87–9, 95, 99, 100, 137–8 and Ussher 33–4, 63, 76, 105–6, 112–3, 116–7, 139 view of Ireland 178–9 James II 5 James son of Zebedee 211–2 James, Thomas 68–71 Jebb, John 3 Jesuits, Society of Jesus mission in Ireland 11–12, 62, 152 controversial theology 59–60, 69–70, 74, 174, 201 and Irish history 215 Jewell, John 67–8, 72 Jocelin 214, 215 Johnson, Samuel 3 Jones, Lewis 131 Jones, Michael 263 Jones, Thomas 11, 14, 23, 28–9, 86, 105, 134 Joseph of Arimathea 120, 211–2 Jourdan, G.V. 279 Julian of Eclanum 210 Justel, Christophe 219 Juxon, John 233–4

311

Keating, Geoffrey 122 Kelke, Roger 25 Kildare, diocese of bishops of, see Andrews poverty 195 Kildare, earls of 16 Kilkenny 54, 78 see also Confederation of Kilkenny Killaloe, diocese of bishops of, see Jones, Lewis, Rider dean of 151 Kilmore, diocese of bishops of, see Moigne, Bedell King, William 100, 197 Kinsale, battle of 13–4, 30, Knox, Andrew 165, 172 Knox, John 24 Knox, R.Buick biography of Ussher 6, 44 Ussher’s theology 75 Ussher and Irish articles 86–90, 98–9, 101 Ussher and presbyterian ordinations 169–70 L’Estrange, Hamon 233 Lally, Isaac 27 Laud, William anti-Calvinism 3, 156, 159 and Arminianism 200–2 and Church of Ireland 103 161, 172–97, 282 and Irish articles 138 and Trinity 163, 198–202 hostility towards 43, 228, 235 on episcopacy 241, 254 relations with Ussher, see Ussher, James, relations with Laud Ussher and 150, 156–60, 163, 200–209, 224, 229–30 Laudabiliter 18, 127 Leerssen, Joep, 218 Leighlin, diocese of bishop of, see Ram dean of, see Parker Leland, Thomas 278 Lely, Sir Peter 285 Leo XI, pope 125 Leslie, Henry 165–74, 195, 243, Ley, John 229, 246, 247 Lilburne, John 285 Limerick, diocese of bishop of, see Vesey dean of see Andrews Viking bishops of 126 Lincoln’s Inn 228, 268–70, 283 Livingstone, John 164–8, 172, 195

312

Index

Locke, John 86 Loftus, Adam archbishop of Armagh 134 archbishop of Dublin 21, 33, 42 and puritans 23, 48, 50, 53–4 reformation policy 22–29 and Trinity College 45–7 Loftus, Adam, viscount Ely 150 Lombard, Peter (bp of Paris) 69, 76, 121 Lombard, Peter 26 Long, John 27 Long, Sir Walter 259 Louvain 20 Lucius, King 211, 213 Lyon, William 22, 29 Macintyre, Alastair 61 Mahaffy, J.P. 217 Malone, William controversy with Ussher 50, 62, 67–8, 106, 116, 120, 152, 190 controversy with Sibthorp 63 on purgatory 153 Marshall, Stephen 251, 252 Marshall, W.B. 203 Marshall, William 285 Martin, Anthony 131–2, 191, 199 Mary, Queen of England 15, 17, 18 Mason, Francis 241 Mason, Henry 160 McAdoo, Henry 89 McCafferty, John 124 McGiffert, Michael 97 Meath, diocese of bishops of, see Jones, Thomas, Martin, Montgomery, George, Ussher, James Mede, Joseph 81, 215–6 Melville, Andrew 39 Milne, Kenneth 279 Moigne, Thomas 135 Money, Lancelot 25 Montagu, Richard 136–9, 143–4, 157, 251 Montgomery, George 106 Mordaunt, Lady Elizabeth 135, 267, 270–1 Morton, Thomas 139, 208, 233, 235, 267 Mountjoy, Charles 30 Much Hadham 135, 139 Muirchú 214 Mulhuddert 12 Netherlands refuge for puritans 42, 45, 282 refuge for Ussher 248 remonstrants and contra-remonstrants in 86, 107, 113, 141, 143, 158, 202 Netherlands, Spanish 21

Netterville,, George 11, 14, 20, 31 Newman, John 3 Newton, Adam 105 Nine Years War 12, 14, 27, 29, 80, 149, 151, 216 Nugent rising 20 Nugent, William 13 O’Sullivan Beare, Philip 121, 127–8, 149, 153 O’Sullivan, William 217 oath of supremacy 17–18, 20 on Irish church 43, 98 Ormond, James Butler, 12th earl of 1, 262, 265, 280 Ormond, Thomas Butler, 10th earl of 21 Oxford movement 3 Oxford, city of 227, 257, 260–1, 262–6 Oxford, University of 13, 20, 23, 25, 27, 48, 54, 130, 200, 202, 209, 227, 258 Ussher and 33, 223 Palatinate 134, 136 Pale 16, 22, 27, 149 Paparo, Giovanni 125 Parker, John 135 Parker, Matthew 218, 219 Parr, Richard 5, 31, 37, 38, 86–7, 105, 190, 203, 223, 227–30, 234, 260, 254, 266, 268, 285 Parry, Edward 162 Pelagianism in Britain 210 in Ireland 128, 157, 210 history of 4, 158 Ussher and Vossius on 205 Pelagius 69, 157, 159, 210 Pembroke, William Herbert, 3rd earl of 111–12 Penry, John 47 Perceval, Sir Philip 263 Percy (alias Fisher), John 74 Perkins, William 38 Perrot, James 27 Perrott, Sir James 112 Peterborough, dowager countess of, see Mordaunt, Lady Elizabeth Pierce, Thomas 282–3 Potter, Barnabas 233, 235, 258 prayer book 11, 17, 27, 28, 90, 245 presbyterianism, presbyterians English presbyterians in Ireland 41–4 in England 24, 45, 53, 83–4, 236, 245, 250–5, 257, 259 in Trinity 45–7 in Scotland 25

Index Scottish presbyterians in Ireland 2, 164–73, 186, 189, 191 Ussher and 1–2, 43–7, 165–73, 240, 243–4, 252–5, 257 Preston, John 42–3, 109, 136, 139, 162, 242 Price, John 133 Prideaux, John 209, 211, 229, 248, 260 Probus 213 Prosper of Aquitaine 158 protestant attacks on 261, 263 Prynne, William 2, 86, 138–9, 190, 208, 229, 264, 283 puritans, puritanism and Irish articles 88–100 in 1634 convocation 186–91, 198 apocalyptic 79–83, 182 Catholic exploitation of 49–50, 120–1, 136, 200 Cathars as puritans 74–5 controversial theology 59, 65–6 in Ireland 23–5, 36, 51–6, 86, 155, 165–74, 242 in England 58–9 and Ramism 39 in Trinity 41–56, 163 Ussher and 2, 36–8, 43–4, 48–51, 55, 74–5, 101, 105–6, 133–4, 142, 154, 167–74, 230, 252, 254, 280–2 Puttock, Roger 62, 152–3 Pym, John 137, 138, 148, 190, 228, 230, 231, 245, 253, 285 Quarles, Francis 154 Radcliffe, Sir George 224–5, 230 Rainolds, John 95, 238, 254 Ramism 39–41 Ramus, Peter 39–41 Ranger, Terence 129 Raphoe, diocese of bishop of, see Knox, Andrew recusants, official policy towards 28–31, 115–8, 150–4, 176–7, 232, 263 Reformation, Irish 15–30 Regnans in excelsis 19 Remigius 156, 159–60 Richelieu, Cardinal 2, 267 Rider, John 13, 50, 61, 67, 72, 120, 122 Ridge, John 165, 167, 171 Robinson, Nicholas 54 Roe, Sir Thomas 113 Rothe, David 15, 121, 215 Rous, Francis 100, 102, 137 royal supremacy 17, 126, 188, 213 Rudyerd, Sir Benjamin 191

313

Russell, Conrad 245–7, 280 Russell, Francis, 4th earl of Bedford 228, 230, 245, 285 Russell, Sir William 29 sabbath, sabbatarianism 87–8, 98, 229 St Augustine and apocalyptic 77–8 and Donatists 117 on grace and predestination 123–4, 138, 156–9, 210–11 and invisible church 73 opponents of 69, 157–8 Ussher and 35, 156–9, 251 St Augustine of Canterbury 211, 213 St John, Oliver (1st viscount Grandison) 105, 115 St John, Oliver 228, 245, 271 St Katharine’s church 30 St Leger, Anthony, 17 St Martin in the Fields, parish of 106 St Michan’s church 12 St Patrick 120–6, 211–4, 278 St Patrick’s cathedral, Dublin Boyle monument 184 clergy of 13, 18, 13, 15, 33, 135 convocation in 226 St Patrick’s purgatory 135 St Paul 211–2 St Paul’s church, Covent Garden 228, 233, 257, 258, 260, 265 Salmon, George 197 Sanderson, Robert 44, 248 Scottish church articles of Perth 164 church settlement in 52 James I and 51 Scurlock, John and Robert 11, 14, 20, 31 sectarianism 14, 144–7, 273–7 Sedulius 123–4, 138 Selden, John 1, 104, 250, 253, 267–8 Sempill, Sir James 105, 168 Shelford, Robert 200–1 Sibthorp, Sir Christopher pope as antichrist 78–83 religious controversy 62–3, 123, 274 Ussher and 62, 129 Sidney, Sir Henry 17 Simon Peter 211–2 Simon the Zealot 211–2 Smectymnuus 236, 248, 253 Spanheim, Friedrich Spelman, Sir Henry 104, 218–9 Spicer, Alexander 151 Spottiswood, James 152–4 Sprint, John 168, 170

314

Index

Stanihurst, James 17, 19, 26, 32 Stanihurst, Margaret 32 Stanihurst, Richard 37, 61–2, 67–8, 214–5 Stapleton, Thomas 66, 67 Stradling family 266–7 Strafford, Thomas Wentworth, 1st earl of appointment of bishops 195–6 and Church of Ireland 176–207 and convocation 184–96 decision on Armagh’s primacy 184–5 impeachment and attainder 228, 231–5, 248 and presbyterians 172 and recusancy 152–3, 176–7 and Trinity 183–4, 198–203 and Ussher 2, 4, 171, 175, views on Arminianism 201–2 Stuke, George 162 Sussex, Thomas Radcliffe, 3rd earl of 18 Synge, George 62, 152 Temple church 106, 111 Temple, William, 27, 39, 42, 51, 62, 163 Termonfeckin 193, 206, 223 Tertullian 152 Thirry, William 214 Thorndike, Herbert 3, 283 Tírechán 214 Tirrell, James 26 Todd, J.H. 5, 275 Travers, Walter 26, 27, 42–8, 54, 56, 58, 166 Trent, Council of 60, 69, 76 Trevor-Roper, Hugh 6, 251 Trinity College, Dublin Catholic attitude towards 26 charter 26, 163, 198–9, 202 and Church of Ireland 56, 174 controversial theology at 11–13, 59–76 foundation 25–6 library 13, 33, 46–7, 63, 104, 174 Tuam, archbishop of, see Vesey Twisse, William 211 Twysden, Sir Roger 1 Tyndale, William 15 Tyrone, Hugh O’Neill, 2nd earl of 13, 29, 145 Tyrrell, Sir James 86 Tyrrell, Sir Timothy 266 Ussher, Ambrose 27, 65, 75, 81 Ussher, Anne 131 Ussher, Arland 32 Ussher, Henry 25, 26, 32, 36, 60 Ussher, James anti-Catholicism 3, 59–64, 106, 111–14, 144–8, 272–4 appointment as bishop 2, 7, 33–4, 105–6

appointment as archbishop 133–4 and Arminianism 209, 229, 284 and Calvinism 5–7, 46, 57–84, 104, 136–44, 167–70, 223, 229–30, 261 character 4–5, 202–7 church fathers 67–70 death of 271 debate with Fitzsimon 11–14 on early Irish church 123–32, 211–4 education 32–55 and episcopacy 1, 224, 235–56 and Irish language 216–8, 276 and Laud 172, 176–207 patriotism 216–9 preaching 33, 111–14, 115–17, 139–44, 175, 233, 258–9 portraits of 285 as prophet 30–1, 111, 139, 142–3, 175, 229, 274–5 religious formation 36–56 reputation 1–8, 223, 282–3 theology of 5–7, 46, 57–84, 104, 136–44 see also Presbyterianism, Ussher’s relations with see also puritans, Ussher and see also apocalyptic, Ussher and Ussher, James, Works Annals 4, 268 Answer to a challenge 67–70, 106, 120, 152 Bibliotheca theologica 68 Body of divinity 81–3 Britannicarum ecclesiarum antiquitates 193, 208–20, 249 Certain briefe treatises 238, 244, 250, 254 Certaine reasons 247 Confessions and proofes 238, 250, 254 De successione 33, 72–6, 81, 92, 105, 120, 123, 211, 215 Discourse of the religion anciently professed 123–30, 138, 152, 215–6, 219, 278 Judgement of Doctor Rainoldes 238, 246, 149 The originall of bishops 238, 254, 257 Power communicated by God 225–6, 267, 270, Reduction of episcopacy 240–56, 269, 281 sermon at Wansted 63, 76 sermon before the Commons 112–4 The soveraignes power 261 Sylloge 152 Ussher, John 19–20, 24, 36 Ussher, Katharine 263 Ussher, Margaret 32, 37 Ussher, Mabel 131 Ussher, Robert 27, 202 Ussher, Sarah 131 Ussher, William 26

Index Uxbridge negotiations 265 Valence, Council of 156 Vere, Lady Mary 133–4 Vesey, John 192 Vossius, Isaac 1, 158–61, 205, 270 Wainwright, Anthony 170 Wales, church in 127 Walsh, Abel 27 Walsh, Nicholas 27 Ward, Samuel (of Ipswich) 43 Ward, Samuel and Irish articles 99, 201 defender of Calvinism 109, 143, 157, 159, 208–9, 235, 248 friendship with Ussher 48, 108, 158, 190 theology of 96, 109, 158 Ware, Arthur 198 Ware, Sir James 148, 216, 277 Warren, Edward 78, 162 Warwick, Robert Rich, 1st earl of 227–8, 230 Waterford and Lismore, bishop of, see Atherton

315

Wentworth, Sir George 230 Wentworth, Thomas see Strafford Weston, Robert 19 Wheeler, Jonas 54 White, Nicholas 27 White, Nicholas 28 White, Stephen 215 Whitgift, John 22, 29, 42, 53, 94, 99, 237, 254 Wight, Isle of 246, 262, 269 Williams, John dean of Westminster 112 bishop of Lincoln 133, 257 restored to favour 228, 235 and execution of Strafford 233–4 and ecclesiastical government 248, 250, 255 Winthrop, John 49–50, 53 Wishart, George 15 Wray, Sir John 145 Wren, Matthew 251, 252 Wright, W.B. 203 York House conference 139–40 Young, Patrick 239