4. The Jacobean Church: of Bibles, Pilgrim Fathers, and High Churchmen
The Jacobean Church: of Bibles, Pilgrim Fathers, and High Churchmen 1. James I and the Hampton Court conference
When the childless Queen Elizabeth died in March 1603, the English throne passed to the Scottish King James VI, who became James I of England
(born 1566; King of Scotland, 1567; King of England 1603–25). Elizabeth's chief minister Sir Robert Cecil (1563–1612) was largely responsible for this; technically, under the terms of Henry VIII's will as ratified by the English parliament, the crown should have passed to Edward Seymour or Lady Anne Stanley. But both were nobodies. Cecil used the machinery of the English state to ensure that James, the only realistic candidate, gained the crown. He was, after all, the descendant of Margaret Tudor, sister of Elizabeth's grandfather, King Henry VII.
The personality, formative experiences, and religious policy of James are considered at length in Chapter 5. He was a resolute Episcopalian who had spent most of his reign in Scotland in conflict with Presbyterians; he had managed to outmanoeuvre them, and bring the Scottish national Church largely under royal control. Yet James' beliefs about salvation were undoubtedly Reformed, which perhaps explains why England's Puritans had such high hopes of their new monarch. Their cause had petered out into nothingness in the 1590s, under the heavy hand of Archbishop Whitgift.
However, they were biding their time. When Elizabeth died and James was proclaimed king, Puritan clergy in the Church of England organized a petition with astonishing swiftness, signed by a thousand ministers, asking
James to reform the Church of his new southern kingdom. The Anglican Church had something like nine thousand clergy, so this petition represented only a small minority of ministers. Nonetheless, there was no other coalition of opinion in the Church so vocal and well-organized. From the fact of the one thousand signatures, the petition is known as the Millenary Petition.
The demands in the petition were nothing new. They were the longstanding Puritan complaints, requesting an end to such things as clerical vestments, the sign of the cross in baptism, bowing at the name of Jesus, the
use of wedding rings in the marriage ceremony,21 and the use of the word priest in the Prayer Book. The signatories also objected to pluralism (men holding more than one church appointment, e.g. two parish churches) and ministers who did not preach. Positively, they proposed a conference of scholars to discuss these issues, presided over by King James.
To the alarm of Archbishop Whitgift and the other Anglican bishops, James agreed to the conference. It probably flattered his vanity to think of himself as an erudite monarch dazzling the assembled theologians with the undoubted depth of his learning. The conference was scheduled to take place on November 1st at Hampton Court, a royal palace on the river
Thames. An outbreak of plague postponed the conference until January 1604.
Unfortunately we have only one contemporary account of the Hampton Court conference, from a writer violently biased toward the Anglican establishment. However, we can reconstruct what happened. The Anglican establishment was represented by Archbishop Whitgift and eight other bishops, eight deans, and one archdeacon. Their chief spokesman was the vehemently anti-Puritan Bishop Bancroft of London. The king's Privy
Council selected a group of Puritans to represent the other side; the council chose (probably) four moderate Puritans, led by the scholarly John
Reynolds (1549–1607), president of Corpus Christ College, Oxford University. Reynolds was the most moderate Puritan imaginable, and certainly no dogmatic Presbyterian—he believed in a reformed Episcopacy.
The other three moderates were Laurence Chaderton, Thomas Sparke, and John Knewstubs. Some think a fifth moderate Puritan, Richard Field, was also present. The three-day conference was almost entirely amicable; only
Bishop Bancroft kept losing his cool and had to be whipped back into line by the king. James did once see red, when Reynolds used the word
"presbyter" (it reminded James of his exhausting struggles with the Presbyterian party in Scotland), but the royal wrath lasted only a moment.
By the end of the conference, the king had agreed to a list of moderate requests for Anglican reform.
It seems pointless describing these reforms, since none of them actually happened. The reason was the death of Archbishop Whitgift in February, only a month after the conference—and his replacement at James' command by Bancroft. With Richard Bancroft as Archbishop of Canterbury, there would never be any reforms, moderate or not; he was the most
uncompromising opponent of all things Puritan in the entire Episcopal hierarchy. James himself was too lazy over tedious matters of administration to chase up Bancroft to enact what the conference had decided. So nothing happened. Once again, the Puritans were left emptyhanded. Worse, Bancroft immediately imposed a new set of canons on all clergy, requiring them to affirm in the most unqualified terms their acceptance of the doctrine, worship, and government of the Anglican
Church; some hundred Puritans were deposed or driven into exile for refusing.
2. The King James Bible James did, however, vigorously pursue one suggestion that emerged unexpectedly from the Hampton Court conference—a suggestion for a new
Bible translation. There is debate about the source of this suggestion. Some think it came from John Reynolds. However, it was no part of the Millenary
Petition. William Barlow, our only first-hand witness to the conference, does say that Reynolds personally suggested the idea of a new translation, which may seem conclusive. On the other hand, Barlow's account is very biased to the Episcopalian side; and since the Episcopal leader, Bancroft, was opposed to any new translation (on the grounds that it might be hijacked by Puritans to smuggle in their pet notions), Barlow may have deliberately ascribed the suggestion to a Puritan like Reynolds in order to smear the whole idea of a new Bible.
The official translators' preface to the new version gives a very different account: it says quite explicitly that King James himself came up with the idea. This latter opinion is not necessarily mere flattery; ideas for a new
Bible translation had been afloat in Scotland for several years, prior to James gaining the English crown. At any rate, whoever originated the suggestion, James certainly seized on it with ardour. Perhaps he realized that here was a way to immortalize his name in Christendom, with Puritan cooperation (many Puritans did indeed favour a new translation) and without having to change anything in the government or worship of the Anglican Church.
Up until this point, far and away the most popular English Bible was the Geneva Bible. Translated by English Protestant exiles in Geneva during Mary Tudor's reign, the Geneva New Testament appeared in 1557, the complete Bible in 1560. It was not favoured by the Anglican establishment on account of its strongly Puritan, even Presbyterian apparatus of marginal notes. The preferred translation on the part of the Episcopal hierarchy was the Bishops' Bible of 1568, enforced by convocation, the Anglican clerical governing body, in 1571. However, it was the Geneva Bible that caught the popular imagination. The Geneva Bible was the Bible of William
Shakespeare, England's master poet, and it was emphatically the Bible of English Puritans of all types throughout the 16th century. Between 1560 and 1611, it went through 60 editions. Even after the new translation sponsored by King James appeared in 1611, the Geneva Bible remained
popular for another half-century; there were 10 more editions. John Milton, England's "second" poet, was still using Geneva (alongside other translations, including the King James Bible) in the middle decades of the 17th century.
James, then, backed the project for a new translation. He personally appointed 47 scholars, who met in various committees in Oxford,
Cambridge, and Westminster over a three year period (1607–10). These scholars were not from any single school of thought; James was more concerned, it would seem, about their scholarship than their theology. Some of the translators were establishment Anglicans, strongly opposed to all brands of Puritanism, critical even of Calvinism, such as Lancelot
Andrewes, William Barlow, John Overall, and Richard Thomson. Some were Calvinists but not Puritans, such as George Abbott, Samuel Ward, and Daniel Featley. Some were moderate Puritans, such as John Reynolds,
Laurence Chaderton, and Thomas Sparke (who had all attended the Hampton Court conference). The King James Bible therefore represented no particular theology, only a broad and general Anglican-style
Protestantism.22
The completed translation was published in 1611. It included the Apocrypha—the "extra" Old Testament books found in one copy or another of the Greek Old Testament (the Septuagint), but not in the Hebrew canon.
All editions of the King James Bible contained the Apocrypha until 1666, when an edition was published without them. Thereafter, King James Bibles varied—some had the Apocrypha, some did not.
Although the King James Bible is often described as a new translation, and James himself thought of it in those terms, it should be pointed out that in fact the overwhelming bulk of its New Testament derives directly from William Tyndale's translation of 1526. Some 80% of the King James New
Testament is simply Tyndale. As the King James Bible supplanted the Geneva Bible in popular use (which it did some time in the second half of the 17th century), this meant that Tyndale's literary legacy was given a new and enduring lease of life.23 No doubt this was not what James intended; but the eventual supremacy of the King James Bible, as the version used throughout the English-speaking Protestant world, and its profound longterm influence on the written and spoken word, meant that James had given
Tyndale a place alongside Shakespeare as primary architect of the English language.
3. A Puritan classic, the first Baptists, and the Congregationalists in America After the false dawn of the Hampton Court conference, Puritanism once again gave up its public attempts to reform the English Church, and concentrated its energies on preaching, pastoral work, and the writing of godly literature. One of its most influential literary expressions appeared around this time, The Practice of Piety (3rd edition 1613: the date of the 1st edition may have been 1611) by Lewis Bayly (d.1631). There is debate about Bayly's origins. He may have been Welsh, born at Carmarthen; others think he may have been Scottish. Educated at Oxford, he held various posts in the Anglican Church before becoming chaplain to James I's son, Prince
Henry, in 1612, then to James himself in 1616. The same year James appointed him Bishop of Bangor (north-western Wales).
Bayly's fame, however, rests squarely on his Practice of Piety. The extent to which Bayly was actually a Puritan in any meaningful sense is perhaps debatable; he was accused of allowing Puritan clergy to function in his diocese without fully conforming to the Church's canons, e.g. regarding vestments, the sign of the cross in baptism, etc., although he denied these charges. He may therefore have been a spiritually-minded Anglican
Calvinist rather than a Puritan. Bayly's book, however, was certainly embraced by Puritans of all sorts as a classic of Christian spirituality. Its impact on Puritan piety was enormous. Endlessly reprinted, it was translated into many foreign languages; it had a peculiarly powerful appeal in the Dutch Republic, where it was the best-selling item in all Reformed literature. It was to gain a special place in English spiritual history as the book through which John Bunyan would one day be awakened to the reality of eternal things.24
Meanwhile, Separatism was continuing to lead its underground life in Jacobean England. In particular, there was an important Separatist gathering at Gainsborough in Lincolnshire, where we find a number of people who would be of crucial significance for the future of Separatism—John Smyth
(c.1570–1612), Thomas Helwys (c.1575–c.1616), John Robinson, William Bradford, and William Brewster. The meeting became so large that it split into two for safety's sake, one group led by Smyth and Helwys, the other by Robinson, Bradford, and Brewster. Both groups emigrated to the Dutch
Republic in search of liberty.
The Smyth-Helwys group arrived in Amsterdam in 1607. Here they made contact with some Mennonites, finding work and lodging with a Mennonite merchant, Jan Munter. The Mennonites were Anabaptists, having originated in the Radical Reformation of the 16th century.25 Soon John Smyth concluded that the Mennonites were right about believers' baptism, and persuaded Helwys and the other Separatists of their group to follow his lead. Smyth then baptized himself in 1609, after which he baptized Helwys and the others, and they formed the first known English Baptist congregation. (The baptism was by pouring, not immersion.) Smyth, a Cambridge graduate, had therefore travelled from moderate Puritanism, through Congregational Separatism, to this Baptist destination: a not untypical path in the early 17th century. Further, Smyth's engagement with the Mennonites had also prompted him to reject Reformed views of sin and grace in favour of the more Semi-Pelagian views of Mennonites, notably their disbelief in original sin. This is why these first known English Baptists are often called "General Baptists", from their belief in a general or universal atonement made personally effective through human free will. It is striking that they developed these views in a land increasingly torn apart by the Arminian controversy, but Smyth's theology is basically Mennonite, not Arminian (Dutch Arminians did not deny original sin).
Smyth and Helwys soon disagreed over the theology of baptism. Smyth came to think that baptism could rightly be given only by those who had already been baptized (there had to be a historical succession of baptisms).
He and some 20 others therefore left the English Baptist congregation and sought to join the Mennonites, although the Mennonites were suspicious, and Smyth died before they decided to accept the English applicants in 1615. Helwys and his group returned to England in 1611 and put down their roots in London's Spitalfield—the first known Baptist church on English soil. Their denial of original sin, however, kept them somewhat apart from other English General Baptists, who were to be mostly Arminian rather than
Mennonite in inspiration. Helwys ended up in prison as a punishment for one of the most famous early Baptist tracts, A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity (1612). This was a vitriolic attack on Anglicanism, and a vigorous assertion (one of the first in English) of the principle of absolute liberty of conscience or religious toleration:
Let them be heretics, Turks [Muslims], Jews, or whatsoever, it appertains not to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure.
This was anathema to almost all Christians of that time, when religious unity was thought essential to social harmony. Helwys died in prison, and Baptist leadership fell to John Murton (1585–c.1626).
The other body of Separatist exiles in the Dutch Republic, led by John Robinson (1575–1625), settled ultimately at Leyden in 1609. Probably a Cambridge graduate, Robinson had been a Puritan-minded Anglican clergyman in Norwich until his Puritanism crossed the line into Separatism.
Unlike the Smyth-Helwys group, Robinson's group of exiles never abandoned infant baptism or Calvinism. Nor were they troubled by internal quarrels, uniquely among the Dutch Republic's various English expatriate congregations—a fact largely due to Robinson's abilities as a peace-loving pastor. In 1620, part of Robinson's church, under the leadership of William
Bradford (1590–1657) and William Brewster (c.1560–1643), emigrated to North America. They were motivated by economic hardship in the Dutch
Republic, fear of the consequences of the Thirty Years' War26, and anxiety for their children, exposed on all sides to an alien culture with its fair share of temptations. Would it not be better to found their own political community in unspoilt territory? So, with Robinson's blessing,
28 adult members of the congregation and their children booked passage on an English ship, the Mayflower, which sailed from Plymouth in Devon on September 6th 1620. Robinson's "farewell address" to the emigrants has become justly famous. As reported by Edward Winslow (1595–1655), one of the emigrants, it reads:
We are now ere long to part asunder [said Robinson], and the Lord knoweth whether ever he
[Robinson] should live to see our faces again: but whether the Lord had appointed it or not, he charged us before God and His blessed Angels, to follow him no further then he followed Christ.
And if God should reveal anything to us by any other instrument of His, to be as ready to receive it, as ever we were to receive any truth by his Ministry: For he was very confident the Lord had more truth and light yet to break forth out of His holy Word. He took occasion also miserably to bewail the state and condition of the reformed churches, who were come to a period [a full stop] in Religion, and would go no further than the instruments of their
Reformation: As for example, the Lutherans they could not be drawn to go beyond what Luther saw, for whatever part of God's will He had further imparted and revealed to Calvin, they will rather die then embrace it. And so also, saith he, you see the Calvinists, they stick where he left them: A misery much to be lamented; For though they were precious shining lights in their times, yet God had not revealed His whole will to them: And were they now living, saith he, they would be as ready and willing to embrace further light, as that they had received. Here also he put us in mind of our Church-Covenant (at least that part of it) whereby we promise and covenant with God and one with another, to receive whatsoever light or truth shall be made known to us from His written Word: but withal exhorted us to take heed what we received for truth, and well to examine and compare, and weigh it with other Scriptures of truth, before we received it; For, saith he, It is not possible the Christian world should come so lately out of such thick Antichristian darkness, and that full perfection of knowledge should break forth at once.
Another thing he commended to us, was, that we should use all means to avoid and shake off the name of Brownist, being a mere nickname and brand to make Religion odious, and the professors of it [odious] to the Christian world; and to that end, said he, I should be glad if some godly Minister would go over with you, or come to you, before my coming; For, said he, there will be no difference between the unconformable [nonconformist] Ministers and you, when they come to the practice of the Ordinances out of the Kingdom: And so advised us by all means to endeavour to close with the godly party of the Kingdom of England, and rather to study union then division; viz. how near we might possibly, without sin close with them, then in the least measure to affect division or separation from them. And be not loath to take another Pastor or Teacher, saith he, for that flock that hath two shepherds is not endangered, but secured by it.
The Separatist emigrants had intended to create their new community in Virginia; they had been sponsored by English merchants of the Virginia
Company, and had legal documents entitling them to live in the colony.
(Virginia's Jamestown had existed as an English merchants' colony since 1607.) However, the Mayflower was blown off course and landed instead at Cape Cod in Massachusetts in early November. The emigrants decided to settle here. So the first Separatist community, at once political and religious, was founded in North America. The colonists are nicknamed "the Pilgrim
Fathers". They called their colony Plymouth.
It should be noted that the Pilgrim Fathers were not the first English settlers in North America, nor even the first settlers with a serious Christian faith. The Virginia colony of Jamestown, founded 13 years earlier, may have been primarily mercantile, but it took religion very seriously. The Virginia colonists were Anglicans with some Puritan leanings, probably shown in their ultra-strict Sabbath laws. It is true, however, that the second
English colony, at Plymouth, was (unlike Jamestown) founded from a specifically religious motive. In the terminology adopted by this book, it was a colony of Separatists rather than Puritans. Plymouth prospered, and William Bradford wrote what would be a famous account of its early trials and triumphs, Of Plymouth Plantation (Bradford's journal from 1620 to 1647). Within several decades, there were three more "religious" colonies—
Massachusetts, New Haven, and Connecticut, settled by English Puritans who had taken the plunge into Separatism.27 It has been estimated that something like 20,000 such emigrants arrived on North America's east coast in the "Great Migration" of 1630–40, to escape from an Anglican Church they found increasingly distasteful. Here were the origins of "New
England"—the Puritan east coast colonies of America that were to have so formative an influence on the embryonic new nation across the Atlantic.
4. Lancelot Andrewes and High Church Anglicanism The Jacobean period saw the origin of a "High Church" tradition within Anglicanism. The chief inspiration for this was Lancelot Andrewes (1555–
1626), one of the most famous preachers and learned theologians of the day.
Born at Barking (originally in Essex, now in Greater London), Andrewes studied at Pembroke College, Cambridge, becoming fluent in 15 languages.
He did not rise very far under Queen Elizabeth, owing to his sacred conviction that the Church did not exist merely to feed finance to the monarchy (Elizabeth offered him two bishoprics on condition that he divert a good part of the income to her—he turned her down). However, King
James, always smitten by erudition, gave Andrewes swift and high promotion. He became Bishop of Chichester in 1605, Bishop of Ely in 1609, and Bishop of Winchester in 1619.
Andrewes seems in his younger days to have moved in Puritan circles; indeed, he never relinquished a Puritan sabbatarianism, to the embarrassment of some of his anti-Puritan disciples. In his maturity, however, he became sceptical about the Calvinist theology that predominated in the Anglicanism of his times, especially its preoccupation with predestination; he thought it pried irreverently into the mystery of God's eternal purposes. Andrewes' theological alternative was to come
"down to earth", from God's high decrees to an Episcopal, sacramental Church, where grace was communicated almost physically, chiefly through the eucharist. Bishops were essential, Andrewes taught, to the existence of the Church: they were the successors of the apostles. In this Church-of-thebishops, the altar rather than the pulpit was the architectural and spiritual focal point. Andrewes held a far more robust view of the centrality of the eucharist in worship, and of the real eucharistic presence of Christ's body and blood, than either Calvinists or even Lutherans. He also expressed a view of the eucharist that used strongly sacrificial language; rejecting any idea of a fresh sacrifice, or Christ being re-sacrificed, he nonetheless taught with emphasis and eloquence that Christ's one perfect sacrifice was made mysteriously present in the eucharist, so that its blessings flowed forth upon the worshiper.
To give sensory emphasis to this theology, Andrewes restored some of the ancient eucharistic ceremonial in his chapel—altar-lights and incense, and the patristic "mixed chalice" (wine mixed with water). He further
sought self-consciously to root Christian doctrine in the teachings of the early Church fathers, notably the Eastern fathers, rather than the teachings of the great Reformed divines of the 16th and 17th centuries. He was prepared to acknowledge that there was still much Christian good in Roman
Catholicism, despite its admitted corruptions that had made the Reformation a necessity. In all this, we see the themes that went into the making of "High Church" Anglicanism.
None of this meant that Andrewes under-valued preaching. It was for his own preaching that he became famous. After his death, a collection of 96 sermons was published in 1629. The 20th century literary critic T.S.Eliot ranked these among the best English prose the 17th century had to offer.
But far more influential were his Private Prayers, written mainly in Greek and Latin, and translated in full into English in 1675. They have transcended the boundaries of Andrewes' High Church outlook to become a universal Christian favourite.
Others who helped form the fledgling High Church movement included Richard Montagu (1577–1641), Bishop of Chichester and Ely; Richard
Neile (1562–1640), Bishop of Durham and Archbishop of York; Augustine Lindsell (d.1634), Bishop of Hereford; Thomas Jackson (1579–1632), president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford University; and John Cosin
(1594–1672), prebendary of Durham cathedral, all of whom had felt the influence of Andrewes. The movement would come to occupy the Church's centre stage under James' son, Charles I, and his Archbishop of Canterbury,
William Laud.