Chaplains in early modern England

Patronage, literature and religion

Hugh Adlington, Tom Lockwood, Gillian Wright

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780719088346
• eBook ISBN: 9781526110688
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Who were early modern chaplains and what did they do? Chaplains are well known to have been pivotal figures within early modern England, their activities ranging from more conventionally religious roles (conducting church services, offering spiritual advice and instruction) to a surprisingly wide array of literary functions (writing poetry, or acting as scribes and editors). Chaplains in early modern England: Patronage, literature and religion explores the important, but often neglected, contributions made by chaplains of different kinds – royal, episcopal, noble, gentry, diplomatic – to early modern English culture. Addressing a period from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, it focuses on chaplains from the Church of England, examining their roles in church and politics, and within both domestic and cultural life. It also shows how understanding the significance of chaplains can illuminate wider cultural practices – patronage, religious life and institutions, and literary production – in the early modern period.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Hugh Adlington, Tom Lockwood and Gillian Wright

In the years after he became domestic chaplain and private secretary to Charles Berkeley, the 2nd Earl of Berkeley, Jonathan Swift thought hard about a chaplain’s responsibilities and opportunities, making him a particularly good example of the wider situations that this collection of essays explores. Before returning to England early in April 1701, Swift spent nearly two years in Berkeley’s Dublin household, engaged in a number of activities, most of which seem to have displeased him at one time or another, as his later writings in various ways recall. Not the least of the immediate causes of Swift’s dissatisfaction was having been so swiftly displaced from his position as secretary to Berkeley by Arthur Bushe, whom even many years afterwards he would not name.¹ Swift wrote over thirty years later in his manuscript ‘Family of Swift’ that he had ‘acted as Secretary the whole Journy to Dublin. But’, as he later recalled, ‘another Person had so far insinuated himself into the Earls favour, by telling him, that the Post of a Secretary was not proper for a Clergyman, nor would be of any advantage to one who aimed onely at Church-preferments, that his Lordship after a poor Apology gave that Office to the other’. Bushe’s secretarial appointment relegated Swift to the duties in and of the household; Berkeley’s official chaplains, among them Dr John Bolton, took responsibility for the public and state functions associated with his position as lord chief justice. And even ‘Church-preferments’ were not forthcoming. As if, Swift grumbled, to emphasise the power and financial opportunity that his new position gave him, Bushe, having taken (Swift alleged) a bribe from Bolton, appointed him rather than Swift to the deanship of Derry when it fell vacant under Berkeley’s disposition, leaving the disappointed Swift with a depreciated and lasting historical grudge, ‘put off’, as he put it, ‘with some other Church-livings not worth above a third part of that rich Deanry, and at this present time, not a sixth’.²

Though his expectations of patronage and preferment were disappointed, not all of Swift’s occupations as chaplain in Berkeley’s household can have frustrated him. Certainly, he had time to translate from their French and Latin originals much of Sir William Temple’s correspondence, and to carry forward the editorial work for his edition of Temple’s Letters, published late in November 1699.³ He found less congenial the domestic cares and duties that fell to him in Dublin. Attending on one or other of the Berkeley women – either Elizabeth, Countess of Berkeley, or her daughter, Lady Betty, later Germain – Swift is reported to have grown tired of reading to her from Boyle’s Meditations. To extricate himself from future obligations, Swift composed his own mock Meditation upon a Broom-Stick and planted it on his unwitting victim, who praised it, either in private (as one account suggests) or in public (as another has it), to her subsequent embarrassment.⁴ ‘This had the desired Effect’, George Faulkner later drily noted, ‘as Mr. Swift never was called upon again to read to her Ladyship’.

If, in different ways, Berkeley’s household offered his chaplain more or less welcome opportunities to participate in its textual culture, Swift seems later to have found his place in its social culture far harder to regulate, at least as far as the uneasy jokes of his Directions to Servants suggest. Some of the fierceness with which their parody operates may be in proportion to the distaste with which they look back on a young man’s social awkwardness and disappointment. The chaplains of Swift’s Directions are regularly the straight men to the larger comedy of the household. Be ‘pert and sawcy to all Mankind, especially to the Chaplain’, Swift advises the Footman; ‘if you happen to be young with Child by my Lord, you must take up with the Chaplain’, he counsels the Waiting Maid; and, reserving perhaps his bitterest directions for the Butler, thus:

If an humble Companion, a Chaplain, a Tutor, or a dependent Cousin happen to be at Table, whom you find to be little regarded by the Master, and the Company, which no Body is readier to discover and observe than we Servants, it must be the Business of you and the Footman, to follow the Example of your Betters, by treating him many Degrees worse than any of the rest, and you cannot please your Master better, or at least your Lady.⁵

If such was the experience of a domestic chaplain, even the royal chaplains, as Swift reported in his Journal to Stella, fared little better. ‘I never dined with the chaplains till to-day’, he wrote – before adding with deadpan timing: ‘it is the worst provided table at court’.⁶ Such experience can only have confirmed his reasons for declining the offer of a chaplaincy extended to him, by ‘a second hand’, from the Earl of Oxford in 1711: ‘I will be no man’s chaplain alive’.⁷

I

If Swift, as we have seen, thought hard about chaplaincy, so it is clear that he thought little of it. But, as his example shows, chaplaincy interacted with a fascinating range of institutions and activities in the early modern period, interactions in which patronage, literature and religion are all in different ways involved. Even in his short and generally discontented tenure, Swift demonstrates the ways in which a chaplain’s position could be deeply enmeshed in early modern networks of civil and ecclesiastical patronage and preferment. His experience with Temple’s Letters and Boyle’s Meditations shows some of the ways in which a chaplain might, as an editor and as an imaginative writer, participate in the overlapping textual economies of print and manuscript in the book trade and the household. At the same time, his awkwardness about placement in the household and its metonymic table reveal something of the lasting difficulties of properly locating the chaplain, his role and his many activities both in early modern culture and in more recent scholarly writing. If, in the early seventeenth century, John Rastell’s Les Termes de la Ley (1624) could state that a ‘Chapleine, is hee that performeth Divine service in a Chappell’, such a narrowly technical definition hardly begins to reflect the range and variety of the chaplain’s duties and occupations.⁸ This collection of essays, by contrast, aims to provide a fuller, more detailed account. As well as recording the numerous types and functions of early modern chaplains, it also explores the important, but often hidden, contributions made by chaplains of different kinds and in different locations – royal, episcopal, noble, gentry, diplomatic – to early modern English culture.

As the essays that follow make clear, such contributions encompass not only the spiritual guidance and companionship offered by chaplains to their patrons, but also their activities as political and literary agents. While in theory chaplains occupied a relatively subordinate status in early modern society, in practice many enjoyed a surprisingly extensive degree of influence and agency in households and institutions. Chaplains to leading figures in the Church, nobility and government might play a prominent role in offering spiritual or political counsel to their patrons, or acting as representatives for the latter in fields as diverse as ecclesiastical politics, licensing and censorship of books in print, construction and maintenance of epistolary networks, and cultural patronage. Chaplains within noble or gentry families might act as power brokers within the local community, and as spiritual guides to male or female patrons, encouraging certain forms of personal devotion and discouraging others, or advising on regimes of prayer and religious reading or the spiritual care of a large household. The office of chaplain could give a young man access to networks of power at an early stage of his career, and offer him the opportunity to advance his own interests as he advanced his patron’s. It could also provide him with the means to develop his own literary and intellectual interests, whether independently or in conjunction with his patron; many chaplains during this period wrote poetry or acted as literary amanuenses for their employers, producing texts that are now key documents of the instrumental uses to which verse could be adapted, and, in their manuscript and printed forms, vital evidence for the textual and social milieux within which these men moved. Yet alongside the many opportunities afforded by the position, the role of the chaplain was also profoundly ambiguous and potentially problematic. Chaplains who stood to gain from the success of their patrons might also share in the downfall of patrons who suffered disgrace or scandal. The role also gave rise to potentially delicate power relationships, given that chaplains were often younger – and in some cases, of a lower social background – than the patrons over whom they, in theory, exercised spiritual authority.⁹

The early modern English chaplain, however, for all his cultural significance, remains a little studied figure, and may have been so even at the time. ‘Bishops or Presbyters we know & Deacons we know, but what are Chaplains?’, asked Milton.¹⁰ To date, just one single-volume study of the early modern chaplain has attempted an answer. William Gibson’s A Social History of the Domestic Chaplain, 1530-1840 (1997) charts the rise and fall in the status of domestic chaplains in England over three centuries, the period in which such chaplains were regulated by law. The present volume seeks to complement Gibson’s pioneering work, addressing a more restricted historical period, from the late sixteenth century to the first years of the eighteenth, and laying greater emphasis on literary and cultural matters and such topical issues as the role of chaplains as spiritual advisers to elite women. With its focus on fresh research and new contexts for understanding, Chaplains in Early Modern England: Patronage, Literature and Religion stands alongside recent interdisciplinary collections that examine early modern educational and professional institutions such as the Inns of Court.¹¹ It also complements existing studies of the clerical profession,¹² as well as two sustained studies of particular kinds of chaplain, in particular historical circumstances – parliamentary army chaplains, in Anne Laurence’s study of the years 1642–51, and royal chaplains, in Peter McCullough’s study of Elizabethan and Jacobean preaching.¹³ Discussion of the literary and cultural activities of chaplains also draws on recent scholarship on the role of secretaries – similarly pivotal figures within early modern cultures, with whom chaplains had much in common.¹⁴ Chaplains and their patrons, like secretaries and theirs, operated within ‘the complex ethics of obligation and reward’, and were active participants in the kinds of household knowledge economies familiar to scholars of textual transmission, patronage and the early modern household.¹⁵

The bibliographical sources available for reconstructing the lives and activities of chaplains are abundant, yet scattered and often incomplete. There is no single, major collection of manuscripts, for instance, which helps us to understand the duties and cultural influence of chaplains, nor are there printed manuals or popular guides comparable to those written about and for early modern secretaries, such as Angel Day’s The English Secretorie (1586). The dispensation rolls of the court of chancery and the lord chamberlain’s warrant books constitute the primary manuscript sources for the identification of chaplains, as Kenneth Fincham and David Crankshaw’s chapters make clear, while the documentary evidence of the activities of chaplains, in manuscript and print, is as extensive as the range of activities themselves, explored by our other contributors. Sermons, devotions and disputations, ecclesiastical and diplomatic papers and correspondence, commendatory and commemorative poems, plays and prose fiction, biographies, and even love letters – the entire spectrum of kinds of writing in the period, in fact – are all testament, as the following pages show, to the distinctive contribution of the chaplain to early modern life and culture. Lastly, two modern digital resources are indispensable aids for the study of early modern chaplains: the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which provides a departure point for more detailed biographical enquiries, and the Clergy of the Church of England Database 1540–1835 (CCEd), which offers a searchable consolidated archive of the principal records of clerical careers in England and Wales from the Reformation to the nineteenth century.

II

The ten chapters in this volume are arranged in broadly chronological order, and each treats in a different way the central question of how interactions in literature, patronage and religion made forms of cultural agency available to early modern chaplains, primarily in England. In each contribution, the question of how and why chaplains act as agents – on whom, for whom, and with whom – is framed in such a way as to make clear the extent to which they were also acted upon, by others, by circumstances and by events. Together, the contributions to our book open out the detail of the case studies of different, overlapping early modern cultures around and within which individual chapters are organised. While the volume is primarily concerned with chaplains within the Church of England, chapters by Kenneth Fincham, Hugh Adlington, Tom Lockwood and Grant Tapsell also provide glimpses of what such chaplains might do outside England, and Fincham’s chapter glances additionally at the role of Presbyterian and Independent chaplains to the Cromwellian court during the interregnum.

Chaplains in Early Modern England aims both to shed light on the complex legal and procedural basis for early modern chaplaincy and to expand our understanding of what chaplains, in practice, actually did. Early chapters by Kenneth Fincham and David Crankshaw draw on statutory and case-study evidence to survey again the different types of chaplaincy current during the early modern period, the processes through which chaplain...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Note on conventions and List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The roles and influence of household chaplains, c. 1600–c. 1660
• 3 Chaplains to the Elizabethan nobility: activities, categories and patterns
• 4 Episcopal chaplains and control of the media, 1586–1642
• 5 Chaplains to embassies: Daniel Featley, anti-Catholic controversialist abroad
• 6 Poetry, patronage and cultural agency: the career of William Lewis
• 7 ‘His Lordships First, and Last, CHAPLEINE’: William Rawley and Francis Bacon
• 8 Richard Corbett and William Strode: chaplaincy and verse in early seventeenth-century Oxford
• 9 The Isham family and their clergy
• 10 A chaplain and his patron: Samuel Willes and the 7th Earl of Huntingdon
• 11 The reluctant chaplain: William Sancroft and the later Stuart Church
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX OF NAMES