Lord Burghley and Episcopacy, 1577-1603

Brett Usher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781472459695
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134805020
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Early Modern History

Lord Burghley and Episcopacy, 1577-1603 examines the selection and promotion of bishops within the shifting sands of ecclesiastical politics at the Elizabethan court, drawing on the copious correspondence of leading politicians and clerical candidates as well as the Exchequer records of the financial arrangements accompanying each appointment. Beginning in 1577, the book picks up the narrative where Brett Usher's previous book (William Cecil and Episcopacy, 1559-1577) left off, following the fall of Archbishop Grindal, which brought the Elizabethan church to the brink of disaster. The book begins with an outline of the period under review, challenging the traditional view of corruption and decline. Instead Usher provides a more complex picture, emphasizing the importance of court rivalries over patronage and place, and a broadly more benign attitude from the Exchequer, which distinguishes the period from the first half of the reign. Within this milieu the book situates the dominance of the Cecils - father and son - in ecclesiastical affairs as the key continuity between the two halves of Elizabeth's reign. Providing a fresh analysis of the Burghley's long and influential role within Elizabethan government, Usher both illuminates court politics and the workings of the Exchequer, as well as the practical operation of Elizabeth's supremacy. Specifically he demonstrates how Elizabeth learnt a valuable lesson from the debacle over the fall of Grindal, and from the late 1570s, rather than taking the lead, customarily she looked to her councillors and courtiers to come to some accommodation with each other before she would authorize appointments and promotions. Note: Brett Usher died in 2013 before the publication of this book. Final editing of the typescript was undertaken by Professor Kenneth Fincham of the University of Kent, who also guided the book through the publication process.

Chapter 1
Introduction: episcopal roles and reputations, 1577–1603

Resumé

Matthew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury, died on 17 May 1575, 16 years and six months to the day after Queen Elizabeth's accession. His old ally and patron William Cecil, 1st Lord Burghley and Lord Treasurer of England since 1572, was then at the height of his influence in the sphere of ecclesiastical politics.

Despite his posthumous reputation as the benign Founding Father of the 'Anglican' tradition, Parker had for more than a decade proved an increasingly morose, self-isolating and conformist chief pastor, encouraging or else abetting the queen in her cautious approach to the government of the church. It was not only leading nonconformists who welcomed the release from what Patrick Collinson describes as the 'siege mentality' of his final years.¹ Apparently with the full co-operation of Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, Burghley was therefore able to secure the translation of Edmund Grindal, archbishop of York, as his successor. Elizabeth's reservations on the subject, officially unexpressed at the time, burst forth in a cataclysmic fireworks display of Royal Wrath within months.

Ostensibly the issue was that of the 'prophesyings', clerical exercises designed by their seniors – bishops, deans, archdeacons and assorted commissaries – to instruct their less able brethren in the right use of the liturgy and above all in the vital matter of delivering a competent sermon. These exercises had proliferated in the southern province during Grindal's absence as archbishop of York after 1570. Placing more store by his evangelical conscience than by the obligations which an Erastian church settlement had imposed on him, Grindal was suspended in May 1577 for refusing to suppress them. Steps were taken to have him deprived or else to force his resignation, but in the event he lived out his life in a state of suspended animation, continuing to function as a diocesan bishop but never allowed to resume his duties as metropolitan and primate of All England. To Burghley, Leicester and a handful of other survivors – even Elizabeth herself? – it must have been poignant that he died on 6 July 1583, the thirtieth anniversary of the death of the 'godly imp', Edward VI.

The disaster of Grindal's failed primacy was obscurely enmeshed with the spectacular incursion into Elizabeth's inner circle of Christopher Hatton, sworn of the privy council, knighted and appointed vice-chamberlain of the royal household in November 1577. Hatton's meteoric rise is reflected in a flurry of episcopal appointments at this time which clearly did not receive Lord Treasurer Burghley's imprimatur and which, behind the scenes, he seems stubbornly to have opposed. Thus, after 19 years as Elizabeth's chief minister, Burghley found himself at the beginning of 1578 in a quandry and in a rage.²

The evidence can be traced in the records of the court of exchequer. The Act for the restitution of first-fruits and tenths (1559) had stipulated that the English and Welsh clergy must discharge their first-fruits – the whole of their taxable income derived from their first year in office – in four six-monthly instalments over a period of only two years. The original members of Elizabeth's first bench of bishops warned the government that such stringent arrangements would prove 'too importable ... for us to bear'³ and thereafter incoming bishops had managed to negotiate increasingly civilized accommodations with the exchequer officials. Broadly, it became the norm that they would be granted three years to pay, in yearly rather than six-monthly instalments. But with the elevation, under Hatton's aegis, of four authoritarian Johns – Piers (Rochester, April 1576), Aylmer (London, March 1577), Whitgift (Worcester, April 1577) and Young (Rochester, March 1578, following Piers's swift translation to Salisbury) – the Act of 1559 was once again peremptorily invoked, a clear signal that, as Lord Treasurer, Burghley emphatically refused to endorse successful candidates who did not have his unqualified support. Burghley's furious, knee-jerk reaction to Hatton's sudden incursion into episcopal affairs may indicate that he believed at the start of the process that the future Lord Chancellor's influence over Elizabeth would prove decisive and that he was facing his own total eclipse as bishop-maker par excellence. Alternatively he was merely intending to administer a 'short, sharp shock' in an effort to reinstate his own preferred policies on the ecclesiastical agenda. If so it was a manoeuvre which was to pay ambivalent dividends. For the rest of Burghley's life the bishops' official dealings with the court of exchequer exhibit an element of wary sparring, often enmeshed with court intrigue, which seems to have been largely absent from the more forthright negotiations of those men elevated in the 1560s and early 1570s.⁴

Slings and arrows

Thus it is the failed primacy of Grindal, quite as much as the Vestiarian Controversy of 1564–67, which marks a watershed in the fortunes of the nascent Church of England. Grindal's fall had a direct bearing not only upon the financial arrangements of the incumbent bench but also upon the bishops' approach to their role under the Crown and, in consequence, upon the processes of consultation which determined the selection of their successors.

During Elizabeth's early years, leading churchmen who were fully committed to reforming principles had two simple ideological choices: either to keep track of continental developments and to make what use they could of those which might with profit be applied within their own Erastian world; or else not to bother.⁵ But gages were now thrown down, lines drawn, theories of churchmanship more exactly elaborated. Episcopal allegiances, like patterns of patronage, begin to diversify. The easily identifiable swings and roundabouts of Elizabeth's first two decades have to be abandoned. The way in which the Elizabethan bench was created, the all-or-nothing 'protestant backlash' which sprang from the Northern Rebellion between 1570 and 1574, the 'Hattonian Reaction' which, emphasizing the puritan rather than the Catholic threat, checked the further steady advance of evangelical episcopacy between 1575 and 1578 – these things, though certainly not without problems of definition, have allowed of a broad analysis. How is it possible to set about discussing episcopal churchmanship in the quarter of a century which followed? As Ecclesia Anglicana moved uneasily towards and then through the Age of Whitgift there appear to be no easy lines of demarcation, no dramatic shifts at the centre to compare with those of 1561, 1570 and 1576–77.⁶ This is a bewildering world of elision and attrition during which, as they tried in their different ways to cope with the rising crescendo of presbyterian and 'moderate puritan' demands in the shires and in parliament, the forces of evangelical episcopacy and those of Parkerian/Whitgiftian conformity slogged it out so far below the parapets of public debate that any attempt to describe the parameters within which that debate was conducted is at best a matter of sophisticated guess-work.

In the first place, and most crucially, the Hattonian Reaction ushered in a sullen power struggle at court for Erastian mastery of the episcopal bench – one which was sustained rather than resolved by John Whitgift's capture of the primacy in 1583. Not until the promotions of 1584–86, made only after Whitgift had been forced to abandon his campaign for subscription to his notorious 'three articles', did Whitgift and Burghley establish an adequate – if always uneasy – working relationship.⁷

By that time Hatton's bid for power in the ecclesiastical sphere was a thing of the past. Indeed, in marked contrast to every other Elizabethan grandee of whom we have detailed knowledge, Hatton seems to have made little effort to establish a personal clientele, clerical or lay.⁸ The 'Hattonian Reaction' may thus be construed as the oddest of all episodes in the history of the Elizabethan church.⁹ His short-lived coup put down no lasting roots for the replenishment of the English bench and he never again achieved an elevation to match those of Aylmer, Piers, Whitgift and Young. Only two letters from Whitgift to Hatton survive (both written during the subscription crisis of 1584)¹⁰ and none at all from Piers or Young. No bishop appointed after 1578 emerges as a suitor for Hatton's patronage and, with the exceptions of Laurence Humphrey and that indefatigable patron-hunter Tobie Matthew, no future dean.¹¹ Hatton's influence on ecclesiastical affairs can finally be traced only through the intermittent barrage of self-justification which he received from John Aylmer. Burghley's administrative equivalent of a howl of rage, the smashing of the 'special relationship' which newly appointed men had come increasingly to enjoy since 1561, thus appears to have achieved at least one of its immediate objectives.¹²

Yet the present study takes it as axiomatic that the events of 1575–77 brought the Elizabethan Settlement to the brink of disaster. The queen's decision to stand by her own limited conception of her role as Supreme Governor wrecked Grindal's primacy, sapped the morale of her incumbent bench and bid fair to inflict irrevocable damage on her relationship with Burghley. Despite the more complex truths lurking within the corridors of power, she refused to accept officially that dissenting voices had a right to be heard, let alone accommodated, within the Elizabethan ecclesiastical establishment.

That is to face a curious paradox. No later than the early 1980s it had impinged upon historians that what was then described as a 'moderate puritan' position was actually the norm within the charmed inner circle which guided the Elizabethan regime during its formative years. In a seminal study published in 1988, Peter Lake took the bull by the horns, arguing that it was therefore 'conformity' that stood in most urgent need of redefinition. If recent developments in the study of the Elizabethan church had made the use of the term 'puritan' fraught with difficulty they had had 'an even more disastrous effect on puritanism's old terminological accomplice, Anglicanism'.¹³ What, therefore, of the likes of Archbishop Parker, who exhibited an inflexibly conformist caste of mind from an early stage? 'More important, what was it that set them apart from the puritans?' If great emphasis had come to be placed upon a 'Calvinist consensus' within the reformed churches of Europe between (roughly) 1580 and 1610, was it to be further assumed that

all that set conformists apart from puritans was a set of piecemeal disagreements about the ceremonies and government of the church and that with the lapse of those...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Brett Usher: a tribute
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: episcopal roles and reputations, 1577–1603
• 2 The struggle for mastery of the episcopal bench, 1576–83
• 3 Taming Whitgift, 1583–89
• 4 Burghley undaunted, 1589–94
• 5 The transformation of the bench, 1594–98
• 6 Conclusion: the end of the reign, 1599–1603
• Appendix I: The bishops and the exchequer 1579–1603
• Appendix II: Revenues of the Crown sede vacante and from first-fruits January 1579–March 1603
• Appendix III: The English and Welsh episcopate 1558–1603
• Brett Usher: Publications, 1992–2010
• Bibliography
• Index