English Presbyterianism, 1590-1640

Polly Ha

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780804776936
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Britische Geschichte

This book offers an alternative interpretation of pre-Civil War England, challenging the standard narrative that English presbyterianism was successfully extinguished from the late sixteenth century until its prominent public resurgence during the English Civil War. From their emergence in the 1570s, English presbyterians posed a threat to the Church of England, and, in 1592, the English crown arrested the leaders of the presbyterian movement. Ha shows that, during the ensuing half century of apparent silence, English presbyterians remained continually active. They made a concerted effort, for example, to build an alliance with common lawyers against episcopal authority. Yet they also sought to prove the compatibility of their church government with royal supremacy. They agitated for further reformation of the Church of England, but by the early seventeenth century they had contributed to the birth of 'independency' and to puritan appeals to neo-Roman views of liberty.

PART I

English Presbyterianism and the Church of England

CHAPTER 1

Royal Supremacy

Presbyterianism, as James VI and I once put it, “agreeth with a monarchy as God and the Devil.”¹ Elizabeth had been equally firm, writing to James in 1590 that “there is risen, both in your realm and in mine, a sect of perilous consequence, such as would have no kings but a presbytery, and take our place while they enjoy our privilege.”² Charles I was emphatic that “all forms of presbyterianism were inherently subversive.”³ Central to the crown's supremacy over the Church of England was its omnicompetence in spiritual jurisdiction, replacing papal authority. Presbyterianism could hardly be taken seriously so long as monarchs believed that it infringed upon their supremacy in spirituals. For presbyterian government was based on the principle of divine right, which insisted that ecclesiastical authority came directly from God by scriptural mandate rather than by delegation through the prince. It also threatened to dissolve the crown's authority over the clergy by replacing the episcopal hierarchy with locally elected church officials.⁴ That presbyterian polity aimed to topple the ecclesiastical hierarchy implied that populist forms of governance would be applied to the state and would overturn the monarchy.⁵

It was in response to the allegation that populist views of governance would be introduced in the state that presbyterians tended to stress the separation of Church and State. As Peter Lake put it, “[S]uch a distinction enabled them to argue…that the introduction of the discipline in the church would have no necessary effects on the structure of the authority in the state.”⁶ But this distinction does not provide a complete answer, since there was no positive evidence that a presbyterian system respected the royal supremacy. Furthermore, there was a danger that emphasis on the separation of Church and State resembled English recusant objections to lay authority (namely that of the prince) in the Church. For instance, Cardinal Allen argued that the Church was spiritually independent of secular authority, especially when under a heathen prince.⁷

Yet reformation of the Church had obviously relied on the intervention of the civil magistrate: Cartwright “affirm[ed] that the civil magistrate is more necessary to the Church than the sun is to life.”⁸ In arguing for the separation of Church and State, presbyterians were more concerned to prevent the clergy from wielding political power (as in the papal tradition) than they were to exclude lay involvement in church government. This is most obvious in their demand that lay elders be elected for oversight of the Church. Unlike separatists, presbyterians followed the magisterial reformers in affirming that the prince held legitimate authority in preserving the Church. Anticipating the potential clash between their doctrine of the two kingdoms and the Elizabethan Settlement, Cartwright employed a careful strategy whereby he “marshal[ed] the weight of his argument in favour of the view that Church and State should be two self-sufficient complete and distinct, but related, societies.”⁹ Peter Lake has written with clarity on this area of exasperating ambiguity:

[In] contradistinction to the papists, Cartwright allowed the prince a right to reform the church unilaterally if and when it had fallen so deeply into corruption as to be unable to reform itself. He also retained a residual right to ignore, revoke and indeed punish the illegitimate use of excommunication by the ecclesiastical authorities. Similarly, the prince could claim a right to prior consultation before, and active participation in, church councils, but ordinarily it remained the case that the “church and commonwealth are distinguished as well under a Christian prince as under an unchristian” and the secular magistrate was, therefore, excluded from an active role in the government of the church.¹⁰

This is the closest definition we have of the role of the monarch in the hypothetical English presbyterian world. As it was, the allegation that presbyterianism infringed upon the royal supremacy reached deadlock in the battle between conformists and Elizabethan presbyterian ministers. On the one hand, conformists were unable to clinch the case against presbyterians at the Star Chamber trial of 1592 when “vital questions about the attitude of the puritans to the royal supremacy and to the Church of England as established by law were in general not answered or were circumvented.”¹¹ On the other hand, this allegation, notwithstanding Cartwright's careful articulation, remained substantially unanswered; by the end of the sixteenth century it remained a primary objection to presbyterianism and silence proved to be fatal. The logical explanation for their lack of response would appear to be that there was no longer any hope of presbyterian reform—that conformists had successfully extinguished it and continued to gain preferment by imagining a presbyterian threat where there was none.

One commentator has recently observed that the absence of a presbyterian response is “quite difficult to account for” given the “large-scale treatises of [Whitgift's] supporters” against them.¹² Indeed, the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were increasingly marked by defensive assertions of the crown's supremacy, which makes sense if the persistence of presbyterianism for the duration of this period is acknowledged.¹³ On one level, presbyterians in fact represented a continued challenge to supremacy by its subjection of the crown's authority to collective jurisdiction and biblical precedent.

But was presbyterianism as inherently antimonarchical and subversive as conformists had contemporaries believe? Scholars have increasingly drawn attention to the ambiguous nature of royal supremacy, which could be appropriated in diverse ways to serve both royalist and radical ends.¹⁴ Many historians have followed Patrick Collinson's lead in viewing the government of Elizabethan England as no mere despotism, but essentially a monarchical republic,¹⁵ and it was in this context that English presbyterianism, which itself emphasized the idea of a mixed church polity, first took root. The treatise “Reformed Church Government” sheds further light on how the presbyterians continued to exploit the concept of a mixed polity and the malleable nature of supremacy to their own advantage. It provides the most detailed presbyterian response to conformist allegations of political subversion to date and indicates that presbyterians continued to champion an alternative exposition of royal supremacy that was independent of episcopacy.

This treatise offers the same defense as Cartwright to the charge that presbyterianism conceived of the possibility of excommunicating the prince and hence could act as a stimulus for resistance: that in the Church of England as at the time constituted Christian princes were already subject to excommunication. More specifically, “[E]xcommunication hath no such force [to withdraw the obedience of subjects & depose princes].” Unlike Pope Pius V's bull excommunicating Elizabeth and absolving recusants from their allegiance to a heretical prince, presbyterians argued that spiritual censure was no basis for resistance or repudiation of the political claims of the prince, for “heathen Princes be still princes.” Similarly, “[If] the husband be excommunicate he is still notwithstanding as An husband to be reverenced and obeyed of his wife. And so if a kinge be excommunicate he is still a king notwithstanding as he was before, And therefore as a kinge to be still obeyed of all his Subjects.”¹⁶

The burden of the treatise, however, was not to refute theories of resistance, but to argue that a presbyterian polity would not detract from the queen's supremacy over the Church. It outlines a form of government that most closely represents a presbyterian polity transposed upon the existing Church of England. Thus it fused a presbyterian polity with royal supremacy, a characteristic strategy argued from the earliest Elizabethan presbyterian apologists onward.¹⁷ In his first presbyterian treatise, Walter Travers had similarly presented an “Anglicized” model of presbyterianism, using the term “bishop” to describe the pastor of a local congregation who would exercise authority alongside lay elders.¹⁸ Although a working relationship between the monarch and a presbyterian polity might have proved problematic, the nature of royal supremacy in the late sixteenth century did not entirely rule out a mixed polity.¹⁹ As Paul Avis has stated, Elizabeth's supremacy “was increasingly regarded as shared with parliament: it was the supremacy of queen-in-parliament.”²⁰ Thus Lake has warned that “before we join Whitgift and the other conformists in writing this [presbyterian] vision off as impossibly radical and un-English in its attitude to the power of the prince, it is worth pausing to consider just how closely such an interpretation fitted the situation and early history of the Elizabethan regime.”²¹

The main strategy in the “Reformed Church Government” was to stress that presbyterianism could be united with royal supremacy through minimal change—namely, by the simple substitution of ministers and elders for bishops:

Whilst some have imagined & others have not ceased to suggest, that this Cause of the Reformed Church governement doth oppugne hir Majestyes^* supreme government and authority, which it doth not so much as touch much lesse violate or empayre…suppose that the Pastor and the other Elders in every Congregation were the Church governors (for the executinge & ministery of the Church censures) in the roome of our Bishops their underofficers & spirituall Courts, is^† it not playne and manifest,

notwithstanding

that hir majestyes supreme governement & Authority remayneth (as is meete it should) untouched & unblemished, as it was before? For there is nothing done herein, but the substituting of the Pastor and Elders to be the Church governors…(in the roome of our Bishops, their underofficers and Courts as is aforesaide) and that in respect of the exercise of the church censures only.²²

The argument for simple substitution could be made to more effect when conformist divines such as Bancroft began themselves to take on board the presbyterian principle of jure divino church government.²³ Divine right episcopacy could be used to affirm the royal supremacy, as in Scotland where it was endorsed by James as “Bishop of Bishops and universal Bishop within his Realm.”²⁴ But to English presbyterians, those who supported jure divino episcopacy made the Church no less independent of royal control than did presbyterian ecclesiology. Jure divino arguments thus forfeited the conformists’ strongest case against presbyterianism, that it curbed the authority of the Christian prince.²⁵ Thus English presbyterians could claim that their polity was as fully as respectful of royal authority as that of episcopalians: “For how can hir Maiestyes Authority be any way empayred or diminished, though the exercise of the Church censures should be taken from our Bishiops, their underofficers & Courts, consideringe that although they exercise them by permission & sufferance of the Prince, yet the power & Authority thereof they clayme by Commission from god, & from his divyne institution.”²⁶

Despite the fact that the “Reformed Church Government” is chiefly fixed on the need to establish parity among ministers and to elect lay elders, it is clearly not describing a form of congregational government. For it affirms a single national Church and adherence to authoritative church government beyond the particular congregation. The overriding concern to demonstrate that ministerial parity was compatible with monarchy shapes the argument to such an extent that it is instead more likely to be read as advocating moderate episcopacy. Having argued extensively (in over thirty folios) against the principle of superiority among the clergy, it goes on to allow for “Bishops of the Dioceses or provinces, [or shire]^* or of the whole Nation.”²⁷ Although these were not to be altogether without function, it is clear that they were circumscribed almost entirely along presbyterian lines and served primarily as a token to close the gap between a presbyterian polity and the royal supremacy. They were to be ministers of a particular flock, exercising authority with neighboring ministers alongside lay elders. More crucially, they neither held disciplinary authority over the other ministers nor acted as moderators in synods and assemblies.

The key was that the prince had to be given some measure of authority in church government, and this was more difficult to establish in ecclesiastical appointments than in other areas of government where the queen could simply be tacked on in the final verdict.²⁸ For obvious reasons, if the queen were to retain her authority through appointing bishops, some form of diocesan bishop had to exist in addition to ordinary ministers. Under the hybrid “presbyterian-royal supremacy,” the queen was given “nomination of thos pastors that should be Bishops of the Dioceses or provinces^† or of the whole Nation.”²⁹ But if presbyterians insisted that a superior officer such as a diocesan bishop was not prescribed in the New Testament, who could accept such office? The most appropriate solution was to apply the title of bishop to all ministers, removing any implication of superiority, while allowing some ministers to accept added responsibilities, the most substantial of which was the summoning of synods.³⁰

This may appear to be a form of moderate episcopacy akin to that established by James in Scotland.³¹ However, as this treatise argues throughout, “[T]he exercise of the church Censures which our Bishops

& their c...