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Providence, Chance and the New Science in Early Stuart Cambridge*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Margo Todd
Margo Todd
Affiliation:
Department of History, Vanderbilt University
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The Historical Journal , Volume 29 , Issue 3 , September 1986 , pp. 697 - 711
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1986

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References

1 Cambridge University archives MS VC Ct I 7, Acta Cunae of the vice-chancellor's court 1609–1612, fo. 9, 22 January 1609/10, recounting Ames's first hearing, and fo. gv, 8 February 1610, recording his second hearing. MS VC Ct I. 39, Acta Cunae 1609–1610. fos. 50–51 V contains a similar account of the first hearing, records that Ames delivered notes on his sermon as ordered on 26 January, and recounts the 8 February hearing at greater length but less legibly than VC Ct I. 7. Ames's, letter to Stoneham, is transcribed as ‘Mr Amias of Lots to Mr Stonam’ and bound together with a manuscript entitled ‘Ames and Gataker of Lotts’, MS Ward R(c. 1626)Google Scholar, among the Samuel Ward papers at Sidney Sussex College. This collection of manuscripts is described in my ‘The Samuel Ward Papers of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge’. Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society (1985), pp. 582–92. The reference to ‘fire and smoke’ in the letter is on p. 9 of the MS. See also DNB, ‘Ames, William’ and Sprunger, Keith, The learned Doctor William Ames (Urbana, 1972), pp. 10–25Google Scholar. In quotes from seventeenth-century works in the present essay, spelling, punctuation and capitalization have been modernized except in titles.

2 Fuller, Thomas, History of the university of Cambridge, ed. Nichols, James (London, 1840), pp. 222–3Google Scholar, noting ‘a letter I have of his [Ames] to a friend [Stoneham?]’.

3 Sidney MS Ward R, pp. 9–15 (a copy of this letter from Ames to Stoneham may in fact be what Fuller had); 133–4 (Gataker referring to a copy of the sermon which Ames wrote after delivering it in Great St Mary's, ‘to give satisfaction to his learned friends’). Portions of pp. 89–120 seem also to have been excerpted from an earlier work.

4 The charges against Ames listed in VC Ct I. 7 are that he said ‘we might as well abuse the word or sacraments or oaths as play at cards’ and ‘it is unlawful to jest [play] with lots, but cards by divers of the best writers are held to be lots, therefore it is unlawful to use them’ (fo. 9). VC Ct I. 39, fo. 50, lists the same charges; on fo. 51 V the scribe adds that Ames called carding ‘shameful and unlawful’, admitting that some things are legal in common law that are not in God's view and therefore should be condemned by preachers. Ward is listed as a member of the vice-chancellor's court in this last account. Sprunger has noted that Cary, Ames's master at Christ's, was reputed to be an inveterate card-player (Sprunger, p. 23, citing Mead, Joseph, a fellow of Christ's, in The court and times of James l, ed. Birch, Thomas (London, 1849), II, 281)Google Scholar; however, we know that Ward opposed the pastime, so that apparently something else was at issue in Ames's hearing.

5 Whatever one's definition of the now much-debated term ‘puritan’, the English divines discussed in this paper are surely within the pale. It would be difficult indeed to argue against the puritanism of the two protagonists, Ames and Gataker, or of such other cited preachers as Gouge, Bolton and Beard. On the more moderate puritanism of Ward, Samuel, see my ‘“An act of discretion”: evangelical conformity and the puritan dons’, Albion (1986)Google Scholar.

6 Gataker, Thomas, Of the nature and use of lots (London, 1619)Google Scholar. Gataker became one of the first fellows of Sidney in 1596; he commenced B.D. in 1603 (see DNB). On the denunciations to which the sermon gave rise, see the preface and pp. 2–3, 8 of Gataker's, A defense of certain passages in a former treatise concerning the nature and use of LOTS, against such exceptions and oppositions as have been made therunto by Mr I.B. [Balmford, James] (London, 1623)Google Scholar. Cf. Balmford's, Dialogue…concerning the unlawfulness of playing at cards [1593]Google Scholar, repr. London, 1623.

7 Sidney MS Ward R, pp. 30, 89, 105, 113, 118, 121–2, and passim.

8 Bodleian Library MS Tanner 72.13, fo. 28, 21 April 1625. Gataker's son Charles later attended Sidney under Ward's mastership: Bodl. MS Tanner 71, fo. 35 (11 February 1630) is a letter from the elder Gataker to Ward concerning his son's academic standing. It should be noted that while Ward sat in judgement on Ames in 1610 and appears from the registers not to have dissented from the judgement of the other heads, the two were apparently on good terms, and Ward's MS journals of the Synod of Dort (Sidney MSS Ward L. 1–16) show his sympathy with Ames's theological positions relating to election.

9 Bodl. MS Tanner 72.13, fo. 28; cf. Bodl. Rawl. D. 47, fo. 28–28V, a pun-laden letter from Daniel Featley to Thomas Gataker indicating that Featley has reviewed Gataker's work along with a treatise by ‘one of those several censurers of lusory lots’ and finds convincing Gataker's argument that lots are legitimate because some events are ruled by man or nature, ‘God's providence and counsels being casual’ (fo. 28v).

10 Sidney MS Ward R, pp. 9–15, is the letter from Ames to Stoneham; pp. 17–21 is a letter from ‘Ames to Samuel Ward of Ipswich’. The latter was apparently mistitled after the MS was written (the title is in an italic hand, and the text is in secretary hand): in the light of Gataker's letter to Samuel Ward of Sidney (Bodl. MS Tanner, 72.13, fo. 28), it seems more likely to be Ames's response to a query from the master of Sidney rather than the lecturer of Ipswich regarding Gataker's position. Much of pp. 17 and 20 are illegible, pp. 22–23 of the MS are missing, andp. 24 is blank. Ames's response to the debate is pp. 89–120 of the MS; Gataker's letter is on p. 121 and his response to the debate is pp. 121–57, all transcribed by a variety of hands. Historians of seventeenth-century Sidney have noted the college's weekly theological disputations, presided over by the college catechist with all of the fellows attending: Edwards, G. M., Sidney Sussex College (Cambridge, 1899), p. 30Google Scholar.

11 The 1619 sermon was presumably what Ames was referring to when he thanked Ward for sending Gataker's sermon to him (p. 17 of Sidney MS Ward R.). Gataker's, Defense, p. 11Google Scholar, notes that the author had the work printed only ‘after having the whole work viewed and reviewed first by diverse as well religious as judicious divines, and having by writing dealt with others of contrary judgements’;. It is plausible that Ames may have been one of the latter, and that an earlier exchange of letters between the two might have been made available to Ward.

12 The title is the same as that of the 1619 edition; hereafter these sermons will be referred to as ‘Lots, 1619’ and ‘Lots, 1627’. The preface of the 1627 edition indicates that the most significant revisions are contained in chapter IV, section 1 (pp. 50 ff.), ‘Of ordinary lots serious’.

13 Donagan, Barbara, ‘Providence, chance and explanation: some paradoxical aspects of puritan views of causation’, Journal of Religious History (1982), p. 385Google Scholar. Pocock, J. G. A. defines providence as a development of the ‘Saviour monotheisms’ replacing a philosophy of history as a series of cycles dominated by tyche or fortuna with a view of history as determined by God in which time is ‘organized around the actions which an eternal agent performed within it’ (The machiaevellian moment [Princeton, 1975], p. 31)Google Scholar. He also cites Boethius' definition: ‘Providence is that perfection of the divine vision in which God sees to (or, to human intellects, foresees) all circumstantial things’ (Consolation of philosophy, IV. vi, noted by Pocock on p. 39).

14 Calvin, John, Institutes of the Christian religion, ed. McNeill, John T., trans. Battles, F. L. (Philadelphia, 1960), I xvi–xviiGoogle Scholar. VanderMolen, Ronald J., ‘Providence as mystery, providence as revelation: puritan and Anglican modifications of John Calvin's doctrine of providence’, Church History (1978), pp. 27–47Google Scholar, discusses changes in Calvinist providentialism during the three generations after Calvin.

15 Institutes I. xvi. 4; VanderMolen, p. 30; Donagan, pp. 392–3. The intent of this doctrine of providence was to comfort the believer by assuring him of God's benevolence; the events of life are ordered for his ultimate good. Cf. Boethius, Consolation of philosophy, IV. vii: ‘all fortune is good fortune’ (equating fortune with providence). Thomas, Keith, Religion and the decline of magic (New York, 1971), p. 79Google Scholar, suggests that a common theme of all post-Reformation [Protestant] theologians was ‘the denial of the very possibility of chance or accident’. Certainly Calvin defined fortune out of existence: ‘however all things may be ordained by God's plan, according to a sure dispensation, for us they are fortuitous’ (Institutes, I. xvi. 9).

16 Gataker, , Defense, pp. 246–9Google Scholar;Institutes III. viii. 1.

17 Granger, Thomas, A familiar exposition…on Ecclesiastes (London, 1621), pp. 38–9Google Scholar, quoted by Morgan, John, ‘Puritanism and science: a reinterpretation’, Historical Journal, XXII (1979), 555Google Scholar. Cf. Field, John, Godly prayers and meditations (London, 1601), fo. IVGoogle Scholar. On Anglican, as opposed to puritan, modifications of this doctrine see Vander Molen, pp. 35–8.

18 VanderMolen, passim.

19 All published in London. Beard, who turned providential history into a form of moral instruction in his work, was Oliver Cromwell's schoolmaster in Huntingdon. His Theatre was reissued in 1612, 1631 and (edited by Thomas Taylor), 1648.

20 Ames, William, The marrow of theology (London, 1629), tr. and ed. Eusden, John D. (Boston, 1968), p. 18Google Scholar.

21 For a recent discussion of this phenomenon during the Interregnum, see Worden, Blair, ‘Providence and politics in Cromwellian England’, Past and Present, CIX (1985), 55–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 E.g., Ames, , Marrow, p. 323Google Scholar (II. xx. 32: ‘Riches lawfully obtained are still the good gifts of God’ and II. xx. 33: ‘Poverty has the character of punishment or affliction', compared with Perkins', William warning, Works (Cambridge, 1618), I, 769, 754Google Scholar, that God may grant material blessings in his wrath; or Greenham's, Richard argument, Workes (London, 1601), p. 269Google Scholar, that riches ‘have been ever greater causes of harm than of good’. Cf. also Gataker, , Certaine sermons (London, 1637), p. 155Google Scholar on this point. Viner, Jacob, The role of providence in the social order (Princeton, 1972)Google Scholar, discusses puritan identification of ‘providences’ as guides to social and economic behaviour.

23 Clark, Peter, English provincial society from the Reformation to the Revolution (Hassocks, Sussex, 1977), pp. 176–7Google Scholar; B.L. Add. MS 40883 (diary ofNehemiah Wallington), fo. 9V; Newcome, Henry, Autobiography, ed. Parkinson, Richard (Chetham Society, 1854), XXVI, 329–70Google Scholar; Ames, , Marrow, II. xx. 27Google Scholar, II. xii. 17–18; Sidney MS Ward R, p. 21.

24 Gouge, William, A plaister for the plague in Gods three arrows (2nd edn London, 1631), sigs. Aiiii–Aiiii v, Avi; pp. 6–7, 11Google Scholar.

25 E.g., Thomas, Keith, Religion and the decline of magic (New York, 1971), ch. 4Google Scholar.

26 Bodl. Tanner MS 75.57, fo. 247 (Heydon to Ward, 29 February 1607/08). Heydon went on to add a fourth possibility: ‘I would gladly hear’, he told Ward, ‘whether any in Cambridge hath so much as endeavoured to enquire into astrology for the reason’. Given Ward's friendship with George Carleton, one wonders whether Bishop Carleton's response to Heydon, , AΣTPOAO∧OγMANIA: The madnesse of astrologers. With an examination in Sir Christopher Heydon's book, intituled A defence of judiciary astrologie (London, 1624)Google Scholarmay have been solicited by Ward. Carleton concludes that divining, or judicial astrology, is not legitimate, but that ‘the foretelling natural effects from the knowledge of their natural causes’ is permissible (p. 45).

27 Fulke, , Prospect (3rd edn London, 1639), sigs. Aii–Aiiiv; fos. 12, 23–34v, 44Google Scholar. In this 46-folio treatise explaining the natural causes even of biblical miracles, only the last three folios admit a role to providence. On a purely quantitative basis, this impresses th e reader as lip-service. O n Fulke's puritanism see Bauckman, Richard, ‘The career and thought of Dr William Fulke’, Cambridge University PhD. thesis, 1972Google Scholar.

28 The opinions of classical pagans, church fathers and medieval schoolmen are cited in Sidney MS Ward R. See also Cioffari, Vicenzo, Fortune and fate from Democntus to St Thomas Aquinas (New York, 1935)Google Scholar.

29 Ames, , Marrow, II. xi. 18 (p. 271)Google Scholar, II. xi. 18 (p. 272).

30 Sidney MS Ward R, p. 11 (Ames to Stoneham), cf. p. 17 (Ames to Ward); Marrow, II. xi. 19, 23 (p. 273).

31 Marrow, II. xi. 6–7 (pp. 271–2).

32 Marrow, II. xi. 10–11 (p. 272); Sidney MS Ward R, p. 10, cf. p. 50, defining fortune as ‘nothing but the mere and immediate providence of God’.

33 Sidney MS Ward R, p. II.

34 Sidney MS Ward R, p. 45 (cf. p. 46 for Gataker's response and pp. 99–108 for further discussion of this problem by Ames); Marrow, II. xi. 6 (p. 271).

35 Cohen, L. Jonathan, ‘Some historical remarks on the Baconian conception of probability’, Journal of the History of Ideas, XLI (1980), 219–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; cf. Hacking, Ian, The emergence of probability (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 27Google Scholar, 29. Hacking, p. 29, notes that the notion of probability arose first from the observed frequency of signs, from what happens ‘almost always’ or ‘often’. His work deals with the development of both aleatory and epistemological probability theory. It would seem that the connexion between casuistry and probabilism which Barbar a Shapiro has observed for latitudinarianism later in the century is visible much earlier in the admittedly very different decision-making process of puritans; her generalization that ‘the religious debates of the seventeenth century produced both a theory of probabilistic knowledge and a technique of inquiry based on that theory’ can be applied to puritans debating providence and chance as well as to the more sophisticated epistemological discussions of the latitudinarians: Shapiro, , Probability and certainty in seventeenth century England (Princeton, 1983), pp. 105, IIIGoogle Scholar. Puritans may have used ‘signs’ differently from their opponents, but their empirical observations of events and frequencies as a basis for judgement, which both Hacking and Shapiro associate with the development of new notions of probability, should surely be acknowledged as one strand of the epistemological developments of the seventeenth century (Shapiro, p. 38).

36 Sidney MS Ward R, pp. 11, 51; Marrow, II. xi. 19 (p. 273).

37 Marrow, II. xi. 28 (p. 274).

38 Sidney MS Ward R, p. 32; cf. Lots (1627), pp. 50–1. His implicit definition of pure contingency is much the same as Aristotle's – ‘nature operating with undetermined causality’. Aristotle demonstrated the existence of fortune as cause from man's use of it to arrive at ethical decisions. See Cioffari, p. 24.

39 Sidney MS Ward R, pp. 46, 49, 53. For example, in divining with sieve and shears, the outcome is influenced by the imagination of the diviner, which affects his physical actions (Lots (1627), p. 403). The obvious natural cause eliminates the possibility of special providence here. Dreams provide a similar case, according to Gataker (Sidney MS Ward R, pp. 83–4, 124); cf. Ames's belief that all dreams are sent directly by God (p. 90). Lest we think this belief peculiar to puritan Calvinists, note that Morton, Thomas drew the same conclusion in Ezekiel's wheels: a treatise concerning divtne providence (London, 1653), pp. 49–50Google Scholar; on p. 48 he argues that providence also pervades all chance, lottery, etc.

40 Sidney MS Ward R, pp. 62, 71. Thus, if Heydon was correct about natural causes for the cold winter of 1607–8, then it could not be seen as a providential warning.

41 Sidney MS Ward R, p. 49.

42 Daniel Featley's summary of Gataker's position in his prefatory epistle to Gataker's, Defense, sigs. Aiii–vGoogle Scholar. The published epistle is a polished version of the letter that Featley had written to the author (Bodl. MS Rawl. D. 47, fo. 28–28V, undated), presumably in the former's capacity as censor (cf., e.g., BL Add. MS 27,936, fo. 64V). Gataker, defines chance or casualty as ‘a contingency or uncertainty severed from forecast and foresight’ and calls it an adjunct both of efficients and of effects (Lots (1619), p. 11)Google Scholar.

43 Sidney MS Ward R, p. 53; cf. pp. 106, 108.

44 Sidney MS Ward R, p. 106; Lots (1619), pp. 19, 21. Such biblical passages a s Eccles. ix. II are cited with delight: ‘The race goeth not always with the swiftest,… but time and chance befalleth them all.’

45 Sidney MS Ward R, pp. 52, 54–5, 69, 90.

46 Lots (1619), pp. 10, 21.

47 Sidney MS Ward R, p. 54; cf. p. 109, Ames's criticism that Gataker here makes ‘all the providence of God …unnecessary and in vain’.

48 Sidney MS Ward R, pp. 54, 69–70, 83; Lots (1619), p. 21.

49 Sidney MS Ward R, pp. 55–6.

50 Gataker, offers such examples as that of a man dying of thirst being saved by the discovery of a pitcher of water in an unlikely place (Lots (1627), pp. 30–1Google Scholar, noted by Donagan, p. 396; cf. Shapiro, p. 38).

51 Sidney MS Ward R, pp. 95–100. Shapiro, pp. 92 ff., discusses how seventeenth-century developments in natural science affected English conceptions of providence, epistemology generally, and attempts to prove God's existence in particular. In relation to Gataker's argument, it should be noted that low probability alone does not make an event providential: many ‘events which seldom fall out’ are called casual: ‘for a man to have his head broke by the fall of a tile unexpected, or to light upon a pot of money digging for other purpose in the soil’ are two examples (MS Ward R, p. 46). These events are casual because unexpected and unpredictable, but their causes are natural and their outcomes have no apparent moral purpose. Presumably if the injured man had just blasphemed or the man finding the money had owed that amount, these improbable events would be construed as providential. In Ames's view, however, all events ‘that seldom fall out’ are providential rather than casual (MS Ward R, p. 48).

58 Tyacke, Nicholas, ‘Science and religion at Oxford before the Civil War’ in Puritans and revolutionaries, ed. Pennington, D. and Thomas, K. (Oxford, 1978), pp. 73—93Google Scholar; Feingold, Mordechai, The mathematicians' apprenticeship: science, universities and society in England, 1560–1650 (Cambridge, 1984)Google Scholar, passim, cf. Hill, Christopher, Intellectual origins of the English Revolution (Oxford, 1965)Google Scholar, passim.

53 Ward had expressed his horror at Cary's election to mastership of Christ's in his diary: ‘Woe is me for Christ's College. Now is one imposed upon [them] who will be the utter ruin and destruction of that college … Lord, my God, take some pity and compassion upon that poor college. In the multitude of thy mercies do not utterly forsake it.’ B.L. MS Harley 7038, p. 344 (8 November 1609); cf. C.U.L. MS Mm 2.25, fo. 161, and Sidney Sussex College MS 45. On the election see Bondos-Greene, Stephen A., ‘The end of an era: Cambridge Puritanism and the Christ's College election of 1609’, Historical Journal, XXV (1982), 197–208CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54 E.g., VC Ct III. 35, fo. 130; VC Ct I. 57, fos. 91–91 v; The whole works of the most rev. James Ussher, ed. Elrington, J. R. (Dublin, 1843–), XV, 504Google Scholar(Ward to Ussher, 25 May 1630) and pp. 579–81 (14 june 1634); and B.L. Add. MS 32,093, fo. 140 (Ward to Laud, 19 December 1635).

55 The vice-chancellor's court registers during Ward's tenure generally indicate dissenting judgements of members of the court; no dissent is indicated in either record of Ames's case.

56 Feingold, p. 41.

57 Feingold, p. 60.

58 Sidney MS Ward A, fos. IV, 3V; Feingold, p. 60.

59 Sidney MS 44, pp. 72, 113–16, 118, 120, 122, 124, 126.

60 Ibid. pp. 443–5.

62 Sidney MS 91, College Donors Book, pp. 23–5, 100 (1618–33); Sidney MS Ward G, fos. 9V–10.

63 Feingold, p. 89, continuing with the comment that Ward was ‘himself a scientific enthusiast and keen mathematician … He alone could have assisted his charge in his pursuit of mathematical es knowledge’.

64 Feingold, pp. 51, no, 138.

65 Feingold, p. 110.

66 Specimens of the handwriting of William Harvey, ed. P[aget], G. E. (Cambridge, 1849)Google Scholar, n.p.; Sidney MS 91, p. 2.