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Crypto-Catholicism, Anti-Calvinism and Conversion at the Jacobean Court: The Enigma of Benjamin Carier

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 February 2009

Michael Questier
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Extract

One of the most problematic tasks which the historian must address is the assessment of people's opinions and the motives for their actions. There is violent disagreement about the opinions of individuals for whom there exist extensive archives of correspondence, whose ideas are recorded in numerous printed works and whose political associations and circles of friends help to disclose their views. How much more difficult then to assess the motives of a man for whom such sources are very slight, whose ideas are set out in the shortest of polemical tracts, and whose opinions, when assembled, seem to represent a mass of contradictions? Such a man was Benjamin Carier whose change of religious opinions and notorious conversion to Rome are the subject of this article. He was a chaplain to James i but his beliefs were not fully attuned to those of the Jacobean clerical establishment and he decided towards the end of his life to embrace Roman Catholicism. He was apparently just a minor churchman whose early promise was never fulfilled and who changed horses out of pique at his enemies' dominance in the Church of England. His conversion in 1613 caused a brief stir but in less than a year he was dead. His influence in the established Church is uncertain; his real doctrinal beliefs appear to be lost or polemicised beyond the point where they can be used to analyse his transfer of religious allegiance.

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Articles
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The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 47 , Issue 1 , January 1996 , pp. 45 - 64
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

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15 Sir Thomas Lake made no efforts on his behalf: Dodd, , Church history, ii. 512Google Scholar. One of Carier's benefices, Paddlesworth in Kent, was in the gift of the Wotton family (though Carier resigned it in 1599), as was his chapelry at Allington: Loomie, A. J., ‘A Jacobean crypto-Catholic: Lord Wotton’, Catholic Historical Review liii (1967), 328–45 at p. 339Google Scholar. There is, however, little evidence of an active connection between him and Lord Wotton (though his friend Casaubon came over in Lord Wotton's suite in 161 o: Pattison, , Casaubon, 307)Google Scholar.

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23 AAW, A xii. 395, 400, 425, 459, 502, xiii. 58.

24 HMC Downshire MSS, iv. 194; AAW, OB i. pt i, no. 31.

25 HMC Downshire MSS, iv. 331–3.

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27 I owe this point to Andrew Foster.

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30 Oxford, Balliol College, MS 270, pp. 153–63. This treatise, written after the Gunpowder Plot but before Carier had decided to forsake the Church of England, is addressed to an unnamed secular peer. This could be taken to mean that Carier had already decided that renovation of the English Church would not come about through its clergy but only as a result of political change. (I am grateful to Anthony Milton for this point.) For a definitive discussion of the issue of reunion see Milton, Anthony, Catholic and Reformed, Cambridge 1995CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ch. vii.

31 Carier, , Treatise, 13 (‘the Puritanes and Calvinists, and all the Creatures of schisme’ were his ‘utter enemies’), 32Google Scholar.

32 Ball. Coll., MS 270, p. 162.

33 P. Lake, ‘The Laudian style: order, uniformity and the pursuit of the beauty of holiness in the 1630s’, and Milton, A., ‘The Church of England, Rome, and the true Church: the demise of a Jacobean consensus’, in Fincham, K. C. (ed.), The early Stuart Church 1603–1642, London 1993, 161–85Google Scholar ( at P. 180) 187–210.

34 Hakewill, Answere, sig. dv. Abbot told Trumbull that Carier had been unsound (implying that he was likely to defect) for years: HMC Downshire MSS, iv. 194. The words which Hakewill reproduced from Carier's commonplace book (dated to early 1612) suggest that as late as this Carier thought it was possible to be in communion with the true Church through a right faith even if, technically, one was a member of a Church which was temporarily in a state of schism.

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36 Questier, , ‘Phenomenon’, 64–9Google Scholar. Carier says that he consciously tried to get away from the prevailing trends in contemporary polemic: Treatise, 11.

37 Hakewill, Answere, sig. D4V.

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40 Carier, , Treatise, 11, 14Google Scholar. Most Romanist polemic emphasised the absolute corruption of the Protestant English Church, fatally infected with heresy, and capable of renewal only through a total abandonment of its claims to independence. This would occur through an unconditional return to communion with Rome (rather than, as Carier implies, through a removal of a few Puritan excesses).

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57 Carier, , Treatise, 30Google Scholar; Hakewill, in reply, claimed that he could ‘find no such words in Sir Francis Bacons Essays printed the yere 1612’ though in the margin he says ‘I have since found words to that purpose in his Meditationes sacrae, but not as M. Doctor quoteth them.’ (He refers in fact to a similar citation in Bacon's Meditationes about schismatics and the two tables which is far more acceptable to him, for it is not anti-Puritan, and it incorporates an attack on the perverters of the second table, and the potential for corruption of Catholic monasticism: Hakewill, Answere, sigs P3r–4r; The works of Francis Bacon, ed. Spedding, J., Ellis, R. L. and Heath, D. D., London 1858–1874, viii. 90–1; vii. 249.)Google Scholar HakewilPs claim that he could not find Carier's citation of the ‘Advertisement’ is presumably because the ‘Advertisement’ did not appear in print until 1640.

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69 Michael Questier, ‘“Like locusts over all the world”: conversion, indoctrination and the Society of Jesus in late Elizabethan and Jacobean England’, in T. McCoog and J. A. Munitiz (eds.), The reckoned expense: Edmund Campion and the early English Jesuits (forthcoming).

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73 Price, , Defence, 39Google Scholar.