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A Reconsideration of Richard Bancroft's Paul's Cross Sermon of 9 February 1588/91

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2011

W. D. J. Cargill Thompson
W. D. J. Cargill Thompson
Affiliation:
Lecturer in Ecclesiastical History, University of London King's College
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Extract

Richard Bancroft's Paul's Cross Sermon of 9 February 1588/9 owes its fame to the fact that it has traditionally been associated with the first appearance in Anglican theology of the jure divino theory of episcopacy. So far as I have been able to discover, this tradition appears to derive its origin from the account of the Sermon given by John Strype in the eighteenth century, although the germ of the idea is considerably older, since it can be traced back to the attacks made at the time by Bancroft's puritan opponents, most notably Sir Francis Knollys, who accused him, along with archbishop Whitgift and others, of seeking to undermine the Royal Supremacy by preaching that bishops owed their ‘superiority’ over the lower clergy to God rather than to the queen. Until the eighteenth century, however, this interpretation of Bancroft's teaching is only to be found in puritan writers. Seventeenth-century Anglican church historians in general do not appear to have attached any doctrinal significance to the Sermon. Peter Heylyn, for example, in his Aërius Redivivus (1670) refers to it as ‘a most excellent and judicious Sermon’ and proceeds to give a lengthy summary of its contents without at any point suggesting that Bancroft was putting forward a novel theory of episcopacy, while Thomas Fuller makes no reference to it at all either in his Church History of Britain (1655) or in his account of Bancroft in The Worthies of England (1662). At the beginning of the eighteenth century the Sermon enjoyed a modest vogue among the Non-Jurors, who admired it for its vigorous defence of the Church of England against the attacks of the puritans; but neither Henry Gandy, who reprinted it at the instigation of Dr. George Hickes in the first volume of the Bibliotheca Scriptorum Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1709), nor Jeremy Collier, who discussed it at considerable length in his Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain (1709-14), drew any explicit connexion between the Sermon and the emergence of the jure divino theory of episcopacy.

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The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , October 1969 , pp. 253 - 266
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1969

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page 253 note 2 A Sermon preached at Paules Crosse the 9. of Februarie, being the first Sunday in the Parleament, Anno. 1588. by Richard Bancroft D. of Divinitie, and Chaplains to the right Honorable Sir Christopher Hatton Knight L. Chancelor of England (E. B. [Edward Bollifant] for Gregorie Seton, 1588, i.e. 1589). Another edition, printed by I. I. [John Jackson] for Gregorie Seton, was also issued in 1588/9. The Sermon was reprinted twice in the seventeenth century by John Norton in 1636 and 1637 and again in 1709 in Bibliotheca Scriptontm Ecclesiae Anglicanae (see below, 254n. 2.).

page 253 note 3 See below, 259–60.

page 253 note 4 Heylyn, Peter, Aërius Redivivus: or the History of the Presbyterians, Oxford 1670, Bk. viii, 283Google Scholar. Heylyn also refers to the Sermon briefly in his life of archbishop Laud (Cyprianus Anglicus, 1668, 62), but he only states that Bancroft ‘therein made an open declaration of those manifold dangers which the prevalency of that Faction would bring upon the Church and State, if they might be suffered’.

page 254 note 1 Fuller, Thomas, The Church History of Britain, ed. Brewer, J. S., Oxford 1845, v. 119–93Google Scholar; Fuller, Thomas, The Worthies of England, ed. Freeman, J., 1952, 301–2.Google Scholar

page 254 note 2 Bibliotheca Scriptorum Ecclesiae Anglicanae: or a Collection of Tracts relating to the Government and Authority of the Church: Being the First Volume of the Choice Tracts and Papers mentioned and recommended by the Reverend Dr. George Hicks, in his Preface to the Three Treatises lately published by him, 1709, 247–315. See also the Preface (viii), where the editor refers briefly to ‘the incomparable Sermon’ and its author without, however, alluding to the jure divino theory of episcopacy. According to a note in the Preface (xxiii), the text of the Sermon was printed from a MS. supplied to the editor by Dr. Charles Goodall, ‘the now worthy President of the College of Physicians’; however, there appear to be no differences, apart from the spelling, which has been modernised, between this text and that of the earlier printed editions and it is probable that Goodall's MS. was simply a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century MS. copy of one of the early printed editions.

The editorship of the Bibliotheca Scriptorum Ecclesiae Anglicanae has sometimes been attributed mistakenly to George Hickes (cf. Usher, R. G., The Reconstruction of the English Church, London and New York 1910, i. 73 nn. 1–3Google Scholar and passim; Davies, E. T., Episcopacy and the Royal Supremacy in the Church of England in the XVI Century, Oxford 1950, 27 n. 2Google Scholar; Philip Hughes, The Reformation in England, 1950–4, iii. 209 n. 3). In fact, it is clear both from the wording of the title (quoted above) and from the extract from Hickes's own preface to his Three Treatises (1709), which is printed by way of foreword to the Bibliotheca (iii-vi), that Hickes had merely recommended the publication of this collection and that he was not himself the editor. S. Halkett and J. Laing Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous English Literature (i. 200) give Henry Gandy as the editor, on the authority of Watt's, RobertBibliotheca Britannica, Edinburgh 1824, i. 399Google Scholar). The work is also listed among Gandy's publications in the D.N.B., s.v., Gandy. According to the original scheme announced by Hickes in the preface to his Three Treatises, the Bibliotheca Scriptorum Ecclesiae Anglicanae was intended to comprise a series of volumes of ‘choice Collections of Tracts and Papers formerly printed in defence of the Church of England, against her adversaries of all sorts, from the time of the Reformation to that of the Revolution’, but, in the event, only the first volume was ever published.

page 254 note 3 Collier, Jeremy, An Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain, ed. Barham, F., 1840, vii. 80 ff.Google Scholar

page 255 note 1 Strype, John, The Life and Acts of John Whitgift, Oxford 1822, i. 559Google Scholar. Strype's use of the phrase ‘was charged to maintain’ is ambiguous. Daniel Neal in his History of the Puritans (1730)—see below, 256—interpreted the words, in the light of Strype's next sentence, as meaning that Bancroft was instructed to put forward the doctrine by Whitgift, an interpretation which makes Strype assert quite explicitly that Bancroft advanced the jure divino theory and which, because of the popularity of Neal's work in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, has had an important influence on the subsequent historiography of the Sermon. However, it seems more probable that the words should be construed as meaning that Bancroft was ‘charged with maintaining’ the doctrine, since the words in italics which follow—‘that the Bishops of England», etc.—are clearly intended as a quotation or semi-quotation and, since no similar passage occurs in Bancroft's Sermon, they can only refer to the accusations levelled against Bancroft by Sir Francis Knollys. If this interpretation is correct, it would follow that the account of the Sermon which Strype gave in the Life of Whitgift is considerably more tentative than that which he subsequently wrote in the Annals.

page 255 note 2 Strype, John, Annals of the Reformation, Oxford 1824, iii Pt. 98.Google Scholar

page 255 note 3 Strype, op. cit., 98–9.

page 255 note 4 Strype, Whitgift, i. 559–65; Annals, iii. Pt. ii, 100–1.

page 256 note 1 Strype, Whitgift, i. 559.

page 256 note 2 Strype, Whitgift, i. 560–3. The two documents which were the cause of Strype's confusion are Sir Francis Knollys's syllogism (560), which Strype wrongly states was written as a result of Bancroft's Sermon, and the preacher's reply to it (560–3) which he consequently ascribes to Bancroft. The minor of Knollys's syllogism is as follows: ‘The preacher, upon Sunday the 12th of January, 1588 [9], maintained that the Bishops of this realm had their superiority over the inferior clergy, otherwise than by and from her Majesty's authority, namely, jure divino’. From this it is clear that Knollys's syllogism cannot refer to Bancroft's Sermon which was delivered on 9 February 1588/9 and this is confirmed by the fact that the arguments used by the preacher in his reply to the syllogism bear no relation to those which occur in Bancroft's Sermon. I have not been able to trace the MSS. which Strype used of either Knollys's syllogism or the preacher's reply and it is possible that they no longer survive. However, a clue to the identity of the preacher of the sermon of 12 January 1588/9 is to be found in a paper in Bodleys Rawlinson MS. C.167, which is headed ‘Short observations of the answeares, delivered by Do: Bridges, to [yr Honoures crossed out] Sr fir. knowles syllogisme’ and which consists of a lengthy examination and refutation of the arguments put forward by the preacher in his answer to Knollys's syllogism. The author of these ‘Short Observations’ was almost certainly Dr. John Hammond, Chancellor of the diocese of London and a frequent correspondent of Sir Francis Knollys at this period, who is now known to have been the author of another paper addressed to Knollys on the subject of the jure divino theory of episcopacy which Strype prints (Whitgift, iii. 220–4) and which he mistakenly suggests was probably composed by either Cartwright or Travers (Whitgift, i. 601). For Hammond's authorship of this paper, which has sometimes been attributed erroneously by modern writers to Whitgift, see Dawley, P. M., John Whitgift and the Reformation, 1955, 179 n. 44.Google Scholar I hope to discuss Bridges's sermon and Hammond's ‘Short Observations’ more fully in a future article.

page 256 note 3 Neal, Daniel, The History of the Puritans; or Protestant Nonconformists; from the Reformation in 1517, to the Revolution in 1688, 1837, i 321–2.Google Scholar

page 257 note 1 Price, Thomas, The History of Protestant Nonconformity in England, from the Reformation tinder Henry VIII, 1836–8, i. 376–7.Google Scholar

page 257 note 2 Hunt, John, Religious Thought in England from the Reformation to the end of last century, 1870–3, i. 86–8Google Scholar; Hook, W. F., Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury, 1860–76, xGoogle Scholar (1875), 194–5; Frere, W. H., A History of the English Church in the Reigns of Elizabeth and James I 1558–1625, 1904, 275Google Scholar; Gwatkin, H. M., Church and State in England to the death of Queen Anne, 1917, 264Google Scholar; Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, s.v. ‘Richard Bancroft’.

page 257 note 3 Soames, Henry, Elizabethan Religious History, 1839, 381Google Scholar n. 1; see also 377–81 for his general account of the Sermon. Soames, whose interpretation appears to be derived very largely from Strype, although he does also give extensive quotations from the Sermon itself, accepted that ‘Bancroft laid it broadly down that episcopal government is a divine ordinance’. What he objected to in Neal and Price was the suggestion that Bancroft's conception of episcopacy was a novel one; however, the only evidence which he cites in disproof of this is a statement by Sir Francis Knollys, quoted by Strype, to the effect that the theory that episcopacy was a divine institution was ‘set down in a printed book, entitled Dr. Whitgift against Cartwright’.

page 257 note 4 Child, G. W., Church and State under the Tudors, 1890, 237–8Google Scholar: ‘Now for the first time, in February 1588 [sic], a sermon was preached by Dr. Bancroft (afterwards Archbishop) at Paul's Cross, in which he suggested, rather than asserted, the divine right of bishops in the Church of England … It is put forward in a mild and scarcely more than suggestive tone, and to a modern reader appears scarcely noticeable as compared with the blast of unqualified asseveration with which the royal supremacy is asserted in its most unmitigated form …’.

page 258 note 1 Mason, A. J., The Church of England and Episcopacy, Cambridge 1914, 45.Google Scholar

page 258 note 2 Davies, Episcopacy and the Royal Supremacy, 27–8.

page 258 note 3 Hughes, The Reformation in England, iii. 209. It should be pointed out that R. G. Usher's remark, which Hughes quotes, was not intended to refer to the jure divino theory of episcopacy. In The Reconstruction of the English Church, i. 50 ff.) Usher (rightly) discussed the Sermon primarily in the context of the puritan movement of the 1580s and for him its claim to be regarded as ‘the turning point in the history of Elizabethan non-conformity’ lay in the fact that it represented the first successful exposé of the aims and methods of the puritan campaign. In a subsequent chapter Usher did also consider the question of Bancroft's attitude towards episcopacy, but only in very general terms; and he says little more than that Bancroft went ‘far beyond Whitgift’ in maintaining that episcopacy was ‘an honourable and worthy institution, sanctified by the approval of past ages’ and that it was ‘not only pe missible but desirable’ (74).

page 258 note 4 Sykes, Norman, Old Priest and New Presbyter, Cambridge 1956, 25–6.Google Scholar

page 259 note 1 [John Penry], A Briefe Discovery of the Untruthes and Slanders (against the true governement of the Church of Christ) contained in a Sermon, preached the 8. [sic] of Februarie 1588 by D. Bancroft [Edinburgh, n.d. but probably published in December 1589, see Chadwick, Owen, ‘Richard Bancroft's Submission’ in this Journal, iii (1952), 59 n. 3], 28Google Scholar: ‘And after this sort do our Bishops account of the present church government, which they hold unchangeable only as long as it shall please her majesty and the state. If M. Bancroft be of another judgement, we say that he condemneth not Aërius alone, but even Jerome and our Bishops for obstinate heretics, and we crave his answer unto the place of Jerome’.

page 259 note 2 I. D. [John Davidson], D. Bancrofts Rashnes in Rayling against the Church of Scotland, Edinburgh 1590. For the hostility which Bancroft's Sermon aroused in Scotland, see Donaldson, Gordon, ‘The Attitude of Whitgift and Bancroft to the Scottish Church’ in T.R.H.S., 4th Series, xxiv (1942), 95–115Google Scholar, and Chadwick, ‘Richard Bancroft's Submission’, op. cit., 58–73.

page 259 note 3 Evidence that Knollys had already begun this campaign several months before the delivery of Bancroft's Sermon is provided by Dr. Hammond's letter to Knollys, printed in Strype Whitgift, iii. 220–4 (see above, 278 n. 2). Strype places this letter towards the end of 1589 after the controversy which had arisen over Bancroft's Sermon but the original which is among the Salisbury MSS. at Hatfield (having been forwarded to Burghley by Knollys) is endorsed 4 November 1588 (cf. H.M.C., Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Hon. the Marquis of Salisbury, Pt. III, 367–70).

page 259 note 4 Cf. Knollys's letter to Sir Francis Walsingham, 20 March 1588/9 (Cal. S. P. Dom. Elizabeth, Vol. II ‘1581–90’, vol. 223, no. 23) and his various letters to Burghley, summarised in Strype, Whitgift, i. 597–600; ii. 50–2.

page 260 note 1 The resemblance between the summary of Knollys's letter which Strype gives (Whitgift, i. 559–60) and the language of Reynolds's reply is so close that I am inclined to suspect that Stype simply based his account of Knollys's letter on what Reynolds had written in his reply. It is perhaps significant that Strype deliberately declined to give an account of Reynolds's reply in Whitgift (560: ‘I shall not make a transcursion here to relate the answer of Dr. Rainolds’), although he afterwards summarised it in his Annals of the Reformation (iii, Pt. ii, 100–1).

page 260 note 2 Strype, Annals, iii. Pt. ii. 100–1. The full text of Reynolds's letter is printed in Informations, or a Protestation, and a Treatise from Scotland. Seconded with D. Reignoldes his letter to Sir Francis Knollis. And Sir Francis Knollis his speach in Parliament. All suggesting the usurpation of Papal Bishops (1608), 73–87, and in The Iudgement of Doctor Reignolds concerning Episcopacy whether it be Gods Ordinance. Expressed in a letter to Sir Francis Knowls, concerning Doctor Bancrofts Sermon at Pauls-crosse, the ninth of February, 1588. In the Parliament time (1641). MS. copies of the letter are to be found in B.M. Lansdowne MS. 61, no. 27 (Reynolds's original letter, forwarded by Knollys to Burghley), B.M. Harleian MS. 3998, no. 2 and B.M. Sloane MS. 271, fol. 41v.

page 260 note 3 Strype, Annals, iii, Pt. ii, p. 98.

page 260 note 4 Strype, Whitgift, i. 559: ‘For the preaching of this sermon, I am apt to believe, he had the instructions of the Archbishop, to meet with these loud clamours that were nowadays made against the sacred calling of the English Bishops’; cf. Annals, iii. Pt. ii, 98. Whitgift, in his famous letter of 1597 recommending Bancroft for appointment as Bishop of London (printed in Strype, Whitgift, ii. 386–8; Usher, Reconstruction of the English Church, ii. 366–9; and Peel, A. (ed.), Tracts Ascribed to Richard Bancroft, Cambridge 1953, xvii-xx)Google Scholar, states: ‘His Sermon at Paul's Cross the first Sunday in the Parliament 1587 [sic], being afterwards printed by direction from the L. Chancellor and L. Treasurer, was to special purpose, and did very much abate the edge of the Factious’. While Whitgift's remarks only refer specifically to the publication of the Sermon, it seems probable that Hatton may also have been behind the selection of Bancroft as preacher on this important occasion. Bancroft's ties with Hatton at this time were close: he had been his Chaplain for about ten years and he is described as such on the title-page of the printed edition of the Sermon without any reference to his other preferments. In addition, there is a close similarity between the language of Hatton's remarks on the subject of the Church in his opening address to Parliament (see following note) and the arguments employed by Bancroft in his Sermon, which suggests that the two pronouncements may have been directly connected. In his so-called ‘Submission’ of October 1590 Bancroft refers to himself as ‘being appointed to preach at Paul's Cross the first Sunday in the Parliament 1588’ but, unfortunately, he does not state who was responsible for the appointment (Chadwick, ‘Richard Bancroft's Submission’, op. cit., 68).

page 261 note 1 A full account of Hatton's speech is given in Neale, J. E., Elizabeth I and her Parliaments 1384–1601, 1957, 195–201Google Scholar. On the subject of religion Hatton stated, in words which read like an anticipation of Bancroft's Sermon, that the Queen was ‘most fully and firmly settled in her conscience, by the word of God, that the estate and government of this Church of England, as now it standeth in this reformation, may justly be compared to any church which hath been established in any Christian kingdom since the Apostles’ times; that both in form and doctrine it is agreeable with the scriptures, with the most ancient general Councils, with the practice of the primitive church, and with the judgments of all the old and learned fathers’ (198).

page 262 note 1 Bancroft, Sermon, 10–11.

page 262 note 2 Bancroft, Sermon, 71 ff.

page 262 note 3 Bancroft, Sermon, 69.

page 262 note 4 Bancroft, Sermon, 69.

page 262 note 5 Bancroft, Sermon, 99.

page 263 note 1 The translation quoted is from Bancroft, Sermon, 99, which differs slightly from—although it is clearly based on—the official Elizabethan translation by Lady Bacon; cf. Jewel, John, An Apology of the Church of England, ed. Booty, J. E., Ithaca, N.Y., 1963, 24.Google Scholar

page 263 note 2 ‘It is evident unto all men, diligently reading holy Scripture, and ancient authors, that from the Apostles’ time there hath been these orders of Ministers in Christ's Church: Bishops, Priests, and Deacons', etc. (Liturgical Services of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, ed. Clay, W. K., Parker Society, Cambridge 1847, 274Google Scholar). The 1559 Prayer Book retained the wording of the Preface to the original Ordinal of 1549 unaltered.

page 263 note 3 Cf. Whitgift, John, Works, ed. Ayre, J., Parker Society, Cambridge 1851–3, ii. 103, 229–30Google Scholar; John Bridges, A Defence of the Government established in the Church of Englande for Ecclesiasticall Matters, 1587, 279.

page 264 note 1 For a fuller discussion of the early Elizabethan attitude towards episcopacy and of Whitgift's views, in particular, see my article ‘Anthony Marten and the Elizabethan Debate on Episcopacy’ in Bennett, G. V. and Walsh, J. D. (eds.), Essays in Modern English Church History in Memory of Norman Sykes, 1966, especially 47–55.Google Scholar

page 265 note 1 Peel, Tracts Ascribed to Richard Bancroft, 95–6; cf. 109: ‘Diversity of times, of manners, and of people, requireth as occasion shall serve, a divers manner, kind, or form of government’.

page 265 note 2 Peel, op. cit., Introduction, especially xx ff.

page 265 note 3 [Richard Bancroft], A Survay of the Pretended Holy Discipline 1593, ch. viii ‘Of Bishops’ passim. Cf., especially the following: ‘In the new testament, our Saviour Christ, whilst he lived on the earth, had his Apostles, and in degree under them his 70 Disciples. After his ascension, the same inequality of the ministry of the word continued in the Church (by all men's confessions) as long (at the least) as the Apostles lived’ (104–5); ‘As the number of Christians grew, and had their particular assemblies and meetings in many cities and countries within every one of their circuits, they [the Apostles] placed pastors in every congregation, they ordained certain Apostolical men, to be chief assisters unto them; whom they placed, some one in this particular country, another in that, and some others in sundry cities to have the rule and oversight under them of the churches there, and to redress and supply such wants as were needful’ (105); ‘Furthermore, who can be accounted to be well in his wits, that will imagine that Christ should ordain such an authority but for some three-score years? especially the same causes continuing, why it was first instituted, that were before’ (106). Cf. also the peroration to this chapter, 142–4.

page 265 note 4 Hadrianus Saravia, De Diversis Ministrorum Evangelii Gradibus, 1590, Preface ‘Candido Lectori’.

page 266 note 1 Saravia, op. cit., 25: ‘Primum ab ipso Domino duos gradus evangelii ministrorum institutes videmus: quorum alter altero fuit superior: et postea ab ipsis Apostolis similiter duos: quando quibusdam ecclesiarum unius civitatis aut provinciae procuratio commissa est, et alii uni tantum ecclesiae fuerunt praefecti’; cf. 7–8.

page 266 note 2 Matthew Sutcliffe, A Treatise of Ecclesiasticall Discipline, 1591; Anthony Marten, A Reconciliation of all the Pastors and Cleargy of the Church of England, 1590, the last section only, beginning at 91v; Thomas Bilson, The Perpetual Governement of Chriset's Church, 1593. For a fuller discussion of these developments, see Cargill Thompson, ‘Anthony Marten and the Elizabethan Debate on Episcopacy’ in Bennett and Walsh, Essays in Modern English Church History, 57 ff.