TY - JOUR
AU - Rose, Jacqueline
AB - Abstract The nature and extent of the royal supremacy over the Church of England proved contentious in Restoration England, especially when Charles II and James II sought to use their ecclesiastical prerogative to legitimate Nonconformist worship. Although the supremacy was a long-established institutional fact of the English church-state, it could be presented in diverse ways. This article outlines six versions of royal supremacy which were expressed, arguing that it was a contested and multiform entity which was manipulated by polemicists for their own purposes. Its location in the monarch alone, in crown-in-parliament, or in delegation to a lay vicegerent was unclear. Its character could be presented as purely jurisdictional or partly sacerdotal. The Declaration of Indulgence of 1672 led to the paradox of Nonconformists upholding the supremacy while the established church limited it. The political and religious insecurities of the Cabal era (1667–73) highlighted tensions and divergences which had been latent in concepts of the supremacy since its establishment under the Tudors. It is therefore vital to contextualize Restoration arguments in Reformation debates. Recognizing that ‘royal’‘supremacy’ was neither invariably monarchical nor inevitably absolute is significant for our understanding of the character of both the Restoration ecclesiastical polity and those who governed it. ‘I have the church and nothing will ever separate us.’1 Charles II's words to the Oxford parliament of 1681 reaffirmed the alliance of crown and mitre so fundamental to the ecclesiastical stability of early modern England. The king's statement encapsulates initial impressions of the Restoration: a revitalized monarchy and an adamantine episcopal establishment, marching in alliance against the forces of whiggery, Presbyterianism and Dissent. Much in this impression is true: at key moments church and king supported each other and indeed, after 1681, Charles remained publicly faithful to the established church – until, of course, his deathbed departure for Rome. Yet, the rhetoric of harmonious church-state relations is highly misleading. The king proved a singularly deviant son of the Anglican royal martyr, while his church, witnessing monarchical courtship of Presbyterians and Catholics, distanced itself from its royal ‘nursing father’. Thus, although the religious stimulus behind Restoration politics is now widely recognized, its complexities need further analysis. Much historiography on ‘the Restoration’, especially its political and religious thinking, focuses on limited periods: the political and religious settlement of early 1660 to late 1662; or the high-profile events of 1678–89 – Exclusion, Reaction and Revolution. The breakdown of the alliance of church and polity occurred most prominently under James II, but was far from unprecedented. The late sixteen-sixties and early sixteen-seventies, the focus of this article, offer a picture of a crown ranged against the episcopate and allied with Nonconformists very different from that often drawn by both royalist and Dissenting polemicists. The Act of Uniformity of 1662, washed in on a tide of renewed loyalty to the Church of England, proved an unstable legacy for the next generation. Even during its creation it was undermined by an abortive royal attempt to add a proviso which would allow the king to dispense individual ministers from wearing the surplice.2 The relatively unrestrained period of preaching between 1660 and 1662 would long be remembered with nostalgia by Nonconformists living under the burden of Anglican intolerance. The enforcement of uniformity was dependent on local magistrates and could, as some scholars have suggested, be patchy and irregular.3 But intolerance was prevalent enough to worry Dissenters, and its erratic nature may only have increased their concerns. Uniformity could be formally abrogated either by widening the scope of the church (‘comprehension’ or, as it was known in Scotland, ‘accommodation’), or by allowing sectarian worship outside the established church by fixed law (‘toleration’) or royal dispensation (‘indulgence’). That comprehension was often preferred, especially by Presbyterians, can be seen by the pejorative terms given to its alternatives – toleration or indulgence of something inherently regrettable, even deplorable. Comprehension was pursued in 1660, 1661, 1667, 1668, 1674, 1680 and 1689, and often rumoured in the intervening periods. Indulgence was attempted in 1662–3, 1672–3 and 1687–8. Toleration was an unintended outcome of the events of 1689. In late 1667 and again in early 1668, in the aftermath of the fall of Charles's chief minister, the earl of Clarendon, proposals for comprehension were put forward by an alliance of legal thinkers such as Matthew Hale and Orlando Bridgeman, the ‘latitudinarian’ bishop John Wilkins, and moderate Presbyterians such as Thomas Manton and William Bates. The first scheme collapsed before it reached parliament, the second was undermined by separatist Independents who thought they could achieve toleration without it. A series of pamphlet debates over church government, rites and ceremonies, conscience and royal supremacy broke out, repeatedly reinvigorated over the next five years by comprehension proposals, the lapse of the First Conventicle Act and its replacement in 1670, then the king's Declaration of Indulgence, issued on 15 March 1672 and withdrawn a year later under pressure from parliament. The government was politically unstable, ruled by the five men of the ‘Cabal’, a name which gives a totally misleading impression of shared policy. In fact, as Maurice Lee has shown, each member pursued his own interests and policies as much in opposition to as with the others.4 Only the cessation of Anglo-Dutch hostilities in 1673, the passing of the Test Act as security against Catholics and the rise of the Anglican royalist earl of Danby brought a calmer political scene. The pamphlet literature of the Cabal period circulated in a milieu of rumours about the abolition of episcopal powers and confiscation of church lands, as Charles grew annoyed with the bishops for blocking his policies.5 Constantly shifting policies between intolerance and relaxation of the laws made it difficult to enforce uniformity. The state papers for the period are full of complaints from local Anglican gentry impatient with Dissenters who, when arrested at conventicles, asserted rumours of an imminent toleration.6 Historians of Restoration religion have investigated the substance of proposals for toleration and comprehension, using parliamentary journals, Richard Baxter's recollections and some pamphlet literature.7 (As this article demonstrates, use of manuscript as well as printed literature is vital.) But no full study yet exists of the ecclesiological case which was a prerequisite of altering uniformity. For if the church and its unity were iure divino, as a formidable strand of Anglican polemic maintained, then incorporating or tolerating nonconformity constituted a sinful connivance in schism. Even if relaxation of the laws was possible, could the king do this alone, or did he need parliament's consent? Could either lay authority – king or parliament – force the divine society of the church to accept a messy earthly compromise, and how far could the hierarchy (itself divided) resist the powers that be? Debates which touched on who held ultimate power over the nature, extent and authority of the church were, in effect, ones over royal ecclesiastical supremacy. However, historians of royal supremacy, who do take such ecclesiological questions into account, have rarely extended their studies beyond 1642.8 This article helps to demonstrate the continuation of such ecclesiological conflict from 1660 to 1689, debate which had constant resort to the theory and history of the supremacy rooted in the previous century. By the Restoration, the supremacy was both an institutional fact of political life and an ideological arena: discussion of it was thus both legally necessary and intellectually desirable. Who supported, and who subverted, supremacy shifted with fluctuating royal policies. Divergent accounts of who wielded supremacy, and for what purpose, were not new, but the disruption caused to the theory of royal protection of the Church of England by the policies and predilections of Restoration monarchs crystallized and exposed such divisions. The political and religious insecurities of the period of the 1672 Indulgence, and the Cabal era generally, make it an especially rich one upon which to draw in order to analyse the supremacy as a contested and multiform entity. The resulting picture is complex, and so this article therefore also proposes an outline map of the multiplicity of forms which ‘royal supremacy’ could entail, given the circumstances of its creation under Henry VIII and development thereafter. Six can be identified. The most obvious form was a jurisdictional power located solely in the monarch. But, second, given the enforcement of Tudor supremacy by statute, a role for parliament could be asserted: supremacy of crown-in-parliament or of mixed monarchy. Third, even if the ruler held ultimate supremacy, he or she might delegate it to other laymen singly or in commission. To make the situation more complex, not only the location of supremacy but also its extent was debatable. Was it purely jurisdictional, or could it claim some spiritual powers (a fourth model)? Furthermore, while royal supremacy was most naturally supported by the established Church of England, when Restoration monarchs offered toleration by the royal prerogative, it was more likely to be upheld by Nonconformists (a fifth model) and questioned or quietly limited by churchmen (a sixth version). This article explores these six modes, models or languages of supremacy in turn. It draws on examples from the period 1667–73, an era when the battle for the nature and power of the church led to clear enunciation of each model almost simultaneously. But it also argues that it is vital to embed these examples within a longer chronological framework of reference. Individual writers do not fit perfectly into each category of supremacy, and it is important to recognize that these models are in some sense idealized and abstract. They should not be taken as rigid entities, but instead have heuristic value as a rough analytical framework challenging historians to recognize not only that the supremacy was an ongoing feature of the later seventeenth century, but also that it was not, and indeed had never been, a monolithic ideology. Prime examples of the first, monarchist and jurisdictional, account of royal supremacy, may be found in two manuscripts submitted to Charles's principal secretary of state, Henry Bennet, earl of Arlington. The first discussion formed the final part of the lengthy treatise ‘Pax et Obedientia’, composed in 1672 and dedicated to Arlington. After discussing the history of the civil wars, the state of nature, and trade, the anonymous author turned to the question of royal ecclesiastical power. Drawing on sixteenth-century authorities, he portrayed a supremacy monarchical, not parliamentary; with authority over churchmen, but not invading the spiritual sphere. The sovereign ‘is in All causes eclesiasticall & ciuill Supreme Head & Gouernour … by Royall And Absolute [here he inserted ‘though Coun[sel]d’] power’.9 He may reform, redress, order, correct and amend heresies, schisms – and puritan ministers. Chapter twenty of the treatise divided the evidence for monarchical powers into four areas. First, the king has the right to visit (that is, to inspect) ecclesiastical foundations – colleges, hospitals and free chapels – instead or over the head of the bishop. Decisions by spiritual judges are always liable to royal review, for the king is supreme ordinary; he has ‘a very great and controulinge Jurisdiction’ and ‘power to visitt as the pope’.10 Second, synods and convocations can only sit with royal allowance and their canons are only valid after receiving royal assent – a process laid down in the Act for Submission of the Clergy in 1534. The king may not only decree new ceremonies for worship, but also authorize the publication of certain doctrines, accept or reject particular translations of scripture and decree ‘what bookes of the bible are canonicall, and what Apocriphicall’.11 Third, he licenses the creation of new and the fusing of old parishes, may change the means of paying tithes and may exact extraparochial ones.12 Fourth, he may establish new bishoprics (as Henry VIII had done in 1543), decide who will be ‘elected’ bishop and grant the right to hold a benefice in commendam with a bishopric. Royal assent before a candidate is consecrated is so essential that the king's prerogative is usurped if it is bypassed; and if that happens then the temporalities of the bishopric can be seized. The revenues of religious houses can be legally expropriated because of the supremacy, while ‘the many Reuocations & Ratifications’ of privileges ‘are soe many Badges of the kinges eclesiasticall Jurisdiction’.13 For any Restoration theorist exploring the supremacy, the history of its eclipse by the medieval papacy and revival under the Tudors was vital, and the author of ‘Pax et Obedientia’ discussed at length papal usurpation of royal powers, exhorting his reader to peruse James I's reply to Cardinal Perron of 1615 in order to find out more.14 Two aspects of the supremacy were crucial to this first model. The first was that royal supremacy and spiritual authority should not conflict. What the author of ‘Pax et Obedientia’ termed ‘eclesiasticall Judiciall gouernement’15 did not mean that monarchs could perform spiritual functions: a denial which the English establishment had vigorously maintained since the Elizabethan Injunctions of 1559. Like earlier theorists, Arlington's client turned to Old Testament examples to clarify his point. Kings might deprive rebellious priests, as Solomon had Abiathar (1 Kings II). However, a counter-example was that of Uzziah (2 Chronicles XXVI), a king pious and careful for his people's good, one upheld by God, but one who grew complacent and hubristic, provoking divine wrath by attempting himself to burn incense in the Temple. Ignoring warnings from the priests to stop, he was smitten with leprosy and never regained God's favour. In the fifteen-sixties it was Catholic opponents of the supremacy who cited Uzziah: the Elizabethan polemicist John Bridges asked whether there was ‘any one Popishe writer on this question of Supremacie, but he alleageth this example’. But a century later Uzziah's story featured prominently in the writings of Restoration churchmen, demonstrating authorial intent to circumscribe royal supremacy within decent jurisdictional bounds.16 Uzziah appears twice in ‘Pax et Obedientia’, on both occasions to balance the need to give Caesar his due with the importance of his keeping his hands firmly incense-free.17 Yet, paradoxically, the author also insisted that kings anointed at their coronations were ‘persona mixta cum sacerdote’. ‘That Accusation is most uniust that a Lay man is the Head of our church’, he protested; a reminder of how easily supremacy could slide towards the spiritual arena.18 The second crucial component of the first model was the firm location of supremacy in the crown alone, not in parliament. Despite using statutes as evidence for royal powers, ‘Pax et Obedientia’ insisted that supremacy inhered in monarchs by common law: acts of parliament declaratory, not introductory. Royal power over convocation, for example, was ‘not by a new created statute, but by common law, of which the statute is but a declaration, or Restitution noe new gift of the supremacy ouer the church to the kinge’.19 Parliament might have been involved in reforming the church, but it had no right to be; it was merely granted a role by the beneficence of Henry VIII's prerogative.20 The paradoxical construction of Henrician supremacy –iure divino royal power proclaimed by statute – meant that later writers could discover in it high monarchical imperium or a supremacy shared with, or even subject to, parliament. Henry himself doubtless believed in the former, but certain of his advisers – Christopher St. German and Thomas Cromwell – favoured the latter interpretation. The importance of monarchical rather than parliamentary supremacy was crucial to defending Charles II's Declaration of Indulgence, in order to forestall parliament from telling the king that he had no power to repeal ecclesiastical laws. The set of memoranda on the supremacy submitted to Arlington by the controversialist Henry Stubbe in July 1672, justifying the Declaration, aggressively refuted any notion of parliamentary ecclesiastical power. Stubbe advocated an absolutist monarch, asserting that the king always was and should be supreme head, before all parliaments and enjoying all papal pre-eminences, as the Oath of Supremacy showed.21 Henry's injunctions, Stubbe explained, ordered clergy to donate money to the poor and to scholars, intervention impossible with purely temporal supremacy. Henry had altered doctrine, and parliament had referred theological questions to him, his proclamations declared what constituted heresy. His power to correct errors originated ‘from the Clergy, and not from the Parlament, except by way of corroboration’.22 In a complex discussion of the Elizabethan settlement, Stubbe insisted that Elizabeth had had recourse to parliament only because of the intransigence of the Marian bishops and their control of convocation: she was ‘enforced to supply the deficiency of Ecclesiasticall authority in Convocation by the shewe of Parlamentary Authority’. This turn to parliament and the grant of more ‘power then of due appertained unto it, or was by the Queene intended to bee annexed thereunto’ was driven by necessity alone – for Stubbe noted Elizabeth's constant denial of parliament's powers to legislate further reformation. ‘Wee must therefore looke upon that part of the Act onely as an intrigue of State, and not an establishment of Right in the Parlament’, he firmly concluded.23 If there were scriptural models for royal supremacy, then it could not be parliamentary as well, for there was no co-ordinate power in the Bible.24 Edward VI, a minor, had issued injunctions and authorized homilies without parliament; he and a few prelates reshaped the Book of Common Prayer. Stubbe noted that Edward's personal royal correspondence protected the unruly Bishop Hooper, while royal letters patent allowed stranger churches the right to depart from the Book of Common Prayer.25 If the pope could allow French and German kings to permit Protestant worship, then ‘the King may no lesse authorise the Church of England to tolerate Schismaticall and Hereticall conventicles’: in short, Charles's Declaration was valid.26 Yet, from the point of its inception the role of parliament in the ‘royal’ supremacy was unclear, as moving from the first to the second model shows. Without constructing a narrative of the ‘rise’ of parliament, claims might yet be detected for a greater parliamentary role in church matters; never until the sixteen-forties excluding the crown, but claiming partnership with it. To put it another way, what exactly did the ‘royal’ part of ‘royal supremacy’ entail: absolute or mixed monarchy? In the fifteen-thirties Christopher St. German described ‘the kynge in his parlyament’ as ‘the hyghe soueraygne ouer the people’, stating that ‘the parlyament may ordeyne many good lawes for strength of the fayth, and for the good ordre of all the people as well spirituall as temporal, though it iudge nat vpon the ryght of thynges that be mere spiritual’.27 Stephen Gardiner, whose De vera obedientia (1535) was a classic exposition of Henrician supremacy, later challenged Edward VI's Protestant regime for carrying out reformation by purely royal prerogative.28 Ratification of new canons became a crucial battleground. Early drafts of the Submission of the Clergy initially located the power to authorize church law in parliament.29 Jacobean M.P.s complained of the invalidity of the canons of 1604 binding the laity without their consent in parliament. The canons of 1640, not ratified by parliament and formulated in a convocation which sat after parliament was dissolved, were widely held to be illegal. The common lawyer Edward Bagshaw insisted that: [The bishops] shall not make Constitutions and Canons without the King's assent, which may be interpreted his assent in Parliament, as well his assent and confirmation by his letters Pattents … And this seems to be the meaning of that Act [for Submission of the Clergy], that the Parliament should have a power in establishing the Canons of the Clergie.30 Bagshaw spoke as if a mixed monarchical supremacy had always been intended. And whenever Restoration monarchs attempted prerogative toleration they were met with claims that suspending the laws universally, as opposed to dispensing particular individuals, was tantamount to repeal, and so a function of crown-in-parliament alone. In 1663 parliament told Charles that the Act of Uniformity ‘could not bee dispensed with but by Act of Parliament’, a vote cited in 1673 against his next Declaration of Indulgence.31 Under James II, a body of pamphlet literature argued bitterly over whether the legislative power, and thus the authority to suspend statutes, inhered in the king's person or whether the consent of Lords and Commons was needed too. The Second Conventicles Bill of 1670 provoked a little-known but informative debate over royal supremacy. On 26 February 1670 a bill was brought in to renew and augment the law against conventicles which had expired in the previous session. In contrast to the first act of 1664, the 1670 legislation contained a proviso saving the rights of the supreme head. The passage of the bill was fractious. It emerged in the wake of the Scottish Act Asserting the Kings Supremacy of 1669, which fulsomely advocated the ‘inherent Right of the Crown’ to the ordering of the external government of the church, notwithstanding any civil or ecclesiastical laws or customs to the contrary. This, the English M.P. Andrew Marvell commented in a letter, gave the king ‘absolute Power to dispose of all Things in religious Matters’.32 The proviso attached by the house of lords to the English act the following year appeared to be making similar claims: Marvell wrote scathingly of the Lords ‘making mighty Alterations … [they] sit whole Days, and yet proceed but by Inches, and will, at the End, probably affix a Scotch Clause of the King's Power in Externals’. The Commons emasculated the original proviso, removing the words shown in italics: Provided always … that neither this Act, nor any thing therein contained, shall extend to invalidate or avoid his Majesty's Supremacy in ecclesiastical affairs, or to destroy any of his Majesty's Rights, Powers, or Prerogatives, belonging to the imperial Crown of this realm, or at any time exercised or enjoyed by himself, or any of his Majesty's royal predecessors, Kings or Queens of England; but that his Majesty, his heirs and successors, may, from time to time, and at all times hereafter, exercise and enjoy all such powers, and authorities aforesaid, as full and as amply as himself, or any of his predecessors, have or might have done the same; any thing in this Act, or any other Law, Statute, or Usage to the contrary notwithstanding.33 In effect, the Commons restricted the prerogative to a specific rather than general one; only regarding ecclesiastical matters. Thomas Lee's speech summarized M.P.s' fears of both the temporal and ecclesiastical implications of such powers: ‘what this Proviso may reach, he knows not … it is an immense power you give, no man knows what. The King never knew the want of this before.’34 While some members were afraid to encroach on royal ecclesiastical prerogative, others thought it possible to remain loyal to the supremacy while dismissing the proviso as irrelevant to the bill. But their eventual submission to even a modified proviso would haunt the Commons – the clause was widely cited not just in printed literature advocating toleration, but also in the House in 1673. When they assembled in 1673 to debate the royal Declaration, many M.P.s insisted that accepting Charles's proclamation would fatally damage parliamentary legislation. ‘This Declaration is a repeal of forty Acts of Parliament, no way repealable but by the same authority that made them. & This Prerogative is illegal’, Grey reported the lawyer John Vaughan as saying.35 Francis North, future lord keeper, complained that the Declaration altered the legislative power resting in king, Lords and Commons – the same complaint that his son encouraged the archbishop of Canterbury, William Sancroft, to use against James II in 1688.36 The Commons' address to the king stated that they were ‘bound in duty to inform your Majesty that penal statutes in matters ecclesiastical cannot be suspended but by Act of Parliament’: the words of 1663. Ten days later the king expressed his sorrow for disquieting them; and perhaps even greater sorrow at ‘the questioning of his power in ecclesiastics, which he finds not done in the reigns of any of his ancestors’. (One M.P. sourly commented that ‘the occasion was never given before’.)37‘We humbly conceive’, the Commons begged, your Majesty hath been very much misinformed, since no such power was ever claimed or exercised by any of your Majesty's predecessors, and if it should be admitted might tend to the interrupting of the free course of the laws, and altering the legislative power, which hath always been acknowledged to reside in your Majesty and your two Houses of Parliament.38 The position one took on where exactly ecclesiastical supremacy resided was thus intensified by, and helped to shape, a general political creed. Those opposed to absolute kingship had no objection to royal supremacy – so long as it was of mixed monarchy. An alternative third model existed: supremacy held ultimately by the king, but delegated to laymen outside parliament. The recipients could be a group of men, such as the high commission court and Elizabeth I's temporary commission of 1559 to deprive the Marian bishops; such bodies might include laity and clergy, with the former perhaps predominating. Alternatively, such powers could be granted to a single man, the paradigm for which was the vicegerency of Thomas Cromwell during the late fifteen-thirties. A century and a half later, authors debating the ecclesiastical commission erected by James II, which inspected university and college statutes, and which suspended the bishop of London, used Cromwell as a precedent for this type of delegation of powers.39 While Cromwell's is the only case of such a power being given to a single man (although how we should treat regents in minorities is debatable), recollection of his vicegerency was clearly in the air during the Cabal years. In 1672 Stubbe insouciantly said that a Declaration of Indulgence was novel, but no more radically novel than Cromwell's authority.40 Moreover, two position papers penned by John Locke's patron, the earl of Shaftesbury, at the time a leading figure in the Cabal, explicitly called for a new vicegerent in spirituals. Shaftesbury's animus was anticlerical, made apparent in his complaint about the wrongful application of ‘church’ exclusively to the clergy. Henry VIII making his chief minister vicar-general was ‘Evident demonstration that Ecclesiasticall Iurisdiction was not tyed to the persons of Clergie men; but might be derivd to whomsoever the supream magistrate (in whom twas settled) would conveigh itt’. If ‘church’ applied to the whole body of the faithful, and if kings were heads of the church, then bishops would do well to remember that their authorities were but ‘favours derivd to them from the Crown, of which Laymen were as capable as themselues’. Only arbitrary royal choice meant that bishops, deans and archdeacons rather than justices of the peace oversaw spiritual matters.41 Along with this underlying anticlericalism (evident also in Shaftesbury's famous Letter from a Person of Quality of 1675) went purposes specific to the circumstances of the early sixteen-seventies. The future whig leader hotly condemned ‘the clandestine machinations of some in Parliament’ who had impugned monarchical sovereignty, thinking ‘some signall act’‘necessary’ for the king to recover his ecclesiastical powers before his title came ‘to seeme ridiculus’. A vicar-general was the solution. Such a figure would purge the clergy and church of abuses, reform academic discipline in the universities and issue injunctions modelled on those of Cromwell, Edward VI, Elizabeth, Cranmer and Ridley. Shaftesbury dangled before Charles the incentives not only of the revenues forfeited by colleges and the first fruits of new incumbents, but also of reprisals against clergy who blocked his plans for toleration. At present ‘the Episcopall Hierarchy … multiplye scandals instead of removeing them, and render themselves a Burthen to the Monarchy, instead of being a Support thereof To the great detriment of his Maiesties affaires’. But with a new Cromwell, Charles would ‘be in a condition to chastise, in a Legall and plausible [popular] way that Clergy; which hath so much opposed his conduct of late; and to reduce them into such a condition that they shall rather allay then augment for the future any discontentments in his Parliament’. It was even possible, Shaftesbury whispered, to suspend the primate of Canterbury himself.42 Divergence between models was therefore partly a question of locating supremacy. Who should wield such powers: the monarch, another layman or group of laymen granted authority by the monarch, or parliament as the source for, or in conjunction with, the crown? But others debated the proper extent and use of supremacy, by whomsoever it was exercised. Was the supremacy a jurisdictional apex of power, or did it penetrate the spiritual arena? Could kings only act in ways acceptable to the established church? Or, if the monarch really was head of the church, could he use his authority to undermine the episcopate and respond to pleas from Nonconformists to pull the hierarchy down? Despite his monarchist moment of 1672, Stubbe verged on heterodoxy in his consideration of the extent of supremacy. Catholic and Calvinist condemnations of the supremacy for allowing kings to administer the sacrament or to consecrate bishops were largely unjust, for the majority of defenders of the supremacy carefully (and very prominently) barred the crown from matters spiritual, the potestas ordinis. The exceptions to this rule are few: Thomas Cranmer, in a manuscript of c.1540; Thomas Hobbes, the most prominent and persistent exception; Theophilus Brabourne, an obscure puritan who exhorted Charles II in 1660 to consecrate bishops in person; and Stubbe in 1672.43 And Stubbe's case is borderline, for in print he denied that English monarchs could perform spiritual actions.44 But when writing privately to deny parliament any role in the supremacy Stubbe stressed the exclusivity of kings as anointed: ‘Hee is Mixta persona, the Parlament was never styled so. Hee is not purely a Lay-man His Unction entitles Him unto a Spiritualty.’ Byzantine emperors, whom Stubbe had earlier cited as an example of royal supremacy, ‘goe into the blessed Altar when they please, and offer incense and imprint the character in triple waxe, as well as the Prelates doe’.45 Even if royal supremacy could not encroach on actions purely spiritual, then its jurisdictional extent might be enough for Nonconformists to support it as a means to attack the intolerant Anglican hierarchy. Dissenting support for royal ecclesiastical prerogative (the fifth model) was certainly widespread in the Cabal years. It is true that some, such as Sir Charles Wolseley, advocated the withdrawal of the government from religion; others used prudential arguments (trade and demography) for toleration; or, more often, argued that conscience could not be imposed upon by the magistrate – the Presbyterian John Humfrey offered a particularly rich case for this.46 But others were willing to advocate the use of royal power against the established episcopate, part of a tradition which occasionally surfaced throughout the English Reformation. Arguably this case can be found among the early Henrician reformers who urged the monarch to purge the land of ungodly prelacy. It can be traced in certain puritans, such as William Stoughton, who in the fifteen-eighties urged Elizabeth to curb episcopal powers which were undermining the royal supremacy, a worry which vexed and irritated the queen's councillor Sir Francis Knollys in the fifteen-nineties.47 Under Charles I William Prynne constantly complained of the usurpation of godly monarchy by what his tract of 1640 called Lord bishops, none of the Lords bishops. After the Restoration such arguments abounded, stimulated not least because Charles II and James II, with their tolerationist Declarations, actually appeared willing to respond. In 1662 the Independent Philip Nye wrote a justification of royal supremacy which insisted that the best ecclesiastical polity consisted of royal headship and independent congregations; this was republished under a different title in 1670 and 1686.48 In the final months of his life, in mid 1672, Nye again wrote in fulsome praise of the supremacy and the toleration it provided, in a pamphlet printed by his son in 1687 in thanks for James II's Declaration. For Nye parliaments offered little hope of godly rule, since they were elected ‘by Vote of the promiscuous Multitude’; monarchs had ever been more ecclesiastically liberal, authorizing worship of stranger churches and attempting toleration in 1660, 1661 and 1662, as well as intending it by the proviso to the 1670 statute.49 The king had sufficient supremacy to tolerate by ‘that Power God and the Nation have intrusted him with, though not with concurrence of Parliament, so much and so often desired by him’.50 Living in constant fear of, if only sporadically subject to, persecution, Nonconformists unsurprisingly engaged in fulsome praise when monarchs responded to their pleas, exalting the supremacy which offered them respite. In 1672 the Presbyterian poet Robert Wild professed a fear that celebrations were premature before parliament had confirmed the Declaration, but decided to enjoy the experience while he could, not least in a gleeful celebration of the king having left the bishops high and dry.51 For Wild this royal Declaration was greater than any papal grant, indeed it exceeded half a millennium of Rome's indulgences.52 In his mock account, upon seeing the Declaration Wild bowed to the royal arms, celebrating a second Magna Carta and a new feast day when the king ‘took possession of his whole Dominions, and the Affections of all Israel’.53 Wild's rampant rhetoric was echoed in a more sober, but no less telling, poem by ‘T. S. of Grayes-Inne’: The Title of Supremacy is now Not lessen'd, but increas'd: all Sects allow Charles their Supreme, and him as Head obey; Owning themselves Conformists from this day. Thus hath his Mercy added to his Store: He's Head of Churches now, but one before.54 Assertions of godly kingship subduing the church were widespread. Stubbe and Marvell compared Charles II to the first Christian emperor Constantine; the leader of the Independents John Owen went one better in comparing him to Christ.55 Intolerance, to such a mindset, was blamed not on the king but on his Anglican counsellors who provoked and incited him to enforce penal laws against Dissenters in order to uphold their own power.56 Nye admitted that godly bishops had been granted authority by emperors, but complained of the decay and withering of ‘the civil Authority, and Glory of Secular Princes and States … the more that Ecclesiastical Officers of the Church, have been advanced and set up in Authority’.57 The Anglican, but anticlerical, John Locke complained that iure divino claims to episcopal authority mistakenly set the clergy up against their royal masters. Where kings submitted to following clerical dictates, they were rewarded by being dubbed iure divino themselves, but woe betide rulers who defied clerical dominion.58 And Andrew Marvell wrote in bitter language of the decay of both Christianity and civil power after the conversion of imperial Rome. With the fourth-century incorporation of church into state (dubbed by Marvell the ‘unnatural Copulation of Ecclesiastical and Temporal’) ‘Ecclesiastical persons … began exceedingly to degenerate’: They follow'd the Courts of Princes, and intangled themselves in secular affairs, beyond what is lawful or convenient to the Sanctity of their Vocation … well-nigh ever since it has been more then half the business of Princes to regulate the brabbles and quarrels that have been unnecessarily sow'd by some of the Clergy; & they have brought the World to that pass that indeed it cannot longer subsist then Kings shall have and exercise an Ecclesiastical Supremacy as far as it can be stretched.59 Another anonymous tract expressed impatience with those who shrank back from a royal action just because it seemed to assert spiritual headship. The author argued for the acceptance of the 1672 Indulgence if for no other reason than to staunch the flow of episcopal oppression. ‘The Lord hath made his Majesty the Instrument to accomplish an intermission of Hostility against us.’60 How could Dissenters afford to spurn Charles II, God's agent against Anglican despotism? What did the Church of England make of all this? Certain of its members offered an aggressive set of claims which sought to protect doctrine and church government from undue civil interference – and which thus partly confirmed Nonconformist assertions of a church disloyal to her monarch. This brings us to the sixth model of supremacy offered: one which strictly limited royal meddling in the church. A true son of the Church of England, the future nonjuror Simon Lowth wrote in 1685, must ‘believe, that the Power of the Prince is quite another thing from the Power of the Church, as also the Power of a Bishop, from the power of a Presbyter’.61 While puritans may have been wrong to assert that a doctrine of iure divino episcopacy necessarily detracted from the supremacy (it did not seem to, for example, in the fifteen-nineties), the advent of a more confident, patristic, ecclesiologically catholic Church of England can be traced in civil war and Restoration writings. One of the foremost Anglican writers during the civil war, Herbert Thorndike, whose early attack on Hobbes's De cive marked out his anti-Erastian position, drafted attacks on comprehension in 1667 and 1668 at the request of the archbishop of Canterbury. His manuscripts, and the later publications based on them, strictly bounded the royal supremacy. Thorndike admitted that the civil power could, indeed should, perhaps must, reform the church when she deviated from primitive rules. Supreme governors could enforce this even against an unwilling church hierarchy (witness the Reformation), but their power was purely restorative; neither they nor the clergy could innovate.62 Thorndike clung to the idea of royal power duly counselled by the episcopate – the guardians of unity and catholic orthodoxy – even as he admited that the king was supreme: ‘The authority of the Church determines what is to be restored; and so enables sovereign power to do it. But against, or without, the authority of the Church, the authority of sovereign power is not pleadable at the Day of Judgement.’63 The royal supremacy and the oath upholding it were not wholly unjust, but they were excessive, almost extinguishing any clerical rights at all.64 Thorndike, like many other Restoration churchmen, drew a distinction between supremacy over all ecclesiastical persons and causes (correct), and monarchical exercise of ecclesiastical powers (wrong).65 It is the civil sovereign in a Christian kingdom who enacts and enforces truth, but it is churchmen who counsel him as to what that truth is: ‘though the crown protecteth, yet the Church is to regulate.’66 Had anyone told Charles that comprehension was good catholic doctrine? However charitable it might appear, Thorndike saw it as an illicit Hobbesian trick: civil power cannot make that change in the ecclesiastical laws, which this Comprehension requires, without the authority and against the consent of the Church here, unless the synods should refuse to be reformed according to the primitive catholic Church. For that is the only plea, that can justify the reformation which we profess, without and against the see of Rome and the bishops that held with it … the Comprehension pretended is the manifest produce of that accursed doctrine, which makes the Church and the whole right of the Church to stand only by the law of the land, and not at all by God's law … that doctrine, which only the Leviathan maintains outright (though others have insinuated it with more art and malice).67 This depicts very clearly the ecclesiological case which outlawed the concept of comprehension even before any substantive proposals had been made about it. Depicting the commonwealth as the inn in which the church rests while on her earthly pilgrimage, Thorndike castigated comprehension as akin to burning down that inn while refurbishing it.68 Comprehension or toleration were not legitimate exercises of royal ecclesiastical prerogative, but a dereliction of monarchical duty to nurse and protect the church: ‘Christian Powers are bound, not only not to persecute the Church themselves, but not to suffer Sects to persecute it.’69 The final figure to whom this article turns, Samuel Parker, serves not only as an example within the sixth category, but also as a demonstration of the complexity of trying to place individual thinkers within models which, as noted above, are idealized. Many writings on the supremacy showed ambivalence (as seen with Stubbe) or convolution (as anyone who has read Thorndike will know), but Parker's deep ambiguities have caused him to be characterized as both an extreme Erastian and a high churchman by both his contemporaries and later historians.70 His contemporary detractors said that Parker advocated wholly novel ideas, subsuming the church into the state, proposing a new royal ecclesiastical absolutism. They thought of the most damaging and insulting label possible to attach to a royalist and an Anglican: they called him a Hobbist. To do so in 1669 and the early sixteen-seventies, in the context of the scandal surrounding Samuel Scargill, the Cambridge fellow forced publicly to recant Hobbesian principles,71 was, perhaps, a deliberate strategy to blacken Parker and, through him, his patron Archbishop Sheldon. Like all successful polemical strategies, the charge of Hobbism contained several elements of truth; as with most caricatures, exaggeration played a not insignificant role. For Parker's opponents also noted a clericalism which implicitly challenged or limited the royal supremacy, which featured prominently in his Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie of 1669 and its subsequent defences. Parker insisted that the supremacy was the distinguishing feature of the Reformation church, an Anglican shibboleth, opposed by both papists and fanatics.72 But despite his rhetoric of a sovereign absolute over the consciences of his subjects, he insisted that this did not imply power ‘absolutely paramount’;73 merely over external rites and ceremonies, and complementing not challenging Christ's headship (which left such matters up to the magistrate).74 Parker expressed exasperation over Dissenting appeals to the monarch to pull down the bishops and expropriate their lands:75 never genuine expressions of loyalty, ‘but because they hope by this seeming compliance so to encrease and strengthen their own Party, as that they may be able to distress the Episcopal Government, and then the Royal Supremacy’.76 Some, he touchily grumbled in 1673, thought that the king poked fun at Anglican loyalty, and held themselves to be in high favour when the penal laws against them were temporarily suspended.77 While his own exalted view of the supremacy made it impossible for him to deny the crown power to indulge if Charles so wished, he insisted that admitting the king could grant toleration did not mean that Nonconformists could demand it as a right.78 In any case, Parker still took care to prove that the crown could not interfere with the two sacraments or with church government. The Reformation, he argued, had restrained but not removed ecclesiastical authority. While he stressed that temporal and coercive authority exercised by bishops could only derive from magisterial allowance, he never denied that their ministerial function came from Christ.79 And, even though it was only in the early sixteen-eighties that he fully outlined his ideas that a Christian church was formulated by divine not human law, nothing in his earlier writings contradicts the denial of the ‘wild conceit’ that princes ‘should be vested with a Power of instituting and abolishing Church Orders and Offices at pleasure’.80 Here we must note not only Parker's refutation of Hobbes – perhaps sincere, perhaps protecting himself – but also his attacks on the Erastian John Selden and the ‘latitudinarians’ Stillingfleet and Tillotson, and that it was these which took up more pages than his demolition of Hobbes. Churchmen rarely denied the supremacy, but they did desire to mitigate it, and they did so by a doctrine of counsel. In 1576 Archbishop Grindal begged his queen that, in church matters, ‘you would not use to pronounce so resolutely and peremptorily, quasi ex auctoritate, as ye may do in civil and extern matters … In God's matters all princes ought to bow their sceptres to the Son of God, and to ask counsel at his mouth, what they ought to do’.81 Richard Hooker, the foremost defender of the late Elizabethan ecclesiastical polity, spoke of a ‘duetifull religious and holy refusall’ to admit sinners to communion, which ‘we graunt every king bound to abide at the handes of any Minister of God’.82 Really godly kings, warned Hooker's ambiguous defence of the established polity, would not disdain to listen to rebuke, ‘all which … may stand very well without resignation of supremacie of power in making lawes, even lawes concerning the most spirituall affayres of the Church’.83 In a classic exposition of the theory of episcopal counsel,84 Parker argued in 1673 that the king has ‘all Power of External Coercion’, but churchmen have a power ‘peculiar to themselves’ to teach and declare divine law; ‘though they cannot force Princes to confirm and ratifie their Decrees, yet may Princes be obliged by Vertue of an Higher Authority, by regard to Piety and Religion … to have reference to their Judgments’. Unlike Stillingfleet and Tillotson, Parker maintained that Christianity must be professed ‘not only without the leave, but against the Edicts’ of supreme authority.85 He followed Hooker in insisting that although admonitions to sovereigns must be ‘private, and prudent, and modest … done with all the Arts of Gentleness and Humility’, they were still necessary. Kings ‘have Souls to be conducted to Heaven as well as their Subjects … and when the Bishop reproves his Prince of any enormous Vice, if he refuse to hear him, he sins against the Command of God’.86 If Sheldon told Charles that indulgence was a vice, his sovereign was morally obliged to take notice. And it was this theory of counsel which provoked Parker's most famous opponent, Andrew Marvell, to characterize him not only as a Hobbist, but also paradoxically as a clericalist subverting supremacy.87 Clear evidence exists, therefore, that the ambiguities of supremacy founded under Henry VIII penetrated English political discourse down to 1689. The work of John Guy, Claire Cross, Conrad Russell and, to some extent, William Lamont on divergent accounts of the pre-civil war supremacy, can be fruitfully applied to the post-1660 era.88 It is possible to identify a set of models of supremacy, with rough edges and overlaps, yet of heuristic value. Not all were enunciated continuously from the Henrician Reformation to the debates over the Oath of Supremacy in 1689 and subsequent nonjuring schism, for they evolved over time in response to polemical needs and political circumstances. But a comprehensive appreciation of Restoration concepts of supremacy must also embed the period in a long-term account to facilitate separation of the particular from the general, demonstrating continuities while identifying change. One conclusion of this article thus regards periodization. In its ecclesiology the Restoration is part of England's ‘long Reformation’, not the ‘long eighteenth century’, although this is not to suggest a total lack of change across the period. Second, this article suggests the need to consider the current division of historiographical labour. The work of Tudor historians, who recognize the interpenetration of ecclesiology and political thinking, has much to teach Restoration scholars who have largely divorced church history from political history and political thinking. A third conclusion is that scholars of religious pluralism, anticlericalism and radical political or religious thought may, paradoxically, find it helpful first to recognize the richness and diversity of expression within the ecclesiastical and political ‘establishment’, which can occasionally be treated as if it were a monolithic entity, but whose heterogeneity radicals could exploit. (Establishments may be a better term: as Elizabethan historians have shown, ideological rifts could exist between the monarch and her regime, the supreme governor and her episcopate.89) For some scholars the ecclesiastical establishment appears universally moribund, a mass of emasculated Erastians.90 Others treat it as if every clergyman was a high-church fanatic eager to persecute nonconformity to extinction.91 Of course elements of both can be found, as well as the whole spectrum in between, which needs further attention. As Felicity Heal has suggested, it would be fruitful for Reformation scholars to ‘return to those groups and individuals who we know had an ability to influence events at the centre … considering anew the importance of theology, of factional politics, of the beliefs of the elites’.92 Scholars of England's ‘long Reformation’ might ponder this. A focus exclusively (and the ‘exclusively’ should be stressed) on the radical or the oppositional, or deafness to the ecclesiological tones of early modern debates on power, not only impoverishes our narrative of Tudor and Stuart church and monarchy, it actually distorts it. Supremacy is a useful, although not the only, route into the diverse languages of early modern authority, for it could empower a monarch or admonish him of his responsibilities. It could be a jurisdictional debate: a juridical account of sovereignty, command and authority. Alternatively, it could be discussed in the language of conscience, or of the conflicting consciences of crown, church and believer.93 Or it could contribute to a moral discourse of prudence and wisdom, in ideas of counsel mediating between church and polity, spiritual and temporal, authority and responsibility. Moral rectitude was an integral part of the exercise of supremacy – or at least of a supremacy which was morally integral. Writers on the supremacy united in celebrating it as a realization of Isaiah's prophecy of kings and queens as the nursing fathers and mothers of churches.94 Ironically, this shared hermeneutic resulted in radically different, even contradictory, positions. But then, as all wise Protestants knew, scriptural exegesis was never a simple task. Footnotes * The author is grateful to Mark Goldie and Richard Serjeantson for comments on drafts of this article; and to Ken Fincham and Susan Hardman-Moore for supporting its application for the Pollard Prize. Thanks are also due to the Religious History of Britain seminar at the Institute of Historical Research and to the Cambridge Early Modern History seminar, where an earlier version was presented. 1 Quoted in M. A. Mullett, James II and English Politics, 1678–88 (1994), p. 35. 2 P. Seaward, The Cavalier Parliament and the Reconstruction of the Old Regime, 1661–7 (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 175–8. 3 J. Spurr, England in the 1670s: ‘This Masquerading Age’ (Oxford, 2000), pp. 231–2; J. Miller, After the Civil Wars: English Politics and Government in the Reign of Charles II (Harlow, 2000), pp. 147, 150–2. 4 M. Lee, jr., The Cabal (Urbana, Ill., 1965). 5 For such rumours, see Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1668–9, 13 Jan. 1668, 18 Feb. 1668, 12 June 1668; Samuel Pepys, Diary, 16, 21 Nov. 1667, 20, 27, 30 Dec. 1667, 1 Jan. 1668, 6 Feb. 1668, 14 Feb. 1669, 16 March 1669. On church property specifically, see Pepys, Diary, 31 Jan. 1668, 4 Nov. 1668, 7 March 1669; Cal. S.P. Dom. 1668–9, 10 May 1669; and see Anon., A Few Sober Queries upon the Late Proclamation (1668), p. 11, for an incitement to such confiscation. (But compare Cal. S.P. Dom. 1667–8, 23 Dec. 1667; Pepys, Diary, 23 Jan. 1668.) 6 For rumours of relaxation of uniformity, see, e.g., Cal. S.P. Dom. 1667–8, 20 Jan. 1668, 3, 7, 26, 29 Feb. 1668, 1 June 1668, 21 Aug. 1668; Cal. S.P. Dom. 1668–9, 5 June 1669; Cal. S.P. Dom. 1670, 6, 10 Jan. 1670, 5 June 1670, 2 July 1670; Cal. S.P. Dom. 1671, 1 Sept. 1671; Pepys, Diary, 21 Dec. 1667, 5 Dec. 1668. 7 On 1662, see G. R. Abernathy, ‘Clarendon and the declaration of indulgence’ , Jour. Eccles. Hist. , xi ( 1960 ), 55 – 73 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close ; E. C. Ratcliff, ‘The Savoy conference and the revision of the Book of Common Prayer’, in From Uniformity to Unity, 1662–1962, ed. G. F. Nuttall and O. Chadwick (1962), pp. 89–148. On 1672, see F. Bate, The Declaration of Indulgence, 1672: a Study in the Rise of Organised Dissent (1908). On the 1674 bill, see J. Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558–1689 (Harlow, 2000), p. 179; R. Thomas, ‘Comprehension and indulgence’, in Nuttall and Chadwick, pp. 189–253, at pp. 215–16. On the Exclusion proposals, see H. Horwitz, ‘Protestant reconciliation in the Exclusion Crisis’ , Jour. Eccles. Hist. , xv ( 1964 ), 201 – 17 ; Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close J. Spurr, ‘The Church of England, comprehension, and the Toleration Act of 1689’ , Eng. Hist. Rev. , civ ( 1989 ), 927 – 46 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close . On 1687–8, see R. E. Boyer, English Declarations of Indulgence 1687 and 1688 (The Hague, 1968); and M. Knights, ‘“Meer religion” and the “church-state” of Restoration England: the impact and ideology of James II's declarations of indulgence’, in A Nation Transformed: England after the Restoration, ed. A. Houston and S. Pincus (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 41–70. 8 An exception is the historian of Interregnum Erastianism, Jeffrey R. Collins (see J. R. Collins, ‘The Restoration bishops and the royal supremacy’ , Church Hist. , lxviii ( 1999 ), 549 – 80 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close ). 9 Yale University, The James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, MS. fb234, Anon., ‘Pax et Obedientia: An Antidote against Rebellion settinge forth the Unreasonablenesse of Mens Complaints against the present Government, the true Cause of the Late Warre, and the Mischiefes that did ensue thereby, with some Remedies humbly offered from Experience and Observation to prevent those Inconveniences that arise from Warre and Disobedience’[c.1672] (hereafter ‘Pax et Obedientia’), p. 365. The author is grateful to the Beinecke Library and to the Sir John Plumb Charitable Trust for assistance in obtaining a copy of this. Italics are used throughout this article to indicate where contractions have been expanded. 10 ‘Pax et Obedientia’, pp. 377–8. 11 ‘Pax et Obedientia’, pp. 379–80. 12 ‘Pax et Obedientia’, pp. 380–3. 13 ‘Pax et Obedientia’, pp. 383–9. 14 ‘Pax et Obedientia’, p. 393 and ch. 21. The Declaration du serenissime roy Iaques I (1615) may have been written by Pierre du Moulin. 15 ‘Pax et Obedientia’, p. 371. 16 John Bridges, The Supremacie of Christian Princes (1573), p. 1094. Restoration citations include: Simon Lowth, Of the Subject of Church-Power (1685), pp. 63, 493; William Falkner, Christian Loyalty (2nd edn., 1684), p. 32; William Falkner, Two Treatises … to which are annexed, Three Sermons (1684), p. 313; Laurence Womock, Pulpit-Conceptions, Popular-Deceptions (1662), p. 18; Henry Jones, A Sermon Preached at the Consecration of Ambrose Lord Bishop of Kildare in Christ-Church, Dublin, June 29 1667 (Dublin, 1667), p. 10. 17 ‘Pax et Obedientia’, pp. 371, 405–6. 18 ‘Pax et Obedientia’, p. 366. 19 ‘Pax et Obedientia’, p. 379, and see also p. 400. 20 ‘Pax et Obedientia’, p. 371. 21 The National Archives of the U.K.: Public Record Office, SP 29/319/220, Henry Stubbe, ‘An Inquiry Into the Supremacy Spirituall of the Kings of England: occasioned By a proviso in the late Act of Parliament against Conventicles’ (hereafter Stubbe, ‘Inquiry’), fos. 325, 320. 22 Stubbe, ‘Inquiry’, fos. 326, 329, 327, 325 (original emphasis). 23 T.N.A.: P.R.O., SP 29/319/221, Henry Stubbe, ‘The History of the Spirituall Supremacy as it was exercised by Qu: Elizabeth’ (hereafter Stubbe, ‘History’), fos. 343–4 (original emphasis). 24 Stubbe, ‘Inquiry’, fo. 330. 25 Stubbe, ‘Inquiry’, fos. 333–4. 26 Stubbe, ‘History’, fo. 345; T.N.A.: P.R.O., SP 29/319/222, Henry Stubbe, ‘An Answer unto certaine Objections formed against the proceedings of His Majesty to suspend the Lawes against Conventicles by His Declaration, March 15 1672’ (hereafter Stubbe, ‘Answer’), fo. 348. 27 Christopher St. German, ‘New additions’, in Doctor and Student, ed. T. F. T. Plucknett and J. L. Barton (Selden Soc., 1974), pp. 327, 332. 28 S. Alford, Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI (Cambridge, 2002), p. 57; The Letters of Stephen Gardiner, ed. J. A. Muller (Cambridge, 1933), nos. 127 (to the privy council, 30 Aug. 1547), 128 (to Sir John Mason, 30 Aug. 1547), 130 (to Somerset, 14 Oct. 1547), and see also no. 129 (to Sir John Godsalve, between 12 and 25 Sept. 1547): it is treason to act against parliament even when ordered by the king. 29 T.N.A.: P.R.O., SP 2/L fos. 78–80; SP 2/P fos. 17–19. 30 Edward Bagshaw, Two Arguments in Parliament (1641), p. 10. 31 T.N.A.: P.R.O., SP 29/64/124; Commons Journals, viii. 442–4 (27–28 Feb. 1662); for 1673, see Anchitell Grey, Debates of the House of Commons from the Year 1667 to the Year 1694 (10 vols., 1763) (hereafter Grey, Debates), ii. 13. 32 Act Asserting His Majesties Supremacy (Edinburgh, 1669); Andrew Marvell to William Popple, 21 March 1670 (The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth (2 vols., Oxford, 3rd edn., 1971) (hereafter Poems and Letters), ii. 313). 33 Marvell to Popple, 21 March 1670 (Poems and Letters, ii. 314–15) – the context for his famous comment about ‘the quintessence of arbitrary malice’. Grey, Debates, i. 246 (original emphasis). 34 Grey, Debates, i. 249. 35 Grey, Debates, ii. 21. 36 Grey, Debates, ii. 67; Bodleian Library, Tanner MS. 460 fos. 33r–v, 25r, 35r–v. 37 English Historical Documents, 1660–1714, ed. A. Browning (1953), p. 78; Grey, Debates, ii. 57. 38 English Historical Documents, 1660–1714, p. 79. 39 London, Dr. Williams's Library, Morrice MS. P573, P577; Edward Stillingfleet, A Discourse concerning the Illegality of the Late Ecclesiastical Commission (1689), p. 54; Robert Washington, Some Observations upon the Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction of the Kings of England (1689), pp. 135–7. 40 Stubbe, ‘Answer’, fo. 349. 41 T.N.A.: P.R.O., PRO 30/24/6B/430. These papers are discussed in John Locke, An Essay concerning Toleration and other Writings on Law and Politics, 1667–83, ed. J. R. Milton and P. Milton (Oxford, 2006), pp. 148–52, which the author read after writing this article. 42 T.N.A.: P.R.O., PRO 30/24/6B/429. 43 ‘Questions and Answers concerning the Sacraments and the Appointment and Power of Bishops and Priests’, in Miscellaneous Writings and Letters of Thomas Cranmer, ed. J. E. Cox (Cambridge, Parker Soc., 1846), p. 117; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. R. Tuck (Cambridge, 1996), e.g. at p. 377; Theophilus Brabourne, Sundry Particulars concerning Bishops, humbly offered to the Consideration of this Honourable Parliament (1661), p. 12. Cranmer's manuscripts became the subject of debate in the Restoration. 44 Henry Stubbe, Rosemary & Bayes, Or, Animadversions upon a Treatise called the Rehearsall Trans-prosed (1672), p. 3. 45 Stubbe, ‘History’, fo. 344. In support he cited Theodore Balsamon, patriarch of Antioch (c.1140 to after 1195). 46 Sir Charles Wolseley, Liberty of Conscience upon its True and Proper Grounds Asserted and Vindicated (1668); John Humfrey, The Obligation of Human Laws Discussed (1671); John Humfrey, A Case of Conscience (1669). 47 William Stoughton, An Abstract, of Certain Acts of Parliament: Of Certaine her Maiesties Iniunctions: Of Certaine Canons, Constitutions, and Synodalles Prouinciall (1583), pp. 138–40, 230–2 [262–3]. For Knollys, see British Library, Additional MS. 48064 fos. 94r−95v, 226r−234r. See W. D. J. Cargill Thompson, ‘Sir Francis Knollys's campaign against the Jure Divino theory of episcopacy’, in The Dissenting Tradition, ed. C. R. Cole and M. E. Moody (Athens, O., 1975), pp. 39–77. 48 Philip Nye, The Lawfulness of the Oath of Supremacy and Power of the Civil Magistrate in Ecclesiastical Affairs (1662), repr. as The Best Fence against Popery (1670). 49 Philip Nye, The King's Authority in Dispensing with Ecclesiastical Laws, Asserted and Vindicated (1687), pp. 13, 23–7, 50–1, 28–9, 30. 50 Nye, King's Authority in Dispensing, p. 60. 51 Robert Wild, A Letter from Dr. Robert Wild to his Friend Mr. J. J. upon Occasion of His Majesty's Declaration for Liberty of Conscience (1672; 1709 edn.), pp. 8, 4, 13. Wild had been arrested at a conventicle in July 1669 (Cal. S.P. Dom., 1668–9, 28 July 1669). 52 Wild, Letter, pp. 7, 12. One of the replies to Wild noted the anticlerical foundations of his royalism: ‘Our freedom is inlarg'd, and that's a thing, / Will make me love, the once loath'd Name of King’ (J. J., Flagellum Poeticum: Or, a Scourge for a Wilde Poet (1672), p. 13). 53 Wild, Letter, pp. 5–6 (original emphasis). He invokes Constantine on p. 5. 54 T. S. [Thomas Sherman?], of Grays Inn, Upon His Majesties Late Declarations for Toleration and Publication of War against the Hollanders (1672), p. 1 (original emphasis). 55 Henry Stubbe, A Further Iustification of the Present War against the United Netherlands (1673), p. 32; Andrew Marvell, The Rehearsal Transpros'd and the Rehearsal Transpros'd the Second Part, ed. D. I. B. Smith (Oxford, 1971), p. 280; John Owen, Truth and Innocence Vindicated (1669), pp. 318–19, 299; The Correspondence of John Owen, 1616–83, ed. P. Toon (Cambridge, 1970), p. 126. 56 Anon., Sober Queries, p. 10; Richard Baxter, Sacrilegious Desertion of the Holy Ministry Rebuked, and Tolerated Preaching of the Gospel Vindicated (n.p., 1672), p. 136. 57 Nye, Lawfulness, pp. 42, 127 (citing Ames). 58 Locke, ‘Toleration A’ (c.1675), in Political Essays, ed. M. Goldie (Cambridge, 1997), p. 234; see also Anon., Sober Queries, p. 11. 59 Marvell, Rehearsal Transpros'd, pp. 237–8. 60 Anon., Vindiciae libertatis evangelii: Or a Justification of our Present Indulgence and the Acceptance of Licenses (n.p., 1672), pp. 7, 20, 25, 26, 29–30. 61 Simon Lowth, A Letter to Edw. Stillingfleet (1687), pp. 57–8 (original emphasis). 62 Herbert Thorndike, A Discourse of the Forbearance or the Penalties which a Due Reformation Requires (1670), pp. 15–16, 43. 63 Herbert Thorndike, ‘The plea of weakness and tender consciences discussed and answered: in a discourse upon Romans xv.1’[1667/8], in The Theological Works (6 vols., Oxford, 1844–56), v. 361. 64 Thorndike, Discourse of the Forbearance, p. 103. 65 Thorndike, Discourse of the Forbearance, pp. 44–5. It appears that this distinction was used by some defenders of the Elizabethan church in the 1560s far more than one between supreme ‘head’ and ‘governor’. 66 Thorndike, ‘Plea of weakness’, v. 367; Thorndike, Discourse of the Forbearance, pp. 40–1. 67 Thorndike, ‘Plea of weakness’, v. 364–5; Herbert Thorndike, ‘The true principle of comprehension: or a petition against the Presbyterian request for a Comprehensive Act in 1667’, in Theological Works, v. 333, is a convoluted version. 68 Thorndike, ‘True principle of comprehension’, v. 341–2. 69 Thorndike, Discourse of the Forbearance, p. 165. 70 G. J. Schochet, ‘Between Lambeth and Leviathan: Samuel Parker on the Church of England and political order’, in Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, ed. N. Phillipson and Q. Skinner (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 189–208; cf. J. Parkin, ‘Liberty Transpros'd: Andrew Marvell and Samuel Parker’, in Marvell and Liberty, ed. W. Chernaik and M. Dzelzainis (Basingstoke, 1999). 71 On which, see J. Parkin, ‘Hobbism in the later 1660s: Daniel Scargill and Samuel Parker’ , Historical Jour. , xlii ( 1999 ), 85 – 108 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close . 72 Samuel Parker, A Defence and Continuation of the Ecclesiastical Politie (1671), pp. 224, 652, 645; Samuel Parker, A Reproof to the Rehearsal Transprosed, in a Discourse to its Authour (1673), pp. 16, 305. 73 Parker, Defence, p. 269; Parker, Reproof, pp. 15–16, 162. 74 Parker, Defence, pp. 219, 275. 75 Samuel Parker, A Discourse in Vindication of Bp Bramhall and the Clergy of the Church of England, from the Fanatick Charge of Popery (1673), pp. 76–7; Parker, Reproof, p. 341. 76 Parker, Reproof, p. 436. 77 Parker, Vindication, pp. 61–3; p. 67 identifies the anticlerical purposes of Nonconformist defences of the supremacy. 78 Parker, Reproof, pp. 164–5. 79 Samuel Parker, A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie (1670 [1669]), pp. 104–5, 49–50; Parker, Defence, p. 409. 80 Samuel Parker, The Case of the Church of England (1681), pp. 34–5, 246. 81 Archbishop Grindal to Elizabeth I, 20 Dec. 1576, in The Remains of Edmund Grindal, ed. W. Nicholson (Cambridge, Parker Soc., 1843), p. 389 (original emphasis). 82 Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, bk VIII, ch. ix. 6 (Folger edn. of The Works of Richard Hooker, vols. i–iii, Cambridge, Mass., 1977–81), iii. 444. 83 Hooker, Laws, bk VIII, ch. vi. ii (Folger edn., iii. 405) (original emphasis). 84 This is discussed more fully in J. Rose, ‘Concepts of royal ecclesiastical supremacy in Restoration England’ (unpublished University of Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, in progress). 85 Parker, Reproof, pp. 172–3; see J. Marshall, ‘The ecclesiology of the latitude-men, 1660–89: Stillingfleet, Tillotson, and “Hobbism”’ , Jour. Eccles. Hist. , xxxvi ( 1985 ), 407 – 27 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close , on this as a test of Erastianism. 86 Parker, Reproof, pp. 177–8, 176–7. 87 Marvell, Rehearsal Transpros'd, pp. 29, 66, 134, 190. 88 C. Cross, The Royal Supremacy in the Elizabethan Church (1969); C. Cross, ‘Churchmen and the royal supremacy’, in Church and Society in England: Henry VIII to James I, ed. F. Heal and R. O'Day (1977), pp. 15–34; J. A. Guy, ‘The Henrician age’, in The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500–1800, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 13–46 (repr. in Politics, Law and Counsel in Tudor and Early Stuart England, ed. J. Guy (Aldershot, 2000), no. xii); C. Russell, ‘Whose supremacy? King, parliament and the church, 1530–1640’, Eccles. Law Jour., iv (1996–7), 700–8; W. M. Lamont, Godly Rule: Politics and Religion, 1603–60 (1969). But see Guy's instincts about the Restoration expressed in ‘The “Imperial Crown” and the liberty of the subject: the English constitution from Magna Carta to the Bill of Rights’, in Court, Country and Culture: Essays on Early-Modern British History in Honor of Perez Zagorin, ed. B. Y. Kunze and D. D. Brautigam (Rochester, N.Y., 1992), pp. 65–88. 89 The work of Patrick Collinson and Stephen Alford is especially pertinent here. 90 C. Cross, Church and People: England 1450–1660 (Oxford, 2nd edn., 1999), ch. 10; R. E. Rodes, jr., Lay Authority and Reformation in the English Church: Edward I to the Civil War (Notre Dame, Ind., 1982), pp. 242–3; R. E. Rhodes, jr., Law and Modernization in the Church of England: Charles II to the Welfare State (Notre Dame, Ind., 1991), pp. 2–14. 91 M. Goldie, ‘John Locke and Anglican royalism’ , Political Stud. , xxxi ( 1983 ), 61 – 85 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close ; M. Goldie, ‘The theory of religious intolerance in Restoration England’, in From Persecution to Toleration, ed. O. P. Grell, J. I. Israel and N. Tyacke (Oxford, 1991), pp. 331–68. Spurr, England in the 1670s, pp. 234–5, notes this tendency, and Goldie's whiggish reading of the church – partly confessed by Goldie in ‘Priestcraft and the birth of whiggism’, in Phillipson and Skinner, pp. 209–31, at p. 212. 92 F. Heal, ‘The English Reformation revisited’ , Eccles. Law Jour. , iv ( 1996 –7), 446 – 53 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close (esp. pp. 450–2), at p. 452. 93 See esp. E. H. Shagan, ‘The English inquisition: constitutional conflict and ecclesiastical law in the 1590s’ , Historical Jour. , xlvii ( 2004 ), 541 – 65 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close ; but also G. S. De Krey, ‘Rethinking the Restoration: dissenting cases for conscience, 1667–72’ , Historical Jour. , xxxviii ( 1995 ), 53 – 83 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close ; J. A. I. Champion, ‘Willing to suffer: law and religious conscience in 17th-century England’, in Religious Conscience, the State, and the Law, ed. J. McLaren and H. Coward (Albany, N.Y., 1999). 94 Isaiah XLIX: 23. © The Author(s) 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Institute of Historical Research. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © The Author(s) 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Institute of Historical Research. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
TI - Royal ecclesiastical supremacy and the Restoration church
JO - Historical Research
DO - 10.1111/j.1468-2281.2007.00419.x
DA - 2007-08-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/royal-ecclesiastical-supremacy-and-the-restoration-church-i0dFLwZqkQ
SP - 324
EP - 345
VL - 80
IS - 209
DP - DeepDyve
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