Lecture - The Hampton Court Conference of 1604 |
For our own Hampton Court Conference, 400 years after the Conference of 1604, we assemble here in Henry VIII’s Great Hall. The setting is artfully archaic and it was built at a time when as much effort had to be made to resist the charge of novelty, as must be employed now to rebut the suggestion of antiquity. Simon Thurley in his excellent new book on the Palace casts doubt, for example, on whether the central hearth was ever used and was anything more than part of a “chivalric conceit”.
We are too numerous to be accommodated in the Royal Privy Chamber where the sessions of the Jacobean Conference took place and indeed we lack the Royal Presence. The Royal Promise, however, we do have. The Queen will visit the Chapel next week to attend divine service according to the Book of Common Prayer and hear the lessons read from the Authorised Version of the Bible, the principal fruit of the Conference of 1604.
You will forgive me for beginning with location. Having myself worked in a partly Tudor Palace at Lambeth, I know that questions of access and the interconnection of rooms are crucial matters when considering the operations of Court Government. Courts, which surround monarchs or other great persons, have dynamics which are not easily understood by those schooled in modern management theory. The Palace itself and the other activities of that winter season of 1604 had their impact on the Conference, which is our theme.
The plague had been horribly virulent in the year 1603 and Hampton by Thames did not entirely escape its ravages. By Christmas, 119 persons out of population of no more than 500 had already succumbed. In London, however, some 30,000 had perished out of a population in normal times of about 140,000. We can understand why this Palace seemed to be a more salubrious place than the old Palace at Whitehall for the keeping of the Christmas feast. Hampton Court was pulsing with life while so many were dying elsewhere. It must have been a nightmare in such circumstances to organise the festivities and adjudicate between those who were summoned to entertain the new King and Queen, spending their first Christmas in England.
Among the three companies of players who performed at Hampton Court that Christmas, the King’s Men had the pre-eminence. Shakespeare was of course the principal playwright and part owner of the King’s Men. They performed on December 26,27,28,30 and twice on January 1st. They were back for the feast of Candlemas on February 2nd. It has recently been argued [see note 4, p.408 Thurley] that Hamlet was the first play performed here, the night after Christmas 1603, as a tribute to the Danish Queen and King James who had spent their honeymoon at Elsinore in 1590. Other companies played perhaps in this very hall on the eve of the Conference and on the day after its preliminary session.
We know for certain that the Hall was used for the elaborate allegorical masques, which involved not so much actors as courtiers and members of the Royal Family in person.
The diplomat Sir Dudley Carleton described the scene here on January 8th [a Sunday evening] when Samuel Daniel’s “The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses” was staged. A great “paradisical mountain” was constructed at the screens end with a winding staircase, down which the ladies of the court descended, dressed in Queen Elizabeth’s finery and representing goddesses. Queen Anne herself was Pallas Athene. After speaking a few lines, they danced down the hall, curtsied to the King and the foreign ambassadors before resuming the dance in the “piazza” before the Cloth of Estate. The ambassadors of the great powers of Europe joined in the dance tossing the nine year old Prince Henry “like a tennis ball” from hand to hand. Midnight struck and the unmasked goddesses with the king and his guests went into the Presence Chamber for a banquet which, Carleton notes, was eaten with “accustomed confusion.”
This was a society which valued elaborate courtesies and communicated emblematically. It was in this setting that the Right Reverend Prelates and the Grave Divines came to debate the future Ecclesiastical and Liturgical Establishment in England in the presence of the King.
It is not easy to find contemporary parallels to the revolution in affairs which flowed from a change of monarch in the seventeenth century and the re-direction of the stream of lucrative patronage. In the months after his accession in March 1603, James’s every word was minutely scrutinised for signs of where he stood on ecclesiastical matters. As the King made his slow progress to London Sir Francis Bacon’ s assessment of public opinion was that there “be two extreams. Some few would have no change; no not reformation. Some many would have much change, even with perturbation.”
James advertised himself as the bringer of union and peace, the Rex Pacificus. With such an ambition, the widest possible unity in religion was clearly vital. The question was how this could be achieved. The consensus of the political nation was unclear and the King’s own position with respect to the Royal Supremacy in the Church and his relations with Parliament and the Bishops were full of complications.
Those pressing for a greater measure of reform to bring the Church of England into line with the “best reformed” Continental Churches, were quick off the mark. In April after some efficient canvassing in the localities, the King was presented with the Millenary Petition, supposedly signed by a thousand ministers, “desiring and longing for the redress of divers abuses of the church”.
The Petition was a moderate document designed to unite a wide range of reformist opinion and to test the temper of the new regime. There were various liturgical points which were old sores. The Petitioners complained about the use of the cross in baptism and the ring in marriage; they urged the abolition of confirmation as “superfluous”; they did not want baptism administered by women; they desired changes in liturgical vesture and the removal of the mandatory wearing of cap and surplice. They wanted to “correct” references to priest and absolution in the Prayer Book; to abridge “the longsomeness” of the service [to give more time for the sermon]; to moderate “to better edification” Church songs and music. They wanted no bowing at the name of Jesus and no readings from the Apocrypha. They wanted more strict Sabbath observance but not “rest upon holy days”. In short they wanted the removal of anything that smacked of Catholic practice.
For the Puritans who instigated the Petition, the Word in the mind and the mouth was the way to engage with the rational God. Bodily observances and everything else was a muddying of the waters. Those who wished to retain old ceremonies and symbols in the Church were simply intent on curdling the pure milk of the gospel, obscuring the truth, as Milton later said, with “guegaws fetcht from Aron’s old wardrobe.”
There was another, minority but more musical vice within the Jacobean Church with a different vision of what God required. One of the most influential of these voices belonged to Launcelot Andrewes who, as Dean of Westminster, was a largely silent but influential participant in the Conference. He had a different view both of God and human beings. Like the theologians of the Primitive Church, Andrewes and his school believed that God was a mystery to be approached not so much with the word in the mind and the mouth but with the mind in the spiritual heart. One of Andrewes’ friends, John Buckeridge warned that “true religion is no way a gargleism only, to wash the tongue and mouth, to speak words; it must root in the heart and then fructify in the hand, else it will not cleanse the whole man”.
The Andrewes school went further. Stripping the altars was simple arrogance. God had always been approached with ceremony and bodily reverence. Those who rejected this spiritual tradition were simply “novelists”.
Andrewes, who later [we ought to remember in this place] became not only a bishop but Dean of the Chapel Royal as well, reveals his inmost self in his own book of private prayers. The volume was according to a contemporary admirer, “slubbered o’er with penitential tears”. The prayers have the humility, the consciousness of sin and the emotionalism which is light years away from the confidence of those who believed themselves to be certainly pre-destined to salvation.
The second and third sections of the Petition dealt with recruiting and making financial provision for an educated preaching ministry. There was some common ground with the episcopate here. Everyone agreed that the educational level of the clergy needed improvement and that the Church was in economic difficulties after being half plundered during the changes of the sixteenth century. The nub of the question was who should oversee the reforms.
The fourth section of the Petition was cautiously phrased but set the alarm bells ringing in Lambeth and Fulham. The ecclesiastical courts were criticised as was the issuing of sentences of excommunication by church lawyers and it was urged that “discipline and excommunication may be administered according to Christ’s own institution”. This was fairly transparent code and the Vice Chancellor and the Heads of Houses in the University of Oxford in their “Answere” to the Petition, discerned an intention of “the utter overthrow of the present Church government, and in stead thereof the setting up of a Presbitery in every parish.”
How would the King react? The aged and ailing Archbishop of Canterbury, Whitgift had an audience with James in May 1603 at Theobalds, Robert Cecil’s palatial residence. The King was amiable and the Archbishop was encouraged but other forces were at work. Among the many Scots attending the new king was an influential minister, Patrick Galloway who provided a private channel of influence for the Puritan coalition.
There was a further flurry of petitioning. The Archbishop and the Bishop of London, Richard Bancroft, who was by now carrying the heat and burden of the day for the Primate, informed Cecil that disaffected ministers in Sussex were attempting to gather signatures from county officers and other members of the gentry, pretending “that his Majesty favoureth their course, and that they do nothing without the direction of some that are in especiall creditt with his Highness.”
The Privy Council met to consider the situation in the presence of the King and the Proclamation of October 24th 1603 was a direct result. The existence of “scandals” in the Church was admitted but crucially the Proclamation declares that the Church of England, “both the constitution and doctrine thereof is agreeable to God’s word and neare to the condition of the Primitive Church”.
The document also revealed that the meeting we know as the Hampton Court Conference was to be between “divers Bishops” and other “learned men”. In the words of Frederick Shriver [see bibliography] who to my mind has most convincingly re-constructed the background to the Conference, it was to be a scholarly disputation “not a general airing of grievances.”
Even so, the bishops were not convinced about the wisdom of such an encounter. Bishops had disputed with Puritans on numerous occasions in the previous reign but the Queen herself had never given the opponents of the Church Establishment the countenance of a personal hearing. James had a different style however. He loved talking theological and constitutional shop. He was familiar with Continental academic practices, relished disputations and saw himself as a latter day Solomon or rather Constantine, presiding as the Emperor had done at the Council of Nicaea and bringing peace and unity to the Church. It is significant that the medal struck for the king’s accession portrays James as a Roman ruler and he is described as Emperor of the whole Island of Britain. The stage was set for a Conference at Hampton Court which was in part a display of the Royal Supremacy but also one event in a busy winter theatrical programme at the Palace.
In response to the Petition, the Conference with the Puritans had originally been set for November but the virulence of the plague in London caused its postponement and it was finally convened in this Palace on Saturday January 14th 1603/4. In the event, the prime movers of the Petition were not included in the puritan delegation who met with the king and the bishops. The more radical voices like those of Arthur Hildersham, Minister of Ashby de la Zouche [whose mother, ironically, was a niece to Cardinal Pole] were excluded. The puritan team of four were all from the moderate wing.
The most hard line was John Knewstub, Rector of Cockfield in Suffolk. Laurence Chaderton was the Master of the puritan stronghold Emmanuel College in Cambridge. Both Knewstub and Chaderton had been Cambridge contemporaries and fellow undergraduates with Bancroft who now faced them as Bishop of London. Thomas Sparke Rector of Bletchley had been a friend of Richard Hooker’s antagonist at the Temple Church, Walter Travers, but soon after the Conference Sparke became a convinced conformitan, publishing an apologia in 1607 entitled “A Brotherly Persuasion to Unity”. The leader of the group was John Reynolds, Master of Corpus Christi College, Oxford and a moderate defender of episcopal government in the church, though not jure divino. The make-up of the delegation was such that there might be some substance in the complaint of Henry Jacob one of the more extreme and excluded Petitioners that the “whole managing of it was underhand plotted and procured by the Prelats themselves”.
On January 14th, a Saturday, the King conferred with a number of Bishops, Deans and members of the Privy Council for about five hours. Dudley Carleton again described the scene in a letter written the next day. The King began with a speech to the assembled dignitaries telling them “he sent not for them as persons accused but as men of choice by whom he sought to receive instruction”. He dealt with many of the matters raised in the Petition and “insisted somewhat upon the disorder of Bishops’ Chancellors; to which the Archbishop of Canterbury, with the Bishop of Winchester and Durham made mild and good answers and the Bishop of London spake well to the purpose but with too rough boldness. The Deans amongst whom was Westminster were only hearers.” The silent Dean of Westminster was none other than Launcelot Andrewes.
Bancroft who played such prominent part in the Conference was an ecclesiastical bruiser with a special talent for investigation. In his youth he had been especially distinguished at Cambridge for his boxing, wrestling and quarter staff play. Contemporaries said that his life had been saved by Chaderton in one town and gown riot. As Bishop of London, Bancroft was a veteran of the long running controversy about governance in the Church.
Theodore Beza, the successor of Calvin in Geneva had divided bishops into three types. Episcopus divinus was “one and the same with a Presbyter. Episcopus humanus was “chosen by the Presbyters to be President over them”. Episcopus diabolus however was “a bishop with sole power of ordination and jurisdiction; lording it over God’s heritage and governing by his own will and authority”.
Even allowing for the prejudicial rhetoric is clear what kind of episcopate puritans believed had survived in the Church of England. Puritans alleged that Bishops stood in the way of a thorough reformation of the Church of England. The pseudonymous Martin Marprelate, expressed his alliterative contempt for bishops thus, “proud, popish, presumptive, profane, paltry, pestilent and pernicious prelates”. Bancroft riposted in a sermon at Paul’s Cross which stirred up a veritable hornets’ nest. He poured scorn on the proposition that the Presbyterian form of church government was the one intended by Christ. “A very strange matter if it were true that Christ should erect a form of government for the ruling of his church to continue from his departure out of this world to his coming again: and that the same should never be once thought of or put into practice for the space of 1500 years.” He also described John Knox as “a man of nature too contentious” and of “perverse behaviour” which brought protests from the Scots and was a trifle rich coming from such an ecclesiastical brawler.
After Saturday’s consultation the Bishops were ordered to return on Wednesday while Monday was assigned for hearing the Petitioners. Carleton writing on Sunday remarked of the prelates and the puritans that “as they do differ in opinions so do they in fashions, for one side marches in gowns and rochets, and t’other in cloaks and night caps.”
The bishops had been examined alone, but on the Monday when the puritans were ushered into the Privy Chamber, they found that Bancroft of London and Bilson of Winchester with a bevy of Deans were waiting for them. William Barlow, Dean of Chester described the scene.
“The King’s Majesty entering the chamber, presently took his chair placed as the day before [the noble young Prince {the nine year old Henry} sitting by upon a stool]”. In the aweful presence of the monarch, the four Puritans knelt down to present their case. “Pernicious and pestilent” prelate I may be, but I can find it in my heart to sympathise somewhat with the petitioners’ plight. The Puritan Quartet stepped onto the stage and became extras in the drama of the Royal Supremacy. They were in a Court used to ceremonious and symbolic communication to plead that the liturgy be abridged and purged of ceremony. They were on their knees representing a tendency in the Church of England that objected to kneeling to receive the host at the Holy Communion.
The King was enjoying himself. Not since King Alfred had such an intellectual come to the throne. James’s tutor had been the Calvinist George Buchanan, one of the foremost scholars of the day. The King’s own voluminous works on statecraft and kingship had a Europe wide circulation.
Like many great men, James had developed the fatal facility for continuous utterance and he constantly intervened as the delegation led by Dr Reynolds made their points. The Barlow account of the Conference [which although it must be treated with some caution since it was drawn up at the request of the Bishop of London is the fullest we have available] has the King “taxing St Jerome for his assertion that a Bishop was not Divinae ordinationis”. The excitable Bancroft broke in that if he could not prove his ordination as a bishop lawful out of Scripture, “he would not be a bishop four hours”. The King approved “their calling and use in the Church” and closed the discussion with his famous aphorism “No Bishop, no King”.
Dr Reynolds wanted the Catechism of Church teaching expanded. The King was courteous but unyielding. “He would have a catechism in the fewest and plainest affirmative terms that may be…adding this excellent gnomical and canon-like conclusion that in reforming of a Church, he would have two rules observed: first that old deep and intricate questions might be avoided in the fundamental instruction of a people” and secondly that changes should not be dictated by a desire to distance the Church from Roman Catholic positions, because there were many areas of agreement.
The Bishop of London also fell to his knees to request that as well as a preaching ministry, “there might be amongst us a praying ministry”. He taxed some ministers with being content “to walk in the churchyard till sermon time rather than be present at public prayer”.
These are very important exchanges, which reveal what was at stake in the Hampton Court Conference. One of the curses of the Western Christian World in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the tendency to over-define mystery with a polemical intention. After the nuclear explosion which shattered the old Western Church, all the fragments recast themselves as the churches we know today. In Diarmaid MacCulloch’s excellent recent history of the Reformation in Europe, he points out that there were no Roman Catholics in Europe in 1500 with the sole exception of the Kingdom of Bohemia where there were churches loyal to the Pope operating under an Establishment which traced its origins to the Hussite movement. The Roman Church recast itself at the long running Council of Trent and in many ways it was reformed more successfully than the Church of England. In the course of drawing up battle lines in the disastrous civil war which was to convulse Europe until the Peace of Westphalia and beyond, all sides were tempted to greater and greater clarity about what divided them with consequences which last to this day.
The reign of James I was overshadowed by this Christian civil war. He tried to play the Rex Pacificus and to identify the common ground, to make peace with Spain and even to contemplate a Spanish match for his son Charles. All this enraged the hotter English Puritans who pressed for intervention in the European war on the Protestant side. It was to be Bancroft’s successor as Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbot who pressed for English troops to be sent in battle on the Continent in what he regarded as an apocalyptic conflict with the armies of Anti-Christ. The middle ground was contracting all the time but the Hampton Court Conference left open the possibility that the Church of England might resist the general trend towards the over definition of mystery and that it might retain the vocabulary of symbol and ceremony which, certainly, the silent Dean of Westminster, Launcelot Andrewes, believed was the door into mystery.
The Puritans, however, were exclusive in their devotion to words and at this point Mr Knewstub intervened. He criticised the use of the cross in baptism and made the astonishing charge that the surplice had been the “kind of garment which the priests of Isis used to wear”. The King saw no reason why such vesture should not continue to be worn in Divine Service, “for comeliness and for order sake”. “This being his constant and resolute opinion, that no church ought further to separate itself from the Church of Rome, either in doctrine or ceremony than she had departed from herself when she was in her flourishing and best estate.”
“Dr Reynolds took exceptions at those words in the Common Prayer Book of Matrimony, With my body I thee worship.” The King replied that this was but a strong way of saying we must give honour to our wives and then followed one of those bawdy humorous asides which did not always go down well with the more strait laced – “turning to Dr Reynolds [with smiling, saith His Majesty,] Many a man speaks of Robin Hood who never shot in his bow: if you had a good wife yourself you would think all the honour and worship you could do to her were well bestowed”.
Reynolds went on to church discipline, which in many ways was the nub of the matter. Perhaps he had been advised by Patrick Galloway to urge a form of discipline, not unlike the evolving Scottish system, which blended episcopal with presbyteral elements. He envisaged a regime grounded in ruri-decanal meetings where they could have “prophesying” of the kind Archbishop Grindall had tried and failed to commend to Queen Elizabeth. At the apex there would be an “episcopal synod where the bishop with his presbytery should determine all such points as before could not be decided”.
It was a fatal misjudgement. Barlow says that his Majesty was “somewhat stirred” but the anonymous account of the Conference preserved in the British Library, which on the whole is more favourably disposed to the puritan cause, gives an even more graphic account of the King’s displeasure. “His Majesty utterly distasting his coors sayd that this was rightly the presbytery of Scotland, wherein John and William and Richard and such like must have theyr censure.”
The dictum “No Bishop, no King” was once more pronounced and the King left the room for his private quarters.
Another day elapsed and on Wednesday, January 18th the King spent a couple of hours with the Bishops and Deans and various civil lawyers. Even in a ceremonious age the compliments to the King’s understanding verged on the blasphemous. The Bishop of London fell on his knees again and protested that “his heart melted within him with joy” and he acknowledged “unto Almighty God the singular mercy we have received at his hands in giving us such a king as since Christ his time, the like he thought had not been; whereunto the Lords with one voice did yield a very affectionate acclamation.” In this rather febrile atmosphere the Puritan delegation was shown in. The King was gracious, amiable but vague and this led to a certain amount of confusion about whether anything at all was to be done to meet the puritan case.
In truth the liturgy and polity of the Elizabethan Church remained virtually intact. This gave a vital breathing space for the development of that tradition in the Church of England so closely associated with Launcelot Andrewes and his spiritual heirs. That part of the Anglican tradition, which was allowed to grow, was concerned with mystery, manners and the golden mean.
The King was pleased with his own performance. Shortly after the Conference he wrote to one of the crypto Catholic members of the Privy Council, Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton. “We have kept such a revel with the puritans here these two days….They fled me so from argument to argument without ever answering me directly ut est eorum moris as I was forced at last to say unto them that if any of them had been in a college disputing with their scholars, if any of their disciples had answered them in that sort” then “should the rod have played upon the poor boys buttocks.”
The minor changes agreed at the Conference were referred to a Committee of Bishops and members of the Privy Council. They reported to the King and he, on February 9th, by Letters Patent ordered the publication and exclusive use of the slightly amended Book of Common Prayer. The Letters were followed up by a royal proclamation on March 5th. The King’s assessment of the Hampton Court Conference was published in the Proclamation in the following words, “We found mighty and vehement informations supported by so weak and slender proofs, as it appeared unto us and our council that there was no cause why any change should have been at all in that which was most impugned, the Book of Common Prayer.” In consequence “we do admonish all men that hereafter they shall not expect or attempt any further alteration in the common and public form of God’s service.”
In the months following the Conference, the King closely identified himself with the Bishops’ programme for reforming the church. In March 1604 in his first address to Parliament, James gave his own definition of Puritanism. He castigates puritans as “a sect rather than a Religion” and specifies their danger to the state, “The Puritans and Novelists do not so far differ from us in points of religion as in their confused form of Policy and Parity, being ever discontented with the present government and impatient to suffer any superiority which maketh their sect unable to be suffered in any well governed Commonwealth.”
Archbishop Whitgift had died on February 29th and Bancroft as Dean of the Province of Canterbury was authorised to summon Convocation, the Church’s own Parliament to proceed with a revision of the Canons. This was to be a prelude to a renewed effort to secure conformity. The new Canon XXXVI stipulated that ministers were only to be ordained or licensed after subscribing to three things, the Royal Supremacy, the Book of Common Prayer and the Thirty Nine Articles of Religion. The wording is based on the three articles issued by Whitgift in 1583 but in the new Canon there is a concluding clause to exclude the possibility of casuistical equivocation. Ministers are to subscribe “willingly and ex animo”. This provoked opposition from parliamentarians and puritan pamphleteers. It did not in the event prove possible to enforce the Canon with entire consistency but in accordance with the King’s intention to divide moderate from radical puritans the subsequent campaign resulted in the departure of modest numbers of the more extreme puritans. About 80 beneficed clergy refused to subscribe and left the licensed ministry of the Church of England. Some of the details can be read in Dr. Babbage’s useful book on Jacobean Puritanism.
I have of course left the most substantial fruit of the Conference to the last. During the conversation between Dr Reynolds and the King on Monday the 16th the former had pressed for a new translation of the Bible on account of the corruptions in those which had been authorised in the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI. When the request is decoded, Reynolds wanted a strict Puritan Bible, the naked word of God without, what puritans regarded as, tendentious translations like the use of the words, “bishop” and “church”. In apparently agreeing with him the King described the very opposite of what Reynolds wanted. James characterised the Puritan’s favourite translation, the Geneva version as “the worst of all”. He proposed that a new translation should be prepared by the best learned in the two universities, then it should be reviewed by the Bishops and presented to the Privy Council before being ratified by royal authority for use in public preaching. The Bishop of London broke in complaining about the marginal notes in the Geneva version which, among other examples of eisegesis, firmly identified the Bishop of Rome with the figure of Anti-Christ in the Book of Revelation. The new Bible was to be an instrument of peace and tendentious marginalia were to be omitted.
It was the beginning of an enterprise which was to involve both Reynolds and Chaderton and lead to the publication of the Authorised Version or the King James Bible in 1611. The appointment of 54 Translators to work in a number of syndicates on different portions of the Scripture is another illustration of the King’s determination to include as wide a range of theological opinion as possible in his Church Establishment.
The King’s instructions to the Translators directed that they were to use “circumlocution” and language in which meaning was to be “set forth gorgeously”. Translation as Miles Smith wrote in the preface to the Authorised Version is the work that “openeth the window to let in the light”. There was to be light but as Adam Nicolson says in a book which I cannot praise too highly, there was to be “no terror of richness” - richness of the kind found in Jacobean art and decoration. The English of the Authorised Version was never the language of the street but a middle way between the demotic and Greek and Hebrew. Plainness was to be married to majesty in stately language which has had a profound influence on English sensibility ever since.
By commissioning the Authorised Version and refusing further substantial alterations of the Prayer Book in response to puritan complaints, the Hampton Court Conference played an important part in keeping the Church of England open to the spirituality of Launcelot Andrewes and his heirs - mystery, manners and reverence for tradition and the golden mean.
In supporting James’s efforts to call for a General Christian Council to bring peace to the Church, Andrewes explained, in writing against Cardinal Bellarmine, the position as he saw it of the Church of England with regard to the conflict between Catholic and Protestant. “Our appeal is to antiquity yea even to the most extreme antiquity. We do not innovate; it may be we renovate what was customary with some ancients but with you has disappeared in novelties.” In limiting what the Church believed to the creeds and the first four Councils, Andrewes asserted that whatever was clouded by controversy was not part of fundamental truth for God had made plain whatever was necessary for salvation. The name Protestant was a temporary convenience, intended to last only as long as Roman abuses persisted.
The King’s behaviour at the Hampton Court Conference may have been startling or even coarse at times but his desire not be trapped into a polemical over definition of mysteries and to devise an ecclesiastical regime which was inclusive enough to serve the unity and peace not only of the realm but of Europe, these are surely not ignoble ambitions. St Augustine described the true Church as one in which there was “in certis unitas; in dubiis libertas et in omnibus caritas”. It is a definition with which King James would have sympathised. The responsibility for the Civil War which broke out under his more rigid and unbending son cannot be laid at his door. After the Conference, only the most extreme puritans were compelled to leave the ministry of the Church of England and the realm faced the threat of religious terrorism which surfaced in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, relatively united and able to include and rely on the loyalty of moderate Catholics as well as a wide spectrum of Protestant conformitans.
As for us at a time when the Church of England is uncertain about its identity; when the stream of inspiration which flows from the altar of God is very low; when we have many opportunities to speak but our words lack the power to convince; when the sense of confidence based on imperial power has dissolved; we could do worse than revisit the sources for the peculiar and rich identity of the Church of England as it developed when England was little more than a offshore island menaced by the big battalions massing on the European mainland – this was the England of the Hampton Court Conference, an England which then as now was ruled by Scots.
Select Bibliography: Babbage, Stuart Barton – Puritanism and Richard Bancroft. London 1962.
Barlow, William – The Summe and Substance of the Conference…at Hampton Court. London 1605.
Cardwell, Edward – Synodalia. Documents from the Province of Canterbury 1547-1717. Oxford 1842.
Curtis, Mark – Hampton Court Conference and its aftermath. History xlvi [1961]
Fincham, Kenneth edit. – The Early Stuart Church, 1603-1642. London 1993.
Gee, Henry ad Hardy, William John – Documents Illustrative of English Church History. London 1896.
MacCulloch, Diarmaid – Reformation. Europe’s House Divided 1490-1700. Penguin 2003.
Nicolson, Adam – Power and Glory. Jacobean England and the Making of the King James Bible. London 2003.
Shriver, Frederick – Hampton Court Revisited: James I and the Puritans. Journal of Ecclesiastical History ‘82.
Tanner, J.R. – Constitutional Documents of the reign of James I. 1603-1625. Cambridge 1952.
Thurley, Simon – Hampton Court. Yale 2003.
Usher, R.G. – The Reconstruction of the English Church. New York 1910.
