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Who Wrote the Preface and Notes for Henry Finch's The Sacred Doctrine of Divinitie, 1590?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

Michael McGiffert
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Extract

The Sacred Doctrine of Divinitie, Gathered out of the Worde of God is a seventy-seven-page octavo for which no one claimed public credit. The book appeared in 1590 (n.s.), as shown by the date of the preface, January 1, 1589, though the title page is misprinted 1599. No place of publication is named; in fact that book came from the press of Richard Schilders at Middleburgh. The author chose anonymity. He must have been known at the time but was not identified inprint until some thirty years later. He was Henry Finch (1558-1625), third son in a prominent family of the Kentish Weald, who became a member of Parliament, a knight, serjeant-at-law to James I, and a respected student of the common law. His stepfather, Nicholas St. Leger, was active in the puritan interest in Parliament, and Finch, too, had a puritanic streak that marked his religious writings from The Sacred Doctrine of Divinitie, his first, to his last and best known, The Worlds Great Restauration, or the Calling of the Jewes, a millennial tract of 1621 that put him at odds with the king.

This much is known: author, printer, date. What has remained obscure, even unguessed at, is the authorship of the long unsigned “Preface to the Christian Reader.” In addition, the work is freighted with glosses that sometimes squeeze the text into a corner or drive it off a page entirely. There are reasons to believe that these marginalia are largely the work of another hand than Finch's, in all likelihood the same that wrote the preface.

Type
Research Note
Information
Albion , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , Summer 1986 , pp. 247 - 251
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1986

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References

1 Finch's career is traced in the DNB; his works are listed with bibliographic comment in Prest, W. R., “The Published Writings of Sir Henry Finch,” Notes and Queries, new ser., 24 (December, 1977): 501–503Google Scholar. Prest has also contributed an account of Finch's legal and religious thought: “The Art of Law and the Law of God: Sir Henry Finch (1558-1625),” in Pennington, Donald and Thomas, Keith, eds., Puritans and Revolutionaries: Essays in Seventeenth-Century History Presented to Christopher Hill (Oxford, 1978), pp. 94–117Google Scholar. The present note has benefitted from Professor Prest's instruction and correction.

2 Finch, , The Sacred Doctrine of Divinitie, Gathered out of the Word of God ([Middleburgh\, 1599 [sic: 1590\), pp. 4–7Google Scholar. Sacred Doctrine proper occupies 56 pages; the remaining 21 are devoted to “A Short Explication of the Lord's Prayer.”

3 Ibid., pp. 9, 13. He directed courtiers to Proverbs, calling it “the Lords own Politickes” (p. 10).

4 Ibid.,, p. 10.

5 Ibid., pp. 3, 8.

6 Reprinted Geneva, 1586, 1589, 1604; Amsterdam, 1632.

7 Finch, , Sacred Doctrine, pp. 8, 9Google Scholar. More than one scholar has taken this remark to mean that Finch “made considerable use” of Fenner, “sometimes translating him virtually word for word.” This mistake is made by Professor Prest, whom I am quoting from “The Art of Law and the Law of God,” in Pennington, and Thomas, , eds., Puritans and Revolutionaries, p. 102Google Scholar. Peter Clark strays in two ways at once in stating that Finch “edited Dudley Fenner's The Sacred Doctrine of Divinitie” (English Provincial Society from the Reformation to the Revolution: Religion, Politics and Society in Kent, 1500-1640 [Rutherford, N.J., 1977\, p. 175Google Scholar). It is also an error to say that the marginalia were drawn from Fenner, as I have done in “Grace and Works: The Rise and Division of Covenant Divinity in Elizabethan Puritanism,” Harvard Theological Review 75 (1982): 494 n. 75Google Scholar. The annotator was one with Fenner in thought but not in expression.

8 Finch, , Sacred Doctrine, pp. 8, 9.Google Scholar

9 Ibid., pp. 19, 22-28.

10 Ibid., p. 17; see also pp. 14, 35.

11 Ibid., pp. 30-31.

12 Sacra Theologia, esp. bk. 4, chap. 2.

13 Finch, , Sacred Doctrine, pp. 51, 45, 47, 43Google Scholar. It is not specified how bishops were to be elected or by whom, and the text is ambiguous about whether they should possess executive authority: “Governers are Elders or Bishoppes. An Elder is hee which is to governe only. A Bishopp is he which is to preach also” (p. 45); but no governmental functions are named for bishops. Elders, in the puritan terms of the time, meant presbyters. By omitting the last word in the quotation Prest lets this teaching serve his view that Sacred Doctrine was “uncompromisingly Presbyterian” (“The Art of Law and the Law of God,” in Pennington, and Thomas, , eds., Puritans and Revolutionaries, p. 103Google Scholar).

14 Clark, , English Provincial Society, p. 175.Google Scholar

15 Lambeth Palace Library MS 465 (“The Epistle to the Christian Reader,” n. p.). The other translations are in the British Library and Dr. Williams' Library.

16 See Michael McGiffert, “The Making of the Covenant of Works: England, 1585-1610” (forthcoming).

17 Clark, , “Josias Nicholls and Religious Radicalism, 1553-1639,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 28 (1977): 133–150CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I am obliged to Dr. Clark for guidance in preparing this note.

18 Ibid., p. 145. The tract was The Plea of the Innocent (London, 1602).Google Scholar

19 Clark, , “Josias Nicholls,” pp. 145–148Google Scholar; quotation p. 147. In English Provincial Society Clark calls Nichols both “a basically non-Presbyterian radical” and a “moderate” (pp. 172, 174); Clark's article shows him a confirmed, if not extreme, presbyterian. The book terms Finch a “Presbyterian with separatist leanings” (p. 178), though the supporting information (p. 175) can be read as evidence of anti-separatism.

20 Finch, , The Sacred Doctrine of Divinitie (London, 1613), p. 9.Google Scholar

21 The dating, correcting the STC's conjecture of 1630, is based on William Gouge's preface to Finch's, Worlds Great Restauration, dated January 8, 1621 [1622\.Google Scholar

22 The Summe of Sacred Divinitie, 3v.

23 Sacred Doctrine (1590), pp. 28–29Google Scholar; Summe, pp. 220-222. Downame's revising of the 1613 text also drew on the 1590 edition for book 1, chapter 5, “Of the Morall Law.”