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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 February 2009

Extract

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

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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

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27 I owe this point to Andrew Foster.

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

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

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

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56 McGee, Godly man, ch. iii, cf. McGee, J. S., ‘Conversion and the imitation of Christ in Anglican and Puritan writing’, Journal of British Studies xv (1976), 2139CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

57 Carier, , Treatise, 30Google Scholar; Hakewill, in reply, claimed that he could ‘find no such words in Sir Francis Bacons Essays printed the yere 1612’ though in the margin he says ‘I have since found words to that purpose in his Meditationes sacrae, but not as M. Doctor quoteth them.’ (He refers in fact to a similar citation in Bacon's Meditationes about schismatics and the two tables which is far more acceptable to him, for it is not anti-Puritan, and it incorporates an attack on the perverters of the second table, and the potential for corruption of Catholic monasticism: Hakewill, Answere, sigs P3r–4r; The works of Francis Bacon, ed. Spedding, J., Ellis, R. L. and Heath, D. D., London 18581874, viii. 90–1; vii. 249.)Google Scholar HakewilPs claim that he could not find Carier's citation of the ‘Advertisement’ is presumably because the ‘Advertisement’ did not appear in print until 1640.

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