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Preaching to Princes: John Burgess and George Hakewill in the Royal Pulpit

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 March 2011

EMMA RHATIGAN
EMMA RHATIGAN
Affiliation:
School of English, University of Sheffield, Jessop West, 1, Upper Hanover Street, Sheffield S3 7RA; e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article examines a previously unnoticed link between the Puritan John Burgess and the Calvinist conformist George Hakewill. In 1604 Burgess preached a court sermon so outspoken and critical of James i's religious policy that he was imprisoned. Nearly twenty years later, however, Hakewill chose to incorporate extended passages from Burgess's sermon into the series of sermons, King David's vow (1621), preached to Prince Charles's household. This article considers why Burgess's sermon became so resonant for Hakewill in the early 1620s and also demonstrates how Hakewill deliberately sought to moderate Burgess's strident polemic. In so doing the article provides important new evidence for the politically attuned sermon culture at Prince Charles's court in the early 1620s and also suggests how, as the parameters for clerical conformity shifted in the latter years of James's reign, Calvinist conformists found a new appeal in the works of moderate Puritans.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 62 , Issue 2 , April 2011 , pp. 273 - 296
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

1 On Burgess's performance in the Greenwich pulpit see Peter McCullough, Sermons at court: politics and religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean preaching, Cambridge 1998, 141–7, 185–7, and Peter Lake, ‘Moving the goal posts? Modified subscription and the construction of conformity in the early Stuart Church’, in Peter Lake and Michael Questier (eds), Conformity and orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560–1660, Woodbridge 2000, 179–205.

2 On the Hampton Court conference see Collinson, Patrick, ‘The Jacobean religious settlement: the Hampton Court conference’, in Howard Tomlinson (ed.), Before the English Civil War: essays on early Stuart politics and government, London 1983, 27–52’, Journal of British Studies xxiv (1985), 169–207Google Scholar at pp. 171–82; and Shriver, Frederick, ‘Hampton Court re-visited: James i and the Puritans’, this Journal xxxiii (1982), 48–71Google Scholar. On subsequent attempts to enforce conformity see Kenneth Fincham, ‘Clerical conformity from Whitgift to Laud’, in Lake and Questier, Conformity, 125–58, and Lake, ‘Moving the goal posts?’.

3 The sermon can be found in BL, ms Harleian 3791, fos 172r–181r; Bodleian Library, Oxford, ms Rawlinson D 353, fos 189r–211r, and ms Eng.the.c.71, fos 40r–47v; Cambridge University Library, ms Add. 336, fos 69r–77r; and Folger Shakespeare Library, ms V.a.351, fos 126r–141r. The textual variations between these witnesses are all minor. The sermon was eventually printed in 1642.

4 McCullough, Sermons at court, 185. In his letter to the king craving pardon Burgess writes ‘Nor durst I prefer mine own possibilities of attaining the Princes service to this duty’: A sermon preached before the late King James, London 1642 (Wing B.5720), 29. All quotations from the sermon and letters in this article will be from this 1642 printed text; page references are given immediately following each quotation.

5 Thomas Gataker, A discourse apologetical, London 1654 (Wing G.319), 36–7.

6 McCullough, Sermons at court, 147. On freedom of speech in the court pulpit see also David Colclough, Freedom of speech in early Stuart England, Cambridge 2005, 93–102.

7 Lake, ‘Moving the goalposts?’.

8 On the community of chaplains to Prince Henry and Prince Charles at St James's Palace see McCullough, Sermons at court, 183–209.

9 Fincham and Lake, ‘The ecclesiastical policy of King James i’.

10 On public concern about James's foreign policy see Thomas Cogswell, The blessed revolution: English politics and the coming of war, 1621–1624, Cambridge 1989, and Simon Adams, ‘Foreign policy and the parliaments of 1621 and 1624’, in Kevin Sharpe (ed.), Faction and parliament: essays on early Stuart history, Oxford 1978, 139–72.

11 Peter Heylyn, A short view of the life and reign of King Charles, London 1658 (Wing H.1735), 18. See also McCullough, Sermons at court, 204–5.

12 The court and times of James the first, ed. Thomas Birch, London 1848, ii. 266–7, 304; McCullough, Sermons at court, 201–2.

13 Lake, ‘Moving the goalposts?’, 189.

14 George Hakewill, King David's vow for reformation of himselfe, his family, his kingdome: delivered in twelve sermons before the Prince his highnesse vpon Psalm 101, London 1621 (RSTC 12616), ‘To the Prince, his family’. All subsequent references are to this edition; page references are given immediately following each quotation.

15 See, for instance, the case of John Donne's allusion to John Williams in his 1623 Lent sermon, as described in McCullough Sermons at court, 135–6.

16 The letters of John Chamberlain, ed. Norman Egbert McClure (American Philosophical Society, 1939), i. 232–3.

17 Peter Beal, In praise of scribes: manuscripts and their makers in seventeenth-century England, Oxford 1998, 109–46 at p. 134.

18 See McCullough, Sermons at court, 202–4, and John Prince, The worthies of Devon, London 1810, 449–54.

19 Lake, ‘Moving the goalposts?’, 204–5.

20 Henry Peacham, The garden of eloquence, London 1593 (RSTC 19498), 13.

21 McCullough, Sermons at court, 131–7.

22 In his dedication to Prince Charles Hakewill stated that it was his intention to present the prince with a printed text so that he could ‘beholde at one view the entire body of those discourses which were delivered disiointly and by peece-meale’: King Davids vow, ‘To the prince’.

23 Burgess and Hakewill are, of course, using different Bible translations. Burgess's translation ‘I will procure thy wealth’ comes from the Geneva Bible, while Hakewill's translation ‘I will seeke to doo thee good’ comes from the Authorised Version.

24 ms Rawlinson D. 853, fos 34–5.

25 See, for example, John King's Lectures upon Ionas, Oxford 1597 (RSTC 14976), 39–40, in which he records Samuel's words to Saul, ‘Because thou hath cast away the worde of the Lord therefore he hast cast away thee from being King’, or George Abbot's Exposition upon the Prophet Ionah, London 1600 (RSTC 34), 44, in which he describes how God whipped David and Solomon with ‘temporal rods’ to punish their disobedience.

26 McCullough, Sermons at court, 32–5.

27 Hakewill also refers to Jehoas earlier on in his sermon as an example of a king who caused an unjust death, the stoning of Zachariah. Once again there are echoes of Burgess in the phrasing: King David's vow, 318–19.

28 Lake, ‘Moving the goalposts?’, 194.