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Laudian Foxe-hunting? William Laud and the status of John Foxe in the 1630s
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
When the prosecutors of William Laud were seeking damning evidence against the Archbishop, they seized upon the fate of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments in the 1630s. They produced a catalogue of abuses, occasions on which Laud had attacked, impugned, or banned the volumes. In his report of the trial, Prynne gave these cases of Foxe-hunting an important position, directly after the accusation that Laud had hindered the distribution of Bibles. The prominence given to Foxe, and the close association with the Bible, were typical of the ways the martyrologist was handled in the early seventeenth century, and tell us much about the regard in which he was held within the English Church. His Book of Martyrs had attained the status of a quasi-biblical text. His works, invoked with an almost scriptural reverence, were appealed to as an unquestionable authority on matters of ecclesiastical history and Protestant tradition.
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1997
References
1 Foxe, John, Acts and Monuments, ed. Cattley, S. R., 8 vols (London, 1837-41)Google Scholar. For William Prynne’s heavily partisan account of Laud’s trial see Canterburies Doome (London, 1646). Alleged attacks on John Foxe are cited on pp. 87–8 and 183–4.
2 Foxe’s interpretation of history is outlined by Jane Facey, ‘John Foxe and the defence of the Anglican Church’, in Peter Lake and Maria Dowling, eds, Protestantism
3 The attack on Foxe came from the pen of John Pocklington, chaplain to Charles I, in his Altare Christianum (London 1637), p. 92. Prynne’s defence appeared in Canterburies Doome, p. 193.
4 William Lamont enters a double caveat against Prynne’s report of the proceedings. Not only did the writer of Canterburies Doome enlarge his account with material amassed after the trial had ended, and which therefore went unanswered by Laud; he also focused on the secondary rather than the primary charge. The peers in the House of Lords had concentrated on Laud’s constitutional misdemeanours, accusing the defendant of usurping powers which rightly belonged to the monarch, people, Parliament, and judiciary. Prynne was more exercised by the religious case against Laud, and his account centred almost exclusively on the charge that Laud had sought to undermine the Church of England in favour of popery. See William Lamont, Marginal Prynne, 1600–1669 (London, 1968), pp. 119–48.
5 Milton, Anthony, Catholic and Reformed: the Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 539–40 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Of the examples Milton cites to illustrate his case, over half relate to Foxe.
6 To reconstruct the events of the Gellibrand case, I have drawn on the three surviving accounts of the proceedings, penned by William Prynne, William Laud, and John Browne, clerk to the House of Lords. See Canterburies Doome, pp. 182–3; Laud, William, Works, 7 vols (Oxford, 1847-60), 4, p. 265 Google Scholar; Browne, John, in Bond, M. F., ed., HMC, The Manuscripts of the House of Lords, 11 (London, 1962), pp. 427–8 Google Scholar.
7 Beale, William, An Almanacke, for the yeere of our Lord Cod, 1631 (London, 1631)Google Scholar.
8 For the deep-seated suspicion of almanacs held by puritans such as William Fulke and William Perkins, see Capp, Bernard, Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs 1500–1800 (London, 1979), p. 32 Google Scholar. One of Gellibrand’s closest professional colleagues was the mathematician Henry Briggs, who had taught at Gresham College from 1595 to 1620. Briggs was a man renowned both for his strong puritan sympathies and his antipathies towards astrology. A contemporary described him as ‘the most satirical man against it [astrology] that hath been known’: Lilly, William, History of his Life and Times (London, 1822), pp. 237–8 Google Scholar. For Gellibrand himself, see Adamson, Ian, ‘The foundation and early history of Gresham College, London, 1569–1704’ (Cambridge University Ph.D. thesis, 1975), pp. 86–7 Google Scholar, 128–30, 143–5; Ward, John, The Lives of the Professors of Gresham College (London, 1740), pp. 81–5 Google Scholar.
9 Cressy, David, Bonfires and Bells; National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (London, 1989), pp. 1–12 Google Scholar. Cressy outlines some of the changes made in the calendar of the Prayer Book, but the full story still remains to be told.
10 The evidence for Henrietta Maria’s involvement rests solely on the uncorroborated testimony of John Gellibrand (the brother of Henry Gellibrand). Laud remained studiously non-committal on the subject, arguing that even if the Queen had sent a message to him, he could not have prevented her from doing so. He side-stepped the two pressing questions – did she send a request, and, if so, did he act on it? For Henrietta Maria’s limited political role and lack of power during the early 1630s see Sharpe, Kevin, The Personal Rule of Charles I (London and New Haven, Conn., 1992), p. 304 Google Scholar.
11 In 1571 Convocation ordered that Acts and Monuments be placed in every cathedral (but not in every parish church as is so often claimed): A Booke of certaine Canons … of the Churche of England… 1571 (London, 1571), pp. 6, 9.
12 The standard monograph on the High Commission is Usher, R. G., The Rise and Fall of the High Commission (Oxford, 1968)Google Scholar. Usher’s work should, however, be treated with some caution. It is best read in conjunction with Philip Tyler’s newly added introduction which, in its concern to bring Usher’s findings into line with modern research, comes close to undermining the original thesis altogether. On the High Commission in the 1630s, Kevin Sharpe echoes Usher’s conclusions, arguing that the Laudian court was, by and large, impartial and just in its dealings. Sharpe, Personal Rule, pp. 374–83.
13 Daniel Featley, arguing the Church of England’s case against Fisher, compared the institutional pedigree of the Church, favoured by Laud, with the Foxeian tradition. For Featley, origins traced through a succession of popes and bishops were a ‘slipperie and dirty way’, and thoroughly undesirable in comparison to the ‘more excellent way’ which could be found in Acts and Monuments: Daniel Featley, The Romish Fisher caught and held in his owne net (London, 1624), sig. K*3a-b.
14 Laud, Works, 2, pp. 170–8, 191–5, 213.
15 Gardiner, S. R., Reports of Cases in Star Chamber and High Commission (Westminster, 1886), p. 212 Google Scholar. Other proceedings against those accused of holding conventicles are to be found in ibid., pp. 198–238 and 274 (the very full account of the case against M. Vicars in 1632), 284–5, 308–10, and in Usher, High Commission, p. 265.
16 Prynne, Canterburies Doome, p. 184; Laud, Works, 4, p. 165. The modern secondary literature is equally divided. Bernard Capp acknowledges the relationship, describing Gellibrand’s almanac as ‘drawn from Foxe’: Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press, p. 47. Anthony Milton notes that the almanac cannot have been an extreme puritan production because it included bishops, but does not point out the Foxeian connection: Milton, Catholic and Reformed, p. 314.
17 In the entries for the month of December, for instance, those Foxeian martyrs abandoned for want of space included Erasmus, Phagius, Bucer, and Hunne.
18 The most glaring printer’s error concerned the Conversion of St Paul, which enjoyed two entries in the almanac on consecutive days. On the second occasion a precise date for the Damascene vision was mistakenly added, which rather unexpectedly reckoned the event as having taken place in the year ‘1557’.
19 That Parliament was keenly sensitive to any attack on Foxe was apparent from its earliest sessions. To mark its opening, two sermons were preached drawing extensively on Foxe. See Haller, William, ‘John Foxe and the Puritan Revolution’, in Jones, Richard F., ed., The Seventeenth Century: Studies in the History of English Thought and Literature from Bacon to Pope (Stanford, Conn., 1951), pp. 209–24 Google Scholar.
20 For an account of the St Gregory’s case, see Davies, Julian, The Caroline Captivity of the Church: Charles I and the Remoulding of Anglicanism, 1625–1641 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 205–50 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Davies’s interpretation is questioned by Nicholas Tyacke. He argues that Laud’s role was more important than Davies allows, with the Archbishop instrumental both in launching the St Gregory’s case itself, and in shaping altar policy during the 1630s: N. Tyacke, ‘Anglican attitudes: some recent writings on English religious history, from the Reformation to the Civil War’, JBS, 35 (1996), pp. 139–67, esp. 156–62.
21 Laud’s allusions to Foxe are sparing indeed, see for instance Works, 4, pp. 226, 265–6, 405, 497.
22 Laud, Works, 4, p. 265. Laud’s sentiments were echoed by John Pocklington in his Altare Christianum, pp. 89–90, though solely in connection with Jewel. Pocklington was quick to insist that Jewel was not to be regarded as gospel, as the Romanists treated their Masters of Sentences. Having circumscribed the extent of Jewel’s authority, Pocklington was quite ready to use Jewel in support of his position and to urge that the former Bishop of Salisbury be properly respected.
23 Pocklington, Altare Christianum, p. 92. Despite his attack on the calendar, Pocklington deployed Foxe elsewhere in the Altare, claiming legitimation for the Laudian position on altars through the authority of Foxe’s martyrs. It was, however, polemical expediency rather than personal enthusiasm which governed Pocklington’s use of Acts and Monuments: see, for instance, Altare Christianum, p. 110.
24 Heylyn, Peter, Antidotum Lincolniense (London, 1637), pp. 68–9, 87–99 Google Scholar. Heylyn’s use of Foxe had been prompted both by the original letter to the Vicar of Grantham and by William Prynne’s later appropriation of the martyrologist in his Quench-Coale (London, 1637), pp. 41–64.