Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

did teach that those who truly believed and repented could be assured that

Christ would exercise his power to save them. This shocking ‘heresy’ led to a

bitter controversy which lasted far beyond his death in 1609 and ramiﬁed

deeply into Dutch politics. The Arminians, or Remonstrants, were supported

by Jan van Oldenbarnevelt, the virtual chief minister and leader of the Estates

of Holland, by the great jurist Hugo Grotius, and by most of the regent class

that governed the Dutch towns. The Contra-Remonstrants (i.e. the high

Calvinists) were backed by the stadtholder Maurice of Nassau (William the

Silent’s son) and most of the nobility and clergy. The dispute became a power

struggle between Maurice and Oldenbarnevelt, between those who opposed

Holland’s dominance of the Union and those who supported it, and between

those who wanted to renew the war with Spain when the Twelve Years Truce

ran out in 1621 and those who did not. People felt so passionately about

Arminianism in the run-up to the English Civil War that one needs to know

what they understood by it.

James’s contribution to promoting the international synod was some-

thing of a diplomatic coup. His delegation openly supported the Contra-

Remonstrant side and applauded its victory, but his diplomatic approval of

the hard-line decrees whereby the Arminian tenets were condemned should

not be taken as a declaration of his personal beliefs. He had genuine objections

to Arminius’s doctrines, and in England he preferred the Calvinist theologians’

position to that of their more liberal challengers; but the four divines whom he

sent to Dort, though regarded as Calvinists, took a mediatory stance there and

repudiated the Bezan doctrine of predestination to reprobation. It seems that

he disliked the attempt by both sides to probe the working of God’s decrees

further than mortal minds can go, and there was an element of diplomacy in

his public support for the synod’s decrees. He still felt a need for Maurice’s

friendship, and judged that a Contra-Remonstrant victory would best restore

unity of a kind in the Dutch Republic and keep it effective as a bastion of the

protestant interest in Europe. The outcome of the synod was naturally

very welcome to English puritans, who from then on smeared their fellow-

countrymen who questioned their high Calvinism as Arminians, whether or

not they subscribed to Arminius’s own beliefs or had even read his works. The

intense interest in the synod led to acrimonious controversy in the universities,

and to a spate of anti-Arminian sermons at Paul’s Cross. This was not to

James’s liking, and in 1622 he commanded his Archbishop of Canterbury

to enforce a set of ‘Directions concerning preachers’, limiting their subject-

matter, forbidding any below a bishop or dean ‘to preach in any popular

auditory the deep points of predestination, election, [or] reprobation’, and

prohibiting ‘railing speeches against the persons of either papists or puritans’.

38 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

Kenyon, Stuart Constitution, pp. 128–30. Some points in this paragraph may need to be qual-

iﬁed in the light of R. B. Patterson, James I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge, 1999).

ch1-2.y8 25/9/02 4:23 PM Page 38

Few of the English divines who reacted against the harsher formulations of

predestinarianism owed much to Arminius, least of all the senior of them, the

learned and saintly Lancelot Andrewes, who was seventy in 1625 and had

only a year to live. Theirs was mainly a native tradition. James was not

unfriendly to them, though in his personal beliefs he stood nearer to the

Calvinist camp. When Canterbury fell vacant, he chose the strongly Calvinist

George Abbot as archbishop rather than Andrewes, who had been widely

expected to succeed. Buckingham patronized puritans, and through him their

most prestigious divine, John Preston, was made a chaplain to Prince Charles.

But James appointed Andrewes to both the English and Scottish privy coun-

cils, and made him dean of the Chapel Royal from 1618. Andrewes’s liturgic-

al practices there, including the placing of the altar, were the pattern for

what Charles tried to impose on the whole church in the 1630s. James gave

bishoprics to ﬁve so-called Arminians, including Andrewes and the future

Archbishops of York and Canterbury, Harsnett, Richard Neile, and William

Laud—though he appointed Laud reluctantly, and only to the remote see of

St David’s, under pressure from Buckingham, for he distrusted his ‘restless

spirit’.

Five was not a large proportion of a bench of bishops numbering

twenty-six, but James grew more sympathetic to the group in his later years,

not because he was converted to their theology but because he shared their

dislike of puritans. This was strengthened by the puritans’ bitter hostility to

the Declaration of Sports that James issued in 1618, ordering the toleration

of lawful recreations (including dancing!) after the time of divine service on

Sundays, and by puritan preachings against his plans for a Spanish match for

Prince Charles, which he regarded as an unwarranted intrusion into matters

of state.

The international situation and the prince’s marriage did bring some

sharpening of religious differences towards the end of the reign, and so did the

increasing conﬁdence of the ‘Arminian’ faction. The latter were regularly

congregating at Durham House, Bishop Neile’s London residence, which

became so notorious as an academy of anti-Calvinism that it was called

Durham College. The circle included two future bishops who were to become

particularly unpopular in the 1630s, Matthew Wren, chaplain successively to

Andrewes and Prince Charles, and John Cosin, chaplain to Neile. Wren

accompanied Charles to Madrid in 1623, and after his return he assured

Andrewes, Neile, and Laud that the prince’s judgement was ‘very right’,

adding that ‘for upholding the doctrine and discipline and the right estate

of the church, I have more conﬁdence of him than of his father’.

Another of

the circle, one of the king’s own chaplains called Richard Montagu, was at the

The Matter of Religion 39

H. R. Trevor-Roper, Archbishop Laud (2nd ed., 1962), pp. 56–7.

Quoted in Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven and London, 1992),

p. 279.

ch1-2.y8 25/9/02 4:23 PM Page 39

centre of a cause célèbre in 1624–5. He had already been under ﬁre in the

1621 parliament for asserting the church’s divine right to tithes in print, but

he was in worse trouble with that of 1624 for publishing A New Gag for an

Old Goose. This was a defence of the Church of England’s doctrines against

a Roman Catholic attack. It did not afﬁrm the doctrines of Arminius, whom

Montagu had never read, but it did not support the Calvinist position on pre-

destination either; it maintained that the church left the ﬁner points touching

the divine decrees undeﬁned, as ‘secrets reserved to God alone’.

Where Mon-

tagu really gave offence was by branding those who took a rigorous line on

predestination as puritans, for their position had always been accommo-

dated within the spectrum of the Church of England’s tolerated beliefs, and

to stigmatize a doctrine as puritan—one moreover widely accepted by the

Reformed churches—was novel and disturbing. Montagu raised the stakes by

defending himself against the Commons’ attack, which had allegedly been

orchestrated by Archbishop Abbot, in a book which he entitled with the

king’s permission Appello Caesarem (I appeal to Caesar), and James saw to it

that it was published, despite Abbot’s refusal to license it. The row rumbled

on into the next reign.

Despite such episodes, one should not exaggerate the extent of religious

dissension in England when Charles succeeded to the throne. Most of the con-

troversy between Calvinists and anti-Calvinists took place at a fairly rareﬁed

academic level, and most English Calvinists had lately been retreating from

the full rigour of Béza’s double predestination. James maintained to the end

a policy of holding a balance within the church, discouraging any polariza-

tion between theological extremes, and if necessary using his authority to

dampen public disputation over mysteries that human reason had no power

to resolve. Consequently the minority in the episcopate and the universities

who held unpopular ‘Arminian’ views were mostly content to keep fairly

quiet about them. Another reason why the Jacobean church accommodated

such differences with a minimum of strife was that most of its active members

cared more about preserving its broad evangelical front than about probing

what was potentially divisive within it. For there really was a consensus in the

Jacobean church—probably a more general one than at any time since the

Reformation, or for a long time to come. The search for causes of the Civil

War has led to too much concentration on disputations among the most high-

ly educated clergy, few of whom held a cure of souls that involved minister-

ing to the laity, and until recently too little on the life of the church as a whole,

including not only the parish clergy but the broad religious public.

It had taken a long time—longer than historians used to realize—to wean

the English people from the old faith and turn the great majority into a truly

40 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

Quoted in White, Predestination, Policy and Polemic, p. 220.

ch1-2.y8 25/9/02 4:23 PM Page 40

protestant nation. A great evangelistic drive was afoot in Jacobean England,

for much still remained to be done, and the educated laity were partners with

the more active clergy in the enterprise. A high proportion of parish livings

were in the gift of lay patrons, generally local landowners. The hitherto lowly

position of parish parsons in the social scale was improving and a growing

proportion were university educated, but a great many were still incapable

of preaching, and lay-endowed lectureships helped to supply what was seen

as an urgent need. The godly among the gentry—and not only those who

came to be called puritans—played their part as patrons by appointing zeal-

ous men to parish livings, by supporting lectureships, by hospitality to

preachers, by conducting daily devotions and rehearsing the weekly sermon

in their households, and by upholding Christian morality as squires and

magistrates.

Much distortion has resulted from attempts to trace a fundamental breach

between ‘Anglicans’ (an anachronistic term) and puritans back into James’s

reign or even earlier. The reality of the Jacobean church was more like a spec-

trum, dominated by a broad middle band of agreement. Yet puritans were

recognized as existing and Ben Jonson satirized them on the London stage.

Mr Zeal-of-the-Land Busy was of course a crude and hostile caricature, but

laying such stereotypes aside, what can be said about puritans at this time,

and what distinguished them from middle-of-the-road English protestants?

There was certainly no sharp line of division, and some historians have ques-

tioned whether they still existed at all; but that leaves us wondering why con-

temporaries were so plainly conscious of them. Apart from a small and

radical minority, they were no longer organized as a militant movement.

They are best thought of as representing a distinctive strain of piety within the

broad protestant establishment, a strain whose roots lay in an intense pre-

occupation with personal salvation. Puritans had no monopoly of predestinar-

ian doctrine, but they generally held it in a rigorous form, as expounded by

their favourite divine William Perkins, whose works (though he died early in

1602) held an almost canonical authority for them. The separation of

humankind into the elect and the reprobate was central to their view of both

this world and the next. They acknowledged that the elect are known only to

God, but they took it as a sign of grace if they could keep God’s command-

ments—‘by their fruits ye shall know them’ was a favourite text—and that

was the main reason for the uncompromising austerity of their moral code.

They were given to constant anxious self-searching; they read every personal

adversity as a trial or judgement and every piece of good fortune as a blessing

of providence. And since faith was the key to God’s saving grace, they set

enormous store by the preaching of the Word and the reading of the Scrip-

tures. The puritan clergy constituted an informal preaching brotherhood, and

the appetite of their ﬂocks for sermons was insatiable. Preachers had two

The Matter of Religion 41

ch1-2.y8 25/9/02 4:23 PM Page 41

supreme tasks: ﬁrst, to awaken sinners to repentance and guide them through

the dark night of the soul to the assurance (if grace were granted) that salva-

tion could be theirs, and second, to instruct the faithful in the full meaning of

the sacred texts and keep them at a high pitch of dedication to their spiritual

calling. They held the authority of the Scriptures to be absolutely paramount,

and in matters of faith and worship they were suspicious of any other author-

ity at all.

Puritans were of course not alone in being anxious about the state of their

souls, as any reader of Donne’s sermons or Holy Sonnets will appreciate. But

they placed a massive weight on every individual’s personal responsibility,

whereas churchmen of an older tradition trusted more to the sacraments as

the media through which saving grace was transmitted, and were content to

accept the operation of the divine decrees as ultimately a mystery. Such men

generally cultivated a serener faith, though not necessarily a less intense one.

It is movingly exempliﬁed in the life and poetry of George Herbert, who

renounced the prospects of a career at court (he was a kinsman of Pembroke)

to become a country parson, and died in 1633 before he was forty. To such as

Herbert the church was a temple and the clergy a priesthood, whose highest

function was the celebration of the sacraments; desirable though it was that

priests should preach it was not essential, as the sacraments were. To pur-

itans, however, priesthood was an uncomfortable concept, except in the

protestant sense of the priesthood of all believers. In their attitude to the

sacraments they were anxious to avoid any tincture of popish ‘superstition’,

and their clergy disliked wearing the surplice and the liturgical vestments; a

plain black gown seemed more appropriate to their calling as ministers of

God’s Word. The central tradition of the Church of England, as against its

puritan and later ‘Arminian’ wings, had been immensely strengthened by

Jewel’s protégé Richard Hooker, who published the essential parts of his

magisterial Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity between 1593 and 1597. In contrast

with puritans who exalted scriptural authority at the expense of all others,

Hooker venerated the example of the early church and the teaching of the

early Fathers, and he stressed the English church’s medieval inheritance.

Unlike the puritan who identiﬁed the papacy with Antichrist, he did not deny

that Rome was a true church, though he strongly afﬁrmed the distinctness

and superiority of that of England. Convinced that God’s grace would be

denied to none who truly sought it, he ﬁrmly believed that the visible

Church of England must aim at embracing all the people of the realm. In jus-

tifying the Royal Supremacy, he granted the absolute authority of the Scrip-

tures in matters of faith, but he argued that they did not and could not

prescribe every detail of ecclesiastical organization and liturgical practice,

which were likely to vary according to the needs and traditions of particular

societies in different ages. There was, therefore, an area of ‘things indifferent’

42 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

ch1-2.y8 25/9/02 4:23 PM Page 42

which could legitimately be regulated by the civil magistrate, and that is why

the Acts of Settlement and Uniformity and subsequent orders by the church’s

Supreme Governor should be obeyed. Puritans remained queasy about the

concept of ‘things indifferent’, but Hooker’s answers to both Roman and

puritan questionings of the Church of England’s authority and rites held great

authority in early Stuart England.

Another contentious puritan characteristic was their hankering after a

‘godly discipline’, to keep the faithful in the paths of righteousness and to

prevent the reprobate from giving scandal to them. Puritans were deeply dis-

satisﬁed with the existing ecclesiastical courts, mostly survivals from pre-

Reformation times, which they felt to be too much concerned with enforcing

clerical conformity and the church’s ﬁnancial dues, and far too little with

raising the moral tone of the nation. In some parishes with a puritan patron,

he and the parson of his choice and a core of like-minded parishioners oper-

ated something like a consistory, with the churchwardens and overseers of

the poor taking the role of elders. There were towns, too, where a strongly

puritan magistracy worked in similarly close concert with the minister or

ministers in a holy war against drunkenness, fornication, swearing, and

sabbath-breaking. And there were whole regions, some quite large, where two

cultures were in conﬂict: the one traditional, attached to old festivals and cus-

tomary merry-makings such as church ales, maypoles, dancing, and games of

football (then a rough free-for-all), the other suspicious of carefree revelling

and hostile to any occasions that encouraged boozing, brawling, and the

begetting of bastards. Very broadly speaking, the older festive culture tended

to survive best in regions given mainly to open-ﬁeld arable farming and

characterized by close-knit manorial communities, whereas puritanism and

its discipline had a stronger hold in pastoral and woodland country, which

commonly had a less cohesive and more shifting population, and in the cloth-

ing districts, which were also less manorialized. The older order tended to

ﬂourish where local society was aristocratically dominated, unless the noble-

man or greater gentry concerned were themselves strong puritans, while the

godly had their way more where the middling sort had a common interest

with the gentry in imposing discipline on the unruly lower orders. There was

to be some correlation between this sort of division, involving religion,

economic occupation, and social structure, with the way in which regions

aligned with one side or the other in the Civil War, but the differences within

and between them were not remotely likely to lead to civil war on their

own account; they just help to explain how people, when forced (often

reluctantly) to make a choice, took the sides they did.

The prevalence of puritanism in many towns, in the clothing districts and

in other regions where godly gentry made common cause with the middling

sort has led some historians to account for it as primarily an instrument of

The Matter of Religion 43

ch1-2.y8 25/9/02 4:23 PM Page 43

social control, designed to teach the feckless poor to labour soberly and dili-

gently in their callings. Such an interpretation distorts the other-worldly

focus of the puritan faith and does less than justice to its preachers’ efforts to

evangelize the under-privileged and the illiterate. Their social teaching was

compassionate towards the honest poor, and they kept reminding the well-

to-do that they were merely stewards of their worldly wealth. Puritans had a

notably good record for charity under Elizabeth and the early Stuarts. There

were stronger reasons than economic interest why puritanism struck root

among the middling sort in many towns and in the rural clothing areas.

Weavers and skilled craftsmen were mostly literate, able to study the Scrip-

tures for themselves and to ponder them at their looms or counters or work-

benches. Towns brought people of similar callings and convictions into close

proximity and provided an apt milieu for the mutual propagation of their

beliefs. The larger ones offered a choice of places of worship, and hence a bet-

ter chance of sitting regularly at the feet of a puritan preacher, especially if

there was a lectureship within the walls. But it would be quite wrong to think

of puritanism as the faith of a particular class, or as an urban rather than a

rural phenomenon. It was widely disseminated through the social scale, and

its propagation owed an incalculable amount to aristocrats such as the Earls

of Bedford, Huntingdon, and Leicester in Elizabeth’s reign—not to mention

the Duchess of Suffolk—and Lord Brooke, Viscount Saye and Sele, and the

Earl of Warwick in Charles I’s. At least a ﬁfth of the peerage were to some

degree puritan in sympathy in 1641,

but even they wielded less inﬂuence col-

lectively than the hundreds of puritan gentry with parish livings in their gift

and a powerful role in the county magistracy.

The puritans’ concentration on drawing out and cherishing those men and

women who appeared to have the seeds of grace in them carried with it a ten-

dency to conceive the visible church as a community of the elect, and to think

of the unregenerate many as somehow outside it. Church-puritans, who con-

stituted the great majority, were aware of the dangers of separation, but there

were small splinter groups who rebelled against the whole conception of a

national church embracing the godly and ungodly alike, and split off to form

congregations purporting to consist only of ‘visible saints’. In their eyes the

only true church of Christ was a community of men and women who, under

their chosen pastor, entered into a mutual covenant to ‘walk together in the

ways of the Lord’ and to submit to a common discipline. These sectaries or

separatists, sometimes called Brownists after one of their early leaders,

incurred the heavy displeasure of church and state alike. They ﬁrst attracted

the attention of government in the 1580s. In 1593 three of their pastors

were executed for sedition, and an Act against Seditious Sectaries was passed,

44 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, p. 742.

ch1-2.y8 25/9/02 4:23 PM Page 44

giving those who persisted in attending ‘conventicles’ the choice between

death or banishment. There was some resurgence of separatism soon after the

Hampton Court Conference, when Archbishop Bancroft (Whitgift’s success-

or and former chaplain) carried out a drive for conformity which led to

about ninety puritan ministers being ejected from their livings, at least tem-

porarily. The English General Baptists had their beginning in 1608, when

John Smyth, being convinced that no surviving church possessed the true

ordinances, baptized ﬁrst himself and then the rest of his congregation. But

separatists remained few, and most of them went into exile, in Amsterdam or

some other Dutch city, rather than face the harsh penalties that threatened

them at home. The most famous of these congregations made an even harder

choice in 1620 when it chartered a little ship called the Mayﬂower, and bound

itself anew in a covenant, some time before it made landfall at Plymouth,

Massachusetts. Theirs was quite a different migration from the much larger

one that followed in the 1630s. Until Charles and Laud formed their fateful

partnership, mainstream puritans felt no need to consider leaving England,

for they felt tolerably at home in its established church.

James’s problems with the puritans were as nothing compared with what he

had suffered from the high Calvinists in his native Scotland. There the Refor-

mation had followed a totally different course from that in England. Instead

of being initiated and controlled by a dominant monarch, it had been carried

to victory by an aristocratic rebellion against a catholic queen, and between

her abdication in 1567 and her son James’s twenty-ﬁrst birthday two whole

decades passed. The leading role of the laity and the long minority resulted in

the establishment of a predominantly Presbyterian Kirk of Scotland, with no

royal supremacy comparable to that in Tudor England. Consistories, called

kirk sessions, took a powerful hold on the religious and social life of Lowland

Scotland. Episcopacy was never formally abolished, but it fell into a long

eclipse, and the main role in governing the Kirk was assumed by General

Assemblies with a strong lay presence. Catholicism, however, survived more

strongly than in England among the nobility and gentry; it was estimated

to claim as many as a third of them, as late as 1600. But it was weaker than

such a ﬁgure suggests, since it was mainly conﬁned to scattered regional

pockets, the chief being Aberdeenshire, parts of the Highlands, Ayrshire, and

the borders.

The high tide of Scottish Calvinism really began to ﬂow in 1574, when the

famous scholar Andrew Melville returned from Geneva to assume the head-

ship of the little University of Glasgow, which was sunk in deep decline. He

inaugurated an impressive intellectual revival, not only in Glasgow but in

St Andrews too, but he was power-hungry for the Kirk, which he fought

through the 1580s and 1590s to make totally Presbyterian. He aimed to

The Matter of Religion 45

ch1-2.y8 25/9/02 4:23 PM Page 45

abolish not only episcopacy but all lay patronage over ecclesiastical appoint-

ments, and to make the Kirk virtually independent of the crown. He taught a

doctrine of two kingdoms, the church being supreme and self-sufﬁcient in all

matters spiritual and the state having power only over the outward man. In

modern Iran he would have made a good ayatollah. He lectured James to his

face in 1596, calling him ‘God’s silly vassal’. By then, however, such over-

weening clerical pretensions were becoming too much for most of the laity

and not a few of the clergy, and in the following year James got a statute

passed which restored the bishops to the Scottish parliament. The tide was

now running his way, but when he was called to England the struggle was still

on for control of the General Assembly, with its powerful representation of

nobles, lairds, and burgesses as well as clergy. James claimed the power to

determine when and where it should meet; Melville afﬁrmed its right of free

assembly. Eventually, in 1606, Melville with seven other ministers was sum-

moned to London, where his invective against the Church of England’s forms

of worship and Archbishop Bancroft’s ‘Romish Rags’ so incensed the privy

council that it committed him to the Tower. There he remained for nearly ﬁve

years, and he was released only on the understanding that he would live the

rest of his life in France. He died at Sédan in 1622, a ﬁgure of the past.

From then on, James gradually restored both the bishops and the crown to

a considerable measure of authority in the Kirk, making use of deftly man-

aged Scottish parliaments and carefully packed General Assemblies. The Kirk

became once more a blend of episcopacy and Presbyterianism, with the kirk

session continuing to exercise a godly discipline at parish level and with

parishes grouped in presbyteries, but with bishops presiding over diocesan

synods and sitting in both the General Assembly and parliament. James

would have liked to go further, and bring both the government and the wor-

ship of the Kirk closely into line with those of the Church of England, but he

knew where to stop. He did manage to press the Five Articles of Perth through

a reluctant Scottish parliament in 1621, which forced the Kirk to accept the

observance of the great Christian festivals, conﬁrmation by bishops, kneeling

to receive holy communion, and the validity of private communion and pri-

vate baptism for the sick. The Articles of Perth were to remain a smouldering

grievance until they were swept away in rebellion, and in face of the hostility

they aroused James wisely shelved his tentative plans to introduce a Scottish

prayer book, loosely based on the English Book of Common Prayer. The last

General Assembly for twenty years met in 1618, and James left the Scottish

ecclesiastical scene in a rather sullen state of peace. He had got his way by

exploiting lay (especially aristocratic) suspicion of clerical ambition. To build

on his success, it was essential to avoid alienating the clergy and the nobles

and lairds at the same time, and giving them a common cause. That was just

what Charles was to do.

46 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

ch1-2.y8 25/9/02 4:23 PM Page 46

Religious problems in Ireland were altogether more intractable, and the main

reason why they did not become explosive under James was that for a long

time after the Elizabethan conquest the Irish were incapable of organized

resistance. The ofﬁcial attitude of the king’s servants in Ireland was that the

way to overcome the natives’ resentment of colonial rule was to ‘civilize’

them, and since they held it axiomatic that English institutions were supreme-

ly civilized, that meant anglicizing them. But if there were difﬁculties in intro-

ducing English models of local government and jurisdiction, the English

common law, and English practices in matters of land use and inheritance,

they were as nothing to the problems of imposing an alien religion. It was not

only that the Old Irish were devotedly catholic; so too were most of the Old

English, who were used to being a powerful part of the colonial system and

were most reluctant to accept that their faith should debar them from public

ofﬁce, as ofﬁcially it now did.

James was personally averse to forcing catholics to abandon their faith or

conform to protestantism. But early in his reign he was under some suspicion

of being soft towards popery, and in 1605 he gave way to his Irish council’s

request for a tough policy. He issued a proclamation denying that he was pre-

pared to tolerate catholic worship, ordering the catholic clergy to leave the

country, and commanding the laity to attend divine service in the established

Church of Ireland. That was never possible to enforce. Over much of Ireland

the parish churches were in ruins, and no worship could be held in them. The

church owned plenty of land, but in the course of time so much of its assets

had been appropriated by laymen or the higher clergy that most of its livings

were too poor to support an educated clergyman—even if a protestant pastor

could have found a ﬂock. The Church of Ireland showed little of the will or

capacity for the impossible task of converting the Irish, whose language very

few of its clergy could speak. It settled to the role of ministering to the mas-

ters of the Pale and to the protestant settlers in the areas of plantation. Trin-

ity College Dublin had been founded in 1591, largely to furnish it with

protestant parsons, but in James’s reign clergy for Ireland still had to be

sought in England or Scotland, and even towards its end only about one Irish

parish in six had a preaching minister.

That did not of course mean that the Gaelic-speaking mass of the popula-

tion went unprovided for. They had their own priests, living in and sustained

by the local communities, and in sept territory especially these were often

monks or friars. Seven Irish colleges (or seminaries) in the Spanish Nether-

lands and north-eastern France trained a steady ﬂow of recruits to the priest-

hood, and though there were tensions between their Counter-Reformation

ideas and the traditional practices of the old Gaelic church, Irish catholics

were still capable of closing ranks if the threat from the protestant ascend-

ancy became acute.

The Matter of Religion 47

ch1-2.y8 25/9/02 4:23 PM Page 47