Bishops, Kings and Leviathan: Nationalism and Integralism in Light of High Church Anglican Political Thought

This article traces the political thought of high church Anglicans from 1580-1720. Beginning with Richard Hooker, Anglican political thought was shaped by the need to balance competing principles. For high church Anglicans, the monarchy was seen as the institution best positioned to defend this balance against what they saw as the twin threats of "Puritanism and popery." However, high churchmen also began to defend a high view of episcopacy even over against the power of the English government, introducing a tension between royal supremacy and high church Anglicanism with implications for both nationalist and integralist conceptions of the state. This culminated in the nonjurors—Anglican clergy and academics removed from their posts for refusing to swear oaths to William and Mary—defending episcopacy against both the new king and defenders of royal supremacy. The example of high church Anglicans demonstrates some perils of both nationalist and integralist approaches to politics for many religious forms of traditional conservatism.

16th- and 17th-Century English Sermons

The continental and English Reformations had a profound impact on the development of the sermon, precipitating a decisive shift from sacramental forms of worship to a Scripture-centered piety. The Henrician Reformation of the 1530s tied preaching to the politics of religion, as the monarch sought to consolidate the Royal Supremacy. The sermon continued to play a crucial role in the promulgation and defense of royal policy for one hundred fifty years, until the Toleration Act of 1689 granted freedom of worship to dissenters and nonconformists. But the pulpit was equally important as a forum in which foreign and domestic affairs could be subjected to scrutiny and criticism, in often fraught and complex attempts to fulfill the Christian mandate to speak truth to power. Preaching did not simply reflect or articulate public opinion, but actively contributed to its formation. The early modern sermon, especially when it was delivered at large and popular venues such as Paul’s Cross or Saint Paul’s Cathedral, was not merely an occasion for the formal exposition of Scripture but a major social event that attracted significant numbers of spectators and listeners. Preachers were keenly attuned to the demands of homiletic decorum: if a sermon was to reach the hearts and souls of the audience, it needed to adapt to the time, place, and circumstances of performance. Places of preaching reflected the primacy of decorum in their architectural layout: the chapels royal embodied the idea of royal supremacy by seating the monarch in an elevated royal closet, for instance. Sermons were preached in a wide range of settings: parish churches and cathedrals; chapels at the Inns of Court and the universities; outdoor pulpits and private meeting houses; and before Parliament and on the judicial circuit. And they existed in a variety of forms and media: in their original performance context, animated by voice and gesture; as manuscript notes, summaries, or illicit copies for further circulation; and in printed formats ranging from expensive folios to penny chapbooks. These different modes of transmission were in turn associated with different architectures of cognition: print culture helped preserve a sermon’s message, but at the cost of sacrificing the spiritual bond with the congregation. In a culture that saw the sermon as the primary means of communication with God, and therefore as the main path to salvation, retaining a connection with the living tradition of apostolic preaching was vital, and preachers sought to augment their printed sermons with features of orality and dialogue in order to compensate for the absence of an immediate rapport with the audience.

In Kent and Christendom?

This chapter looks in detail at the evidence for Heywood’s involvement in the so called Prebendaries Plot against Thomas Cranmer in the diocese of Kent. It explores the religious divisions that provoked the complaints against Cranmer, and the interrogatories put to those interviewed over their involvement. It offers the first detailed analysis of the charges against Heywood, concluding that the playwright was not involved in any conspiracy against Cranmer, and indeed that describing the events in Kent as a ‘Plot’ is itself potentially misleading. Rather, when finally confronted with the demand that he affirm the Royal Supremacy, Heywood initially refused, and so became a traitor under the terms of the Treason Act of 1534. The chapter describes Heywood’s dramatic appearance on the scaffold with his co-accused, largely fellow members of the More circle, and his subsequent abject public abjuration.

Discord, Dissent, and Division

Even if we cannot follow Heywood’s engagement with the fine details of political events in his work in these years in quite the way that we could through his earlier interludes, it is nonetheless possible, and important, to track his path against the wider picture of English Reformation politics, the advance of royal policy and the reactions it provoked, in order to see how the twists and turns of Fortune’s favour affected him, his family, and influential patrons such as Mary Tudor, and how and why Heywood was brought to his own crisis of conscience in the winter of 1543. This chapter examines Heywood’s fortunes in the years following More’s death against the curious contortions of Henry VIII’s religious policy, describing the evolution of Henry’s Erasmian ‘middle way’ in religion, and the tensions that it permitted and exacerbated, setting the scene for Heywood’s condemnation for treason for denying the Royal Supremacy in 1542.

New Forms, New Challenges

Heywood’s songs have generally been seen by literary scholars as essentially harmless evocations of joie de vivre. This chapter looks afresh at their insistent evocation of good-will and harmony, and their rejection of malice, reading them in the light of the repressive legislation of 1533–34, which defined all opposition to the Royal Supremacy or Henry VIII’s second marriage as malicious acts of treason. It also examines the interrogation and trial of Thomas More, and More’s use of good-will as a specific defence against the charge of ‘malicious’ treason. In this context, Heywood’s songs become more pointed and political, an attempt to present himself, and the group of Catholic singing men around St Paul’s cathedral, as innocent of treason, part of a community bound together by values of loyalty, conviviality, and traditional good works of charity and hospitality in the face of increasing pressure on such things from outside.

Główne kategorie myśli politycznej Richarda Hookera

The Main Categories of Richard Hooker’s Political Thought This article outlines the main philosophical and political issues of this late-Tudor Anglican divine. Hooker’s ideas, developed in Of the Laws of Eccclesiastical Polity, provide some atypical answers to typical questions about the state and itsconnection with the church. The first issue presented is the nature of law and reason: Hooker’s approach bears a strong resemblance to St. Thomas Aquinas’ thought here. We can also observe the naissance of a theory of a “social contract”, as society enters an agreement to nominate a governor over them. Hooker seems to be applying this theory to both the origins of the state and of the church. Indescribing the role of tradition in law-making, Hooker can be called the pioneer of the Conservative doctrine. We shall indicate the role of the Revelation in Hooker’s outlook and his polemics with the Puritans here. Finally, we will come to Hooker’s criticism of the theory of two powers, his favour of monism and its historical proponents, and to his arguments for the royal supremacy in England.

“To Omit the Precise Rule and Strayt Observacion”: The 1572 “Bill Concerning Rites and Ceremonies” and the Campaign for Liturgical Diversity in the Elizabethan Church

The focus on the rise and stall of English Presbyterianism has obscured other attempts by politically active puritans to address the problems that bedeviled the Elizabethan church—in particular, how to reconcile a promiscuously international reform movement with the reality of a national church, and the desire for parish-level autonomy with royal supremacy and statutorily mandated uniformity of practice. This article takes as its subject one such attempt, the remarkable “Bill Concerning Rites and Ceremonies” introduced in the 1572 Parliament, which leveraged the episcopal structure of the church to the advantage of the godly, empowering bishops to grant individual priests the right to diverge from the Book of Common Prayer liturgy and to adopt elements of the rituals used by the French and Dutch “stranger churches” then worshipping in London. The bill's emergence at a very specific juncture, after the statutory confirmation of the Thirty-Nine Articles in 1571, illustrates how godly Protestants sought to use newly ratified regulatory powers to their advantage and to establish that only theological, not liturgical, uniformity mattered for a functional and true national church. Moreover, the bill was legally innovative, proposing to use episcopal power in disaggregated ways, thus institutionalizing the exceptions in worship that individual bishops had informally granted to the ministers under their supervision. It offered a remarkable vision of a national church that contained within it ad hoc and multinational liturgies and that was defined not by its adherence to one form of worship but by the supervision of an enlightened bishopric.