Early modern England was a personal monarchy. The wills and whims of kings and queens determined the great affairs of state, while the fate of polities hung on the outcomes of dynastic chance. The dependence of the body politic on the body natural meant that most people could agree that the monarch was anima legis, even if only some ventured to say that they were also lex loquens. The enforcement of laws was a matter of co-operation and negotiation with local elites, but the direction of policy was undoubtedly a royal affair. Nevertheless, personal monarchy did not mean that kings were not swayed by individuals and groups around them. The world of personal rule was also the world of access, influence, and patronage. Nor was influence per se a negative thing, for advice aided royal decisions. The politics of kingship were thus also the politics of counsel.
Early modern monarchy was also Reformation monarchy. In England, the magisterial Reformation went to the extreme of making the monarch supreme head of the church, further widening the scope of arcana imperii. It was not novel for good rule to include facilitating salvation, but what salvation involved was unprecedentedly contentious. Kingship and tyranny now appeared in the guise of godly and ungodly rule. Discussion of government was soaked in scriptural passages, the meanings of which were more than ever politicized – and newly difficult to elucidate as textual scholarship destabilized God's Word.
This article reviews the politics of kingship and Reformation through the lens of counsel. Studies which currently exist on the politics of counsel suggest how richlyvaried early modern thinking on this topic was. First, John Guy has identified two sixteenth-century languages of counsel: one humanist-classical, one feudal-baronial, the latter one metamorphosing into parliamentary claims to free speech.Footnote 1 Secondly, David Colclough has explored the variety of traditions of parrhésia (free speech and the rhetorical figure used at the start of such speeches) in early Stuart England: classical rhetorical, religious, parliamentary, and extra-parliamentary.Footnote 2 Thirdly, Patrick Collinson has demonstrated the most eminent example of ecclesiastical parrhésia in action: Archbishop Grindal's 6000-word criticism of Elizabeth I.Footnote 3
Early modern clergy practised ecclesiastical counsel, but they also reflected on its theory. Those discussions did not always announce themselves explicitly. While ecclesiastical counsel was a distinct political language, it did not reside in a specific textual genre. It can be found in sermons to kings, sermons about kings, defences of the royal supremacy, and wider reflections on the nature of the English church and monarchy. Its disparate nature may go some way towards explaining why it has not received the attention it deserves from historians. Where it exists, historiographical attention to the prophetic tradition has tended to focus on the hotter sort of Protestants: Hugh Latimer, Edward Dering, Edmund Grindal, and the 1620s polemicist, Thomas Scott. This fragmented literature implies that these cases are unusual: the outcome of an especially forceful preacher, or a ‘puritan’ inclination, or a monarch whose imperium was flawed by their age or their gender.Footnote 4 This article recovers the prevalence of counsel in conformist supporters of the established church across the early modern period.Footnote 5 This is not to reject the existence of puritan counsel, only to deny that such rhetoric belonged exclusively to puritans. This study begins by identifying different languages of counsel, before turning to a brief survey of the ecclesiastical version between 1558 and 1688. It then compares types of advice-giving by considering a series of questions about the justifications, nature, and impact of counsel. As such, it provides a conspectus for a broader project on kingship and counsel from 1509 to 1689. That project is sorely needed to further our understanding of the politics of kingship in England's long Reformation.
I
Considering a variety of types of counsel helps identify the common and the distinctive features of the ecclesiastical version. The first tradition Guy identified was a humanist-classical one. The transalpine humanists whose milieu was the princely court found counsel to be a way to fulfil the Ciceronian vita activa. If their ancient preceptor was Cicero, their contemporary guide was Erasmus's Education of a Christian prince (1516), which insisted that frank counsel kept kingship from deteriorating into flattery. Counsellors praised a king's wisdom, bolstering his reason, not flattering him into enslavement to his passions. Thus a bad king was to be preferred to one with bad friends, and a country should thank counsellors more than kings for good rule.Footnote 6 Erasmus's agenda was echoed in book one of Thomas More's Utopia (1516), and in Thomas Starkey's Dialoge between Pole and Lupset (c.1532). These men debated whether counsel was worthwhile. Was advising kings the highest end of human life, or was it an at best futile and at worst dangerous pursuit? Where Lupset and Morus believed counsel must at least be attempted, Pole and Hythloday withheld it as liable to be scorned (although in so doing they provided it).
Humanists explained the need for counsel in Aristotelian fashion – the superiority of collective wisdom to a single man's fallible reason. Sir Thomas Elyot showed how ‘one mortall man can nat haue knowledge of all thynges done’, so needed lesser magistrates in order to ‘gouerne with the better aduise, and consequently with a more perfecte gouernance’. Elyot quoted book three of Aristotle's Politics when exploring this and echoed the Ethics when stating that virtue is the mean discerned by reason. Flattery was wrong because it enslaved reason, obfuscating knowledge of virtue.Footnote 7 Counsel had to combine frankness with decorum. Erasmus warned against dangerous flatterers who simulated free speech, but bemoaned the decline of contemporary counsel, even from churchmen and confessors. Yet he stated that ‘rebukes should be delivered in private and in such a way that the severity of admonition is toned down by a touch of pleasantness in manner’. His insistence that moral correction from churchmen should not turn into public harangues would be repeated ad nauseam by Anglican advocates of counsel.Footnote 8 On the rare occasions when humanists got down to specifics and institutionalized counsel in councils, they said little about the number or role of churchmen within these.
The pre-eminent form of institutionalized counsel was parliament, the king's great council. As Guy notes, those enunciating the feudal-baronial version of counsel increasingly looked to parliament, and this article prefers the epithet ‘parliamentary counsel’.Footnote 9 MPs argued for the need to speak freely in order to serve their monarch with their honest counsel. ‘The true dutie of a counsell and counsellors consisteth … to deliberate, to conferr, to consult, to speake freely.’Footnote 10 Their speeches often employed parrhésiastic openings, apologizing for and justifying their boldness. But when did liberty of speech become licentious? One instance might have been Peter Wentworth's denunciations of Elizabeth's leniency to Mary Queen of Scots in the 1570s. Insisting that MPs had a constitutional duty to speak freely, Wentworth defended speaking ‘boldly’ by comparing it to ‘flattery’ and ‘trayterous sugred speeches’, drawing on classical dichotomies. But his offence was perhaps less his outspokenness than his lack of apology for it. As the privy councillors examining him put it, he ‘might have uttered yt in better termes’.Footnote 11 MPs worried about monarchs not listening to them, but many also wanted to keep counsel discreet and private – only after 1641 could speeches be licensed for printing, and unlicensed publication was an offence until the 1760s. Members were, however, only temporary counsellors. In 1614, they were instructed to speak ‘with that reverence and duty to his Majesty as becomes subjects, with such judgement and discretion as becomes councillors’.Footnote 12 Like the pulpit, parliament was a quasi-public space in which counsel could be invited and provided but could also get out of hand. Speaking boldly was dangerous when the protective mantle of conciliar status was a temporary one, when the right to offer counsel was contingent on time and place.
Lay members of the Lords and Commons were not reticent about asserting their duty to speak their conscience, citing scripture, and reminding princes of their religious obligations. But these claims perforce carried more weight when legitimized by clerical status. The language of ecclesiastical counsel had its own ancestry. Biblical texts such as verse 46 of Psalm 119 outlined the duty to admonish hostile magistrates, to ‘speak before kings and not to be ashamed’; Matthew 10:18–20 explained that the Spirit would provide Christians with speech against their persecutors. Donning a prophetical persona, ecclesiastical counsellors claimed they vocalized God's word. This legitimized bold speech and outlawed cowardice. Reading God's orders to the prophet Ezekiel, ecclesiastical counsellors knew they could not afford to engage in the discussions which humanists did over whether to attempt advice. ‘If thou givest [an evil man] not warning’, God told Ezekiel and his successors, ‘his blood will I require at thine hand … if thou warn and he turn not … he shall die … but thou hast delivered thy soul.’Footnote 13 With the soul of the counsellor and the counselled at stake, ecclesiastical advice could perhaps be pushed more forcefully than its lay counterpart.
Scriptural injunctions to counsel were overlaid with a rich history of examples of its practice, in particular during the era of Christian Rome. In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Church of England clergy increasingly venerated the patristic era and expended vast amounts of scholarly energy studying it. They loved the third-century African bishop, Cyprian, with his defence of episcopacy and defiance of Rome. They found in Constantine the model for imperial supremacy. And when they surveyed the third through fifth centuries they witnessed in turn a church in a hostile state, a church established by the state, and a church responding to the problems of heterodox and apostate emperors: they saw, in short, their world. They could draw on a series of encounters between bishops and emperors long entrenched in ecclesiastical history. As Peter Brown has noted, ‘no ecclesiastical history of the [fifth century] was complete without a vivid scene of confrontation that emphasized the successful parrhésia of monks and bishops in their dealings with the emperor’.Footnote 14 The most prominent example was Bishop Ambrose's rebuke of the emperor Theodosius. This episode is important to consider because subtle differences in early modern treatments of it contained fine but extremely important distinctions.
Ambrose's fortieth and forty-first epistles recounted his criticism of Theodosius for ordering a bishop to fund the rebuilding of a synagogue demolished by a Christian mob. The letters narrated a bleak face-to-face confrontation when the bishop refused to celebrate Mass until the order was revoked. When Theodosius later ordered a massacre of tax rioters in Thessalonica, Ambrose pleaded with him to repent. This, his fifty-first epistle, did not involve angry language or direct argument. But it was inflated by the fifth-century historians, Theodoret and Sozomen, into personal conflict. Theodoret depicted Ambrose ‘inspired by Divine zeal’ rebuking Theodosius who shed ‘floods of tears’ for months afterwards until forgiven. It was not only Theodoret who admired ‘the boldness and fervent zeal of the one, and the submission and pure faith of the other’.Footnote 15 Early modern readers did so too, and, crucially, they read Theodoret's sensationalist account as well as Ambrose's epistles.
Ambrose's letters offered a pattern for episcopal counsel. They opened with a figure of parrhésia, saying the bishop only offered advice (on God's behalf), which Theodosius might reject. As a bishop, he spoke truth to power, painful only because Theodosius was so used to flattery. ‘Are we so prostrate with flattery as to forget the rights of a bishop?’ he asked Valentinian II.Footnote 16 In a careful blend of humility and clerical pride, Ambrose would both ‘advise … entreat … exhort … admonish’, and refuse to celebrate Mass for Theodosius. An early-seventeenth-century Catholic translator of Theodoret called this excommunication.Footnote 17 English churchmen did not agree on its meaning. But as a successful act of episcopal parrhésia it was praised and copied, and not just at the puritan end of the ecclesiastical spectrum. The Whitgifts and the Bancrofts, the Parkers and the Sancrofts, used such language, for when monarchs dared to pursue their own ecclesiastical agendas, Anglican churchmen quickly found their voices. In so doing, they did not jettison their belief in the royal supremacy and monarchical absolutism; they merely shifted the emphasis from exalting to exhorting their rulers.
The existence of absolutism in early modern England is contested by historians.Footnote 18 This article suggests that widening our understanding of debate on royal power beyond the narrowly juridical helps us understand how advocates of divine right kingship could hold monarchy to be ‘absolute and limited’.Footnote 19 Kings were self-limiting, conceding powers to parliaments and common law. But these privileges were rooted in royal grace, and the combination of this with the core of absolutism (non-resistance) precluded challenges to royal authority. There was an absolutist mode of thinking about kingship (and one which grew over time) which denied that any coercive restrictions could be enforced on monarchs who defied law, especially human law, which had only directive not coactive effect on them. Juridically, this was absolutist in stating that the only response to royal breaches of divine law was passive obedience – neither to resist sovereignty, nor to assist sin. It was often associated with Anglicans who distanced themselves from any notion that kings could be excommunicated or suffer judicial penalties if suspended from taking the sacrament. Defenders of the established church used royal inexcommunicability as a polemical weapon to denounce ‘papists’ and ‘fanatics’ as equally seditious – and their churchmanship was signalled by whether they included puritans in such condemnations.
Nevertheless, because absolutists refuted the idea of resistance to tyranny, they were concerned to prevent it arising. Keen to show how kingship was ‘absolute but not arbitrary’, they argued that tyranny stemmed not from the amount of power held but from the uses to which it was put. In this Aristotelian account, tyranny was rule in the private interests of the monarch, often fuelled when royal reason became enslaved to tyrannical passion. Even more significantly, absolutists knew that many monarchs did not mean to be tyrants, but were rather in danger of unintentional misgovernment. After explaining that subjects could not resist an evil tyrant, they therefore dealt with the problem of the erring monarch. Kings were to be thought of as omnipotent, but they were not omniscient.Footnote 20 To bring together royal will and royal goodness (inseparably united in God), moral restraints were needed: education for the young future king, counsel for the adult monarch. Thus counsel ensured rule was good: it channelled and assisted, it did not impugn, sovereignty. Writers on counsel often reminded their readers that it was a counterpart to and not a contradiction of imperium. Their constraints on kings were not juridical but moral: the ought and the should not the ‘must’, backed with the threat of damnation if they were ignored. Esteem for counsel was not limited to absolutists and Anglicans, but where to give advice, whether to institutionalize it, and how far to push it were crucial, if almost invisible, demarcations.Footnote 21 Read carefully, counsel helps us spot these, and thus to distinguish ‘absolutists’ from ‘constitutionalists’, or to seek a richer nomenclature. Where good rule rested on royal character, and especially where the royal will was supreme in ecclesiastical affairs, clerical counsel was vital. As the following survey shows, it was remarkably prevalent in early modern English history.
II
In their defences of the royal supremacy against a newly vigorous Catholic assault during the 1560s, apologists for the Church of England often insisted that the doctrine of supremacy was not merely one of flattery. Tellingly, John Jewel insisted that he and his fellow clergy flattered monarchs ‘as S Ambrose flattered Theodosius’.Footnote 22 This claim was not a facile one. Although we might balk at Walter Haddon's description of Elizabeth as one who ‘gladly frequenteth publique sermons’,Footnote 23 we should not overlook the rhetoric of counsel propounded in early ElizabethanFootnote 24 tracts on the supremacy.
One major defence of supremacy was that it was merely jurisdictional governance, not spiritual priestly power, officially asserted in the 1559 Injunctions, and oft repeated thereafter.Footnote 25 The second was that the church's royal governor heard godly counsel about how to govern it. This featured especially prominently in Alexander Nowell's Reproufe of M. Dorman, John Bridges's Supremacie of Christian princes, and Robert Horne's Answeare to Marian clergy who refused to swear the Oath of Supremacy. These were neither insignificant tracts (they were certainly lengthy), nor were they penned by unimportant men. Nowell was dean of St Pauls; his catechism would be recommended for use in the 1571 canons. Horne was bishop of Winchester; Bridges would become dean of Salisbury in 1577 and bishop of Oxford in 1604. Significantly, a discourse of counsel was shared by the Calvinist (puritan-inclined) Nowell and the later critic of puritanism, Bridges.
In the course of showing how Elizabethan clergy were better than Catholic ones at telling monarchs their duties, Nowell offered an unusually explicit account of why counsel was needed: ‘authoritie and knowledge doo not alwaies ioyne’.Footnote 26 Sometimes he compared the clergy's advice on religious questions to that of lay counsellors on civil ones, elsewhere he insisted on the superiority of ecclesiastical counsel. ‘Christian Princes, ought to vse the aduise of the godly learned and specially of the Cleargie’; no one is ‘more mete’ to provide religious advice than a ‘godly learned Bishop’.Footnote 27 Nowell knew that ‘knowlege to consider & geue cou[n]cel, & authoritie to determine and make lawes, are not all one’, but if royal supremacy created binding law, the content of such laws – in particular the determination of difficult doctrinal questions – rested in those who had knowledge.Footnote 28 That knowledge varied with circumstances: ‘neither Priestes nor Princes, in that they be Priestes, or Princes, but in that they say or commaund laufull, and godlie things, are in matiers ecclesiasticall to be obeied’.Footnote 29 Kings are not to accept at face value what their preachers assert, but must find out divine law for themselves, and they must sometimes use their jurisdictional power to remove ungodly bishops who pervert God's orders.Footnote 30
This was aptly demonstrated by fourth-century examples. Constantine reformed the church and rightly judged the quarrels of his quibbling bishops.Footnote 31 But the heretic Constantius was wrong to sack learned orthodox bishops and Hosius warned him of his wicked mistake: ‘that he beinge both vnlearned, and infected with errour, should not take vppon hym to teache learned and godlie Bishoppes’, for he ‘should rather learne of them’.Footnote 32 Pre-eminently, Ambrose had corrected Theodosius. For although Nowell occasionally asserted the superiority of the emperor to the clergy, of the superiority of him who invites and receives over him who gives counsel,Footnote 33 he more often boldly proclaimed the greater authority of the ecclesiastic whose godly advice a prince must obey:
Princes must geue place to Bishoppes, as to their superiours in their owne peculiar and particular offices, wherein Princes haue nothing to doo: or to speake more properlie, the Princes must geue place to Gods woorde ministred by the Bishops, and other ministers Ecclesiasticall, and ought … patiently to heare their vices by them with the same woorde of God, and by the authoritie thereof rebuked: & if they doo deserue by contempt against the same, to be also excommunicated, quietly to suffer the same.Footnote 34
Important here is the use of ‘must’, not ‘should’; the insistence that all preachers, not just bishops, have this authority over princes; and the permitted pursuit of that criticism to excommunication. Ambrose, Nowell said, had excommunicated Theodosius. Albeit Nowell denied that excommunication legitimized the overthrow of a monarch, he was still atypical in using the word ‘excommunication’.Footnote 35
English Protestant apologists rarely ventured so far: it was the Catholic Stapleton who spoke of Ambrose excommunicating Theodosius.Footnote 36 But Nowell was not alone in claiming that the Word vocalized by the minister was something to which kings were subject. Bridges stated that the minister ‘surmounteth farre the boundes of the Princes office, in respect of his spirituall ministerie’.Footnote 37 There was a dual asymmetry between a priest with a superior function and a monarch with superior jurisdictional oversight of that function.Footnote 38 Just as to ask counsel about policy was not to concede sovereignty, so to obey the ministry of good priests did not expunge royal supremacy – not least because Catholics were wrong when they asserted clerical superiority stretched to deposing the prince.Footnote 39 When Uzziah burned incense in the Ark, he was warned by the priests but struck down by God.Footnote 40 Thus clergy ‘may, yea they oughte’ to ‘exhorte’ and ‘rebuke’ the prince ‘and lay before him the terrible threates of God’, but they should not depose him; just as Ambrose ‘told the Emperor of his dutie, and so should al godly Bishops do’.Footnote 41 Bridges's godly bishop was:
bounde bothe to disobey the vices [of the prince], and to reproue the Prince for them, and to terrifie him with the threates of Gods wrathe, althoughe it coste him his life … yet is he not bounde to rebell … Yea he is bounde to the contrarie, to obey.Footnote 42
This classic statement of passive obedience both neatly refuted Catholic doctrines of papal deposition and maintained the clerical duty of moral criticism. Of course a godly monarch would hear and gladly act upon godly counsel. Indeed, this merely complemented their good rule in temporals: ‘Princes shoulde aske counsell in all ecclesiasticall matters of their godlye learned clergie, and they should aske it of God … the Prince ought to aske counsell also in euery weightie ciuill affayre.’Footnote 43 But monarchs had to be careful, for they could easily be abused by evil ecclesiastical counsellors, and indeed had been in times past – hence the rise of papal power, hence Henry VIII's defence of the seven sacraments, hence Mary I's unfortunate reign.Footnote 44 Ungodly counsellors could and should be removed by monarchs.Footnote 45
Warnings against evil counsel complemented encouragement to hear godly clergy. Horne and Haddon explained how emperors ‘beguiled by the false Bishoppes’ had been wheedled into erroneous decisions and into granting clergy unfair privileges.Footnote 46 John Aylmer similarly blamed bad rule on ‘the lewde perswasions of … clattering Clargie … spiritual spiders’.Footnote 47 But this problem was no excuse for entirely eschewing episcopal counsel. Charlemagne, Horne explained, was ‘moued with the zeale, that all Princes ought to haue’ but lacked ‘the pure knowledge that good and faithful Bishops’ should have given him. By contrast, Constantine, ‘truely taught of the moste Christian Bishoppes’, was praised for his religious policy.Footnote 48 And while most of Jewel's Apology focused on the ability of monarchs to remove ungodly clergy, his Defence later explained how ‘the Highest Prince is but a Subiect’ when being taught matters of faith; ‘inferiour, not onely to a Bishop … but also to euery Inferiour Prieste’.Footnote 49
Such sentiments signal how the superiority of the ecclesiastical counsellor to the monarch could be asserted without a theory of divine right episcopacy. Archbishop Matthew Parker, who showed no sign of believing in anything other than iure humano episcopacy, was unafraid to challenge what he felt were mistaken church policies by Elizabeth. ‘I would be sorry’, he told Cecil in 1561, ‘that the clergy should have cause to shew disobedience, with oportet Deo obedire magis quam hominibus’ (Acts 5:29). In 1568 he insisted that he ‘will not be abashed to say to my prince that I think in conscience’.Footnote 50 This was exemplified in the letter which he and his fellow bishops wrote to Elizabeth complaining about images in the Chapel Royal. The letter began humbly, offering obedience. It then embedded evidence against the use of images within two invocations of conscience. And it offered a parrhésiastic apologia for the bishops' behaviour through familiar examples:
We pray your Majesty also not to be offended with this our plainness and liberty, which all good and Christian princes have ever taken in good part at the hands of godly bishops [whereupon Ambrose's fortieth epistle to Theodosius is cited]. These, and such like speeches of St. Ambrose, Theodosius, and Valentinianus, the emperors did always take in good part; and we doubt not but your Grace will do the like.Footnote 51
Similar language can be found in 1566, when the bishops invoked both their own and their Queen's duty to God to care for religion. And it was not impossible to apply it to temporal matters, such as the vexed question of Elizabeth's marriage, which the bishops urged ‘not … as counsellers in policy, but as Christ's ministers in vigilancy, loquentes ad cor, and burdening your Majesty's conscience in charity; which is a case incident to our ministry, evermore favourably heard of princes, and faithfully observed of pastors’.Footnote 52
Little was said by Elizabethan theologians about how and where counsel was to be given. Nevertheless, they rarely spoke in institutional terms: mentions of synods and convocations are totally lacking. On occasion, the rhetoric of counsel did slip into the invocation of councils, in particular parliament, normally in order to assert the common consent of the realm to the Elizabethan church.Footnote 53 This posed the danger of the need to hear counsel sliding into the duty to take heed of councils (privy or parliamentary); but generally advice was depicted as informal or as coming from the pulpit.
This provides an important nuance to current historiography on Elizabeth's queenship. Scholars have recently argued that Elizabeth's court and councils were filled with men who, imbued from their humanist education with the principles of the republican Cicero, desired to mitigate royal power. Although willing to be subjects of a monarch, these men also conceived of themselves as citizens of a commonwealth, wanting mixed rather than ‘mere’ royal power. Furthermore, they supported rebellions driven by Protestant theories of resistance and tyrannicide against monarchs in Scotland, the Low Countries, and France. The regime, these historians conclude, was fissured at its core between the cautious absolutist Elizabeth and her activist godly councillors such as William Cecil and Francis Walsingham.Footnote 54 The complaints by such men that Elizabeth ignored their advice can engender the sense that a strong rhetoric of counsel implies a theory of mixed polity, that every plea to hear advice was an eruption of the classical republicanism bubbling away beneath the monarchist crust of Elizabeth's government. But counsel was employed not only by those wishing to limit royal power or men secretly favouring a mixed polity; it was a crucial part of absolutist discourse. Counsel (especially of the non-institutionalized variety) signified kingship as opposed to tyranny, not mixed polity as opposed to monarchy. If Elizabeth, as has recently been asserted, took ad hoc counsel from a variety of courtiers, and not just the institutional privy council, this was absolutist counsel in action.Footnote 55
Theorists of imperium wanted Elizabeth to hear counsel, but would not go so far as to insist that she act upon it. It is true that there were some – Cecil perhaps amongst them – who did at times step over this narrow boundary, insisting that the queen must act upon the advice they repeatedly gave to her, refusing to consider her (in)decision as final.Footnote 56 But a strong doctrine of counsel on its own did not invalidate sovereignty, civil or ecclesiastical. Crying to their queen to take heed of their advice, practising their counsel in sermons, Jewel, Nowell, et al., did not necessarily agree with royal policies, but they sought to use, not restrain, imperium. Their own free speech was buttressed not with Ciceronian examples, but early Christian ones. Christian imperial Rome, not pagan Republican Rome, was the answer to Tridentine Catholicism. That the end of Elizabeth's reign saw a simultaneous strengthening of divine right monarchy and iure divino episcopacy should not surprise us, for imperium and consilium were, after all, partners.
III
Over time the Elizabethan church and state changed. Alongside the rise of authoritarian conformism under Whitgift's primacy went the assertion of iure divino episcopacy and monarchy, a shift dramatic enough to be labelled Elizabeth's ‘second reign’ by John Guy.Footnote 57 What constituted a claim for divine right episcopacy, however, is less clear than might initially seem. It might involve an assertion that bishops had governed the church since apostolic times. More clearly, it was the claim that Christ himself had ordained episcopacy in distinguishing the Twelve Apostles from the Seventy Disciples. Most securely, it meant arguing that episcopacy could not be abolished. Bridges said Christ had approved the Apostles' creation of bishops, and this amounted to divine institution. Richard Hooker allowed that the abolition of bishops was possible, though he said Christ had created them.Footnote 58 Only Matthew Sutcliffe, Hadrian Saravia, and Thomas Bilson made episcopacy unchangeable.Footnote 59 Nevertheless, there was a shift from justifying episcopacy as the most preferable church government, ultimately authorized by the monarch, to denying royal ability to change it. Yet this did not seem to affect notions of counsel.
Late Elizabethan writers continued to insist that counsel was a moral obligation which did not detract from sovereignty. Archbishop Whitgift noted that Constantine had heard episcopal advice which ‘nothing at all abridged his authority’. Would any godly prince act otherwise? The insistence that ‘it is no subiection to follow Counsaile’ was made in an ecclesiastical context, but it had a wider resonance for the growing idea of absolute monarchy. When Bridges stated that the prince was ‘bounde’ to ask advice on legislation, he spoke of a moral (directive) obligation, not an enforceable (coactive) one, and therefore kept royal supremacy intact.Footnote 60 This distinction was also suggested by Richard Cosin in 1584: ‘it is … honourable to the prince to suffer himselfe to be directed by godlie ecclesiasticall lawes, not impugning his prerogatiue’.Footnote 61 The absolutist tone of Cosin's comment – a prince self-limiting, led by directive not coercive authority – shows how ideas of monarchs being absolute, but not arbitrary, in part emerged from an ecclesiological debate, all of these comments made in works defending kings and bishops against Presbyterianism.Footnote 62
This was absolute kingship, but not arbitrary tyranny (abused authority). Any leanings towards the latter could be rebuked. Late Elizabethan authors faced up to the question of what happened when a monarch did not automatically act in a godly manner. They keenly refuted the notion, denounced as papist and Presbyterian, that a preacher could excommunicate a sovereign.Footnote 63 But asserting both this and the need to rebuke erring rulers was extremely difficult, not least because the examples cited could be interpreted as excommunications – as with Ambrose and Theodosius. Bridges thought the bishop ‘somewhat more rough than needed, vnto so penitent a Prince’ but freely admitted that ‘not onely Ambrose, but also Theodosius, is of all writers highly commended’.Footnote 64 The future archbishop Richard Bancroft more dangerously spoke in the early 1580s of Ambrose's excommunication of Theodosius. But this was due less to his ecclesiology (in the early 1580s Bancroft seemed to think church government adiaphorous) than a sign of his sources: Theodoret and Sozomen.Footnote 65 Conversely, despite advocating iure divino episcopacy and thinking Theodosius excommunicated, Sutcliffe carefully explained how ‘it was no iudiciall power, nor superior iurisdiction, which [Ambrose] exercised … but such as any priest might have vsed, who is bound to declare to princes their duties, out of the word of God, although he haue no superior iurisdiction’.Footnote 66
There was an important distinction between rebuke or admonition on the one hand, and deposition of monarchs on the other. One was necessary counsel, the other illegitimate judicature. Furthermore, as Sutcliffe's use of ‘any priest’ shows, due admonition was not a monopoly of bishops but possible for all churchmen.
This seems to be Hooker's argument in the final fragmented book of the Laws. ‘A duetifull religious and holy refusall to admitt Notorious transgressors’ to communion is something ‘every king [is] bound to abide at the handes of any Minister of God’, as Theodosius with Ambrose.Footnote 67 When other defenders of the Church of England spoke of ‘excommunication’, this was (Hooker said) what they meant.Footnote 68 He explained it was best not to denounce kings from the pulpit, a sentiment which would be repeatedly emphasized. Monarchs who were ‘admonished, counselled, comforted, and if need were, reproved’ ‘in private (for with Princes this is the most effectual way of doing good)’ would not reject counsel, but ‘grant a kinde of Superiority’ to their counsellor.Footnote 69 This would, theorists agreed, reinforce their godly credentials, protect the authority of the church, and was, they insisted, what actually happened in England. For historians this is frustrating: perfectly functioning ecclesiastical counsel, because private, would be irrecoverable now.
IV
The partnership of divine right monarchy and episcopacy reached its peak in the early Stuart period. The need to defend the Oath of Allegiance renewed attacks on the papal deposing power, but denying deposition did not preclude offering counsel. Even Great Britain's Solomon needed ecclesiastical assistance in governing his church, whilst his son's proclivities towards accommodating Catholicism also provoked acts of counsel.
William Goodwin's sermon to James in 1614 provides a good example. Goodwin used Anglican counsel as a foil to papal deposition. Kings come ‘to our Pulpit, not to our Tribunal; where wee may reproue, not chastise, reprehend, not punish, depresse, not depose’. This did not mean supine sycophancy, for it was a pastor's duty to denounce a congregation's sins ‘till their eares tingle’. Princely heresy, idolatry, and apostasy were ‘to be Censured’, and of course the standard example followed. ‘We exempt not Kings, from the iust censure and reprehension of the Church. Wee honour the Courage and resolution of Ambrose, wee admire the moderation and submission of Theodosius.’ Nor did lack of coercive authority leave the church powerless, for God's Word in the preacher's mouth ‘hath in it a kinde of Omnipotencie’.Footnote 70 Robert Wakeman warned against ‘fawning and flattering Parasites’ – Satan's wiles; George Carleton, future bishop of Chichester, linked flattery to papalism.Footnote 71 Carleton mounted a vehement attack on the papal deposing power, but (like Goodwin) contrasted this with the model for Anglican correction of kings, Ambrose. Ambrose rightly defied his prince in order to defend true doctrine, but in so doing offered ‘a true rule of obedience … courage, godlinesse, and exact obedience, all truly tempered’.Footnote 72
Jacobean clergy urged that ecclesiastical counsel be integrated into state policymaking. The royal chaplain Richard Eedes condemned those who said ‘godlinesse is no good courtier, religion too simple to bee a counsellour’. Instead let ‘the voyce of piety be heard in the chapels and clossets … the face of pietie be seene in the presence, and the heart of piety dwell in the most priuy chambers of the courts of princes’.Footnote 73 Laud insisted not only that God should be granted a place in councils, but that He was owed ‘the highest room at the council table’.Footnote 74 Eedes explained to James how sermons helped him hear truth, ‘that stranger in the eares of princes’, but which ‘in a loue to their good, is no enemie to their greatnesse’. God's Word grants kings liberty from ‘the tyrannie of their own affections, which otherwise will rule and ouerrule both them and their kingdoms’.Footnote 75 Divine counsel was the solution to tyranny diagnosed in Aristotelian fashion.
This solution only worked if kings heard counsel. Eedes bemoaned those who sat through sermons but who never let their content touch their hearts, perhaps recalling his chaplaincy to Elizabeth I.Footnote 76 John Donne's answer was to urge preachers not to speak ‘of the duties of Kings, in publike and popular Congregations’, nor to ‘chide the Kings openly, and threaten the Kings publiquely’, but rather to speak in a ‘humble and reserved manner’.Footnote 77 ‘Bitter and satyrical’Footnote 78 preaching angered monarchs; decent and orderly language might persuade them. Discretion was the route to direction.
Ecclesiastical counsel was recognized when it was practised. Prophetic and patristic personae were willingly taken on and applied to its givers. When Charles I in ‘the Graces’ set out to appease the Anglo-Irish Catholic community, he provoked ecclesiastical admonition. Malcolm Hamilton, archbishop of Cashel, adopted the persona of an Old Testament prophet urging reformation when petitioning the king. Charles, like an early Christian emperor, toyed with yielding to Arians and heretics ‘for pollicy sake, yet the true Orthodox Bishops did stoutly stand bothe againste the heretiques and against the Emperors’.Footnote 79 James Ussher, archbishop of Armagh, told his king that laymen should submit to prophets on religious questions. Samuel Ward, master of Sidney Sussex, Cambridge, wrote to Ussher praising ‘your parrhésia in the sermon before his Majesty’. And Ussher's quondam chaplain and early biographer wrote that Ussher could not restrain himself once he entered the pulpit, lauding one who ‘even before kings … was not ashamed’ – an echo of Psalm 119.Footnote 80
Charles was not a king who tended to be amenable to counsel if it did not contain the advice which he wished to hear. Perhaps he was more open to ecclesiastical than to lay counsel, for Anthony Milton has recently suggested that he did take some note of sermons against sacrilege in the 1640s.Footnote 81 His general inability to accept criticism, however, alongside his ineptitude at even pretending to hear it, did much to destroy his kingship. The 1640s reminded Anglicans that deposition was threatened by Presbyterians and Independents as well as by popes. Henry Hammond reiterated his church's belief in the inexcommunicability of kings.Footnote 82 In the 1650s Bishop Bramhall used the idea of clerical counsel to legitimate the English Reformation against its Catholic opponents. Reformed by a partnership of crown and clerical advice, the English church perfectly blended royal and ecclesiastical authority. Kings were supreme in ecclesiasticals, but ‘not as fully, nor as absolutely’ as in temporals. Accepting Henrician supremacy was not the ‘extravagant expressions, or oylie insinuations of parasiticall flatterers’, for it was possible for ‘a Politicall Head’ to be under ‘an Ecclesiasticall Pastor’.Footnote 83 Bramhall explained that: ‘Though we give to Sovereign Princes within their own Dominions a Legislative power in Ecclesiasticall causes, yet not without good advise, especially in … high points of Faith … and who are more fit Counselors for Princes in such cases then Synods, and Bishops?’ Pastors were the ‘proper Counsellors in Church affairs’. Kings who ‘have a learned Councel of Ecclesiasticall Persons to direct them’ were ‘never to be considered as ignorant Laymen’.Footnote 84 Notably, Bramhall still spoke of directive, not coercive, ecclesiastical authority and expressed no doubts about sovereign acceptance of counsel. His new king, Charles II, would utterly fail to live up to such expectations. After 1662, the partnership between church and crown was restored in law but shaky in practice, as kings courted dissenters and Catholics. Under such circumstances ecclesiastical counsel was more necessary than ever before.
V
The Interregnum proved that Anglican communion could survive shorn of establishment. Although a narrow and adamantine church was restored in 1662, churchmen's confidence in royal support never returned. Plenty of professions of an alliance between church and crown can be found, for Charles II, James II, and their subjects frequently did employ Anglican royalist rhetoric against dissenters. But monarchical adherence to the established church was dubious under first a suspected, thereafter an open, Catholic.Footnote 85 Anglicans sought to channel royal authority into supporting them rather than patronizing Catholics and dissenters, again by emphasizing the king's need to hear their counsel. Even John Gauden, who had conformed during the 1650s, and who favoured moderated episcopacy, had a high regard for ecclesiastical counsel. In 1661, his Pillar of gratitude for the restoration of bishops and their authority offered a series of elaborate metaphors for the place of ecclesiastical counsel in the polity. A Christian state without it is as a body without a soul; and if the king – the pilot of the ship of state – needs counsellors for his compass, the bishops are the magnetic needle of that compass.Footnote 86 Such metaphors could be employed defensively to protect the church. The high churchman Herbert Thorndike argued that the substance of ecclesiastical law was determined by the ‘mature advice of persons competent’ and he denied the king could comprehend nonconformity ‘without the authority and against the consent of the Church’. William Falkner, a pastor who thought Thorndike too clericalist in many ways, nevertheless agreed with him that churchmen provided ‘directive’ moral authority whilst kings gave decisions coactive judicial sanction – terms familiar in absolutist discourse.Footnote 87 In 1660, the future vice-chancellor of Oxford John Lloyd wrote that the king had greater legal power than his bishops, but that he ‘ought not to … make laws purely or properly Ecclesiastical, without their concurrence in Counsel and consent’. To care for the church and for his subjects' salvation was ‘the peculiar and proper work of a Christian King, which he may well doe without the authority of Bishops and presbyters; but which he may best doe with their grave advice and counsel’.Footnote 88
When discussing fourth-century Christian history, Restoration churchmen contrasted true orthodox clerical counsel with corrupt Arian flattery of heterodox emperors. Samuel Parker explained that emperors had mistakenly used their power against the church or good churchmen because they were too weak to resist the enticing flattery of Arian evil counsellors. Constantius yielded to the Eusebians because ‘his Ears [were] wholly posses't by his Women, Eunuchs and Courtiers’; this faction had then seduced Valens ‘by flattering him in the grossness of his folly, [they] got the entire management of him’.Footnote 89 By contrast, Ambrose had insisted that he could not ‘crouch to so mean a Flattery, as to forget my Sacerdotal Trust’ to protect the church.Footnote 90 When the Arian emperor Constantius undermined the Catholic church, Bishops Athanasius, Hosius, Hilary, and Liberius ‘freely and boldly reproved him for it to his own face’.Footnote 91 Bishop Basil had rebuked the prefect Modestus with ‘the true old primitive Spirit, resolution adorn'd with Civility’, and the emperor had loved him for it.Footnote 92 These characters had contemporaneous resonance for Parker. Crafty statesmen whose ‘Counsel is nothing but flattery’, he warned in 1672, were enticing Charles II away from his real duty to uphold the episcopal church. Reflecting on this period in his History of his own time, Parker complained that Lord Keeper Bridgeman (son of a bishop, and involved in one of the comprehension proposals of 1667) had upheld the establishment until overcome by the ‘haughty and yet flattering brow’ of clergy pursuing toleration.Footnote 93 Conversely, Archbishop Sheldon had thwarted proposals to suspend the Act of Uniformity in 1662 by entering the privy council, uninvited, and denouncing the idea. Sheldon's ‘sharpness of wit … copious eloquence, and … weight of reason … did not so much persuade as command the assent of the King’.Footnote 94
Parker's emphasis on counsel echoed that of other Restoration churchmen. Simon Lowth argued that princes were ‘to be urg'd and taught publickly, as are others, and particularly in private, and where due opportunity to be severely warned’.Footnote 95 Falkner praised Ambrose for retaining the obedience of a subject while offering due admonition. Churchmen should correct but not excommunicate kings.Footnote 96 This not only served kings by maintaining passive obedience, it also cared for their souls and was the best way to do the service required of good subjects. Gauden combined classical accounts of reason and the passions with his clerical position when he told Charles II that ‘it will always best become us rather to offend you by telling you the truth in a decent manner, than to betray you to those sinful infirmities or passions which are your greatest enemies, next to your flatterers’.Footnote 97
If Charles II was all too willing to succumb to his sinful infirmities and passions, he also managed to retain Anglican obedience for the majority of the time. Not so his Catholic brother. By 1688, Anglicans were frustrated by James's assault on their church's established privileges and a number of preachers expressed their anger over it, not least in the Anglican Chapel Royal, which James absented himself from but did not abolish. In 1687 John Tillotson attacked conversion to Catholicism when he ‘magnified those who … choose rather to be God's favourites than the King's’.Footnote 98 But one example in particular stands out: the sermon in the Chapel Royal by Thomas Ken, bishop of Bath and Wells, on Passion Sunday 1688. Ken was no fiery puritan. He put his church above his obedience to the king in May 1688, as one of the Seven Bishops who protested against reading James's Declaration of Indulgence. But he put loyalty to James above Protestantism when he was deprived for refusing to swear allegiance to William and Mary after the Revolution. That Ken, one of the mildest of the nonjurors, spoke out so fiercely shows how much James's actions had annoyed him. In 1687, the king had used Bath Abbey, without Ken's permission, to touch for the king's evil, employing a pre-Reformation service prefaced by a Catholic missionary sermon.Footnote 99
When Ken had last preached at the Chapel, in March 1688, it had been packed with a crowd including thirty nobles and Princess Anne;Footnote 100 and we might venture to think it was the same in April. Ken began with a parrhésiastic apology for his ‘bold undertaking’ in telling a royal court unwelcome truths. As was appropriate for Passion Day, he emphasized the need to repent of sins. But he did so in the guise of a prophet, citing Amos rebuking Jeroboam in what Ken called the chapel royal, and Micah pressing Hezekiah to repent. ‘The assistance of God's spirit’ made Micah ‘wonderfully successful’, so much so that the king not only obeyed, but ‘liked the preacher the better, for the conscientious discharge of his prophetic duty’. Ken described how God aided the repentant Judean church to triumph over the tyranny of the Babylonians and their allies the Edomites. In a perfect description of Anglican passive obedience, he explained how the Jews would ‘subject their persons to the Babylonish government, but not prostitute their consciences to the Babylonish idolatry’. He refused to make the contemporary application wholly clear, except that Judah was the Church of England, urged to ‘fervent prayers and tears’ as the route to relief from tyranny. But he hardly needed to: the Babylonish antichrist obviously meant the Catholics; the Edomite rebels from the true church undoubtedly signified the dissenters. Most boldly of all, Ken insisted he trusted that James's ‘royal candour’ would permit counsel but throughout cheekily emphasized the need for the king's personal attendance for advice to be effective.Footnote 101 Of course James was not present, and when he heard of the sermon his ‘royal candour’ manifested itself in a summons to Ken to explain himself. Nothing daunted, the bishop replied that had James ‘not neglected his own duty of being present’, such problems would not have arisen.Footnote 102 Like Latimer and Grindal, Ken could speak before kings without shame.
Such claims were reiterated a few weeks later, when Ken, five of his fellow bishops, and Archbishop Sancroft petitioned James to rescind his order to read his reissued Declaration of Indulgence from every parish pulpit. Furious, James had the Seven Bishops committed on a charge of seditious libel. At their trial, they argued that a humble request, delivered to the king in private, was not sedition but counsel. Sancroft planned a speech in which he would argue: ‘That as all his brethren, the Bishops of this Church, so he more eminently, were counsellors to the King by their office, in matters ecclesiasticall, as the temporall Peers were of his counsell in lay matters, and his judges in matters of law.’Footnote 103 This echoed a number of themes of ecclesiastical counsel. It also bore a strong implication (given the context) of the moral duty of kings to hear it. In fact, Bishop Lloyd was even more explicit about this: Sancroft ‘by his place is Counsellor to his Majesty, and … ought to be advised with in all things belonging to the Church’.Footnote 104
Counsel was not the only language the bishops used, and their claim of a right to it did not convince everyone. The dissenter Henry Care argued that ‘a Bishop's private Opinion may be warrant enough for him to speak when he is requir'd, but not to reprove a Prince upon pretence of Duty’.Footnote 105 But the deterioration in the relationship between king and counsellor symbolized a crumbling regime. In the autumn of 1688 James rescinded many of his Catholicizing strategies, turning to Anglicans like Sancroft and Nottingham for advice. Having lost all trust in the king by this point, they refused to aid him, despite staunchly denying any support for the imminently invading William of Orange. Counsel could only succeed when both recipient and giver were fully committed to it.
VI
Having demonstrated the frequent invocation of clerical counsel, it is useful to compare it to other genres of advice-giving, to highlight their similarities and differences. Five aspects may be analysed: why counsel was necessary, who should give it, how to provide it, exemplary accounts of it, and its impact on sovereignty.
First, for all their insistence on royal temporal and ecclesiastical prerogative, theorists of counsel recognized the inability of kings to rule alone. Monarchs made the final decision on policy, but it was right and proper for them to hear advice on what to do. However wise the ruler, the defect of the single intellect was an ever-present problem. Counsel got round the need, posited by Aristotle, for royal virtue to be superlative, i.e. to exceed the collective value of everyone else (of course, Aristotle had deliberately set an impossible standard for kingship).Footnote 106 Lawmaking involved both will, supplied exclusively by the king, and reason, used by the king but supplemented by others. Parliamentary counsellors were reticent on these points, justifying the role of the king's ‘great council’ with historical rather than Aristotelian authority. Debate over parliament's rights in the 1680s, for example, used (and fuelled) medieval feudal history. Humanist counsellors thought differently. Elyot, Starkey, and Erasmus emphasized the danger of royal reason succumbing to the passions, especially if tempted by evil flattery. Ecclesiastical counsellors had a parallel case, applying their theodicy to the notion of kings as little gods on earth. In God, will and reason were perfectly fused, a pattern which kings should follow but could not replicate without extra reason from counsellors. They were to be thought omnipotent, but could not be believed omniscient. Richard Eedes thus explained that the greatest men had most need of ‘advice in wisedome, & assistance in power’.Footnote 107
If humanist and ecclesiastical counsellors agreed on the first question, they diverged on the second: who provided advice. Humanist treatises on counsel focused on its impact on the counsellor rather than the counselled and whether there was any point providing it. Ecclesiastical counsellors seemed in little doubt on this point, simply justifying their role in providing advice. In so doing, they often compared churchmen's advice on religious policy with that of the judges on legal questions. Archbishop Sancroft did this by arguing that bishops had a right to give counsel ‘by their office’. Behind Sancroft's ex officio justification for counsel lay claims of clerical expertise. William Cave spoke in the 1680s of the clergy's ‘Education, and presumed Knowledge’, Richard Hooker in the 1590s of their ‘exacter judgement in matters divine than kings’.Footnote 108 Claims for expertise in fact widened the arena of potential counsellors. Perhaps surprisingly, churchmen offered a theory of ecclesiastical, not episcopal, counsel. Those keenest to insist on divine right episcopacy, separated by divine order from other clergy, were loud in asserting that every clergyman could teach the prince. Preachers were authorized by God's Word to correct kings; indeed, they were obliged to do so. As the book of Ezekiel told them, they were liable for any royal faults left uncorrected.
Clerical counsel was strikingly informal, insofar as its theorists were extraordinarily reticent about institutionalizing ecclesiastical counsel. They did, it was true, occasionally defend bishops' seats in the Lords and the role of convocation. These were especially important to justify in the Long Parliament (1640–2), in the late 1670s, and (for convocation) the 1690s. Intriguingly, those defences often involved medieval history and ancient constitutionalist arguments rather than patristic or classical ones. But overwhelmingly theorists spoke of counsel outside institutions not council in them. Perhaps Reformation laws restricting convocation's power of debate meant counsel was more feasible than council. Such fluidity may in fact have been advantageous, for it allowed counsel to continue even when parliament and convocation were not sitting.Footnote 109 This lack of concern for institutional counsel probably did not derive from satisfaction that it was working, i.e. being taken. Instead, it had more to do with concern for the third question, the manner of advising a monarch.
Negotiating criticism while upholding due deference was an issue which all varieties of counsel addressed. All used a classical dichotomy between flattery, appealing to the passions; and counsel, appealing to reason. Erasmus fulminated against flatterers, but suggested adding ‘a touch of pleasantness in manner’ to admonition, and giving it privately. MPs not only began critical speeches with apologias for frankness, but also worried about debate outside of parliament. Ecclesiastical counsellors defended modest and private speech, even if providing it in a quasi-public pulpit, in a sermon they later printed. This had a vital legitimating function. Samuel Parker argued that Anglican counsel was ‘private, and prudent, and modest’ and so legitimate, whereas Presbyterians haranguing kings from the pulpit was not. Not the least stimulus to such defences of what Parker called ‘Resolution adorn'd with civility’ was the idea that this would result in successful counsel, as Hooker and John Donne argued. Political motives led Donne to oppose ‘proclaim[ing] the fault of the kings in the eares of the people’, but giving a speech appropriate to one's audience was also part of rhetorical decorum.Footnote 110 Yet ecclesiastical counsellors were equally concerned not to become flattering sycophants.
The balance between deference and honesty was pursued in the examples of ecclesiastical counsel cited, the fourth question. Nobody mentioned Grindal, perhaps because his case was too contentious, perhaps because he had not succeeded. Only Henry Dodwell discussed Thomas Becket; possibly due to him being too papalist – or perhaps because he had not succeeded.Footnote 111 Frequently used examples might be Old Testament prophets, but overwhelmingly they were patristic. The fourth century offered so many good patterns and so many good warnings that many discussions of counsel emerged in ecclesiastical history. Constantius's apostasy to Arianism was blamed on evil ecclesiastical counsellors who flattered him. Conversely, a phalanx of godly bishops had defied imperial heresy: Athanasius, Basil, Hilary, Hosius. As we have seen, almost every early modern writer who spoke of ecclesiastical counsel cited Ambrose and Theodosius. The use and (because of Theodoret) misconception of this example was far more prevalent than Collinson's article suggested. Its frequent citation is a reminder to historians of the importance of looking at ecclesiastical history and patristic scholarship, themes sorely in need of historiographical attention.
Patristic study helped ecclesiological debate, which was especially heated in England because of the idiosyncratic royal supremacy. Nevertheless, the discussion of ecclesiastical counsel and the ecclesiastical prerogative reflected a broader sense of counsel and sovereignty, the fifth question. All counsellors – ecclesiastical, parliamentary, and humanist – insisted that advice aided, not impugned, sovereignty. Francis Bacon put this very clearly in his essay ‘Of counsel’: ‘Soveraignty is married to Counsell’; albeit cynically encouraging kings to pretend that they had thought of the good ideas which really came from counsellors.Footnote 112 Elizabethan clergy, Jacobean preachers, and Restoration theologians all insisted that counsel and the royal supremacy went hand in hand, because counsel was service, not an imposition. The seventeenth-century Anglican divine Jeremy Taylor said that counsel was part of friendship, so that enforcing advice was acting not as a friend, but as a schoolmaster. Hadrian Saravia, the late-Elizabethan theorist of divine right episcopacy and monarchy, stated that kings and bishops should take ‘sweete counsell together like friends’, since when this broke down they conceived ‘false opinions of each others gouernement’.Footnote 113
Counsel lubricated the relationship between bishops and kings, as it did that between monarchs and the wider political elite, but how far could it be pushed? Most writers stated that kings could not be excommunicated. Those willing to use the word explained that they would not give it a judicial dimension, distancing themselves from Catholic and Presbyterian writers. Nevertheless, the possibility remains that ecclesiastical counsel, because pertaining to the soul not the body, might have been capable of being pushed further and harder than lay counsel – a theory which is probably impossible to prove. It was harder to get rid of ecclesiastical than it was lay counsellors: parliaments were dissolved on the accession of a new king, privy councillors could be removed, favourites might fall. But a new monarch inherited their predecessor's bishops and deprivation of them was hard. Yet ecclesiastical counsellors did not enjoy immunity. Grindal's correspondence earned him sequestration; Elizabeth wanted to deprive him. Archbishop Abbott's condemnation of the Spanish Match was countered by the threat of house arrest and his criticism of Sibthorpe's absolutist sermon saw him banished from court.Footnote 114 If ecclesiastical counsel was ubiquitously expressed, when it was distasteful to kings its success in practice proved remarkably evanescent.
VII
My planned broader study of counsel of all varieties will shed light on some central aspects of early modern kingship: the politics of access, relationships within and between political elites, the dynamics of male versus female monarchy, and the relative roles of formalized bodies such as parliaments and privy councils compared to fluid and informal courtly advice. It will aid understanding of the relationships between, and relative extent of, ideas drawn from the Ciceronian, Stoic, and Aristotelian heritage; ancient constitutionalist use of Anglo-Saxon and medieval history, and medieval scholastic concepts of counsel. How far were these distinct – and did early modern writers on counsel differentiate them or use them eclectically? This article has only offered some thoughts preliminary to that wider study, and sketched one genre of counsel. But some conclusions can already be drawn.
Counsel operated in a four-dimensional framework set by the adviser, the recipient, the forum wherein advice was given, and its political and religious circumstances. Debate on it was inflected by its direct or indirect, public or private provision, its role as pre-emptive advice or ex post facto rebuke. The language of ecclesiastical counsel had its own distinct concerns, but also shared in other conciliar ideas. Not only has its role been neglected, but that neglect has been damaging, for it highlights three important things. First, it reminds historians of religion that the royal supremacy was not intended as an Erastian takeover of the church by the state, but a partnership of godly magistrate and godly bishops. Secondly, this study is of wider significance to historians of political thought and practice who explore the temporal as well as ecclesiastical prerogative. While passive obedience and divine right monarchy were crucial in Anglican theorizing, a rich seam of discourse about how to ensure that kingship did not turn into tyranny existed. It was the absolutists who were most concerned about preventing tyranny, since they argued it could not be resisted. Thirdly, the language of ecclesiastical counsel reminds intellectual historians not only of the importance of attending to the defenders of the monarchy and established church as well as their opponents, but also of the remarkable range of sources for political theorizing in this period. The intellectual world of the people this article has discussed was not a Ciceronian landscape, nor was it wholly an Aristotelian one. Instead, its contours were provided by the Bible, the church Fathers, and ecclesiastical history; an intellectual scheme which the Enlightenment eclipsed, but which historians must strive to recover.
