I

In June 1604 John Burgess mounted the pulpit in the Chapel Royal at Greenwich to preach a sermon which would thwart his ecclesiastical career for the next twelve years.Footnote ¹ A Puritan cleric from William Chaderton's diocese of Lincoln, Burgess had gained access to the royal pulpit through the offices of James Montague, dean of the Chapel Royal. Montague hoped to give his protégé an opportunity to please the royal ear and gain preferment. Burgess, however, seems either to have prioritised his religious duty over gaining preferment or spectacularly misjudged how to go about gaining royal approval. Rather than preaching a sermon hedged with compliments to his new royal master, as would be expected of a minister in his position, he used his access to advise James on how best to reform the Church along strict Calvinist lines, implying, or in moments of spectacularly daring rhetoric stating, that at present James was not fulfilling his divinely ordained duty to lead the Church in the path of the godly. James, however, as Burgess might have realised if he had had a little more political acumen, felt that he had set to rest all such issues at the Hampton Court conference concluded just a few months earlier.Footnote ² Consequently, frustrated to hear Burgess rekindle past ecclesiastical quarrels and, not surprisingly, unimpressed at being told his job by a lowly minister, he promptly had Burgess shut up in the Fleet Prison. Burgess was subsequently grilled by Archbishop Bancroft and instructed to subscribe to the canons of 1604. There the matter might have ended if Burgess had not felt betrayed by the ecclesiastical authorities, with whom he believed he had a tacit agreement that his partial subscription to the 1604 canons was acceptable. He consequently wrote letters to the king, the privy council and Chaderton defending his position and then circulated the sermon and his letters in manuscript. Peter Lake has identified five manuscript copies of the sermon; this impressively wide circulation ensured not only that Burgess was self-consciously able to establish himself as a Puritan martyr, but also that, even after his eventual deprivation later in the year, the ghost of his sermon continued to haunt the royal pulpit.Footnote ³

This article examines one example of the afterlife of Burgess's sermon. As Peter McCullough has pointed out, the sermon was not only an attempt to influence James's government of the Church, it was also an ‘audition’, since Montague was hoping to gain for Burgess a place among the evangelical chaplains who served the household of Prince Henry at St James's Palace.Footnote ⁴ Obviously, in the event, such an attempt had to be aborted and Montague was forced to recruit elsewhere. Thomas Gataker tells us how he was approached with an offer of Burgess's place:

Gataker refused the offer, claiming that he was ‘naturallie of a verie bashful disposition’ and had ‘a great indisposition and aversness to Courtlie attendance’. Undoubtedly Burgess's ‘trouble’ must have influenced Gataker in his ‘great indisposition’ to court attendance. Indeed, Gataker, with his fervent evangelical churchmanship, was probably extremely wise to take Burgess's fate to heart. What is, however, more intriguing, is that Burgess's hour in the royal pulpit was continuing to influence preachers at St James's Palace nearly twenty years later. In the final sermon of his series entitled King David's vow (1621), preached to Prince Charles and his household, George Hakewill included approximately 400 words of Burgess's ill-fated sermon. Thus far this unusual case of pulpit-borrowing has remained unnoticed by scholars. Hakewill, moreover, seems to have learned from Burgess's fate, since the text he appropriated was carefully rearranged and interspersed with the compliments and rhetorical strategies which were necessary when giving advice to the monarch and which were so strikingly absent from the original sermon. In essence, however, Burgess's text remained so intact as to constitute a direct borrowing, rather than a more watered-down rewriting. Hakewill clearly intended his congregation to hear and recognise Burgess's voice. In the rest of this article I wish to discuss why it might be that Hakewill chose to turn to Burgess at this particular historical moment. I will then examine more closely Hakewill's borrowings from Burgess in order to suggest how he adapted the sermon of 1604 to speak to a congregation in 1621, and also to shed light on what Peter McCullough has described as the ‘boundaries for clerical conformity’ in the Jacobean pulpit.Footnote ⁶ Hakewill's editing of Burgess means that it is possible to explore how he understood and negotiated the unwritten rule of what could and could not be said in a court sermon and also illustrates the greater scope for a preacher to speak his mind in the St James's pulpit compared with those at Whitehall and Greenwich.

II

At first glance the ecclesiastical careers of John Burgess and George Hakewill appear poles apart. Burgess was a Puritan nonconformist, unwilling to subscribe to the 1604 canons without the mental reservations and private glosses that Peter Lake has termed ‘modified subscription’, and ultimately prepared to choose deprivation over conformity.Footnote ⁷ George Hakewill was a Calvinist conformist in the tradition of George Abbot, John King and Joseph Hall, and a rising star in the church hierarchy. He was sympathetic to the Puritan element in the Church, but believed firmly in conformity to the established Church. A former Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, Hakewill became a chaplain to Prince Charles following the death of Prince Henry in 1612. His reputation as an anti-Catholic polemicist, his enthusiastic endorsement of reformed teaching, and the fact that he had spent a year of study at Heidelberg, meant that he was an obvious addition to the circle of evangelical divines who had served at St James's.Footnote ⁸ Moreover, Hakewill further established the close link between Exeter College and St James's Palace, joining Exeter alumni such as John Prideaux, Daniel and Sampson Price, Lewis Bayly and Thomas Winniffe. In 1617 Hakewill gained the archdeaconry of Surrey, appointed by Burgess's erstwhile patron, Montague.

This promotion was, however, to be Hakewill's last preferment. The early 1620s brought radical religious change and the brand of churchmanship espoused by men such as him was to fall irretrievably from royal favour. The religious wars in Europe, James's pursuit of the Spanish match, and the deaths of Calvinist patrons such as Montague (1618) and John King (1621) destabilised the balance of Calvinist conformists and avant-garde conformists at court.Footnote ⁹ Angered by the criticisms of his foreign policy aired by the evangelical wing of the Church, James moved closer to clergy with avant-garde, proto-Arminian sympathies.Footnote ¹⁰ While George Abbot fell from favour, Lancelot Andrewes succeeded Montague as bishop of Winchester, and the Arminian George Montaigne succeeded King in London. James also took action with regard to the ministers dominating Prince Charles's household. Andrewes had advised James in 1619 that Charles was ‘not well principled by those which had the tutelage of him, either as to the Government or Liturgie of the Church of England’ and in the early 1620s James undertook a reshuffle of the St James's Palace household, placing Matthew Wren, Andrewes's own domestic chaplain, as Charles's chaplain.Footnote ¹¹ Andrewes's concern about the St James's pulpit and James's willingness to heed his warnings are not surprising given that the preachers at St James's were especially vocal critics of James's religious and foreign policies. Sampson Price and Thomas Winniffe, both former members of Prince Henry's household, were imprisoned after preaching sermons condemning James's foreign policy in 1621 and 1622 respectively. Significantly, as Peter McCullough points out, they were the first ministers to be imprisoned following a sermon since Burgess.Footnote ¹² Hakewill too added his voice to the clamour of anti-Spanish sentiment which issued from the St James's pulpit. In 1621 he published a series of sermons on Psalm ci entitled King David's vow. The preface tells us that the sermons were preached from the St James's pulpit and the sermons themselves contained a fervent refutation of James's foreign policy. They also contained a significant proportion of prose from Burgess's sermon of twenty years earlier.

In practical terms it would not have been difficult for Hakewill to lay his hands on Burgess's sermon. The number of manuscript copies which have survived is testament to the extent to which the text circulated. As Peter Lake has argued, Burgess never intended the sermon and letters to Chaderton to be private communications; they had always been a ‘semi-public vindication’ of his stance.Footnote ¹³ More interesting is the question of why Hakewill chose to turn to Burgess at this particular moment. Despite the two-decade gap and the differing ecclesiastical positions of Hakewill and Burgess, there are a number of circumstances to connect the two occasions. Burgess was preaching to James at the start of his reign and his sermon self-consciously offered James a model by which to proceed in the initial years of his sovereignty. He interpreted his text as a ‘charter’, claiming that it was ‘the Kings great Charter, for the good of Ierusalem’ (p. 2). Although Hakewill was not preaching to a newly-enthroned king, he was preaching to a prince who in a few years could expect to succeed to the throne. And, like Burgess before him, he drew attention to this fact. He explained that his text was David's vow ‘for the reformation and government of himselfe, his householde and State’ made either just before he came to the crown or shortly after, and stated explicitly that he believed that this text was ‘as seasonable I hope to the times, as suitable to the person’.Footnote ¹⁴ Thus both Burgess and Hakewill interpreted their texts as manifestoes for government and mounted the pulpit with the intention of laying out an agenda for new monarchs.

Burgess's key concerns were the ceremonies stipulated by the canons of 1604. Hence he concluded with the story of Augustus who, rather than have Pollio's servants punished for breaking a glass, had all the glasses smashed. Burgess insisted that ‘I will not apply it’ (p. 19), but after what had already been said his meaning was of course unmistakable: James should remove the objectionable church ceremonies, rather than punish the ministers who refuse to subscribe to them. The parameters for concern about church ceremonies had, of course, changed drastically between 1604 and 1621. Burgess's scruples about ceremonies such as using the sign of the cross in baptism gained a new dimension given the belief among many clergy in the early 1620s that James's pursuit of the Spanish match was nothing more than the initial move in the country's descent into papistry and idolatry. The general scope of Burgess's argument, however, would still have stood: James should remove the obstacles to his subjects' loyalty, like the Spanish match and his passive foreign policy, rather than punish his people for rejecting them.

Hakewill, though, could presumably have constructed a case against the Spanish match without the aid of Burgess. Burgess was not an especially learned preacher, nor one with particularly distinctive rhetorical abilities. Nor was there a culture of ‘pulpit borrowing’ in the period. Certainly preachers would regularly re-deploy extracts of their own sermons or preach the same sermon to different auditories. They would also, of course, frequently recall and respond to each other, particularly in the close-knit circles of elite court preaching.Footnote ¹⁵ John Chamberlain documents an instance of such influence in 1606. Writing of the sermons preached before the Scottish Presbyterians at Hampton Court he records that ‘The fowre sermons at court passed with goode commendation, only Doctor Buckridge is somewhat toucht as a plagiarie, in that the bishop of Chichester [Lancelot Andrewes] having communicated with him what he meant to do, he coming immediately before him preoccupated much of his matter’.Footnote ¹⁶ It is clear, however, that Chamberlain is not using the term ‘plagiarist’ in a modern sense. At no point in his sermon does Buckeridge ever speak Andrewes's words or quote from him. Rather, Chamberlain seems to be suggesting that it was the thematic similarity of the sermons, crucially their shared perspective on issues of ecclesiastical authority and obedience, which caused Buckeridge to steal the thunder from Andrewes's pulpit performance. Indeed, the issue behind Chamberlain's observation is not so much ‘pulpit borrowing’, as Andrewes's growing influence and Buckeridge's ostentatious self-identification as one of his disciples. ‘Pulpit borrowing’ of the sort exemplified in the case of Hakewill and Burgess is in an entirely different league to such instances of influence and no research on sermons of the period has yet turned up another example of wholesale, but tacit, use of a contemporary's sermon. As the derogatory force behind Chamberlain's use of the label ‘plagiarie’ clearly demonstrates, originality was what was valued in early modern sermon oratory. Hakewill's brazen redeployment of a previous sermon, a particularly notorious one at that, was audacious to say the least.

It is, however, very clear that Hakewill was not simply using Burgess as a source for anti-papist rhetoric. Rather, he was deliberately evoking the occasion of Burgess's sermon. In other words, he expected his congregation to be familiar with Burgess's sermon and intended them to hear his quotations from the 1604 text. Such a strategy of reanimating earlier texts with the sentiments of the 1620s was not unusual. In his account of the scribal output of the so-called ‘Feathery Scribe’, Peter Beal has shown how Sidney's Letter (1579) to Elizabeth i, dissuading her from marriage to Alençon, was revived in manuscript circulation in the mid-1620s and 1630s as a response first to anxieties about the Spanish match and ultimately as a reaction to Charles's eventual marriage to Henrietta Maria. Beal demonstrates how ‘Sidney's fifty-year-old discourse served, in effect, as a classic warning about the dangers of such an alliance – or at least as a historical precedent for such considerations.’Footnote ¹⁷ Hakewill seems to have sought a similar effect in his sermon. By summoning forth the ghost of Burgess, he was evoking a precedent of opposing royal policy from the pulpit, conjuring up just such another ‘classic warning’ against idolatry. And although the promulgators of Sidney's letter in the 1620s would have been hard-pressed to find any who had been alert to it in the 1570s, Hakewill, on the contrary, was speaking in 1621 to the very same household for which Burgess had auditioned in 1604. Any number of those who heard Hakewill's sermon could also have been in the congregation to whom Burgess had preached. Older members of Prince Charles's household such as Henry Burton (clerk of the closet), Robert Carey (chamberlain), Robert Kerr (gentleman of the bedchamber) and Thomas Murray (secretary) would all, most likely, have heard both sermons, as could some of the prince's chaplains, such as Thomas Winniffe, Richard Senhouse and George Carleton. Hakewill was clearly deliberately playing to the famed sermon connoisseurship of the St James's household, quoting Burgess to the very congregation that was most likely to hear the allusion.

From that moment on, Hakewill's career was to be haunted yet more closely by that of Burgess. In 1623 he was imprisoned after presenting his prose work The Wedding robe or A treatise touching the unlawfulness of Protestant marriages with papists to Charles. This incredibly outspoken tract, entirely dedicated to demonstrating that James's much cherished Spanish match was contrary to divine law, was to impede Hakewill's ecclesiastical career as irrevocably as Burgess's sermon had his twenty years earlier. Rumour had it that Hakewill had the work transcribed in another hand and then presented it to Charles, gaining from the prince a promise that he would not show it to James. Charles, however, broke his word and passed the tract on to James, and consequently Hakewill and all those who knew of the manuscript were imprisoned. Andrewes was called upon to refute the tract, and Hakewill was dismissed from attendance on the prince and denied any further preferment.Footnote ¹⁸ This course of events meant that, ironically, in 1623 Calvinist conformist George Hakewill was to find himself enduring a very similar fate to that undergone by Puritan nonconformist John Burgess nineteen years earlier – a stark reminder of how, to use Peter Lake's metaphor, the religious goalposts had shifted in the twenty years of James's reign. As Lake himself puts it, musing on the similarities between the attempts to gloss and interpret outward conformity in 1604 and the 1630s, ‘Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose’.Footnote ¹⁹

III

It remains to consider in more detail how Hakewill used Burgess's sermon and how his congregation would have reacted. Although most of the Burgess quotations were included in the final sermon of the series, Hakewill slipped his first allusion to Burgess into his opening sermon. Having introduced his text, the first verse of Psalm ci (‘I will sing mercy and judgement: unto thee, O Lord, will I sing’), Hakewill proceeded by applying the virtues of mercy and judgement to the duties of princes, explaining how for princes, the virtue of mercy necessitates ‘releeving the afflicted, and righting the oppressed; by receiving their petitions, by hearing their grievances, by granting their reasonable sutes, by dispatch of Iustice’. He continued with the example, ‘It was well said of Augustus, that Petitions should not bee given to a Prince, as meat to an Elephant that one is afraid of’ (p. 25). The analogy of giving a petition to the monarch and elephant-feeding is idiosyncratic to say the least and for Hakewill's congregation the metaphor must have immediately recalled what was surely its only other airing in the court pulpit, the opening of Burgess's sermon. Burgess's text had been Psalm cxxii. 8-9 (‘For my brethren and my neighbours sake, I will now speake peace unto thee: because of the house of the Lord our God, I will procure thy wealth’) and he, like Hakewill, had opened his sermon by applying the Psalm to the duties of princes, arguing that princes must ‘speak peace’ to their people, in other words they should not, as James famously had a tendency to do, hide away among a select group of favourites. Burgess had then used precisely the same example of Augustus, telling his congregation how, when Augustus was presented with a petition by a poor man, he ‘encouraged him, and said, Petitions should not be given to a Prince as meat to an Elephant, that one is afraid of’ (p. 5). The elephant metaphor is so unusual and peculiar that its redeployment by Hakewill must have been a deliberate strategy to recall Burgess's sermon. Metaphors were recognised in the period as having the particular rhetorical quality of being especially memorable. As Henry Peacham explained, ‘they leaue such a firme impression in the memory, as is not lightly forgotten’.Footnote ²⁰ This distinctive image of elephant feeding was thus the perfect allusion for Hakewill to use to conjure up the ghost of Burgess.

Having seized his congregation's attention, Hakewill then interwove the rest of his argument with echoes of Burgess. Burgess, in characteristically uncompromising terms, had insisted that it is not only a duty for princes to ‘speak peace’ to their people, but that it is a necessary tactic for maintaining power. He claimed that it is ‘a bond, and one of the best that Princes have to obliedge the hearts of their subjects unto them’ (p. 4). Twenty years later Hakewill practically reiterated this very argument, telling his congregation that:

With Burgess's sermon already brought to their attention, it would have been easy for the congregation to see the connection. Indeed, Hakewill then continued by stressing that a prince should not take pleasure in punishing his people, drawing again on the example of Augustus ‘who seemed himself to suffer when he inflicted punishment on others’. At this point his auditory could hardly have failed to recall that final, electrifying, career-toppling moment when Burgess used the example of Augustus telling Pollio to smash all the glasses, rather than punish a servant for breaking one, to lecture James on church ceremonies.

If the congregation could not have avoided hearing the references to Burgess's sermon, then neither could they have remained ignorant of Hakewill's rhetorical intention in drawing on them. In addition to encouraging James to treat nonconforming ministers with mercy and leniency, Burgess had been reacting against James's preference to hide away from crowds and govern from a small, select power base, a style of monarchy very different from that of his predecessor, Elizabeth i. In the 1620s, when Hakewill was preaching, James's aversion to public display had become even more pronounced. Shocked by the reaction to his pro-Spanish foreign policy, he retreated yet further, spending much of his time in his country hunting lodges such as Theobalds among his favourite courtiers.Footnote ²¹ Thus well might Hakewill draw on Burgess in order to advise Charles not to make his father's mistake of shunning his subjects. Significantly, however, Hakewill did not go as far as Burgess. Burgess's final argument in favour of ‘speaking peace’ had been that ‘to doe otherwise is not safe’ (p. 5), giving the examples of Rehoboam who ‘for want of speaking peace … put himselfe out of the greatest part of his Kingdome’ and Caesar whose proud speeches gave ‘distaste’ and led to the conspiracy against him. Hakewill judiciously omitted this extension of the argument, demonstrating that he, unlike Burgess, understood the boundaries of what could and what could not be said in the court pulpit.

IV

Hakewill's audacious allusion to Burgess must have caused a ripple of shocked recognition among a sizable proportion of the congregation. And those younger members of the household who were not able to pick up on the reference would surely have been made aware of it quickly: no doubt manuscript copies of Burgess's sermon were soon in high demand at St James's Palace. It must be assumed, moreover, that the ghost of Burgess's sermon had the rhetorical effect Hakewill intended, for in his final sermon of the series preached, presumably, some weeks later, he returned to Burgess.Footnote ²² The text for this sermon was Psalm ci.8 (‘I will earely destroy all the wicked of the Land, that I may cut off all wicked doers from the Citie of the Lord’), but when, in the final branch of the sermon, Hakewill turned to gloss the last remaining words, ‘the Citie of the Lord’, the text he used was none other than Psalm cxxii.9, the text of Burgess's sermon. Thus Hakewill explained, ‘This, our Prophet expresseth yet more cleerely in another Psalm, 122. 9, “Because of the house of the Lord our God, I will seeke to doo thee good”’ (pp. 329–30).Footnote ²³ By this point in the series word must have spread and every member of the congregation been alert to the allusion. But they were still, presumably, not prepared for what followed. For in the remainder of the sermon Hakewill did not just allude to Burgess, but he ostentatiously incorporated large and significant passages of Burgess's prose into his sermon.

Burgess's application of the first half of his text, ‘For my brethren and neighbours sake, I will now speake peace to thee’, to the duties of princes had been bold, but it was when he turned to the second half of the verse, ‘because of the house of the Lord our God, I will procure thy wealth’, that he became especially reckless. Interpreting the words as a call to princes to restore and maintain religion in their kingdoms, Burgess had stated in no uncertain terms that princes must provide for their subjects' needs. He addressed James directly in one of his most rhetorically daring passages:

It seems incredible that Burgess delivered this directly to James's face. The final phrase sounds distinctly like a threat: James should reform the Church along strict Calvinist lines or his royal authority will be undermined. Hakewill, however, incorporated this very passage into his sermon, addressing Prince Charles with precisely the same words that Burgess had used to his father:

The atmosphere must have been electric as the congregation simultaneously recalled Burgess and teased out the strong contemporary resonances of his words. The decision of the Bohemian electors to give their crown to Frederick of the Palatinate, rather than suffer religious persecution under the Catholic Habsburg Ferdinand, had sparked off a debate on this very theme. Moreover, the fear that James was about to precipitate a Catholic revival in England meant that an emphasis on providing for true worship of God must have seemed particularly urgent. In Hakewill's hands the passage metamorphosed from a commentary on the fall-out of the Hampton Court conference into an urgent and breathtakingly outspoken interjection into the politics of 1621. If Hakewill did indeed preach this before Prince Charles without reprimand, then it is testimony to the greater latitude afforded by the St James's pulpit compared to those under the king's supervision at Whitehall and Greenwich. Perhaps it even indicates how St James's should be thought of as distinctly oppositionist in relation to James's policy.

Significantly, however, the location of the passage in Hakewill's sermon provided it with a slightly different emphasis to that it had carried in Burgess's, twenty years earlier. Burgess had used the phrases ‘true worship of God’ and ‘feare god rightly’, which, in the context of his sermon, had specifically evoked the godly style of worship that he and other non-conformist ministers were advocating: in other words, rejecting practices such as the sign of the cross at baptism. Thus the ‘this’ in the phrase ‘And if Princes provide not this for their Subjects’ had referred to the 1604 controversy over ceremonies. Hakewill, however, was talking of protecting souls from ‘impiety’ and ‘irreligion’. The terms ‘impiety’ and ‘irreligion’ in the 1621 context of anxieties about James's foreign policy and the rise of avant-garde conformity at court implied Catholicism. Hence the ‘this’ in Hakewill's ‘provide not this’ suggested protecting the people from Catholicism, rather than ensuring the correct version of Protestantism. Hakewill was clearly reanimating the earlier sermon with concerns specific to the early 1620s, but, even amid the Spanish match controversy, an attack on Catholicism would always be an easier position to defend than an attack on conforming practice within the English Church. Consequently Hakewill's line of argument was not quite as extreme as that which Burgess had put forward.

Burgess had proceeded to illustrate his point that not providing true religion puts the monarch at risk, by discussing how the oaths of atheists and Catholics cannot be trusted. He explained:

There was much here that must have appealed to Hakewill in 1621. Indeed, the ideas were very similar to those he later expressed in his tract on the Spanish match The wedding robe in which he said of the pope, ‘it being in his power to dispence, it must needs likewise be in his power for reasons to himself best knowne to revoke his dispensation at his pleasure’.Footnote ²⁴ Hakewill chose, however, to leave out most of this section, perhaps because he felt such prose was too dangerous. To talk in the abstract about how princes need to maintain true religion in order to keep their subjects' loyalty was one thing, but if Hakewill had included Burgess's passage with its comments on England becoming dependent on a foreign power it would have sounded like a direct comment on the Spanish match. Many Englishmen feared that a Spanish queen would establish a Spanish court in England whose first allegiance would be to the pope. Thus Hakewill took only Burgess's last sentence and added it to the previous paragraph, telling his congregation:

Thus Hakewill kept Burgess's argument, but left out the examples which in 1621 were too politically volatile. As all good orators know, however, silence can often speak louder than words and it is not impossible that some members of the congregation were familiar enough with Burgess's sermon to recall the very examples Hakewill was carefully omitting. Burgess's sermon could well have provided an unspoken subtext between Hakewill and his auditory.

Burgess had then continued by drawing on biblical exempla. He pointed out that all the biblical accounts of the kings of Israel and Judah begin by relating how the kings dealt with matters of religion:

Strikingly, Hakewill rendered this passage nearly word for word:

Hakewill chose, however, to apply some editorial discretion, excluding Burgess's next argument that

Burgess had clearly relished the thought of divine punishment falling on ungodly princes, but Hakewill was more restrained, even though the concept of God punishing evil kings was commonplace in sermons of the period.Footnote ²⁵ Or perhaps Hakewill felt less attracted to the argument, given that in 1621 it seemed to be the godly princes in Europe, such as Frederick, who were being punished, while the ungodly Ferdinand flourished.

Burgess had then continued by selecting specific biblical examples, discussing the stories of Jehoram, Jeohas and Solomon. He had revelled in the narratives, claiming of Solomon's fall that he ‘cannot name [it] without trembling’, and including some wonderfully lurid details about how God ‘smote [Jehoram] with a disease in his bowels’ (pp. 13–14). Common to all the examples was the fall of princes who fail to listen to their religious advisers. The passage was lengthy, and Hakewill chose to use only Burgess's first phrase, ‘So yet specially hath God humbled Princes, and even povred contempt upon them, when they have contemned or forsaken the house of the Lord’ (p. 13), adding it on to the previous paragraph so that his version reads:

Hakewill's editing again toned down Burgess. He took the main argument, that God will humble princes if they forsake the house of the Lord, but left out Burgess's gratuitous examples. Hakewill may also have been anxious about the references in Burgess to Solomon who ‘in his old dayes [was] seduced … to set up grose idolatry’ (p. 13). Idolatry was a hot issue in 1621 given Andrewes's introduction of an avant-garde style of worship into the Chapel Royal, and supervision of renovations at the Greenwich chapel which were to include life-size paintings of the prophets and Apostles, following his appointment as dean of the Chapel in 1619.Footnote ²⁶ Hakewill had already inveighed against this development earlier, in his third sermon, arguing that:

His comments had remained general, however, and it could be that he felt that following them with an example of a king who had instituted idolatry would be too risky. Indeed, the danger would have been exacerbated by James's self-identification with Solomon to which Hakewill had already alluded in his second sermon. In a thinly veiled hint that James should stop posturing as a wise rex pacificus and instead launch into Europe to defend the Protestant cause and rescue his grandchildren's inheritance Hakewill had claimed, ‘It is not wise thoughts, or wise speaking, or wise writing, or wise gesture & countenance, will serve the turn; but wise behaviour: the former are gracefull, but the other needfull’ (pp. 43–4). To follow this allusion to James as Solomon with an account of Solomon's fall would have gone beyond the bounds of what could be expounded safely in the pulpit.

In exchange for Burgess's examples Hakewill added a neat summary of Burgess's argument:

Although this sounds like Burgess, it is, in fact, pure Hakewill. Coming at a moment when James was deliberately seeking to distance Charles from his evangelical chaplains, Hakewill was making a strong call on the prince to heed the religious advice of the godly St James's ministers. Indeed, he situated the sermons in precisely this context in his preface to Charles in which he hoped that he may ‘serve your Highness in somwhat, as well absent as present, specially now that your frequent presence with his Majesty enforceth your often absence from your Familie’. If Charles was to be a second King David, then Hakewill was keen to position himself and the other godly chaplains as Gad, Nathan, Abiathar and Hiram. Hakewill then returned to Burgess by concluding with a watered-down version of Burgess's Joash narrative:

Burgess's rendering of this story had been rather more sensational:

The similarity of the syntax of the first sentence suggests that Burgess was still Hakewill's source here, though he chose not to include the suggestive image of the net and, considering his auditory, wisely omitted the detail of princes who misadvise kings.Footnote ²⁷

At this point Hakewill's sermon ended rather abruptly. Burgess's sermon, however, had continued and Hakewill used some of his later text in an earlier section of his own sermon. Although quick to point out that he could continue providing examples, Burgess had stopped his biblical trawl for ungodly kings, limiting himself to one final remark on the subject. He informed his congregation:

Burgess had then proceeded to use a reading of Bellarmine to make the point that princes must take care of religion or else Rome will succeed in taking it over. Hakewill, however, took the example of Pope Adrian iii and the imagery of the flow of blood and inserted them into a discussion of papal power which came at the start of his final sermon, before the other direct borrowings. His argument was that ‘It is a Romish errour, repugnant to the word of God, and to the examples of the best Kings and Monarchs before and since Christ, to restraine Princes from protecting and promoting the true worship of GOD within their Realms’ (pp. 330–1), and he then used the Burgess passages as an example:

Why did Hakewill reorder Burgess and place this discussion of Rome first? The answer most probably lies in the fact that Hakewill was, once again, adapting Burgess to speak to the specific circumstances of the early 1620s. For Burgess, Rome and the encroaching tentacles of papal power were an example of what happens if princes neglect religion. It was a future threat, intended to inspire James to start reforming the Church along the right lines. For Hakewill, however, protecting true religion from Rome was his main rhetorical aim. Hakewill's point when stating that princes must take good care of religion was that religion must always be the priority: ‘Among other main and waighty matters then pertaining to the Princes charge, the care of GOD's truth and Church must be the chiefest’ (p. 330). Thus, although the Spanish match may arguably make sense in secular terms, in religious terms it is reprehensible, and the religious context must always take priority. Hence Hakewill had discussed Rome first to show why it was that the Catholic Church prevented a monarch from promoting the true faith, while Burgess used it later as a warning.

After Burgess's discussion of Rome, Hakewill's borrowings from his sermon stopped, apart from one striking phrase at the very end of the sermon. When discussing how princes should both repair and maintain the house of the Lord, Burgess had claimed that the first thing to be done was to suppress the ‘common enemy’. He took James's actions on coming to England as an example, claiming:

Hakewill incorporated the last sentence into his second sermon. When discussing how good kings wait for God to grant them kingdoms rather than usurping them, he observed how James had waited for Elizabeth's death before taking the English throne, adding:

The different uses to which the men put the example, however, epitomise their different approaches. In Burgess's text the observation had been used to make the point that although James had suppressed Catholicism, he had failed, as yet, to reform the Church. What should have been a compliment became a reproach. In Hakewill, however, the example worked much more effectively as a compliment, since he let the phrase stand, rather than developing it into a request for more action. Ostensibly all he was talking about was kings entering their kingdoms. But of course, in the context of a series of sermons which outlined a position fervently in opposition to the Spanish match, the phrase cannot be taken merely at face value. Undoubtedly this hint about not tolerating other religions was meant to be taken as a comment on James's foreign policy and fears that Catholics were, indeed, regaining toleration. By situating the phrase in a discussion of something quite different, however, Hakewill ensured that it could also function as a simple compliment. Once again, he had succeeded both in rendering Burgess's sermon relevant in the context of 1621, and in toning down Burgess to ensure that he did not suffer a similar fate.

V

Burgess's 1604 sermon made him notorious. He constructed himself as the public face of those Puritan ministers who could not tolerate the outcome of the 1604 Hampton Court conference, and his eventual deprivation signalled his status outside the English Church. Indeed, he was soon to make this distance physical as well as ideological by moving to the continent. Thus far historians have sought to emphasise how future clergy sought to distance themselves from, and define themselves against, Burgess. Peter McCullough has demonstrated how Burgess's sermon established the boundaries for what could be said in the court pulpit, while Peter Lake has argued that it demonstrated how, despite the gloss of conformity provided through modified conscription, ‘pro-Puritan bishops … and moderate Puritans like John Burgess did not in fact agree … on many of the central symbolic and liturgical issues that conventionally defined Puritanism’.Footnote ²⁸ In part, this article supports such findings. In his editing of Burgess's prose Hakewill demonstrates a consistent attempt to tone down Burgess's rhetoric. It is worth emphasising that, although Hakewill's prose tract The wedding robe led to his imprisonment, the sermons in King David's vow were not only judged acceptable when preached, but were also printed for public consumption. The fact remains, however, that Hakewill deliberately and extensively used Burgess's sermon. Rather than rejecting Burgess's text as an embarrassment to the ministry, he took his prose and skilfully adapted it so that it spoke to his own contemporary congregation, suggesting how Calvinist conformists found a new appeal in the works of modern Puritans when placed under pressure in the early 1620s. Hakewill's resurrection of Burgess's sermon demonstrates that Burgess did not only haunt the royal pulpit as a warning for future preachers, but that his prose also survived as a positive source for commentary on the religious duty of princes. Hakewill's sermon also provides important new evidence to support Peter McCullough's work on the St James's palace pulpit. Not only does it illustrate the extent of the comparative political freedoms enjoyed by the prince's chaplains and the ‘godly’ character of his household, but it is also testimony to the immersion of the St James's Palace congregation in a particularly politically sensitive sermon culture. That they were able to hear and respond to the intertextual allusions in Hakewill's sermons suggests just how acute early modern sermon congregations could be. They were not merely paying attention to biblical quotations and references to the church Fathers and other authorities, but they were also attuned to specific contemporary echoes. The fact that Hakewill expected an echo of Burgess's sermon to speak to his audience, conveying a specific set of associations, demonstrates just how potent sermons were as a social and political, as well as religious, referent in the early modern period.