John Bramhall straddles two usually unrelated fields. To the Irish historian, he is the ecclesiastical henchman to that thoroughgoing Lord Deputy, Thomas Wentworth, acting as an Irish Laud to Wentworth's Charles. But to English political theorists he is notable as the marginal but still interesting defender of royal absolutism and opponent of Thomas Hobbes. This book concentrates upon Bramhall in his Irish incarnation and provides an astute and authoritative account of his ecclesiastical policies in Ireland.
Arriving as chaplain with Wentworth in 1633, Bramhall was soon appointed to the see of Derry and, following the Irish convocation of 1634, rapidly took on the role of de facto primate of Ireland. He threw himself into the task of bringing the Church of Ireland into line with the Church of England by reforming its confession and providing it with disciplinary canons and was equally busy in improving the income of the church by forcing rapacious laymen to cough up church lands that they had detained.
John McCafferty performs an essential service in tracing the way that Bramhall set about this latter task, showing how his claims for the increase in ecclesiastical income, which he took pleasure in totting up and sending over to England, were, although exaggerated, real: the only problem was, of course, that his efforts came to naught following the 1641 Catholic rising. As with so many English officials in Ireland, the pervasive impression is one of immense efforts and limited long-term impact.
McCafferty also provides a clear and entertaining narrative of the imposition of English norms on the Church of Ireland. His analysis of the disciplinary canons is detailed and impressive—rightly placing them, rather than the Thirty Nine Articles, at the centerpiece of Bramhall's reform program—discipline, not doctrine. And his judgment of the overall constitutional impact of Laud's and Bramhall's policies is spot on: the 1634 convocation “was not a victory of the Church of England over an autonomous Church of Ireland, but a realignment of the Church of Ireland within the three kingdoms” (113). The book also gives us the most thorough account of the way in which Bramhall and his masters enforced the Irish canons in 1635–40, most notably through the High Commission, whose operation McCafferty subjects to a very useful analysis: it was “a compact and busy court exercising a national jurisdiction from Dublin, using English procedure and precedent, and concentrating above all on those who obstructed the recovery of the church and its clergy,” in short, “a perfect miniature of the workings and assumptions of Wentworth's viceroyalty” (168).
Alhough this will become the standard account of Bramhall's role in Ireland, it has occasionally to be used with caution. Sometimes the judgment is simply too sweeping, passing over complicated realities with overly neat or confident formulations. Thus, Trinity College is dismissed as “an Irish version of the ‘king's favourite, Chelsea College’” (61). It is of course true that Trinity like Chelsea served as a center of anti-Catholic propaganda, but to dismiss its impact on the ministry of the Church of Ireland by reference to its supplying only thirteen graduates to the Ulster dioceses in 1622 is to ignore the regional bias of the college toward the south and east and the fact that by the second decade of the seventeenth century around half of its graduates were entering the ministry of the Church of Ireland.
Occasionally McCafferty assumes he knows something that is simply unprovable from the sources. Ussher, it is stated, must have been “highly affronted” (72) by his treatment by Wentworth—yet Wentworth's letters repeatedly stress his good relations with the primate, who dedicated his book Immanuel to him. Given Ussher's characteristic reticence, we may never know his true feelings on this and other matters. McCafferty (like Bramhall before him) also shows a pervasive tendency, often on rather fleeting evidence, to assume that the Church of Ireland was in reality subject to the Church of England. Irish bishops, McCafferty thinks, asked their clergy to subscribe to the English canons even before 1634; the Irish Articles of 1615 betray the desire of “possibly a very large element” of the 1615 convocation to unite the two churches; in short, “the constitution of the early Stuart Church of Ireland was that of the English church” (67)—a bold statement that passes over the much murkier, complex realities of the early seventeenth century. Even Bramhall's canons of 1634 referred confusingly to both the “churches” and the “church” of England and Ireland. McCafferty, as a result, persistently underestimates the importance of the development of a distinctive, indigenous Protestantism, pioneered by Trinity and Ussher, which saw the Church of England not as a mother but a sister church.
Finally, he takes a decidedly jaundiced view of the Scots Presbyterians’ later claims that they had been tolerated by lay and ecclesiastical patrons in Ireland in the halcyon 1620s, opting instead for Bramhall's more cynical explanation that the Presbyterian clergy were popular with landlords because the ministers did not challenge their detention of church property, while Ussher simply made a political judgment to leave the matter to the civil authorities. The reality, again, was probably more complex, with Ussher and many other Irish bishops and clergy sharing with the Scots clergy a stress on theological rather than ceremonial unity—doctrine, not discipline. Similarly, their chief lay patron, Lord Clandeboye, although differing from the Scots on ceremonial issues, would, given his education in Scotland and early career in Trinity, share a common commitment to double predestinarian Calvinism. But these cautions do not detract from what is an impressive contribution to Irish historical studies.
