I. Introduction
William Sheridan,Footnote 1 bishop of Kilmore and Ardagh, preached a provocative sermon at the fashionable St. Werburgh's church in Dublin in March 1685 entitled “S. Pauls confession of faith, or, A brief account of his religion.”Footnote 2 In the sermon and in the preface attached to the published version Sheridan defended the teachings of the established Church of Ireland against both Dissenters and Catholics, using Saint Paul as the prime example of true apostolic faith, “that as he was no turbulent Fellow, nor raiser of Sedition in the Common-wealth; so he was no setter forth, nor maintainer of heretical Doctrines, or Novelties in the Church.”Footnote 3 Sheridan defended the vehemence of his preaching against accusations of “Disloyalty” and “Unseasonableness,” pointing specifically to his role as a bishop in the established church as placing the burden to speak uncomfortable truths directly on his shoulders. “That whatever policy may seem to be in being silent at this time; it is too mean, and has too much of the World in it ever to be expected from a Clergyman, especially it cannot from a Bishop, whose very Consecration obliges him to preach and drive away all Erronious and False Doctrine contrary to Gods Word, and both privately and openly to call upon, and incourage others to the same,” especially, he continued, “while we have not only the Law on our sides, but also the Word of that King (who is famous for having never broken it) to defend our Religion.”Footnote 4
Sheridan was preaching at a particularly uneasy time for the Church of Ireland, when the Catholic King James II ascended the throne of England and Ireland and, by extension, to the headship of their established churches. Clergymen like Sheridan found themselves in the unenviable position of defending their own church and hierarchy, even under the leadership of a Catholic monarch. Yet even during the years leading up to this event, tension characterized an Irish understanding of episcopacy: defending the necessity and authority of bishops while limiting their power, upholding the virtues of the church's close relationship with the state while carefully drawing boundaries of jurisdiction to maintain the church's independence, and valuing the national church while defending the place of non-episcopalian denominations in the universal “Catholick Church.” The sermons and tracts examined in this article date from the era following the deaths of the three great Irish divines of the seventeenth century. James Ussher, the earliest and most influential, had died in 1656 while in exile in England; John Bramhall followed in 1663, a mere two years after his consecration as Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland; and Jeremy Taylor, famous for his works of sacramental theology and practical piety, died in 1667 after only nine years in Ireland. William King, the church's greatest defender in the early eighteenth century, had not yet begun to make his mark on the Irish scene, and indeed his involvement in a controversy with the Catholic convert Peter Manby in 1687–88 was one of his earliest public confrontations. Thus the post-Restoration period is one in which the best-known Church of Ireland ecclesiastics cannot be relied upon to give a definitive “Irish perspective” on established religion. Instead, we must turn to less influential churchmen in order to gain a sense of the theological reasoning practiced by the Irish clergy.
The works examined here are remarkable in two ways. First, they show that the basic ideas behind the Irish episcopal system were rooted in a combination of scriptural arguments and civic arrangements that could allow for a surprising amount of flexibility in some circumstances. Second, they underline the centrality of episcopacy to the Church of Ireland's identity by the great lengths these divines were willing to go to see that it was upheld in some form, however reduced, rather than let it be overthrown entirely when threatened in times of crisis. These selections make it clear that the ongoing challenge for the Restoration church in Ireland was to build a cohesive settlement that would maintain a national church under the headship of the king, serving as a bulwark against the Irish Catholic and Scots Presbyterian threats, bringing order to the kingdom devastated by war, and preventing against another outbreak of violence on the scale seen in the 1641 risings.
II. The Church of Ireland in Historiographical Context
J. I. McGuire once lamented that “the history of the Church of Ireland between 1641 and 1690 has not excited much interest among historians over the past thirty years.”Footnote 5 His words still resonate a decade later. While much work has been done in recent years on Ireland in the mid-to-late seventeenth century, less attention has been given to religious beliefs in this period, especially those that marked protestantism as distinct from Catholicism, or the different types of protestantism as distinct from each other. The protestant established church has surely been the most neglected subject in studies of early modern religion in Ireland. F.R. Bolton's detailed examination of the Church of Ireland as a Caroline church in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries marked a high point in studies of establishment belief and practice, one that has in recent years been matched in scope by the essays contained in the touchstone collection for any student of the early modern Church of Ireland, As By Law Established.Footnote 6 While monograph-length treatments of the development of established protestant belief in the Irish social and political context have appeared with increasing frequency in recent years, they have been restricted to certain key individuals in the church, such as James Ussher, John Bramhall, and William King, mainly in the form of biographies of their careers or close analyses of their theologies.Footnote 7 Large gaps therefore still exist for the story of the Irish church in the mid-to-late seventeenth century, for which the age-old question of whether the Church of Ireland was a “Caroline” or “puritan” church will do little to solve.Footnote 8 For instance, it is well known that Jeremy Taylor's belligerent attitude especially towards Dissenters probably cost him a post in the “determinedly moderate” English church, though it in turn may have caused him to be selected deliberately for a bishopric in the Presbyterian-dominated Ulster counties of Down and Connor.Footnote 9 He was also undeniably towards the extreme end of an Arminian sacramentalism and Laudian liturgical bent. How such a man could be taken to be representative of a church that also made room for the former Presbyterian Edward Worth on the restored episcopal bench, then, should perhaps give historians pause.
There have been detailed studies of protestants as a social group in Ireland in the later seventeenth century, a topic dominated by the work of S. J. Connolly and Toby Barnard.Footnote 10 While the Church of Ireland is not necessarily the main focus of their monographs—Connolly's looks at the three major religious groups of Church of Ireland, Dissenters, and Catholics, while Barnard's recent tome rarely explicitly distinguishes between Dissenters and the establishment—both works are indispensible for grasping the social makeup and economic situation of the church as it existed after 1660. However, due to the nature of the inquiries being made, the beliefs and religious thought undergirding the well-documented disputes over land, tithes, Presbyterian open-air gatherings, and fears of Catholic violence are not explored in these works. In fact, it is publications that have focused on the development of Dissenting groups in the Restoration period that have drawn on the widest number of Church of Ireland clergymen for their primary source base in their attempt to capture the reactions of the establishment against which the Dissenters were forming themselves.Footnote 11 It is unfortunate for the scholar of the established church that such extensive research on churchmen of this period was done in the service of another topic, thereby illuminating only one side of these historical personae. Generally speaking, the historiography of protestant Ireland in the second half of the seventeenth century has offered enough tantalizing leads to outline the general contours of the Church of Ireland. It is time to revisit the questions of belief and theology posed in the mid-twentieth century, now making use of the wide variety of interpretive tools available to historians of religious thought today. Our understanding of Irish history in the Restoration period can only benefit from a closer look at the intellectual world of the religious establishment. A modern study of the beliefs of the religious establishment in Restoration Ireland is certainly overdue.
III. Background: Ireland, 1600–1689
The Church of Ireland in the Restoration period was a church in transition. Its forebears in the early part of the century had bequeathed to it a legacy and self-understanding of being an indigenous Irish church, independent from the Church of England despite sharing a supreme governor in the monarch, and tracing its lineage back to Saint Patrick in the fifth century.Footnote 12 The pre-war church had seen sporadic efforts to preach and catechize in the Irish language, the development of a Calvinistic theology promulgated through the teaching faculty of Trinity College Dublin, and a certain measure of rapprochement with Presbyterians and other puritans in order to keep the protestant presence in Ireland as cohesive as possible.Footnote 13 Trinity graduates began filling the ranks of the protestant church from about 1600, and in 1615, the convocation of bishops drew up 104 articles of faith for protestant Ireland, modeled on yet distinct from the Thirty-Nine Articles of Elizabethan England.Footnote 14 This Irish identity was tried in the clashes in Convocation in 1634, when the first set of Irish Canons were drawn up and the English bishop John Bramhall, newly appointed bishop of Derry and the agent of Laudian church reform in Ireland, failed to secure the repeal of the Irish Articles in his efforts to bring the Irish church more in line with her sister in England.Footnote 15 Such was the state of the Church of Ireland when a Catholic uprising began in 1641 and quickly spread to engulf the kingdom in a multiyear conflict of religious, ethnic, and political animosities.
The war and Interregnum period had two major effects on the protestant population, religiously speaking. First, many Church of Ireland clergy were driven out of the countryside to safety in Dublin or England. The church was then effectively suppressed in Ireland as in England. Technically, however, this suppression was never legally enacted, because the Dublin Parliament never passed its own version of the English bill.Footnote 16 While this seems to have had little effect on the daily experience of the clergy who remained in the country before 1660, the fact was later touted as evidence for the Church of Ireland's unbroken apostolic succession and continued religious independence from England.Footnote 17
The second effect was the explosion of radical protestantism through the army and the settlement schemes of the 1650s, which divided the protestants in Ireland along both denominational and ethnic lines. A variety of sects took root in Ireland in the 1650s, and theological debates raged between different groups in this period.Footnote 18 Scots Presbyterians and Quakers would eventually develop into full-blown denominations in the later part of the century. English-style Presbyterians and Independents were absorbed into larger congregations in the 1660s and 1670s, while the Baptists mostly died out when Cromwell's army, with which the Baptist movement was closely associated, left the country at the end of the 1650s.Footnote 19 Such rapid expansion also gave rise to a differentiation between Old and New Protestants. A combination of English, Welsh, and Scots settlers and planters from the reign of James I, English protestants who had come to Ireland in the sixteenth century, and the few families of Old English (twelfth-century Norman) descent such as the Usshers who had converted to the reformed faith in the mid-sixteenth century made up the Old Protestants, who were present in Ireland before 1641. New protestants were those who travelled to Ireland after the risings. It would be a generation or two before they and their progeny would embrace the heritage of their adopted land.
The Restoration began in Ireland several months before Charles II issued his Declaration of Breda in April and returned to England in May 1660, when “a small group of middle-ranking officers” seized control of Dublin Castle from the hands of the remnants of the Cromwellian army in a bloodless coup in December 1659.Footnote 20 Outside of Dublin, nobility and gentry quickly moved to secure power for the restoration of the Dublin Parliament. Charles II was declared king in London on May 8, 1660, and in Dublin by a hastily convened Convention on May 14th. The Restoration was indeed a “restoration” of a number of things: the monarchy was restored with Charles II as the king of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales; order was restored to kingdoms that had seen two decades of upheavals; and the church was restored, in a sense, resembling its pre-1640 self in structure but differing in some key aspects.Footnote 21
In Ireland, only eight bishops had survived from the pre-war period and seventeen of the twenty-two sees were vacant.Footnote 22 Sixteen of these were filled within the year. James McGuire suggests that perhaps the greatest commonality among these new episcopal appointees was their having suffered for their “conspicuous loyalty to the Anglican cause during the Interregnum” and that John Bramhall, bishop of Derry from 1633 and Laud's right-hand man in Irish church reforms, had worked closely with the Lord Lieutenant to ensure that nearly all of the vacancies were quickly filled by candidates of his choosing.Footnote 23 At the end of January 1661, ten bishops and two archbishops, including Bramhall as Archbishop of Armagh, were consecrated together in a ceremony in Dublin. This public display of the restored church, and the symbolic support offered by the officials and other residents of Dublin, made it clear that an episcopal structure upheld by the support of the state was to be the only acceptable path for the Restoration kingdom.Footnote 24
Yet the Restoration in Ireland did not simply mimic the similar process happening in England. The Church of Ireland at the Restoration faced a scattered clergy, depleted by a lack of ordinations and consecrations in the previous two decades; a significant population of protestants whose ecclesiologies did not allow for an episcopal structure; a Catholic population defeated and moved westward but still very much the majority on the island; a legacy of Irish protestantism to draw from, yet a closer relationship with the English church due to the personal backgrounds of many new clergy and a desire for the protection and support of the government and English monarch; and the diminishment of the puritan strand in the Church of Ireland as some chose Dissenting churches over the establishment. As opposed to the multiple acts passed by Westminster in the early 1660s inducing conformity in England, only the Act of Uniformity was also passed in Dublin, though not until 1666. The Irish church simply could not afford a “Great Ejection” of dissenting ministers on the scale seen in England in 1662. Rather, enforcement of conformity was largely left up to individual bishops, some of whom responded with gusto.Footnote 25 For the next three decades, until the outbreak of war in 1689 forced many clergy to once again flee the island, the church settled, if uneasily, into its place as the minority-within-the-minority: an episcopal establishment within the protestant population of Ireland.
IV. Religious Tensions
The Church of Ireland continued in its long-standing tradition of viewing itself as a beleaguered minority throughout the Restoration period. On the one hand, the threat of Presbyterian hostilities and takeover of the national church loomed very real in the Irish imagination. With the end of the Cromwellian reign, the tens of thousands of various puritan groups, now officially Dissenters, began to shift, either coalescing into denominations or fading away. This process was not lost on members of the establishment. While Quakers were obnoxious to the churchmen, they posed no serious threat. The Scots Presbyterians, on the other hand, were a different matter entirely. Their large numbers, especially in the north of Ireland, their strong communal identity, and their close ties with Scotland that involved the back-and-forth transfer of sometimes troublesome ministers between Ulster and the west of Scotland meant that their shifting beliefs and dynamics were of great concern to the established church.Footnote 26 Presbyterian challenges to the established episcopal church in Scotland, which would lead to its eventual overthrow and replacement with a Presbyterian established church under William and Mary, alarmed the Irish clergyman. So did Presbyterian encroachment on church land in the north of Ireland as dissenting ministers refused to give up their livings or undergo reordination, the large crowds that dissenting Scots ministers attracted, and their refusal to abjure the Solemn League and Covenant.Footnote 27 In fact the Presbyterians in Ireland were generally moderate, probably due to the lenient enforcement of anti-Dissent measures by the Crown and the Irish civil magistrates during this period, and the regular payment of the regium donum to Presbyterian ministers beginning in 1672.Footnote 28 Irish Dissenters did not mirror the risings of Scottish Covenanters against the episcopal establishment in 1666 and 1679, nor England's Rye House Plot of 1683 or the Monmouth Rebellion in 1685.Footnote 29 Despite the railing of many Church of Ireland ministers against the Scots in their lands, then, some sort of intra-protestant peace prevailed as long as the third and most worrisome party to both camps existed: the Irish Catholics who made up the majority of the Island's population.
Irish Catholics at the Restoration period were the amalgamation of two groups that until the 1640s had preserved distinct identities: the Gaelic Irish and the Old English, the latter being the English-speaking descendants of the Norman settlers who had first come to Ireland in the twelfth century. Despite the official Reformation, by the 1620s a fully functioning shadow hierarchy of Catholic clergy was in place in Ireland, reinforced by Irish priests who had gone to study in Irish colleges on the continent. Following the Irish wars in the 1640s, the Cromwellian army came to Ireland to put down the Irish in a series of brutal military maneuvers that lasted from 1649 to 1653, after which many of the Irish were transported west to Connacht and much of their land was seized and divided up among the established Old Protestants and the New Protestants who were settling in Ireland.Footnote 30 In the meantime, the protestants of Ireland were haunted by the fear of another Catholic uprising like the one that began on October 23, 1641 that had sparked off a dozen years of war. Protestant memories of this time, whether the official ones maintained through the October 23rd sermons mandated by the Irish Book of Common Prayer of 1666, or unofficial ones such as John Temple's and Henry Jones's depictions of Irish atrocities in their writings about the rebellion, as well as simple living memory, kept alive a continual fear of a Catholic takeover of the island and general slaughter of protestants.Footnote 31 The Popish Plot in 1678, the accession of the Catholic James II in 1685, and his subsequent packing of the Irish administration and army with Catholics only raised the level of suspicion and anxiety among Irish protestants. A glance at France, where hundreds of thousands of French protestants were expelled by Louis XIV that same year after four years of increasing harassment by his dragonnades, illustrated all too clearly the dangers of a Catholic monarch ruling over a protestant minority.Footnote 32
It was within this context that the Church of Ireland clergy worked to define their place and that of their church as the true church appointed by Christ under the headship of the king for the salvation and security of the people of Ireland. A selection of sermons and tracts written in the 1660s, 1670s, and 1680s illustrates the particular effort they made to defend the church as a true church and the special role of bishops within it. Much of the discussion about how to identify the Church of Ireland as a true church against the competing claims of Catholics and Dissenters hinged upon the discussion about bishops, since this was the most visible point of difference and a key factor in the Church of Ireland's identity. The position of reformed bishops needed to be explained with care, since it seemed to distinguish the church from the Reformed churches elsewhere with whom it shared a reforming theology and history and opened it up to charges of being half-reformed and papist. It was thus imperative that the English and Irish understanding of episcopacy be carefully explained in discussions of what made the established church the best of the true churches. The object was to prove the unbroken succession of the bishops from the apostles, especially during the upheavals of the sixteenth century reformations, to explain the close relationship of the church and state in the English system, and to prove from scripture and antiquity that an episcopal structure was both scriptural and primitive, and therefore in full accord with a properly reformed church.
V. The “Catholick Church” and the Apostolic Succession
The first step in this task was to define the “Catholick Church” as a worldwide church, distinct in whole or in part from the institution of the same name headquartered in Rome.Footnote 33 The “Catholick Church,” in this understanding, was marked by Christian faith and proper government, regardless of interdenominational quarrels. As William KingFootnote 34 defined it, in a dispute with a new convert to Catholicism, “The Catholick Church is the whole body of men, professing the Religion of Christ, and living under their lawful Spiritual Governours.”Footnote 35 In 1663, the Irish Convocation declared that before homilies were given, “ye shall pray for Christ's holy catholic church, that is for the whole congregation of Christian people dispersed throughout the whole world and especially for the churches in England, Scotland and Ireland.”Footnote 36 Unlike the Catholic Church under the headship of the pope, the Church of Ireland and the Church of England made no claim to being in and of themselves the one true church. Rather, “the Churches of England and Ireland are no more the Catholick Church, than the English Seas are the whole Ocean; but they are a part thereof.”Footnote 37 The Churches of England and Ireland were national churches within the greater “Catholick Church,” which itself was not located in any one place. “‘Tis by these two marks we must find the Catholick Church,” said King. “Where-ever we find the Faith of Christ, and the Persons professing it, living in submission to their Regular Pastors; there we have found a branch of the Catholick Church; and to that Society we ought to be ready to unite ourselves in this Profession and Submission.”Footnote 38 To assign any head or ruler to this universal body of national churches other than Christ himself was “to destroy the very notion of the Catholick Church.”Footnote 39 There was no other “Head or Principle of unity to this Society” aside from the headship of Christ, profession of a scripturally supported Christian faith, and a properly ordered ecclesiastical society according to the principles given by Christ and the scriptures.Footnote 40
The next step, then, was to show where in the scheme of the “Catholick Church” the bishops fell, and why they were necessary. This was a matter of establishing the antiquity of the office of bishop in the direct line of apostolic succession. King, in the passage quoted above, located the churches of Ireland and England within the wider “Catholick Church” precisely “because they hold the Catholick Faith intirely and are governed by their lawful and Catholick Bishops, who have not had for many years, so much as a Rival appearing to contest their Title and Succession.”Footnote 41 Samuel FoleyFootnote 42 delineated the divine origins of episcopal authority: as God sent Christ, Christ sent his apostles, and the apostles sent their successors after them. This located the bishops firmly within the Christian tradition. Because Christ instituted this form of government, Foley concluded that bishops must be “absolutely necessary to the preservation of his Society, and consequently of his Religion, that such a Society could not subsist without it.”Footnote 43 The key argument for establishing the apostolic succession was to show that it had been instituted by the apostles within their own lifetimes. The Book of Acts and the apostolic letters provided the proof of these instances, with the most common examples cited being Paul's commissioning of Timothy and Titus to the communities of Ephesus and Crete, respectively, though Peter's sending Mark to Alexandria and the choice of Matthias to replace Judas in the company of the Twelve also provided examples of an apostolic succession that had begun well before the death of the last apostle John.Footnote 44 The clergymen were in agreement that no other form of church government had existed prior to the sixteenth century. Henry JonesFootnote 45 made a point to say that not even heretical churches in ancient times had the rule of elders without bishops, the one exception being the heretic Arius, a point that put the Presbyterians in direct line to heresy as a result.Footnote 46
Those who supported protestant episcopacy, however, needed to make the distinction that not everything granted by Christ to the apostles was passed down through the episcopal generations, in order to avoid being drawn too closely into the Catholic understanding of episcopacy and hierarchy under the Pope. Both Jones and Foley agreed that the first bishops, through their consecration by the apostles, had received authority to govern. More specifically, they had received their “name, place and work” from the apostles, which included the ordinary offices of “Overseeing, Ordering, Ordaining, Preaching and Baptizing,” found in the Great Commission of Jesus to his disciples in Matthew 28:19–20, their title of bishops, and their place in the church as above other clergy and therefore as worthy of the most respect.Footnote 47 However, neither the “extraordinary” parts of the office, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, their infallible doctrine, nor the universal charge of the apostles to care for the churches of the whole world were extended to their successors.Footnote 48 This was, of course, a direct contradiction to the authority claimed by the pope on the basis of his succession to the chair of Peter, and by extension the Catholic bishops worldwide who claimed a monopoly on true doctrine and apostolic authority. Foley explained that the extraordinary gifts of the Holy Spirit granted to the apostles were necessary for the building up of the earliest church—for example, the gift of tongues was needed in order to preach to as many people as possible—but once the church and apostolic succession had been firmly established, such extraordinary gifts were no longer needed.Footnote 49 This reasoning implied that the office of bishops marked a fully mature Christian church.
In the Irish context, it was particularly important for the church to know where it stood in relation to Catholic bishops and Presbyterian elders (presbyters), the leaders of the other major denominations. In arguments against Catholics, the question was one of the validity of episcopal orders, which was tied closely to the question of the authority that the English and Irish bishops had used initially to enact the Reformation in their dioceses. The protestant bishops could not deny the validity of the Catholic bishops, generally speaking, since both claimed the same lineage up to the middle of the sixteenth century.Footnote 50 Protestants writing against Catholic opponents therefore made it clear that they believed that Catholic bishops were valid bishops, though tyrannical, cruel, and teaching false doctrines.Footnote 51 As King argued, “The Orders of Priest and Bishop given by Roman Catholicks are valid, and capacitate a man to perform all the Duties belonging to those Offices in a Christian Church, which we readily acknowledge.”Footnote 52 The denomination mattered little; after all, “the Ordainers are only Instruments, but the Power is from Christ.”Footnote 53 Thus, the episcopal protestants “charge the Popish Priests and Bishops not with want of Orders, but with abusing the Orders they have, to ill intents and purposes.”Footnote 54
Andrew Sall,Footnote 55 a Jesuit theology professor who converted to the Church of Ireland in 1674, detailed the method by which bishops were consecrated in the Churches of England and Ireland and compared it to that of the Catholic Church in order to show that the protestant ceremonies were not only valid, but were in fact more pure and better resembling the primitive church than the Catholic ceremonies. He drew on the example of the Council of Carthage in order to make his case. Church of England consecration, he argued, was valid because it involved the primitive formula of the imposition of hands by three bishops, the giving or placing of the Bible on the new bishop, and the saying of a blessing over the newly consecrated person.Footnote 56 However, he distinguished between the matter of the ceremony, or the means necessary for conferring sacramental grace in the apostolic succession, from the form of the ceremony, which could be changed to suit the circumstances. The laying on of hands by three bishops was the matter, or the means of conferring grace, and was the essential, unalterable part of a consecration. The blessing was also an essential part, but words being a form rather than the matter of conferring grace, they could be changed, which even the Council of Trent agreed was acceptable when circumstances demanded it. Sall pointed out, for instance, that the Catholic Church had changed the blessing that began with the words, “Accipe Spiritum Sanctum,” or “Receive the Holy Ghost,” so that only the presiding bishop consecrator should say them, whereas at Carthage, he maintained, the presider and his assisting bishops all said the words together. “And as the Roman Church upon this account introduces new rites,” he argued, “why may not that of England abolish others, especially such as are found to be superstitious?”Footnote 57 Thus, in once again taking up this practice for the blessing, the Church of England had changed the ceremony to better fit the circumstances—the circumstances being, of course, reforming the existing church structure to bring it more in line with the primitive beliefs and practices of the ancient church.
VI. Episcopal Jurisdiction: Scope and Limitations
In conversations with Catholics, then, while many things were under discussion, the pastoral role and validity of the office of bishop was not for the most part one of them. Much more effort was spent fighting with Presbyterians and other Dissenters in order to demonstrate how a bishop differed from a presbyter, and that this difference could be traced back to the commission that Christ himself gave to his apostles and his disciples. Henry Jones took up the charge with enthusiasm when he preached at his brother's consecration as bishop of Kildare in 1667. Bishops were elders, he said, and some elders were bishops, but the two offices were “both distinct, in Degree, and Dignity.”Footnote 58 He admitted that “the strength of the Objection is in what concerns the work, common to Bishops and Elders: For if the same work be common to both . . . then what needs a distinction of Persons and Offices?”Footnote 59 To answer this question, he examined the common duties of ordination and overseeing. To show that bishops had a special role to play in ordaining clergy, he countered the claim of “the laying on of the hands of the Presbyterie” in 1 Timothy 4:14 by pointing out that Timothy, claimed by the church to be a bishop, was also present at the laying on of hands in 2 Timothy 1:6. To Jones this implied that the presence of the bishop as the primary actor in an ordination rite was a necessary piece, while the presbyters were subordinate, assisting members.Footnote 60 As for overseeing, presbyters and bishops had in common the role of “Preaching, Baptizing, and ordering the flock committed to them.”Footnote 61 The difference was in degree and scope: presbyters were limited to working in their parishes “among their own people, and within their own districts onely,” while a bishop's jurisdiction lay within his much larger diocese, which included the parishes.Footnote 62 Thus, like the chief priests and the apostles, bishops acted in this capacity as “overseers to those other Overseers” with many churches, not just one parish, under their care.Footnote 63
This distinction of jurisdiction also limited presbyters in their preaching, baptizing, and other functions: while they were qualified to do so by their office, they were only enabled to do so in a certain area by their local bishop, and their exercise of power was limited and regulated by the bishop's authority. Similar to the pastor's charge to teach and discipline his parish flock, the bishop had the same care over his diocesan flock, which included both the laity and clergy. Jones did not deny the Dissenting claim from scripture that all were priests and kings in the new covenant; rather he claimed that such kingship and priesthood was “spiritually, and in a private capacity, as to our selves onely,” ruling our own passions, and offering up our own sacrifices of praise to God.Footnote 64 But only some, he argued, were “expresly called, and peculiarly appointed” to public office on behalf of others.Footnote 65 Bishops, then, were emphatically not the same thing as elders.
Once again, however, the church had to walk a fine line between Catholics and Dissenters on this topic as well. In touting the authority of bishops over against the Dissenters, they had to be careful to draw limits around a bishop's authority in order that they not be drawn into arguments for the pope's supremacy as bishop of Rome over the other bishops of the church. Jones, for instance, in his tirade extolling the powers of bishops over other clergy in their dioceses, was careful to limit the role of bishops to their own diocese, and not condone a bishop exercising his power to oversee in another's diocese. This would make him “a busie body in other mens matters,” one of the primary charges against the pope, that he had unjustly usurped power in the church.Footnote 66 That is, the bishop of Rome had overstepped his rightful jurisdiction in claiming to have charge over bishops outside of his own diocese (Rome), which up until the Reformation included interfering in the dioceses in England and Ireland. In this understanding, the English Reformation restored the original balance of power in the church, that of one bishop controlling his own diocese and no other.
Responding to a Catholic reading of the Book of Acts about the nature of the shared authority of the apostles Peter and James in Jerusalem in the first years of the church, Andrew Sall argued that Peter never claimed authority over James in Jerusalem. Therefore, the Pope's claim of superiority and governance over all other bishops based on his episcopal lineage from Peter “is certainly more then his right.”Footnote 67 Sall argued from the early church fathers that in the first five centuries of the church no one bishop ever claimed to be higher than the others; as an example he pointed to Gregory the Great denouncing the ambitions of the patriarch of Constantinople. Thus, he concluded, “None of those more worthy first Bishops of Rome (for five hundred years) did ever pretend to any such Supremacy.”Footnote 68 King agreed. He challenged his Catholic opponent to “shew that the Pope could ever give them [Catholic priests and bishops] Power to exercise their Office in these Kingdoms; since it is directly against the ancient Laws and Practice observed and enacted by our Ancestors, and in force at the Reformation.”Footnote 69
The common thread of positive argument for bishops in a reformed church, uniting the arguments against Dissenters with the arguments against Catholics, was of the role, authority, and necessary place of lawful governors in the understanding of the church. Against Catholics, the role of bishops as lawful governors of the church was used to justify the English and Irish reformers’ break with the authority of Rome in the sixteenth century. “England and Ireland were Governed by Bishops ever since they were Christian,” said Jeremy Taylor,Footnote 70 “and under their conduct have for so many ages enjoyed all the blessings of the Gospel.”Footnote 71 William King spent a considerable amount of time on this question, since he was arguing against a man who had left the Church of Ireland to become a Catholic once James II had taken the throne. King distinguished between “the Power or Capacity of governing the Church, interpreting Scripture, Consecrating other Bishops, Ordaining Priests and Deacons, Offering, Baptizing, and Confirming” and “the admitting the Bishop so impowered to the exercise of that Power within certain Limits, which we call a Diocess.”Footnote 72 The former was a divine right of bishops; the latter a canonical right. On both of these counts the English reformers had acted within their rights, and the heads of the Catholic Church in Rome were acting outside of their jurisdiction when they tried to interfere with the internal workings of the English and Irish churches. “Although therefore the first Reformers had their Orders from Bishops in Communion with the Church of Rome,” he said, “yet it was as Christian Bishops they Ordained, and as English Bishops that they admitted the first Reformers to their Charges.”Footnote 73 It was not “as private men” that they had enacted the Reformation, somehow rebelling against their lawful governor the way that his convert opponent or the Irish Presbyterians had done, but rather as representing the national church “in her Convocation, and by her Authority.”Footnote 74
VII. Reformed Churches Abroad and Dissent at Home
If both lines of argumentation against Catholics and Dissenters in favor of reformed bishops were to be followed, however, the question naturally arose of how exactly reformed churches that lacked bishops fit into the English and Irish idea of what constituted a true church. If Presbyterians, Independents, and other dissenting groups claimed their Reformed heritage from the sixteenth-century reformers just as the Churches of England and Ireland (sometimes) did, yet if an episcopal hierarchy were still necessary in a truly reformed church, how could the Irish bishops reconcile the place of continental reformed churches in the universal “Catholick Church”? Responses were conflicted. Henry Jones, in his zeal to promote episcopacy, railed against presbyters as an “inferior” order that “trampled on” the “Sacred Hierarchy” in the “Schism” begun in Geneva in 1541 (which he paralleled in an aside to the same destructive work wrought upon the Irish exactly one century later in 1641) in which the sacred office of bishops was “ambitiously sought after, & sacrilegiously usurped,” the language recalling the marks of the Roman Antichrist that would not have been lost on Jones’s audience.Footnote 75 Not everyone in the hierarchy took such a dramatically scathing stance against the Genevan-style ecclesiastical reforms; indeed, Jones himself backtracked somewhat in the lengthy preface he wrote for this sermon before it was published in order to rescue the reformers themselves from his charges of a heretical, schismatic development in the church.
According to Jones's preface, the Reformation “occasioned, rather than designed” the new Presbyterian form of church government. Because the reformers were unable to win over the popish bishops who were in place already and who persecuted the reformers, they were “enforced to act in that work of Reformation without those Bishops, whom they could not gain, and who were to them so contrary.”Footnote 76 However, Jones was at pains to stress that the early Reformed churches did not lack bishops out of conviction, but for practical considerations only: “Yet did not those Reformers in that, cast off Episcopacy, with aversness to the Order; but onely in respect of those individual persons of the Popish Bishops oppressing, they the Reformers in the mean time professing for Episcopacy, and greatly desiring it, if it might be.”Footnote 77 Jones pointed to the writings of Melanchthon, Luther, and Beza for support. That is, the reformers, being good biblical Christians, would certainly have wanted to have bishops in order to more perfectly imitate the form used in the earliest times. The only thing stopping them from this most perfect form of church governance was the fact that they were unable to convince the individual bishops in their areas who remained loyal to Rome.Footnote 78 Therefore, not even the example of the reformers could be used as evidence in supporting a Presbyterian or other non-episcopal system. The Irish Dissenters thus remained “in Schisme, and Separation” from the true church, because they chose not to have bishops when it was possible to do so, while the episcopal establishment, along with “the moderate sort of Reformers,” were the heirs to the true Reformation in both belief and governance.Footnote 79
A key issue in the volleys against Dissent was the belief that non-hierarchical ecclesiological systems—in the later Restoration period in Ireland, this generally meant Scots Presbyterianism—encouraged disorder among the people because their system of government and modes of worship were inherently disordered and disorderly.Footnote 80 Those whom William Sheridan labeled as “Separatists” had a “disorderly tumultuous way of serving God.”Footnote 81 Order, found in hierarchy, was antithetical to governance by “Parity” and “Community”—Jones, writing in the last 1660s, singled out in particular the Quakers “and such”—because they resulted in unchristian confusion.Footnote 82 In his zeal to draw the distinction between the ordered establishment and the dangerous disorder of the Dissenters, Sheridan insisted, “Thô I will not deny but several National Churches might differ from one another in their Forms of Worship; yet I never read nor heard of any who had not a Form by which they did worship, until our modern Presbyterians.”Footnote 83 Samuel Foley, however, could be a little more commonsensical than his colleague in his view of Presbyterianism, which he apparently did not consider to be the next best thing to anarchy, observing rather that “Pretenders to different Forms of Church-Government, do Acknowledge some Form to be always necessary, and consequently Authority to Rule and Govern, for ever to reside in some Persons or other,” even if they did manage to deny the apostolic succession of bishops.Footnote 84 This did not damn them any less in the eyes of the established church, however; King illustrated the gravity of their continued separation from the episcopal establishment by pointing out that “the present Dissenters were the Bishops Subjects . . . and so their Separation from their Bishops is a Schism; that is, an Ecclesiastical Rebellion.”Footnote 85
By contrast, for Jones and his episcopalian confreres, there was beauty, purpose, and security in order, just as an “army under its banners is in order” and brings security, so heresies and schisms did not trouble a church that functioned within its proper government as attested to by scripture and antiquity.Footnote 86 Jeremy Taylor in 1661 pointed to the recent past to show that “the Episcopal order is the principle of Unity in the Church; and we see it is so, by the innumerable Sects that sprang up when Episcopacy was persecuted.”Footnote 87 Taylor listed some of the many advantages of the Reformed episcopal church in his address to the new bishops. “Bishops have ever since been the greatest defensatives against Popery,” he told them. The reformed episcopal system “rescues the Clergy from contempt; so it is the greatest preservative of the peoples liberty from Ecclesiastick Tyranny on one hand, and Anarchy and licentiousness on the other. That it endears obedience. And is subject to the Laws of Princes. And is wholly ordained for the good of mankind, and the benefit of Souls.”Footnote 88
VIII. Relations with the State
The argument surrounding the idea of bishops as lawful governors naturally touched on the relationship of the church with the state, and specifically that of an episcopal church with a monarchy. The established church and the monarchy were structurally similar and anciently upheld, according to these writers, and as such the flourishing of each supported the other. As Taylor observed, “Episcopacy is the great stabiliment of Monarchy; but of this we are convinc'd by a sad and too dear bought experience.”Footnote 89 It would be enough to show just from nature and history that a hierarchical arrangement was necessary. But as the choral anthem at the mass consecration in Dublin in 1661 proclaimed when the choir sang, “Like that above, a Monarchie . . . Like that above, an Hierarchie,” both structures were seen to mirror the very heavens.Footnote 90 Thus could William Sheridan declare that even zealous protestant preachers “are to be lookt upon as false Teachers, so long as they continue their rebellious and seditious practices against the State.”Footnote 91 By “rebellious and seditious practices,” Sheridan meant practicing a religion that was not in line with the religious establishment and was therefore both illegal and unscriptural. “Let our dissenting Brethren take notice,” he urged, “that while they in contempt of Authority oppose the establish'd and known Laws, by their riotous, unlawful Assemblies, that their Religion and Profession of Faith is false and erroneous, and quite contrary to St. Paul's here in my Text.”Footnote 92 The churchmen were convinced from reason and past experience that the same evils that infected the church—disorder and leveling tendencies—could and would threaten the state, which shared the same structure and the same arguments to uphold it.
William King also compared episcopacy with monarchy when he defended the right of the local church to enact reforms under the authority of the bishops. Every national church had the right to alter “Rites and Ceremonies,” to enact or abrogate “all Ecclesiastical Constitutions,” and to reform “Abuses and Corruptions crept into the Church.” This authority was the same as that “which the supream Civil Power hath of altering the Civil Constitutions; the Fundamental Laws of Religion being preserved inviolable in the one, and of the State in the other.”Footnote 93 The state may even have the authority to insert itself into the affairs of the church in times of need. Andrew Sall, arguing against Jesuits in favor of a national church as opposed to one run by a foreign bishop in Rome, drew on “the practice of the Church, both old and Christian,” “the autority of Fathers,” and the Scriptural precedent of reforming monarchs like Hezekiah and Josiah, to show “that it belongeth to Princes to protect and have an eye over their people in matters of Religion; to procure the integrity and reformation of it, when decayed.”Footnote 94 Likewise, in the preface to his first protestant sermon preached in Dublin in 1674, Sall urged obedience to the church “established by the Law and Government which God has put over us.”Footnote 95
William King went the farthest in his relating the church and monarch when he declared, “The Supremacy of the King in Spiritual Causes is a Temporal thing, as much as an Advouson of a Spiritual Living. It is inherent in the Crown.”Footnote 96 By his reasoning, the two were so closely connected that when Queen Mary had tried to reverse her father's reforms in the 1550s, she was trying to do an impossible task: the supremacy of the monarch over the national church could not simply be set aside in favor of the pope. Thus the adherence of the monarch to Catholicism was not in itself enough to legitimately establish Catholicism in a kingdom, whether the monarch be Mary Tudor, Louis XIV in France, or James II in England. As King argued, “It is not sufficient that the Power that establishes a Religion be competent; and the Methods regular by which it is settled: but likewise it is necessary that the Religion be true in it self.”Footnote 97 Established popery was still popery, and no amount of legislation could make it right.
But there was an interesting tension on display in remarks about the balance of power between church and state. Like with the fine line between arguing for bishops against Dissenters yet clearly marking the boundaries of episcopal power against Catholics, those who touted the close relationship between church and state also had to tread carefully in order to avoid granting too much power to the state over the church. Sall defended this close relationship precisely because the monarch did not interfere with the running of the church. Princes obeyed the laws of the church, he said, “practising even less power in Church Affairs, then the Kings of Israel, and Christian Emperors did.”Footnote 98 English monarchs were aware of their limitations and did not try to grasp at power in the church, he argued; rather, “our Princes pretend not to any other Supremacy or power over their Subjects, then such as the godly Kings of Israel had in their time over the Jews, and the Christian Emperors in the Primitive Church over their respective Subjects.”Footnote 99 William King held that the English kings had never challenged the power of the keys.Footnote 100 By the same token, Jeremy Taylor warned the bishops against becoming too wrapped up in worldly honors, which he saw as the initial cause of the moral decline of the episcopacy after the first few centuries of an exemplary episcopal establishment. Bishops may involve themselves in state affairs for the purpose of correcting moral or spiritual problems, but they must not become mere agents of the state. The church, he implied, must ultimately remain an independent and free structure. “Consider therefore what is your great duty,” he warned his listeners. “Consider what is your great danger.”Footnote 101
IX. Applications: Flexibility in Times of Crisis
The foregoing survey of works that dealt directly with the question of the role of bishops in the Restoration church in Ireland has highlighted some key themes on the minds of the clergymen at the time. The first was the question of authority. Where the reformed bishops drew their authority, in what ways the pope overstepped his authority, how the church operated with and alongside the state, why the bishops could claim authority over Dissenters at home yet be in communion with those abroad—all these considerations informed an Irish reformed episcopacy's view of itself. Secondly, the reality of constantly having to defend against attacks from Catholics and Presbyterians, both of whom were numerically dominant over the established church and so posed a very real threat in their command of the loyalty of the local populations, kept the discussions about episcopacy at a very down-to-earth level. There was less talk of the more spiritual practices of a bishop, such as their role in the celebration of sacraments, or even very much elaboration of a bishop's role as a pastor and guide.Footnote 102 Rather, the emphasis was on the very basics of the bishops’ right to exist and the boundaries within which their exercise of office properly belonged.
Two conclusions may be drawn from the foregoing discussion. First, in the eyes of Church of Ireland clergy, bishops as the head of a properly ordered church hierarchy were absolutely essential to a biblical faith and practice. This point could not be argued. However, it is also clear that the basic marks of a bishop as given above were in fact fewer than might be assumed from the vehemence with which arguments in favor of bishops were made. As we have seen, they included an established line of episcopal succession that could be traced back to the apostles, an ordination ceremony that involved the laying on of hands by three bishops and a blessing, and a recognition of the legal authority of the local national church as agreed upon and established by the convocation of higher clergy and the monarch as its lawful governors, and obeyed by the subjects in that jurisdiction. The objections that the authors examined here raised, especially against Presbyterians, could be whittled down to these crucial issues. This fact of limited essentials, plus the particular position of Irish protestants—their numerical minority, their shared fear of another Catholic uprising made worse by the accession of James II, the Presbyterian triumph in Scotland over the established episcopal church under William and Mary, the church's history of puritan accommodation in the earlier part of the century—combined to provide an interesting space in which a comprehensive church settlement, bringing together episcopal and Presbyterian forms of church government into one institution, could be considered. Such a situation happened at least twice in practice and twice in theory throughout the century. It is to these compromises that we will turn our final attentions.
As has been shown elsewhere, the Church of Ireland before 1641 was both theologically and practically more open to puritans in her midst than the contemporaneous Church of England.Footnote 103 One incident in particular that is often highlighted was the willingness of Andrew Knox, bishop of Raphoe 1611–1633, to allow for the legality of Presbyterian-style ordinations in his diocese so long as a bishop was present among the presbyters who participated in the laying on of hands of the new minister.Footnote 104 He may have been the only bishop to practice such a compromise; he certainly did not represent the opinion of all of his brother bishops. But he also was not explicitly prevented from doing so by his superiors, either; a telling mark of passive acceptance of a compromise useful for keeping the peace among protestants. Likewise, when war loomed heavy on the horizon in 1641, the Irish Primate James Ussher penned a treatise known as the Reduction of Episcopacie outlining a church structure that would keep the titles and recognize the fact of bishops and other episcopal clergy, but which would have them function within a larger synodal-style government that would also include Presbyterians. His argument rested on the idea that whether the titles were of bishops and priests, or of presidents and presbytery, the function and place of such leaders in the church was the same.Footnote 105 At the local level he called for discipline to be handled within the individual congregations, with diocese-wide synods and a national council as the higher-level governing bodies. The bishop, in this scheme, would not act alone as in the episcopal system; Ussher pointed back to the time of the church fathers when “the Bishop might hear no mans cause without the presence of [the] Clergy.”Footnote 106 Likewise, he argued, the restriction on the Presbyterian clergy to discipline, preach, and administer sacraments “proceedeth onely from the custome now received in this Realm; no man can doubt, but by another Law of the Land, this hinderance may be well removed.”Footnote 107 This compromise clearly stemmed from the understanding discussed above of the essential nature of the legality of local church positions and the minimum number of essentials for retaining bishops in a reformed church.
Ussher wrote his treatise in 1641, yet it was not published until after his death in 1656. It appeared in multiple editions, in the late 1650s, in 1679, and in 1689.Footnote 108 While it was not the only compromise settlement on the market, Ussher's fame as a churchman and scholar, his steadfast loyalty to the royalist cause, and the longevity of the book into printings more than thirty years later, all suggest its importance as a stand-alone text. At its publishing, it carried the endorsement: “WE are of the judgement That the form of Government here proposed is not in any point repugnant to the Scripture; and that the Suffragans mentioned in the second Proposition, may lawfully use the power both of Jurisdiction and Ordination, according to the Word of God, and the practice of the ancient Church.”Footnote 109 One of the signatories was John Bramhall, Ussher's successor as Archbishop of Armagh at the Restoration. Bramhall, though a notorious Laudian before the war, carried the possibility of a more flexible understanding of the place of Presbyterian clergy within the restored church into the early years of the settlement before his death in 1663. The question of what to do with clergy who had been ordained in the Presbyterian fashion during the Interregnum but who wished to be a part of the national church settlement was a delicate one. Bramhall worked around it by insisting that such ministers in his jurisdiction be re-ordained, but only as a matter of ensuring that the legality of their position could not be called into question; he was emphatic that such an action was not in fact a re-ordination because their ordination in a Presbyterian fashion was valid even though it was not legally recognized under the new church settlement. Under these terms, a higher number of Presbyterian ministers than Bramhall apparently expected (though nothing like a majority) submitted themselves to validation at the Restoration.Footnote 110
Three decades later war and a change in the monarchy once again threatened the Irish church establishment. At this time Ussher's Reduction of Episcopacie went into another reprinting, and William King penned an unpublished manuscript subtitled, “Notes of a design 1688 for union,” recently examined by Andrew Carpenter.Footnote 111 Carpenter explains that there is “a whole section on ordination” dealing with “accepting and re-ordaining the minsters of dissenting churches into the established church.”Footnote 112 He notes “a number of surprisingly liberal compromises” in order to bring the Presbyterian population into the established church.Footnote 113 King's compromise contained strong echoes of the more comprehensive church from earlier in the century, especially before the Laudian crackdown began in 1634. In this section of the manuscript, which Carpenter quotes at length, King asserted that the power of presbyters to ordain without the presence of a bishop was merely “a question,” though they certainly had such power if a bishop was present; that any re-ordination would not be out of a sense that Presbyterian ordination was invalid, but rather in a legal sense “to make it more unexceptionable to the church”; and that if a minister would generally conform but had genuine scruples about something specific, that his place to officiate in his congregation should not be challenged by the other clergy.Footnote 114 Unlike Ussher's compromise, however, which dealt solely with church structure, King's unpublished plan would “make very radical reforms” in the structure, practice, and prayer of the Church of Ireland as “the only slender hope of preserving any protestant episcopal succession in Ireland” in 1689.Footnote 115
X. Conclusion
From the foregoing examples we can see that certain definitive aspects of the early Irish protestant church remained in force, at least among some members of the clergy, even to the end of the Restoration period. In fact, a distinctive Irish nuance emerges in considerations of episcopacy that had not been entirely subsumed even by the renewed presence of Englishmen on the restored bench.Footnote 116 This study of Irish understandings of episcopacy poses one explanation of the church's emergence from the turbulent 1688–1691 period relatively intact. In England, by contrast, variant conceptions of episcopacy underlay the juring/non-juring divide at the accession of William and Mary to the English throne in 1689, while in Scotland, the established church lacked a tradition of jure divino argument for episcopacy and instead linked it to an erastian ideal “which ultimately undermined its own chances of survival,” finally demonstrated in the disestablishment of the episcopal church in Scotland in 1690.Footnote 117 The Irish reality of being numerically and at least implicitly physically threatened on two fronts by large numbers of Dissenters and Catholics forced the Irish church to return again and again to the basics of what it believed concerning its structure and hierarchy. Such a commitment to a small number of essentials may very well have helped the church weather upheavals that severely shook the English and Scottish churches. The Irish church did not, on the whole, experience a major ejection of Presbyterian clergymen at the Restoration, nor did they have large numbers of non-juring clergy or disestablishment in the face of a Presbyterian majority under William and Mary. By looking more closely at how some of the Irish higher clergy conceived of the role and necessity of bishops in their church, we gain a more nuanced understanding of how the leaders of the restored Irish church understood themselves. Far from being re-cast in the image of the English church at the Restoration, the Church of Ireland retained a distinctive, if not always explicit, Irishness in the face of changing circumstances that served the church well as both an identity marker and survival tactic during many challenging years of self-definition and external turbulence.
