This is the last book from Patrick Collinson, premier historian of English Puritanism. Collinson showed himself a master in his magisterial work, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). Through many works since, Collinson demonstrated his wide understandings of the context of the movement called “Puritanism” in its many forms and variations. He finished this book as he was dying (d. September 28, 2011) and entrusted the work to press under the guidance of Alexandra Walsham and John Morrill. The book is vintage Collinson, wide-ranging in understanding, deft in style, and packed with illuminating insights.
This volume traverses ground Collinson covered in his seminal work. But here he focuses on the developing movement for Presbyterianism as a polity of reform for the Church of England during the second half of the sixteenth century. The protagonist is the archenemy of Puritans and Presbyterians: Richard Bancroft (1544–1610). Bancroft was chaplain to Lord Chancellor Hatton and then Archbishop Whitgift. He became Bishop of London (1597) and vigorously sought to uncover and stamp out the dangerous viewpoints he believed were subversive and revolutionary in their intent and threatened the church and its monarch. Given Whitgift's infirmities, Bancroft virtually functioned as Archbishop and wielded enormous power (189).
The book is not a biography of Bancroft, per se. It is, says Collinson, “an extended pre-history” of the controversial prelate, who was the ‘arch Anti-Puritan’” (1). Indeed, “extreme hostility to Puritanism makes up a great deal of what we know of Bancroft in his first sixty or so years” (2). Bancroft's Daungerous Positions and Proceedings . . . under Pretence of Reformation, and for the Presbityeriall Discipline along with his The Survay of the Pretended Holy Discipline (both 1593) were a detailed chronological summary of bodies of evidence Bancroft amassed against the presbyterial movements and their participants; and a survey of what he considered the main tenets and infrastructure of Presbyterianism. Of Daungerous Positions, Collinson says: “No more tendentious history of the churches calling themselves Reformed, and especially of their representation in the British Isles, was ever perpetrated” (8–9). Theologically, Collinson indicates that “Bancroft shared with Elizabethan Catholics a profound hatred, if not for John Calvin, for the Calvinism which he created in Geneva” (26).
Bancroft began his battles by using the writings of Robert Browne and Robert Harrison, who advocated church reform not “tarrying for the magistrate” and stressed the need for the church to be composed of the visible godly, to accuse them of the early church heresies of Montanism and Donatism (30).
The 1580s saw the establishment of regular “conferences” of “Puritan” clergy whose actions came to be known as the “Dedham Classis” a “kind of Presbyterianism in informal and unauthorised action” (42). The growing “network” of those who wanted church reform became more institutionalized—which Bancroft identified as a badge of disciplined Precisianists—his preferred term for “Puritans.” Bancroft became a staff member of the High Commission, looking into ecclesiastical matters, with powers to enact secular penalties of fines and imprisonments. He became driven by perceived Presbyterian conspiracies. He wrote parliamentary speeches for Sir Christopher Hatton against radical Puritans. Hatton also became a prime mover of the case against the main advocate of Presbyterianism, Thomas Cartwright.
Collinson provides a thorough discussion of the Marprelate Tracts. The answer to “Who was Martin Marprelate?” has never been satisfactorily given, with some twenty-two candidates having been proposed. Collinson weighs in by saying that “if we are to settle for a single author then the man who in all respects fits the bill is Job Throckmorton” (64). According to Whitgift, Bancroft—now Whitgift's chaplain—was the first to try to detect the Martinists. With what followed in the wake of the controversy, Collinson says, “in all probability Bancroft was the backroom boy behind all these legal and extralegal goings on. What was needed was the experience and expertise of the sleuth, and that is what Bancroft was best able to supply” (77).
Bancroft hit his stride with his raids on the studies of the godly ministers, detailed by Collinson, seeking evidence of their participation in surreptitious actions of a Presbyterian order. This was epitomized in a twenty-two page Book of Discipline which was the subject of discussion among the Presbyterian-types. Those accused were hauled before the Star Chamber to answer for their actions; a number were imprisoned.
Collinson details the ins and outs of Bancroft's campaigns and the political and ecclesiastical dimensions that all played parts. He includes chapters on “Prayer, Fasting and the Word of Spirits;” “Possession, Dispossession, Fraud and Polemics;” and the efforts of Bancroft and Robert Cecil against the Jesuits. Bancroft spoke of “puritan-popish assertions” and compared the Presbyterians to “the rankest Jesuits in Europe” (187), even while Bancroft was “widely suspected of crypto-Catholicism” (160).
The last act in Collinson's account ends with Bancroft's elevation to succeed Whitgift as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1604. Collinson takes us through the Hampton Court Conference, the meeting of Puritans hoping for further church reform with the new King James VI and I, and the role Bancroft played in humiliating and bruising the Puritans. The upshot was the promulgation of the 144 Canons of 1604 and “the renewed campaign to impose conformity on the clergy, enthusiastically backed by King James I” (193). Collinson's view as to why Bancroft became Archbishop is that “we may regard Bancroft, from James's point of view, as a necessary purgative, to stamp a rebellious Puritanism out of existence” (210). After Hampton Court, “between seventy-three and eight-three beneficed clergy” were ousted from their livings, “the greatest disturbance of the clerical freehold between the outset of Elizabeth's reign and the Long Parliament” (215).
This splendid and detailed study of Bancroft, the “puppet master of Anti-Puritanism,” (81) is a fitting conclusion to the work of the preeminent historian of sixteenth-century England.
