The sermons
On 16 November 1640 the House of Lords ordered the immediate release from the Tower of John Williams, bishop of Lincoln and dean of Westminster. This was a studiedly theatrical move, because Williams had been the most prominent critic of Archbishop Laud's religious policies, and the most high-profile victim of the Personal Rule. A month later Laud was impeached, leaving the stage clear for Williams to become the leading parliamentary spokesman of his order. Peter Heylyn later complained that ‘his person [was] looked on as sacred, his words deemed as oracles’.Footnote 1
Since Williams had close and long-standing relations with a number of Parliament's chief power-brokers,Footnote 2 he swiftly became a key figure amongst the more moderate Parliamentarians. For a year he was central to the nation's political life, a significance that he had not enjoyed since surrendering the Great Seal in 1625. He was daily active in the Lords, and masterminded an attempt to reshape the English Church along more Protestant lines.Footnote 3 His standing was underlined by his preferment to the archbishopric of York on 4 December 1641.
Later that month, however, Williams overplayed his hand. He composed a petition suggesting that Parliament was not duly constituted if the bishops were prevented from attending by hostile crowds. For this, he was impeached on 30 December 1641 and returned to the Tower, along with all the bishops who had signed the petition. Upon his release in May 1642 he followed the king to Yorkshire. After a botched assassination attempt, he fled to Wales, where he remained, but for one trip to royalist Oxford, until his death in 1650.
In 1651 there were still 237 manuscripts by John Williams in the library of Westminster Abbey.Footnote 4 In 1653 a small room adjoining the library at Westminster was furnished to hold them. When a fire engulfed this room in 1695, all these manuscripts, and therefore the vast majority of Williams's literary remains, were destroyed.Footnote 5 Nevertheless, in the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, there is a volume of manuscript sermons and sermon notes written by Williams. Since the Westminster fire, these sermons have been the largest single collection of Williams's own writings in existence, and the only collection to give a significant insight into the archbishop's theology. Until now, they have not been seriously studied.
None of the sermons in Pepys's collection is dated, though one of them does give a date within the text itself. This is a sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Advent. In it, Williams argues that the liturgical purpose of the day is ‘to teach us not to doubt of Christ's coming, just [as] in the time he came 1644 years sithence or thereabouts’.Footnote 6 So this sermon was presumably preached on the Fourth Sunday of Advent in 1644, which fell on 18 December of that year. Williams evidently reused this sermon, however, because there is an alternative introduction to it written out on its first page. This cunningly adapts it for Christmas Day. Williams writes that ‘We are to celebrate this day, the feast of the Nativity, of Christ's coming in the flesh.’Footnote 7 He then underlines that the Church has prepared for this feast over four successive Sundays, and finally announces that he has accordingly taken his text, which was ‘read here yesterday’,Footnote 8 from the set readings for the last of these preparative Sundays, the Fourth Sunday of Advent. In 1645 Christmas Day fell on a Monday, so that gives us a date for this recension as well: 25 December 1645. On both those dates Williams was in North Wales.
Two of the sermons in the Pepys Library volume are written out in full. These are both in fair hand, but with scribbled alterations. The alterations are the kind that a preacher might make just before delivering a sermon. An overly didactic ‘You’ becomes the more inclusive ‘We,’ and an impolitic reference to the virtues of Cardinal Pole is crossed out.Footnote 9 The first of these is a Good Friday sermon. The second is a sermon on Genesis iii.15. Both of these sermons were evidently intended to be preached before the king, since Williams addresses him directly in each text. In the Good Friday sermon he promises that ‘With God's assistance therefore, and your royal patience, I will unriddle these knots of my text plainly, briefly and orderly.’Footnote 10 In the sermon on Genesis, he refers to the king as ‘the only bishop of the outward discipline of the Church’ and begs him to ‘cause the fourth commandment … to be at the least wise politically and ecclesiastically observed in Your Majesty's dominions, as it was ever heretofore’.Footnote 11
The dean of Westminster was customarily the court preacher on Good Friday. Williams, however, was frequently barred from the pulpit during the reign of Charles i.Footnote 12 Even so, he preached consistently on Good Friday under King James i,Footnote 13 and occasionally during the reign of his son as well, so that gives a range of possibilities for the Good Friday text. However, a clue as to the date is given within the sermon. Williams denounces those who ‘dally with the dugs of the Church, … sport it with the mysteries of salvation, … raven on the patrimony of the Crucified’.Footnote 14 This suggests that Williams delivered it at a time when the Church was coming under particular attack. This in turn indicates that the likeliest year for the sermon is 1641. Before then, Williams had not preached at court for a number of years,Footnote 15 and afterwards he was either in the Tower, in 1642, or in Wales, so hardly in a position to preach before the king. The Lord Chamberlain's roll confirms that Williams was indeed invited to preach on Good Friday in 1641.Footnote 16 So this sermon was presumably preached on that occasion: 23 April 1641. This would certainly explain why the reference to Cardinal Pole had to be abandoned. Praising Bloody Mary's most prominent clerical counsellor from the Whitehall pulpit, in the spring of 1641, would have been insensitive even for a cleric so famously indiscreet as Williams.
Further support is lent to this date by Williams's striking choice of text: John xi.51 ‘And this spake he not of himself: but being high priest that year, he prophesied that Jesus should die for that nation.’ This verse does not appear anywhere amongst the set texts for Good Friday. In fact, it occurs immediately after the raising of Lazarus, and as Williams's hearers would surely have known, the verse refers to Caiaphas's advice which is delivered one verse earlier, in John xi.50, ‘that it is expedient for us that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not’. In late April 1641 there can surely have been no one who missed the relevance of that verse to the fate of Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford.
On 21 April 1641 the House of Commons, frustrated by the slow pace of Strafford's public trial, had passed a bill of attainder condemning him. The earl of Bedford and his allies, anxious not to alienate the king, immediately began working to ensure that it would not lead to Strafford's execution.Footnote 17 Williams, who was a friend and ally of Bedford,Footnote 18 was consequently toeing his party's line when he told the Whitehall congregation that Good Friday, that ‘we neither may nor must kill an innocent man to prevent the temporal destruction of the Commonwealth’.Footnote 19 It is ironic that Williams was forced to change his opinion a few weeks later. Because when Bedford's manoeuvres eventually failed, Williams found himself advising the king, on 9 May 1641, to sign an execution warrant for a man whom Charles firmly believed to be innocent.Footnote 20
The second sermon preached before the king was clearly delivered while Parliament was in session.Footnote 21 It also contains an implicit attack on the Book of SportsFootnote 22 and a request that the king reintroduce afternoon sermons.Footnote 23 To make such remarks would have been seditious and quite possibly dangerous earlier in Charles's reign; but they would have been timely in the summer of 1641. Sabbath observance was evidently moving up the agenda, since the House of Commons passed an order, on 1 September 1641, forbidding sport and recreation on Sundays and encouraging afternoon preaching instead. The Lord Chamberlain's roll confirms that Williams was also invited to preach before the king on Sunday 25 July 1641.Footnote 24 The sermon may have been intended to prepare the way for a concession to godly concerns.
Apart from the two royal sermons, the rest of the volume is made up of some complete sermons in note form and a number of sermon fragments, also in note form. None shows any sign that it was delivered before the king, but two do invite a specific date. The first of these is a sermon on John xvi.18. This is a fast day sermon,Footnote 25 and since Williams speaks in it of ‘this Parliament’ and addresses his congregation as ‘My noble Lords’,Footnote 26 it must surely have been delivered before House of Lords. The text further refers to the Parliamentary prohibition of all images of the crucifix.Footnote 27 This measure was proposed by the House of Commons on 1 September 1641, and agreed to by the House of Lords a week later.Footnote 28 So the sermon must have been delivered after that date. This indicates that the sermon was intended for the Lords' fast day of 22 December 1641. On this occasion, the House of Lords invited Williams to preach in the morning at Westminster Abbey, and James Ussher in the afternoon.Footnote 29 This sermon is the most stridently anti-Arminian of the Pepys Library collection. At a time when the bishops were perceived to be holding back the tide of godly reform within the commonwealth,Footnote 30 an implacably Reformed sermon from the archbishop of York was undoubtedly politic. A warning about the dangers of civil war was perhaps less politic but it was undoubtedly prophetic.Footnote 31
The second dateable sermon is on John xx.19. This is an Easter Day sermon. It suggests a clerical congregation, since it speaks of the risen Christ as ‘A bishop or, as Beza, curator animarum. An excellent precedent for such as take cure of souls. That if they find their people beginning to fall away into … any gross sin … to give them no time to wax brawny, grow cold, freeze in their sins.’Footnote 32 The sermon also hints that its audience may be suffering from affliction,Footnote 33 or even persecution.Footnote 34 Further light is cast on this sermon by a shred of antiquarian evidence. This is the list, found stuck on the inside cover of a book and published in 1858, of the bishops who preached while they were prisoners in the Tower during 1642. It indicates that the archbishop of York was one of those who preached to his brother bishops, and that the text he chose when he did so was none other than John xx.19.Footnote 35 The date on which this took place was 20 AprilFootnote 36 1642.
It is possible to place a couple more of the sermons with less but none the less some precision. The first can be dated to within a few months. It is a sermon on Matthew v.20. In it, Williams explains how good works are a necessary way and means for the believer to go to heaven, but are not thereby the cause of the believer's going to heaven. He explains that ‘Doncaster from this place is my way to London, it is not therefore a cause of my going to London.’Footnote 37 This suggests that Williams delivered the sermon somewhere in Yorkshire. The geographical description would fit with the environs of Cawood, the dilapidated seat of the archbishops of York. Williams lived at Cawood after leaving London in May 1642, and until he was forced to flee. Since Williams arrived in Conway on 4 October 1642,Footnote 38 this gives six months during which he could have used these words.
The second roughly dateable sermon is on Luke xviii.10. This can be given a terminus post quem. At one point during this sermon, Williams attacks a separatist pamphlet called The cry of a stone.Footnote 39 This is a reference to Robert Coachman's The cry of a stone, or a treatise; showing what is the right matter, form and government of the visible Church of Christ. Since Coachman's work was published in London during 1642, Williams must have delivered his sermon after that.
The remainder of the sermons in Pepys's volume give little information which could be used to date them. That said, they are marked by concerns which place them in the 1640s rather than earlier. Parliament receives regular mention, and Williams frequently hints at some antagonism between it and the crown.
This atmosphere of tension is not universal. In a fragment of a sermon on Luke xvi.31, for example, Williams encourages his hearers to ‘acknowledge in all thankfulness, those great blessings which we have from the king and the state and especially from this estate representative, our honourable Parliament. To have Moses and the Prophets preached and diligently preached in our churches every sabbath day’.Footnote 40 The phrase ‘this estate representative’ may suggest that this text was also preached before Parliament, but there is not enough of the text remaining to confirm that.
Many other sermons, however, do presuppose a degree of political tension. Williams repeatedly condemns those who use the sacred Scriptures for political purposes. He warns against those who look to the Bible for ‘matters to apply (or rather) to misapply, to the king, or to the Parliament. … Matters which testify somewhat of their friends or their foes, somewhat of their party or faction’.Footnote 41 Elsewhere, again in the context of differences between the king and Parliament he underlines that ‘To apply the scriptures to matters of state is to misapply them … It is not the kingdom of England but the kingdom of heaven that the holy scripture informs us of.’Footnote 42
On one occasion, Williams openly laments the state of the nation, complaining about the breakdown in the normal structures of government. He writes ‘This is the mischief we groan under in England at this time, to be governed, instead of good old laws, by the wits of the time, by young mens’ arbitrement and discretion. … God send me to be governed by the worst law, rather than by the best discretion.'Footnote 43 In other cases, a background of armed conflict is explicit. One fragment was clearly composed with soldiers in mind,Footnote 44 and another refers explicitly to the evils of civil war, when brother fights against brother.Footnote 45
In one passage Williams condemns those who take up arms against their sovereign. He argues that the way to discern whether a given inclination to act is actually a stirring of the Holy Spirit within us is to test it against the Scriptures. The application of this rule is clear: ‘I have a motion to obey my King. I am satisfied I am so moved by the Holy Ghost … Because the Holy Ghost, in scripture, teacheth me so to do. I have a motion to rebel against him. I am assured it is not from the Holy Ghost. Why? Because the Holy Ghost in my bible teacheth me no such thing.’Footnote 46
Williams goes on to argue that taking up arms against the king is triply wicked. It runs contrary to the credenda (things to be believed) of Christianity, because, properly understood, such rebellion is an assault on the Catholic Church. For, as he writes, ‘the Church being enclosed in the commonwealth, if I believe I may destroy the king and the commonwealth, I cannot believe in the catholic Church’.Footnote 47 It runs against the agenda (things to be done) of Christianity, because the king is the political father of all his subjects, and to attack him is therefore contrary to the fifth commandment, ‘Honour thy father and thy mother.’Footnote 48 It also runs against the oranda (things to be prayed for) of Christianity, because in 1 Timothy ii.2, St Paul instructs Christians rather to pray for kings and those in authority, than to attack them.Footnote 49 This sustained attack on rebellion suggests that the sermon, of which this fragment was a part, was delivered after the Civil War had broken out.
Mixed in with this background of tension and conflict, there lurk disagreements about church polity. As Williams notes, ‘Many read the scriptures to help them frame and erect new Churches, new disciplines, new ecclesiastical governments out of them. And these new governments they will needs call the Kingdom of Christ, the Sceptre of Christ, the Empire of Christ.’Footnote 50 This may be a reference to Henry Burton's defence of congregationalism, Christ on his throne (1641), which uses such language. But the Presbyterian Samuel Rutherford also referred to ‘Christ's sceptre in church censures’ in Lex rex (1644),Footnote 51 so it was presumably commonplace. Williams condemns such exegesis as a flagrant misuse of God's Word, which leaves the polity of the Church to the decision of the magistrate.
Williams similarly condemns those who set themselves up as preachers without due authority or lawful ordination. He complains of ‘the impudent boldness of some cobblers, smiths, button-makers in these lawless and licentious times’.Footnote 52 Such people, he argues, are dominated not by the Holy Spirit but by a ‘spirit of giddiness’.Footnote 53 This too suggests a date in the 1640s, as alarm about separatist congregations and uncontrolled preaching became increasingly widespread after 1641.Footnote 54
To sum up, Pepys's volume contains three sermons which were intended for state occasions at some point during 1641. Two of these sermons were preached before the king. One of these can be convincingly tied to 23 April 1641, Good Friday, and the other to 25 July 1641. The third is the fast day sermon which Williams preached before the House of Lords on 22 December 1641. Besides these, the volume contains one sermon which is specifically dateable, on its first airing, to 18 December 1644, and in its second to 25 December 1645. The volume then contains one sermon which can only have been preached during Williams's brief sojourn in York between May and October of 1642, and a further sermon which cannot have been preached before the publication, in 1642, of Coachman's The cry of a stone. Beyond these, it includes a number of sermons and sermon fragments, all of which, to varying degrees, suggest a background of either political conflict or open warfare, and therefore fit most naturally with a date during the 1640s. These sermons are, therefore, the remnant of Williams's preaching after his first release from the Tower in 1640.
The preacher
Most historians are decidedly dismissive of John Williams's performance as a churchman. He is commonly presented as a man of few principles, whose career in the Church was not so much a vocation as a means to political power. Amongst contemporary historians, Hugh Trevor-Roper led the charge against him, and his approach has set the tone for subsequent studies, though more by dint of its descriptive panache than its reliability. Trevor-Roper presents Williams as a worldly politician with little interest in his pastoral duties. He writes that, as far as Williams was concerned, ‘the interests of the Church were nothing to him when weighed in the balance against his own advancement or the humiliation of a rival. He was a politician with a taste for splendour, who had taken orders as a medieval nobleman took them, to be a step to power and feudal dignity’.Footnote 55 The key to understanding Williams, he writes, is to grasp that ‘His religion was a mere parergon to his politics, a spare-time job designed to secure his income while he devoted himself to more serious activities.’Footnote 56
Trevor-Roper is equally dismissive about Williams's personal beliefs. He describes Williams as ‘proudly indifferent to the ideas and convictions held by more earnest churchmen’ and writes that ‘he behaved throughout his career as if no differences in religious principles existed’.Footnote 57 He also suggests that Williams had no more sympathy for the Reformed churches abroad than William Laud,Footnote 58 and that he stood aloof to the debates between Arminians and Calvinists.Footnote 59
A more recent biographer of Laud, Charles Carlton, evidently accepted Trevor-Roper's assessment, writing of Williams that ‘His faith was as shallow as it was broad.’Footnote 60 Kenneth Fincham, for his part, has suggested that Williams was negligent of his episcopal duties, that his reputation within his diocese was that of a bon viveur rather than a serious pastor, and that he cannot therefore be ranked amongst the godly bishops of the Jacobean period.Footnote 61 Charles Knighton, in an essay on Williams's time as dean of Westminster, is similarly dismissive of Williams's commitment to his cure, writing that ‘Williams acquired the deanery and retained it principally because it gave him an ideal base from which to conduct his political operations.’Footnote 62 Citing Trevor-Roper, Knighton suggests that ‘to Williams religion was at best of secondary importance’.Footnote 63 Even Brian Quintrell, who is prepared to concede that Williams was at least consistent in his adherence to Calvinism, none the less underlines that ‘the image Williams presents in his portraits is that of a gentleman rather than a senior cleric’.Footnote 64
There is, of course, no doubt that Williams was an ambitious politician who relished being at the centre of the nation's political life and chafed at being excluded from it. John Hacket, Williams's chaplain and confident, and the man who wrote his first biography, makes no attempt to hide this, admitting that Williams wished to be one of the king's counsellors,Footnote 65 and detailing Williams's repeated attempts to clamber back into favour with the duke of Buckingham and King Charles.Footnote 66 However, quite why a predilection for exercising secular power should be sufficient grounds to write off Williams's commitment to his clerical calling is far from clear. A large number of clergy served as justices of the peace during the early Stuart period, including several bishops who combined Reformed theological credentials with a noteworthy degree of pastoral seriousness.Footnote 67 James Ussher, the famously godly archbishop of Armagh, was a member of the Irish privy council. And William Juxon, bishop of London, served as Lord Treasurer from 1636 to 1641.
John Hacket was certainly prepared to defend such royal service as ‘not opposite to Christ's evangelical administrations, but co-incident’,Footnote 68 and could cite the eminent Reformed theologian Andrew Melville in his support.Footnote 69 Williams himself, in a 1641 speech defending the right of the clergy to be involved in the political life of the nation, was able to cite a number of eminent Protestant divines who had served in secular office. He mentioned specifically Johann Brenz, Abraham Scultetus, André Rivet, Pierre du Moulin and Alexander Henderson. And Williams's insistence that there was no inherent problem with a clergyman exercising secular jurisdiction finds echoes in the writing of the Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, John Prideaux.Footnote 70 So it is not self-evident that political ambition either was, or was widely thought to be, inconsistent with a committed clerical ministry.
Portraying Williams as a negligent churchman inevitably involves dismissing much of what Hacket wrote about him. There is not time in this article to address all the claims which Hacket advances on Williams's behalf, and it may well be that Williams was not quite as assiduous as his chaplain makes him out to be. However, it is at least possible to reconsider the claims which Hacket makes about one aspect of Williams's ministry, namely his preaching.
Hacket was prepared to admit that Williams delegated some of his pastoral work to others,Footnote 71 but he refused to concede any ground on the bishop's commitment to the pulpit. As soon as he was ordained, Hacket writes, ‘he began to labour in his master's harvest, and became a preacher of more frequency and diligence, than it useth to be with fellows of houses for the greater part’.Footnote 72 When he became a parish priest, he preached ‘constantly twice every Lord's Day at Walgrave or at Grafton … performing his turn at Kettering, a market town not much remote, in a lecture supplied by a combination of the learnedest divines of the vicinage’.Footnote 73
When Williams became bishop of Lincoln and Lord Keeper, this commitment to preaching did not wane:
Whether his abode were within his diocese or without it, he knew that the calling of a bishop went along with him in every place. And whatsoever the standing weight of his business that lay upon him, he remembered to stir up the gift of God that was in him by the putting on of hands. He preached constantly in the Abbey of Westminster … besides the sermon which he preached every Lent in the king's royal chapel.Footnote 74
Even when Williams was compelled to reside at Buckden, Hacket notes, this commitment to the pulpit continued: ‘He had good gifts to preach withal, and good gifts are given to profit others.’Footnote 75
A number of historians have dismissed this material as little more than hagiography. Kenneth Fincham notes that Hacket presents Williams as a diligent preacher, but argues that ‘Hacket's interpretation owes more to biographical conventions than to reality.’Footnote 76 Such preaching as Williams undertook, Fincham suggests, was intended principally to shore up his political base; it did not indicate a real commitment to the pastoral task:
No doubt on occasion Williams, consummate actor that he was, played up to the image of the preaching pastor in order to consolidate his popular standing amongst the Lincolnshire gentry, and to underline his distance from the ceremonialist policies of Charles i and Laud. But every indication is that the Bishop's prime interest lay in national politics.Footnote 77
Charles Knighton, too, has expressed his doubts about Williams's preaching. He notes that Williams was frequently excluded from the pulpit in Whitehall during the reign of Charles i. However, he argues, ‘exclusion from the Court itself rather than its pulpit was the more frustrating for Williams; though he occasionally fostered the image of himself as a preaching pastor, this was more by way of anti-Arminianism than for any positive purpose’.Footnote 78 Knighton even suggests that Williams may have preached less frequently than the records of Westminster Abbey indicate, opining that ‘he may not have exercised his duty in person even when specifically listed’.Footnote 79 Dew Roberts, Williams's only twentieth-century biographer, also questions Williams's commitment to the pulpit. He suggests that, during Williams's brief stay in Yorkshire, he was not so much active as a preacher as busy preparing for war.Footnote 80 And, referring to Hacket's claim that Williams was also preaching regularly whilst in Wales, he writes that ‘in Williams’ own correspondence there is no mention of these pious activities. When he had fled from Yorkshire he had turned his back on his ecclesiastical functions. Once he reached Wales, military matters absorbed his attention'.Footnote 81
The Pepys Library sermons offer a powerful rejoinder to these doubts about Williams's commitment to the pulpit and suggest that Hacket's claims on Williams's behalf may have to be taken more seriously. The manuscript demonstrates that Williams was an active preacher, even when he was enmeshed in the political wrangling of 1640–2, and the Civil War thereafter. And since at least one of these sermons was preached in Yorkshire, and another in Wales, they also show that Dew Roberts is mistaken in his claim that Williams effectively abandoned his clerical duties at the outbreak of the Civil War. He was evidently still preaching in December 1645.
Furthermore, the sermons in this volume were not the only ones that Williams preached at this time. It is known that Williams preached before the king on 24 January 1641,Footnote 82 but that sermon is not contained in the Pepys Library manuscript. In other words, the Pepys Library sermons are only a partial record of Williams's homiletic activity during the 1640s. If a court sermon has been lost, it seems reasonable to assume that others may have been as well. The case for taking Hacket's account more seriously is further strengthened when his description of the content of Williams' preaching is taken into account. Hacket writes that, when Williams was in Lincolnshire
Many a Sabbath Day's journey he took to the adjacent towns, to let them see and hear their diocesan: not omitting the punctilio of the canon, to stir them up to the reading, and hearing of the holy scriptures, but taught it with much variety from Luke xvi.31. ‘If they hear not Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead.’Footnote 83
Within the volume from the Pepys Library, there are indeed several sermons which exhort the congregation to read and hear the Scriptures, just as Hacket describes. There is one sermon on the very text which Hacket cites.Footnote 84 There are also two sermons on the closely related text, Luke xvi.29: ‘Abraham saith unto him, they have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them.’Footnote 85 On the basis of these texts, Williams duly exhorts his congregation to the reading and hearing of the Scriptures. Since Hacket's description of the frequent content of Williams's preaching turns out to be accurate, it might not be unreasonable to assume that what he says about Williams's frequency in the pulpit has some grounding as well.
It is also striking that, although some of these sermons were written for state occasions, the majority were clearly intended for ordinary parish churches. In two of them, for example, Williams notes that some of his hearers may not be able to read.Footnote 86 He takes pains to underline that the Scriptures belong also to the ‘common people’.Footnote 87 In a Trinity Sunday sermon, he underlines that even ploughmen need to understand the doctrine of the Trinity,Footnote 88 and draws a rustic analogy for the Holy Spirit which involves the sign of a public house.Footnote 89 Given this engagement with ordinary congregations, Kenneth Fincham's suggestion that Williams's preaching was merely a form of political grandstanding begins to look somewhat uncharitable.
The case for arguing that Williams was an insouciant pastor is not as strong as is generally assumed. The Pepys Library manuscripts certainly suggest that he was a more painstaking preacher than some historians have suggested. Williams clearly enjoyed being a significant political player, and spent a great deal of energy attempting to remain one. And, as Fincham has shown, he was also not the most energetic episcopal visitor on the bench.Footnote 90 However, the notion that Williams was only interested in his clerical position as a source of income and status is a caricature. Like a number of early modern clergy, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, he was a committed servant of his prince as well as an active clergyman. The Pepys Library sermons are evidence that, at least with respect to preaching, Williams aspired to relatively high standards of episcopal ministry, and continued to do so even under adverse circumstances.
The doctrine
Most historians have been prepared to call Williams a ‘Calvinist’ but that description has generally been mitigated in some way. Trevor-Roper, though admitting that Williams can be described as a Calvinist,Footnote 91 thought that he had no fixed religious convictions at all, arguing that he ‘refused to commit himself to the inconvenience of a principle’.Footnote 92 Hajzyk suggests that Williams's apparent commitment to Reformed theology had more to do with opposing Archbishop Laud than personal belief.Footnote 93 Knighton indicates that Williams's love of music ‘tempered the severity’ of his Reformed theology, and ‘set him at odds with most of those whose political and religious opinions he supposedly shared’.Footnote 94 Quintrell calls Williams a ‘Calvinist’, but one ‘with liberal inclinations’.Footnote 95
Williams's manuscript sermons, however, do not suggest that his commitment to Reformed, or ‘Calvinist,’ theology was anything other than self-conscious, straightforward and wholehearted. His disrelish for the theological innovations sponsored by the Laudians, and particularly for the recent influx of Arminianism, is strongly expressed. The soteriology that Williams advances from the pulpit is resolutely Reformed. He is emphatic that God's grace is absolutely sovereign in the process of salvation. ‘The Holy Ghost is the principal agent or efficient cause, to show us our sins/bring us to repentance’,Footnote 96 he argues, and ‘it is by the Holy Ghost that God moulds, frames, weaves our thoughts in the work of conversion, as manufactures are wrought by men's fingers in their making and composition’.Footnote 97
Williams insists that there is nothing in the human soul that prepares the way for grace. He is scathing about Arminian preachers who have suggested that human beings cooperate with God's grace at the moment of conversion: ‘May we therefore never hear again out of our English pulpits, of any moral efficacy or persuasion, of any spark in the cold hearth … of any motus primo primi, of any so much as the wagging of a feather, toward true repentance in the heart of the sinner that is not framed and moulded by the Holy Ghost.’Footnote 98
Williams is equally committed to the Reformed reading of human nature. ‘Our nature’, he insists ‘lies wholly and entirely buried under sin, and all the produce thereof, [and] is forced to cry out with the leper in the law, I am unclean, I am unclean.’Footnote 99 Human beings are shaped in sin, and their highest righteousness is ‘as the menstruous clothes of a woman’.Footnote 100 It is a widespread error, Williams argues, ‘that we come not into the world with that prejudice divines would put upon us … Nor are we so black with original sin as St Austin would have it’.Footnote 101 This mistaken opinion, he notes with sadness, has been maintained not by ‘the schoolmen, the Socinians and the Arminians only, but some of the pulpits of England before this Parliament’.Footnote 102 Such teaching, he argues, is itself a symptom of human corruption. For ‘in this matter of sin, our understanding is like a dark dungeon, and we cannot possibly by nature … find out our original corruption till the Holy Ghost by vouchsafing to come down and by shedding of his beams into our souls and consciences shall be pleased … to manifest and declare the same unto us’.Footnote 103
Given the state of humanity, a mighty exercise of divine power is needed to bring men and women to salvation. The working of the Holy Spirit in the process of salvation is not, therefore, something that can be resisted. Grace is as gentle and as implacable as logical deduction.Footnote 104 ‘When the Holy Ghost hath once enlightened our understandings and accordingly fixed our wills, into the knowledge and belief of these high mysteries, then they become forthwith strong and invincible demonstrations.’Footnote 105 The Arminian understanding of grace is deficient, Williams insists, and cannot explain how a sinner can be brought to the change of heart and mind required for true repentance. ‘These resolutions no Arminian can work with his moral suasions and exhortations.’Footnote 106
Williams is equally dismissive of the Arminian tendency to undermine Christian assurance, by casting doubt on the doctrine of justification by faith alone. He writes:
I have pitied the pity of some late divines, sorry forsooth that we of the Reformation should look to be justified by faith alone and an assurance of salvation … which are such inward, or hidden graces, say these men, as they cannot tell themselves whether they have them or no. And I do likewise believe that some young divines do scarce believe their believing.Footnote 107
For Williams, by contrast, assurance is something which every Christian can aspire to and attain:
Dost thou feel in good earnest thy soul wounded, thy conscience pricked, thy God enraged by reason of thy sin, and no one thought, word or deed of thine own fit to be applied as a plaster to the same, but yet with a true, though a weak and an humble faith, layest hold on the mercy of God in Christ …? If thou beest disposed or affected in this kind, thou knowest more of thy justifying faith, than all the doctors of the Sorbonne can inform thee.Footnote 108
Williams's reading of justification is again uncompromisingly Reformed. He insists that the believer is justified by the righteousness of Christ, ‘a righteousness imputed, and laid hold on and applied to ourselves by a true and lively faith’.Footnote 109 Sanctification, growth in the believer's inherent righteousness, is ‘indissolubly knit and joined with our justification’,Footnote 110 but is not itself a cause of salvation. As he writes:
We Protestants do not attribute our acquiring or obtaining of the kingdom of heaven, to our sanctification or inherent righteousness, a righteousness lame and imperfect, a righteousness already due unto God, a righteousness but newly given us by God. But we fetch all our interest to this kingdom from our justification, from our relative righteousness, from our imputed righteousness, from the righteousness of Christ Jesus, by the tender mercy of God, accounted, reckoned and allowed unto us.Footnote 111
This commitment to the Reformed understanding of salvation can also be seen in Williams's approach to the atonement. On the cross Christ bears the punishment for human sin, for ‘it behoved God, even in the pardoning of sins, to declare his hatred and detestation against our sins, that he did not pass them by them, as trifles to be neglected, but as horrible indignities to be severely vindicated, even with the death of his only Son’.Footnote 112 Christ's death, he argues, is thus a ‘holocaust for all nations … for all the drove, as it were, of mankind’.
However, this does not mean, as the Arminians vainly suggest, that Christ atoned for the sins of all human beings. Rather, it means that Christ died for human beings of all races and nationalities.Footnote 113 Grace can therefore be called universal only ‘in regard of the nations, generations and conditions of men’.Footnote 114 Williams writes that ‘what he assumed in his incarnation, he offered up in his passion, a nature common to all men, all kinds of men, Jew and gentile … And this universal grace … I take to be all the universality intended by the Ancient Fathers’.Footnote 115 But if the only universality of grace which Williams is prepared to grant is this non-specificity in terms of race and nationhood, then Williams is, of course, asserting that the atonement avails only for a limited number, namely the elect.
When Williams turns to consider the nature of Christ's presence in the sacrament, he once again advances an explicitly Reformed theology. He writes that ‘All the Reformed churches agree in this, that to a worthy and faithful receiver, Christ's body and blood … is really exhibited in this sacrament.’Footnote 116 But the manner in which it is exhibited is certainly not physical in nature: ‘I do not believe he is present on the altar either before or after the words of consecration. I do not believe he is in the bread or in the wine’; rather, Christ is present ‘spiritually to the faith of a worthy receiver’.Footnote 117 For, as he insists, ‘Faith only can conceive. Faith only can perceive. Faith only can receive the depth of this mystery.’Footnote 118
Although Williams is demonstrably Reformed in his theology, he is also committed to the established polity of the English Church. That said, Hacket is going too far when he claims that ‘Lincoln ever defended the divine right of his order, that it was necessary in a Church rightly constituted.’Footnote 119 In fact, the Pepys Library sermons show Williams arguing that the organisation of the Church was not divinely ordained, but was rather something which the Christian magistrate was entitled to decide. Closely following the thought of Richard Hooker, he argues that
the outward discipline of the church is not set down/directed in scriptures, punctually and particularly. But … in general words only. As ‘Let all things be done in the outward discipline of the church decently and in order.’ But what this decency and order is, [is] not conveyed in the scriptures but left to the Christian magistrate.Footnote 120
Even so, and again following Hooker, Williams insists that episcopacy was undoubtedly the most ancient form of church government, and has its roots in the apostolic period. As he says, ‘all learned men confess episcopacy, government by bishops, was fixed in God's Church from the death of the apostles to our age’.Footnote 121 Although the Bible does not enjoin a precise form of church polity, Williams argues, it does rule out some possibilities. For example, the Bible makes it clear that congregationalism of any sort, ‘these independent churches that will be questioned by no higher power’,Footnote 122 must not be tolerated. For even the divinely inspired John the Baptist permitted himself to be questioned by his lawful superiors, the Sanhedrin, and claimed no independent right to preach.Footnote 123 So if Williams's views on church polity were not as high-flying as Hacket suggests, they none the less enabled him both to defuse the iure divino argument in favour of Presbyterianism, and to hold the line against independency and separatism.Footnote 124 And that was undoubtedly useful in the polemical atmosphere of the 1640s.
However open-minded Williams may have been about the right ordering of the Church, he was absolutely clear about the centrality of the Scriptures to her life. His is a striking example of the word-centred piety which has been observed to mark the thought of Herbert and Donne.Footnote 125 And that is not surprising, since he was a patron to both men. ‘It is the holy scripture’, Williams insists, ‘that is the queen of all the sciences, because there and there only, we hear news of eternal life, we receive any testimony of Jesus Christ.’Footnote 126 As a result, hearing the Scriptures is vital to the life of a Christian; and in hearing, Williams includes reading.Footnote 127 ‘Hearing is the sense of all kinds of knowledge and therefore God useth it for the instrument of saving knowledge … It is the prime outward instrument of man's salvation.’Footnote 128 Because hearing the Scriptures read and expounded is the ordinary means to a saving faith.
Of course, the hearing that saves is not merely an outward hearing. The believer must ‘mark/listen to/understand Moses and the prophets’.Footnote 129 And, having understood the Scriptures, the believer must then apply them to his or her life. ‘Because the lessons of Moses and the prophets are not contemplative verities to be known only … but they are most of them practicable verities, things to be known, understood and put in practice.’Footnote 130 Doing that, of course, requires more than hearing and understanding; it also requires obedience. For that reason, Williams notes, ‘this is true and sound divinity, that our … adhesion unto the rules and precept of God's word, as perpetually good and to be performed by us is a more essential part of Christian faith than to assent to them’.Footnote 131 Hearing, in other words, is only fruitful if it is crowned by obedience.Footnote 132
The Scriptures, Williams insists, belong to all Christians, clergy and lay,Footnote 133 men and women, adults and children.Footnote 134 And it is papal tyranny, he argues, to keep the Scriptures away from them.Footnote 135 Christians should hear God's word regularly in Church, and read the Scriptures, if they can, every day.Footnote 136 They should prepare for sermons by carefully reading the text which the preacher intends to expound; and, after the service, take the text back to their house, to read it again for their family and servants, and impart to them the notes and observations that they have garnered from the sermon.Footnote 137 Only a lawfully called minister may expound the Scriptures publicly in the congregation, but all Christians may expound the Scriptures at home.Footnote 138
Williams's high view of the Scriptures shapes his view of Christian worship. Although he concedes that ‘prayer is the principal duty of our latreia, our worship and service of God’,Footnote 139 he is insistent that hearing sermons is a vital aspect of divine service too. He writes
I do not like of these late divines, that (as much as in them lieth) set praying and preaching together by the ears and will needs prefer the one before the other. I like better the judgement of the Church of England that incorporates the sermon or homily as part of her liturgy and her public praying. Without preaching we should not be able to perform our praying. When Christ taught his apostles to pray, he did it in a sermon and by way of preaching.Footnote 140
Preaching cannot be severed from prayer without destroying both divine ordinances; ‘And truly the serpent is not a little beholding to some churchmen of late, that have endeavoured to preach down preaching.’Footnote 141
This is not the only contemporary liturgical tendency which Williams castigates. In one of his sermons on Luke xvi.31, Williams underlines that Christians should have no commerce with the dead. He raises as a possible objection to this view: ‘But were not prayers for the dead maintained as lawful by our divines, not many years sithence? Were they not preached before his Majesty?’ Audaciously, Williams then cites the writings of King James against practices enjoined from his son's pulpit, and insists ‘that howsoever some divines of the Church of England give a fair exposition/interpretation, to these prayers and commemorations which we read in the ancient fathers. Yet is this church in general clearly of the opinion that no prayers or commendation of the dead should be used at all’.Footnote 142
John Williams's preaching in the 1640s was, therefore, consciously and confidently Reformed. He was openly hostile to the doctrinal and liturgical innovations of the 1630s, even where these had been defended in the presence of the king. Once again, it seems that Hacket was right, and the historians who have muddied the waters of Williams's theology are wrong. Hacket placed Williams accurately when he wrote of him that ‘He compared the commonplaces of Peter Martyr, Chemnitius, Musculus, Calvin and Zanchi … with the sacred text, and found that harmony in them all with the oracles of God's word, that he perceived he might with a good conscience, as he would answer it to Christ Jesus, defend the integrity of the Reformed religion.’Footnote 143
The Pepys Library sermons raise a question mark over some criticisms that are commonly levelled at Archbishop Williams. Rather than supporting the claim that he was uninterested in his pastoral duties, they suggest that he was an active preacher, even when he was caught up in politics. They also suggest that his adherence to Reformed theology was consistent, self-conscious and explicit. This picture of Williams as a committed preacher of the Reformed faith makes better sense of his abiding links with the godly community than previous historiography has done. This is the kind of man to whom Robert Devereux might turn to discuss his marriage. This is the kind of man to whom the Seymours, the Sidneys, the Herberts and the Cecils might send their sons for education. This is the kind of man whose words might be cited with approval in Francis Russell's commonplace book. This is the kind of man whom Ralph Brownrigg and Samuel Ward might travel from Cambridge to visit. Trevor-Roper's unprincipled and indolent worldling is not.
John Williams was probably not a perfect bishop, and his reputation for holiness was never widespread. He was, however, committed to at least one aspect of his vocation, and it was the aspect which, with his word-centred piety, he would have ranked as the most important. For after the word of God itself, he told the House of Lords, ‘The second means whereby the Holy Ghost reproves us of sin is the ministry of the gospel … the preachers of God's word; the boanerges and thunderers of the Law.’Footnote 144 Then, in words that he might easily have applied to himself, he reminded the peers that ‘In these though they seem to you never so frail and brittle vessels … Yet are there many times contained treasures, treasures secret and hidden treasures, illuminations, motions, inspirations of the Holy Ghost.’Footnote 145
