james ussher, archbishop of armaghby r. buick knox

Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd

James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh by R. Buick KnoxReview by: William O'SullivanIrish Historical Studies, Vol. 16, No. 62 (Sep., 1968), pp. 215-219Published by: Irish Historical Studies Publications LtdStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30006496 .

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REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES 215

JAMES USSHER, ARCHBISHOP OF ARMAGH. By R. Buick Knox. Pp 205- Cardiff : University of Wales Press. 1967. 35s.

USSHER'S latest biographer, Dr Knox, of the Theological College, Aberystwyth, originally presented his study as a doctoral thesis in the University of London in I956. In revising and condensing for publica- tion he has had the benefit of works on church history which appeared in the following ten years. Manuscript sources are used only to a very small extent and the special number of Hermathena for the tercentenary of Ussher's death in 1956 was unfortunately missed. The book falls naturally into two distinct parts: chapters I-III which deal with Ussher's career in biographical sequence and the remaining chapters which form a series of separate essays each considering some special aspect such as: 'Ussher and Bedell ', 'Ussher and presbyterianism'. This inevitably leads to repetition, but offset by greater precision of treatment than Ussher has ever previously encountered from his biographers. For the first time his career is handled altogether dispassionately, and while longer contemplation of difficulties not yet fully resolved may lead to a clearer picture it is unlikely that the balance set up here will be seriously disturbed except perhaps in judging the character of his doctrine. Although Dr Knox in this matter would opt for a degree of Calvinism, most of his discussion points rather in the opposite direction. A good example of this is the very convincing case he makes for Ussher's Irish articles being no more Calvinist in intention than the English thirty-nine articles, contrary to generally received opinion.

Dr Knox would argue that Ussher's mind was compartmentalized, that the contradictions in his understanding remained unresolved; that he could make distinctions between the visible and invisible church without shaking his loyalty to the establishment; that he could lean on the need for episcopal succession while ignoring the papal allegiance of his own predecessors and at the same time see the true succession of the Christian church in the utterly anti-episcopalian Waldenses. But surely all of these apparent contradictions indicate rather an adherence to the central christian position where even predestination and free will are held con- currently. Although there is a chapter on Ussher as 'scholar and church- man' and estimates of his character and his work as a pastor, the book is nevertheless weighted heavily towards the aspects of his career around which controversies have crystallized over the last three hundred years. For these Dr Knox provides admirably clear and persuasive discussions and judgments. Inevitably this involves a good deal of historiography, which is well handled when it comes up, but the absence of any general treatment is noticeable. Such a sketch, linked as it must have been with an evaluation of the sources on which any account of Ussher has to be based, would have made a most valuable addition to this study. Even if it did nothing else it would certainly give the reader a proper sense of the difficulties Dr Knox has overcome in achieving his balanced view.

The chapter on the organization of the church is among the best things in the book. Dr Knox sets Ussher's understanding of episcopacy

G1



2 I6 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES

over against that of the great anglican thinkers of the period like Hooker and Jeremy Taylor and of puritan divines like Cartwright, and finds his position remarkably close to that of Hooker. He remained a staunch upholder of his order; though bowing to the king's necessities he was ready in The reduction of episcopacy, in 1641, for the dilution of episcopal jurisdiction in a synodal type of church government. He seems however not to have been prepared for any concession in the ordination of priests or consecration of bishops. It is probably not without significance that Ussher was the first critical editor of the letters of St Ignatius which provide the earliest witness to the emergence of the bishop's authority in the church. Dr Knox provides a most useful account of Ussher's position in the face of two of the sees in his own province under Scottish bishops: Raphoe under Andrex Knox and Down and Connor under Robert Echlin. Writing (not necessarily to a lord of the council as the author has it (Ussher, Works xvi, 51 o-I )) after Knox's death in 1633, he describ- ed the state of Raphoe 'in which for the present there is not so much as a face seen of the government of the Church of Ireland'. Ussher's friendly relations with the European scholars who were the leaders of continental protestantism did not stretch to condoning the abolition of episcopacy except as a temporary expedient during the fight for reform.

He believed in the divine right of kings, and faith in the importance of the king's role in the government of the church was one of his guiding principles. Remotely it was a legacy from the general disillusionment that followed the failure of the fifteenth-century papacy and conciliar move- ment to reform the church. The council of Trent came too late and in any case its effects in hardening the lines of division and imposing a detailed conformity could have little attraction for an anglican church- man, especially one of Ussher's temperament. More nearly Ussher's devotion to the crown sprang from the extremely critical situation of the Church of Ireland. The reformation, despite the Henrician distribution of monastic lands among the Irish nobility, had failed to find a popular footing and the counter-reformation had taken over as the really active religious element in the country. In the outcome the reformed church was altogether dependent on government, and whenever the king's needs demanded the adoption of conciliatory tactics towards his catholic subjects then the established church was in danger of being overwhelmed. So in the first year of his episcopate Ussher called for the recusancy laws to be enforced against the catholic gentry even though, as Archbishop Hampton pointed out, in admonishing him, they were his own kinsmen. By way of excuse Ussher instanced the use by catholics of one of the churches in his diocese. Yet despite this state of war Ussher saw his catholic neighbour in our current phrase as part of 'the people of God' and found in them true understanding of some Christian doctrine which he could not find in their theologians. For him the government and official teaching of the Roman church were corrupt and could be reformed only by upsetting the whole papal order. Like most men of his time he believed in the legitimacy and effectiveness of the secular power in imposing a religious conformity. However, as Dr Knox brings out clearly, he was unquestionably more conciliatory towards the puritans than




towards the catholics, who constituted the really serious threat to the Irish established church. No one in Ussher's position, no matter how friendly his relations with catholic scholars, could afford to forget the political realities which governed his tenure of the primacy. Although he corres- ponded with David Rothe, the titular bishop of Ossory, in 1623 on their mutual interest in the history of the Irish church, the formally treasonable aspects of such a correspondence were remembered. It took place not directly but through an intermediary, Dr Christopher Dillon, and Rothe signed himself Nicholas Laffan, using his mother's maiden name. In 1631 Ussher was given a royal licence 'to confer with popish priests, bishops and jesuits' (Knox, p. 37) which presumably legalized his relationship with Rothe and the Franciscan scholars with whom his connections were particularly close.

He struck the imagination of his contemporaries to an unusual degree, a rare example of the historian dazzling his admirers to the point where they need no longer see the unwilling administrator, the devoted royalist, the unsparing pamphleteer against the catholics. His knowledge of the early history of the church was exceptional for his day and helped him to a stronger notion of the fundamentals of Christianity and to see partial conformity with them even in the most fiercely contending views. King, parliament and Protector could all look to him for encouragement and more extraordinary still men of many shades of religious opinion could see him leaning to their side. Thus one would claim that he was at heart a presbyterian and another could see him joining the church of Rome. This would not have been possible if Ussher had been less good an historian. Dr Knox does him less than justice in implying that he subordinated his work to polemical ends. He certainly used his discoveries for such ends but that was a different matter. Dr Knox contrasts his historical exposition with Camden's less didactic work in the Britannia to its disadvantage and yet it was Ussher who had the wider reputation. It is true that the results of his historical labours are not now practically useful, largely because more information is available, but this does not detract from his greatness. He was unquestionably one of the pioneers of the study of history as it is understood to-day, and the dominance he exercised over the minds of his European contemporaries was due solely to this. Dr Knox brings out very well Ussher's grasp of the sweep of events and of the need for a sound chronology, to which he devoted so much of his research, so that not only could the sequence of Jewish and Christian history be followed but also related to that of other peoples and cultures.

Dr Knox has been misled by Elrington (Ussher, Works, i, being A life of the author by Charles Richard Elrington, Dublin, I847) about Ussher's attitude to the Irish language. The same incident serves also to illustrate how his theological position differed from that of Bedell, who, as Dr Knox demonstrates in writing of the interpretation of baptism, was further to the left theologically. Lacking an explanation of Ussher's reproachful letter of 23 February 1629/30 and Bedell's hurt reply, Elrington mistakenly assumed that Ussher was shocked at Bedell's pastoral



218 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES

use of Irish, regarding it as a betrayal of the old colonial class to which he himself belonged. Such a bad guess is the more surprising since else- where Elrington cites Parr's account (Ussher, Works, i, 208-9) of how Ussher postponed the ordination of a self-educated Englishmen until he knew enough Irish to preach to the people in the only language they understood. The key to the quarrel, which was clearly not linguistic, is to be found in a letter (Tanner letters, pp 97-8) from Bedell to Samuel Ward, of 14 November 1630 :

I desired still as I had done before to know my accusation. It was, in sum, that I seemed to come near the papists in certain instructions which I had given touching reading prayers in Irish, about the sign of the Cross and the presence of IHS in the sacrament. My words for the former were that if in the saying of In the name

of the Father and of the Son etc. any of the people did cross themselves, the minister should tell them it was not amiss if they did so, provided they put no

confidence in the sign, but in Him that died on the cross. And touching the sacrament, that Christ was truly present, not to the bread and wine, but the

worthy receivers. For the first of which I referred myself to Mr Perkins Problem

(? Wm. Perkins, Problema de romanae fidei . . . ed. studio Sam. Wardi, Camb. 1604) and for the second to Mr Calvine.

He (who as it seemed, had not seen my paper) told me that himself had taught the presence of Christ's body even in the word really.

We were soon of accord. I telling him that I had even professed here and in

England and in Italy that the differences between us and the church (or court rather) of Rome were not in faith (which we had in common) but in certain additions foreign to it which by corrupt custom were crept in and which he

acknowledged.

It emerges clearly in the course of the letter that Nicholas Bernard, pluralist dean of Kilmore, who was also Ussher's chaplain, was the mis- chief maker who had misreported Bedell's instructions.

Another point used to illustrate Ussher's supposed disapproval of the use of Irish was his failure in 1638 to prevent his archiepiscopal court from outing Murtagh King, the Irish translator of the Bible, from the benefice Bedell had given him in 1633. This was however only one of the issues in which Bedell had suffered from the primate's court in which Ussher's authority seems to have been largely nominal. On his first appointment Ussher fought hard to assert his control over his lay chancellor, but secularization of the ecclesiastical courts had already proceeded too far and he had to accept defeat. Bedell waged the same war with the lay official of his court when he was appointed to Kilmore, but, although he succeeded temporarily by means of a technicality in expelling his chancellor, he also failed eventually. Neither bishop can be held responsible for the actions of their courts. Bishop Reeves, in a note in T.C.D. MS 1072, p. 203, suggests that the outing of King was probably the work of William Hilton, Ussher's brother-in-law, who was also his registrar. The Irish episcopate's loss of control in their courts in the early seventeenth century needs a detailed investigation, but meanwhile Dr Knox handles the various problems it sets him most satisfactorily.




A fresh investigation of Ussher's notebooks and perhaps those of his brother Ambrose and of Luke Chaloner, one of the original fellows of Trinity College and afterwards his father-in-law, would throw more light on his intellectual development. There is still much detailed work to do on the background history of the Church of Ireland in his time, as suggested above in the case of the episcopal courts. His historical work and his relations with other scholars would repay separate fuller studies. Even his relations with government need further investigation. It is surely wrong of Dr Knox to suggest that Ussher ceased to concern himself with Ireland after the outbreak of the rebellion in I641. His continued presence at the court between 1642 and 1646; his appointment by the Irish privy council as one of their representatives in I644; Sir Charles Coote's denunciation, however mistaken, of his activities would seem to point in the opposite direction. His letters to Bramhall in I641 (Rawdon papers, pp 81-6) show him working most strenuously for the church in adverse conditions, and allowance must also be made for the fact that relatively few of his letters survive from the final part of his life passed as a refugee at different places in England and Wales.

Ussher's stature will stand out more clearly as the divisions in the western church are healed. He is unquestionably one of the few out- standing men who have been successors of Patrick; only two, Malachy and Richard FitzRalph, achieved anything like his wide reputation. When the sources of the present reformation of the Roman church come to be seriously studied, especially the dominating influence of Newman, the significance of the part played by Ussher's church will become more evident. Major exponents during Newman's formative years of that characteristic combination of the evangelical and catholic strains were John Jebb, the bishop of Limerick and Alexander Knox, 'the sage of Dawson St.', but in the Church of Ireland the tradition begins with Ussher himself.

WILLIAM O'SULLIVAN

BOOKS OF SURVEY AND DISTRIBUTION: BEING ABSTRACTS OF VARIOUS

SURVEYS AND INSTRUMENTS OF TITLE, 1636-I703. Vol. iv: COUNTY OF CLARE. Introductions by R. C. Simington. Index of persons, places and subjects by Breandin Mac Giolla Choille. Pp xlviii, 609. Dublin: Stationery Office, for the Irish Manuscripts Commission. 1967. £6 6s.

THIS is the fourth volume in the series of Books of Survey and Distribu- tion taken from the eighteenth-century copies, formerly in the Quit Rent Office and now in the Public Record Office of Ireland. The previous volumes - Roscommon, Mayo and Galway - were published between 1949 and I962. The present volume differs from its predecessors in repro- ducing the text of the manuscript in facsimile. Two facing pages of the manuscript --one showing the pre-Cromwellian ownership and the other the post-Cromwellian-are reproduced on a single page. Photo- graphic reproduction has no doubt made for economy and the avoidance



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