Kenneth Fincham

The Ecclesiastical Policy of King James I

In a sermon preached at Hampton Court on September 30, 1606, John King proclaimed that “our Solomon or Pacificus liveth.” James I had “turned swords into sithes and spears into mattocks, and set peace within the borders of his own kingdoms and of nations about us.” His care for the “Church and maintenance to it” was celebrated. All that remained was for his subjects to lay aside contentious matters and join “with his religious majesty in propagation of the gospel and faith of Christ.” The sermon was the last in a series of four preached—and later printed—at the kings behest before an unwilling audience of Scottish Presbyterians. The quartet outlined Jamess standing as a ruler by divine right and laid down the conceptual foundations of the Jacobean church. A godly prince, exercising his divinely ordained powers as head of church and state, advised by godly bishops, themselves occupying offices of apostolic origin and purity, would preside over a new golden age of Christian peace and unity. A genuinely catholic Christian doctrine would be promulgated and maintained; peace and order would prevail. James I was rex pacificus , a new Constantine, a truly godly prince. As he himself observed in 1609, “my care for the Lords spiritual kingdom is so well known, both at home and abroad, as well as by my daily actions as by my printed books.”

THE RESTORATION OF ALTARS IN THE 1630s

The nationwide campaign to erect railed altars in the 1630s has always been seen as a central feature of the Laudian reformation of the Church. Recently some scholars have denied its close association with Laud and Arminian sacramentalism, and have proposed that the policy originated with Charles I, to be reluctantly endorsed by his archbishop. As for its enforcement, Julian Davies has identified at least five variants which were implemented in the dioceses. This article argues instead that Archbishops Neile and Laud were centrally involved in the introduction of the railed altar, and that they oversaw the imposition of a single altar policy, with only Williams of Lincoln briefly championing a variation on it. Differences did emerge, however, over where communicants should receive, since this had not been prescribed by authority. Charles I, on this reading, was not the driving force for change, although he clearly came to support it.

The Ecclesiastical Policies of James I and Charles I

Recent scholarship has tended to contrast the acumen and flexibility of James I with the ineptitude and rigidity of his son Charles I, whose shortcomings are regarded as perhaps the most obvious cause of the Civil War.1 This interpretation has been most marked in religious history, with Charles’s government held responsible for both the final destruction of the Calvinist dominance of the English Church and the triumph of Arminianism, which created tensions powerful enough to destabilise politics and lay the ground for war. In some accounts, the villain of the piece is not Charles I but William Laud, whose doctrinaire policies and irascible rule proved disastrous for himself and the Stuart monarchy.2

Archbishop Grindal 1519–1583: The Struggle for a Reformed Church (1979)

This essay seeks to explain the least celebrated of Patrick Collinsons books. It begins by looking at how it has seemed to be too much under the shadow of its predecessor, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, and had a little imprudently been preceded by three essays that rather stole its thunder. Too many scholars have wrongly thought what was left was the husk rather than the kernel of Edmund Grindal. So they missed a masterly marriage of deep and informed study of diocesan records with a command of the treacherous currents of ecclesiastical politics in Whitehall and Lambeth. What is more, Collinson offers a long?sighted account of Grindals importance for the subsequent history of the Church of England down to the time of Sacheverell Affair (1709–10), and a brilliant analysis of his marginalia in books now in an Oxford Library. The essay suggests that Grindal is made too central and too representative of post?Reformation evangelical Protestantism, while at the same time the roles of John Jewel, Arthur Lake and others are overlooked, but it commends the book as one of the rare accounts of a public career in the Church in the later sixteenth century. The essay ends by looking at Collinsons continuing passion for seeing the Reformation through the lens of individuals’ lives.