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His bishops were not so keen at the prospect of James displaying his learning in a semi-public setting, and Bilson advised the King not to risk such a conference: ‘Content yourself, my Lord,’ replied James condescendingly, ‘we know better than you what belongeth to these matters.’13 Originally scheduled for November 1603, the conference was postponed until the New Year, and took place at Hampton Court in January 1604. The royal conference would become a familiar sight over the next two decades. It was not an equal forum. James would preside on his chair of state, flanked by judges, councillors or churchmen, depending on what was to be debated. The plaintiffs (perhaps common lawyers, the Commons or as here Puritan ministers) elected a spokesman to make their case from the floor. James would respond as he saw fit, often peppering his earnest pronouncements with crude jokes. Although on occasion he became bored, he evidently relished these chances to display his intellect and wit.14
Our main source for the Hampton Court Conference, as it became known, is the ‘official version’ by William Barlow, Dean of Chester, blatantly partisan in its portrayal and occasional ridicule of what he calls the ‘opponents’, the Puritan ministers. But precisely because of its unguarded bias, it provides a wonderful account of a particular moment in English ecclesiastical history, when the leading figures of the Church of England found in their new King not only a champion but apparently a serious and learned champion. By the end of the second day’s conference James’s ‘singular readiness, and exact knowledge’ had ‘raised such an admiration in the lords’ that one of them was heard to say exclaim ‘he was fully persuaded, his Majesty spake by the instinct of the spirit of God’. Sir Robert Cecil affirmed ‘that very much we are bound to God, who had given us a King of an understanding heart’. As Lord Chancellor Ellesmere passed through the door of the Privy Chamber, he said to Barlow, ‘I have often heard and read, that Rex est mixta persona cum sacerdote [a king is a mixture of a person and a priest], but I never saw the truth thereof, till this day.’ And Barlow himself wrote, ‘Surely, whosoever heard his Majesty, might justly think; that title did more properly fit him, which Eunapius gave to that famous rhetorician, in saying he was a living library, and a walking study.’15
The opening meeting of the conference took place on Saturday 14 January, significantly without the Puritans. James met first with the bishops, deans and the lords of the Privy Council in his Privy Chamber, sitting in his chair. He began with what Barlow called ‘a most grave and princely declaration of his general drift in calling this assembly’. It was, he claimed, ‘no novel device’ but typical of all Christian princes starting their reign who ‘take the first course for the establishing of the church, both for doctrine and policy’. Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth had, of course, all wanted to change the religious polity; James, he insisted, ‘was happier than they’ because as yet he saw ‘no cause so much to alter, and change anything, as to confirm that which he found well settled already’. This pronouncement, Barlow noted, ‘so affected his royal heart, that it pleased him to enter into a gratulation to Almighty God (at which words he put off his hat) for bringing him into the promised land, where religion was purely professed; where he sat among grave, learned and reverend men; not, as before, elsewhere, a King without state, without honour, without order; where beardless boys would brave him to his face’.16
However, while James did not intend ‘any innovation’, ‘nothing could be so absolutely ordered, but something might be added afterward thereunto’. In any state, just as in any body, ‘corruptions might insensibly grow, either through time or persons’, and he had received ‘many complaints’ since his accession, ‘especially, through the dissentions in the Church, of many disorders, as he heard, and much disobedience to the laws, with a great falling away to popery’. He purposed therefore, ‘like a good physician, to examine and try the complaints, and fully to remove the occasion thereof, if they prove scandalous, or to cure them, if they were dangerous, or, if but frivolous, yet to take knowledge of them, thereby to cast a sop into Cerberus’s mouth, that he may never bark again’ – in other words, ‘to give factious spirits no occasion, hereby, of boasting or glory’. This is why he had called the bishops in by themselves, without their Puritan opponents, so that if anything did need to be redressed it could be done ‘without any visible alteration’ – James repeated this point three times.17 He moved on to raise several points from the Petition that he wanted the bishops and deans to address: confirmation, absolution, private baptism and excommunication. When the King had finished, Whitgift knelt down, and said ‘how much this whole land was bound to God for setting over us a King so wise, learned and judicious, addressed himself to inform his Majesty of all these points’.18
James entered into the discussion enthusiastically, often proffering his views first and then seeking approval from the bishops. Frequently he would call for the Bible to check up on a particular passage. He was not afraid to challenge the opinion of the learned divines. When they reached the matter of private baptism, Whitgift told the King that the administration of baptism by women and lay persons was allowed neither in Church practice nor by ‘the words in the Book’. James objected to this, ‘urging and pressing the words of the Book, that they could not but intend a permission, and suffering [permitting] of women, and private persons to baptize’. The Earl of Worcester admitted that the words ‘were doubtful, and might be pressed to the meaning’ but Church practice suggested otherwise. James responded that this was a point on which the primitive Church need not be followed (it was not ‘sound reasoning from things done before a Church be settled and grounded, unto those which are to be performed in a Church stablished and flourishing’). It was ironic, he continued, that only fourteen months ago he had been criticising the divines in Scotland ‘for ascribing too little to that holy sacrament’. Then ‘a pert minister’ asked him, ‘if I thought baptism so necessary, that if it were omitted, the child should be damned? I answered him no: but if you, being called to baptize the child privately, should refuse to come, I think you shall be damned.’19
Barlow was impressed. The session lasted three hours, which flew by since his Majesty handled all the points so admirably, ‘sending us away not with contentment only, but astonishment; and, which is pitiful, you will say, with shame to us all, that a King brought up among Puritans, not the learnedest men in the world, and schooled by them: swaying a kingdom full of business, and troubles, naturally given to much exercise and repast, should, in points of divinity show himself as expedite and perfect as the greatest scholars, and most industrious students, there present, might not outstrip him’. Barlow was particularly struck by James’s assertion that, despite the fact that ‘he lived among Puritans, and was kept, for the most part, as a ward under them, yet, since he was of the age of his son, ten years old, he ever disliked their opinions; as the Saviour of the world said, “Though he lived among them, he was not of them.”’20
The following Monday, 16 January, the four Puritan plaintiffs were called into the Privy Chamber. Dr John Rainoldes was President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and Dean of Lincoln, a fine scholar who had tutored Richard Hooker at Oxford, but had declined to be raised to a bishopric by Elizabeth.21 Laurence Chaderton was Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge; Thomas Sparke was a prebend of Lincoln; and John Knewstubs a noted controversialist. James was already seated in his chair, surrounded by the Bishops of London and Winchester and all the deans and doctors, as well as his Scottish chaplain Patrick Galloway. Even ten-year-old Henry was present, ‘the noble young Prince, sitting by’ his father ‘upon a stool’. James made much the same speech to the Puritans as he had to the bishops and deans, ending by saying that since ‘many grievous complaints had been made to him, since his first entrance to the land, he thought it best to send for some, whom his Majesty understood to be the most grave, learned, and modest of the aggrieved sort, whom, being there present, he was now ready to hear, at large, what they could object or say’. As the four knelt, Rainoldes, whom
Barlow identified as ‘the foreman’, presented the four heads of their argument: that the doctrine of the Church should be preserved in purity, according to God’s word; that good pastors might be planted in all churches to preach that doctrine; that the Church government might be sincerely administered according to God’s word; and that the Book of Common Prayer might be ‘fitted to more increase of piety’.
Rainoldes had got as far as saying that the Book of Articles of Religion, now some forty years old, needed clarification, when the Bishop of London suddenly cut him off, and falling to his knees, burst into a tirade against the Puritans. They aimed not to reform, he claimed, but to overthrow the Church; they wanted to impose their doctrine of predestination, which was a Presbyterian doctrine; and they only opposed the rite of confirmation because they could not confirm. James by no means applauded this interruption, remarking instead that he might excuse the bishop’s passion, but he ‘misliked his sudden interruption’. Bancroft should have allowed Rainoldes to have finished, since there could be ‘no order, nor can be any effectual issue of disputation, if each party might not be suffered, without chopping, to speak at large what he would’.22 Although his early intervention had backfired, Bancroft was more successful when he turned to an issue close to James’s heart, that of personal attacks in sermons. Pulpits should not become the platform for lampoons and satires, he declared, ‘wherein every humorous, or discontented fellow might traduce his superiors’. This naturally appealed to the King who agreed it was ‘a lewd custom’; he threatened ‘that if he should but hear of such a one in a pulpit, he would make him an example’, and admonished the Puritan ministers, ‘that every man should solicit and draw his friends to make peace and if any thing were amiss in the Church officers, not to make the pulpit the place of personal reproof, but to let his Majesty hear of it’.23
James’s contribution to this session was much less constructive. During a discussion of whether only bishops were qualified to perform baptism, Bancroft referred to St Jerome who asserted that view, though he was ‘otherwise no friend to bishops’. James did not let the reference pass, and taxed St Jerome for his assertion that a bishop was not ordained by God; his views on the question could be summed up ‘with this short aphorism, No Bishop, no King’. As Rainoldes went further with his case, James reverted, as he often did when he was bored, to levity. Rainoldes raised Article 37, ‘The Bishop of Rome hath no authority in this land’, claiming that it should be augmented to read ‘nor ought to have’. At this James ‘heartily laughed’ and the lords followed suit. ‘What speak you of the Pope’s authority here?’ he asked. ‘Habemus iure, quod habemus, and therefore, in as much as it is said, he hath not, it is plain enough, that he ought not to have.’ According to Barlow, this was one of several motions that seemed ‘very idle and frivolous’ to the King and the lords, and so they drifted into ‘some bye-talk’, as someone remembered a quip ascribed to one Mr Butler of Cambridge about a Puritan: ‘a Puritan is a Protestant frayed out of his wits’. Rainoldes was not to be put off. When he proposed that a negative assertion (‘the intention of the Minister is not of the essence of the Sacrament’) James protested that if he put into the book every negative proposition the book would ‘swell into a volume as big as the Bible, and also confound the reader’. He recalled how John Craig in Scotland did a similar thing, casting all his beliefs in negative terms: ‘who with his I renounce and abhor, his detestations and abrenunciations he did so amaze the simplest people, that they, not able to conceive all those things, utterly gave over all, falling back on popery, or remaining still in their former ignorance. Yea,’ continued James, ‘if I should have been bound to his form, the confession of my faith must have been in my table book, not in my head.’24 When Rainoldes had finished, James turned to the Puritan ministers. ‘Surely,’ he said, ‘if these be the greatest matters you be grieved with, I need not have been troubled with such importunities and complaints, as have been made unto me. Some more private course might have been taken for your satisfaction.’ And he turned to the lords, shaking his head and smiling.25
Despite James’s attitude to the Puritan ministers, there were some areas of agreement. To the demand that learned ministers be planted in every parish, James expressed his approval in principle. He had complained to Whitgift the previous October that ‘in many parts of the realm the parishes are so ill-served with persons not able to instruct in matters of their faith as is very scandalous to those of your degree and given much advantage to the adversary to seduce them.’ At that point, he had ordered that bishops should undertake an audit of their dioceses as a matter of urgency;26 now, however, he was not about to be seen to give in to a Puritan demand, and claimed that a sudden change would be dangerous. In any case, the universities could not afford to put a sufficient minister in every parish, and ‘he had more learned men in this realm, than he had sufficient maintenance for’ – so maintenance had to come first. In the meantime, young ministers who were ignorant and beyond hope should be removed; older ministers should be allowed to die in post. But ‘Jerusalem could not be built up in a day’.27
The more violent clashes arose from the demands of the Puritan John Knewstubs. Knewstubs took exception to the use of the sign of the Cross in baptism: this would offend the ‘weak brethren’, those clergymen who would not accept change, he claimed. ‘How long they would be weak?’ demanded James, incredulously. Was not forty-five years ‘sufficient for them to grow strong?’ Indeed, it seemed to him that ‘some of them were strong enough, if not headstrong; and howsoever they in this case pretended weakness; yet some, in whose behalf, they now spake, thought themselves able to teach him, and all the bishops of the land’.28 With his third question Knewstubs truly upset the King: these ‘weak brethren’ wondered how far James’s Church ordinances should bind them ‘without impeaching their Christian Liberty?’ The King, reported Barlow, ‘was much moved’. He said he would not argue the point, but added that ‘it smelled very rankly of anabaptism’. It reminded him of ‘the usage of a beardless boy’, John Black, at the last conference he had had with the Scottish ministers in December 1602. Black had told him ‘that he would hold conformity with his Majesty’s ordinances, for matters of doctrine, but for matters of ceremony, they were to be left in Christian Liberty, unto every man, as he received more and more light, from the illumination of God’s spirit’. More and more light until they go mad with their own light, said James, ‘but I will none of that, I will have one doctrine and one discipline, one religion in substance, and in ceremony: and therefore I charge you, never speak more to that point’.29
There were moments of humour. When Rainoldes objected to the phrase ‘With my body I thee worship’ from the Book of Common Prayer’s marriage service, James poked fun at the unmarried academic. ‘Many a man speaks of Robin Hood, who never shot in his bow,’ he said to Rainoldes, smiling; ‘if you had a good wife yourself, you would think all the honour and worship you could do her, were well bestowed.’ On the matter of ‘churching’, the service of purification of women after childbirth, James quipped ‘that women were loath enough of themselves, to come to Church, and therefore, he would have this, or any other occasion, to draw them thither’. When Rainoldes approved the bishops’ wearing of the ‘corned cap’, James turned to the bishops and said: ‘You may now safely wear your caps, but I shall tell you, if you should walk in one street in Scotland, with such a cap on your head, if I were not with you, you should be stoned to death with your cap.’ When Rainoldes urged that the Church should abandon the sign of the Cross ‘because in the time of popery it had been superstitiously abused’, James pointed out that by the same argument they should renounce ‘the Trinity, and all that is holy, because it was abused in Popery. They used to wear hose and shoes in popery,’ he pointed out to Rainoldes, ‘therefore, you shall now go barefoot.’30