Irish Historical Studies, xxxvi, no. 144 (Nov. 2009)
Review article:
Refraining the Reformation*
T
he Reformation in Ireland has never lacked chroniclers, defenders and detractors. The reason for this is not hard to discern. The older literature that grappled
with the processes of religious change in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Ireland
was based on a number of well-recognised and widely agreed propositions.1 The
first of these was that confessional and political positions were inextricably linked,
and the fate of one served not only as a proxy for the other but as an explanation
for the trajectory of change; thus, to explain the failure of the reform process to
strike deep roots in sixteenth-century Ireland, one had only to invoke the failure
of the Tudor conquest. The second proposition was that there was a clear link
between religion and ethnicity; thus, settlers were, by definition as well as (in
one view) by the grace of God, Protestant, while the older inhabitants of early
modern Ireland were, axiomatically, Catholic. Neither of these propositions has
stood up to rigorous scrutiny. Detailed examination of settler communities among
the English of Munster and the Scots of Ulster has revealed a substantial cadre
of Catholics among these apparent bastions of Protestant civility.2 Secondly, the
debate between Nicholas Canny, Brendan Bradshaw and others about the inevitability of the 'failure' of the Reformation, while ultimately inconclusive, had a
wider effect of questioning straightforward correlations between the activities of
the government and the shaping of belief.3 As a result, religion has emerged from
being a proxy for colonial activity, or the doings of the Dublin government, to
being seen as a much more contingent and complex subject.
Religious thought and questions of belief have come to play a significant part
in explaining how the Churches worked and what shaped people's lives. While
* JAMES USSHER: THEOLOGY, HISTORY AND POLITICS IN EARLY MODERN IRELAND AND ENGLAND.
By
Alan Ford. Pp 315. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2007. £64.
JAMES USSHER AND JOHN BRAMHALL: THE THEOLOGY AND POLITICS OF TWO IRISH ECCLESIASTICS OF
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. By Jack Cunningham. Pp 233. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing.
2007.£55.
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF THE CHURCH OF IRELAND: BISHOP BRAMHALL AND THE LAUDIAN REFORMS.
By John McCafferty. Pp 268. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2007. £58.
1
For the older literature, see Alan Ford, '"Standing one's ground": religion, polemic
and Irish history since the Reformation' in Alan Ford, James McGuire and Kenneth Milne
(eds), As by law established: the Church of Ireland since the Reformation (Dublin, 1995),
pp 1-14.
2
For example, David Edwards, 'A haven of popery: English Catholic migration to
Ireland in the age of plantations' in Alan Ford and John McCafferty (eds), The origins of
sectarianism in early modern Ireland (Cambridge, 2005), pp 95-126.
3
In particular, Nicholas Canny, 'Why the Reformation failed in Ireland: une question
malpose'e' in Journal of Ecclesiastical History, xxx (1970), pp 423-50.
598
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GILLESPIE - Refraining the Reformation
599
confessional positions are still recognised as important, they need to be seen in
context. A starting point is the realisation that belief was not the same as religion,
and that individuals shaped their religious outlook by taking confessional positions
into account whilst measuring that against experience, especially the experience of
the unexplained.4 As a result, the firm confessional boundaries beloved of earlier
historians can now, on occasion, seem to be negotiable and even permeable; thus,
confessional peace of the 1620s and 1630s can sometimes be as important as
the confessional conflict of the 1640s and 1650s.5 It is this sense of contingency,
coupled with an awareness of the importance of ideas in shaping political and
religious action, that characterises the books reviewed here. Together, they set
out to explore some of the diversity of Protestant thought in the early seventeenth
century, and the implications of that diversity for the experience of religion in
areas as far apart as parliamentary politics and identity formation.
James Ussher is one of those curious individuals who looms so large in the
history of early modern Ireland that he has been almost overlooked. His significance has been of such magnitude that it has deterred all but a few historians
from writing about him, despite the fact that an edition of most of his works has
existed since the middle of the nineteenth century. Thus, the last biography was
Buick Knox's James Ussher, archbishop of Armagh, published in 1967. Part of
the problem in getting to grips with Ussher is his very wide range of interests. He
was an archbishop, politician, theologian, chronologer, historian and, perhaps most
problematic for modern historians, an accomplished linguist inclined to pepper
his letters with Hebrew and Greek words and phrases. He also strives to break
out of the boxes that historians create for him. He both defended the proposition
that the pope was the Antichrist, and simultaneously fraternised with the enemy
by exchanging manuscripts and information with Catholic bishops and clergy in
the 1620s and 1630s.
Alan Ford, as historian turned theologian, is uniquely equipped to tackle the
problems that Ussher presents. As befits the subject, this is primarily an intellectual history that deals with the evolution of Ussher's thought rather than with
his involvement in the murky worlds of ecclesiastical or secular politics, although
both do have a place in this book. Thus, Professor Ford traces Ussher's ideas
from his intellectual formation in the nascent Trinity College, Dublin, through his
period at the college as a professor, during which he and his colleagues 'set out
to domesticate Calvinism and, in particular, Calvinist anti-Catholicism' (p. 84).
How successful they were is traced through chapters on the Irish Articles of 1615
(which Ford suggests irenically may have been partly written by Ussher and partly
by others) and the politics of the 1620s. At one level, the rising tide in the 1630s
of Arminianism, backed by the king and his lord deputy in Dublin, led Ussher
into what Ford describes as 'internal exile', where he became a voice crying in
the wilderness. When the rising broke out in Ireland in October 1641, Ussher
found himself in England, where he remained. Two chapters in the book examine
this previously little-understood period in Ussher's life, and how he struggled to
defend godly episcopacy in a world increasingly riven by sectarian dispute.
4
Raymond Gillespie, Devoted people: belief and religion in early modern Ireland
(Manchester, 1997).
5
Idem, 'Godly order: enforcing peace in the Irish Reformation' in Elizabethanne Boran
and Crawford Gribben (eds), Enforcing the Reformation in Ireland and Scotland, 15501700 (Aldershot, 2006), pp 184-201.
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By the time Ussher died in 1656, it must have seemed that his world had collapsed twice; first in the 1630s when his brand of Calvinism was marginalised by
the government, and, secondly, in the 1650s when the Episcopal Church and its
liturgy, of which he was a prime defender, was dismantled and proscribed by the
Cromwellian regime. Yet that would be to sell Ussher short. Into the nineteenth
century, it was still the historical works of Ussher that ordinands in Trinity College,
Dublin, read in order to understand the history of the Irish Protestant Church, and,
in particular, to explain how the Church of Ireland was, indeed, the true Church,
and how the Reformation had constituted not a break in the life of the Church
but, rather, a return to its original purity. As this book rightly identifies, the key
to understanding Ussher is not his linguistic ability, his political manoeuvrings or
even primarily his theology, but his deep understanding of history. There is little
doubt that Ussher was a good technical historian; chapter 9 of this book, devoted
to his Britannicarum ecclesiarum antiquitates (1639), illustrates this without a
shadow of a doubt. He had a mastery of both standard sources (mainly Latin
rather than Irish) and contemporary historiography, and he deployed a network
of contacts to locate evidence scattered around the Irish countryside. However,
the Britannicarum ecclesiarum antiquitates was untypical of Ussher's historical
work. More representative is his Discourse of the religion anciently professed by
the Irish and British, which appeared first as an appendix to a work by his friend
Christopher Sibthorpe in 1623 and as a separate volume in 1631. This, as Alan
Ford's work suggests, was not a straightforward piece of history but, rather, a
point at which history, memory, identity and theology intersected. Its function was
not simply to chart the past but to explain to Irish Protestants who they were and
where they had come from. Using a series of religious markers (such as a celibate
clergy, Communion at Mass, purgatory and auricular confession), it constructed
a story demonstrating that the practices of his own Church of Ireland were in line
with those of the early Irish Church, and, hence, heir to the Church of the Apostles.
In doing so, he linked in contemporary ideas of chronology and apocalypticism so
that the Irish Church could take its place among the pantheon of the Churches of
European Protestantism. Moreover, he did all this not in his customary scholarly
Latin but in the English language that would be accessible to those in the Church
of Ireland who pondered such issues.
Ford's book paints a nuanced and vivid picture of Ussher's thought such that
it will now be possible to understand the complexity of those ideas for the first
time. Perhaps more importantly, it allows Ussher to be placed in the context of
his contemporaries. In particular, he deserves comparison with his fellow historian, Geoffrey Keating, whose history was equally leavened with theology and
memory, but from a different tradition. No less does he deserve to be compared
with his historical student, James Ware, whose work on the succession of Irish
bishops conveyed similar, though distinct, messages to the work of Ussher. Such
comparisons are now possible with this book as a baseline.
In his comparative study of Ussher and John Bramhall, bishop of Derry, Jack
Cunningham juxtaposes Ussher's nuanced and carefully crafted sense of himself
within his world with another theological position that was rapidly gaining ground.
Imported from England rather than home-grown, it was most clearly articulated in
Ireland by John Bramhall in the 1630s, and is one of the subjects of Cunningham's
comparative study of Ussher and Bramhall. This wide-ranging book moves from
the complexities of dogmatic and sacramental theology to the stormy waters of
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GILLESPIE - Reframing the Reformation
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the involvement of the two men in secular and ecclesiastical politics, and, finally,
to the calmer world of the writing of ecclesiastical history. At a technical level,
this sort of comparative exercise is challenging, since to keep control of one set of
complex ideas is difficult enough, but to hold on to two (and to make meaningful
comparisons) is potentially a nightmare. Yet Dr Cunningham succeeds masterfully
with a clear narrative that highlights the dramatic differences between the two
men. In almost every area of thought and human endeavour, they differed: Ussher
was 'pessimistic, regarding man as fallen and incapable of his own redemption',
while Bramhall was 'optimistic in his assessment of the nature of man, saying
man is able to choose good and, by implication, salvation' (p. 201). It is not hard
to see that, from this base, both would see the world differently, Ussher preferring
Word to sacrament, while Bramhall held the Eucharist in Catholic regard. Equally,
Ussher's flexibility in Church government is matched by Bramhall's uncompromising episcopacy.
While historians certainly appreciated that the Arminian views of Bramhall were
different to those of Ussher, Cunningham brings out just how all-pervasive those
differences were, and, thus, how irreconcilable the debates in the convocation
of 1634 about the reform of the Church of Ireland actually were. This alerts us
to an aspect of religious division perhaps not as fully investigated as it might
be. Protestantism was not a monolithic body in the early seventeenth century;
indeed, on the basis of Cunningham's work, it is clear that even the Church of
Ireland had many almost irreconcilable camps with differing theological outlooks.
All of this bears comparison with the diversity that has been observed within
Catholicism between Tridentine and traditional religious positions. The relations
of these various factions have been given little attention in the history of religion
in early modern Ireland. Indeed, it may well be that it was as difficult to move
from being a traditional Catholic to a Tridentine one as to move from traditional
religion to Protestantism. Likewise, the gulf between Calvinism and Arminianism
may have been so great as to be unbridgeable. However, if in Catholicism the
Mass held potentially warring factions together, Cunningham suggests that it was
secular politics, and particular ideas of divine-right monarchy, that kept Ussher
and Bramhall in the same camp. This is an interesting and useful suggestion that
should provoke further work on the linkages between religious and political ideas
- subjects that have tended to be studied in isolation - so as to understand more
fully what contemporaries in early modern Ireland meant when they described
themselves as Protestants. In the light of Cunningham's conclusion, the Corkman
who told insurgents in the 1640s that T am of the religion that both the king and
the lord lieutenant general of Ireland profess which is the true Protestant religion'
may be telling us more than he realised about the ability of Protestant Ireland to
cohere in the early seventeenth century.6
In a sense, the third of these books - that by John McCafferty - represents the
fruits of the interactions of the positions discussed by Ford and Cunningham.
After the wide sweep of ideas that characterise the work of Ford and Cunningham,
McCafferty's work pulls us back to the practical politics of the 1630s, and the outworking of ideas in the real world of ecclesiastical high politics. Conventionally,
the reorganisation of the Church of Ireland in the 1630s is seen as an ecclesiastical
extension of Wentworth's policy of tightening royal control and making the Irish
6
T.C.D., MS 826, f. 299.
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Church conform to the ideas of Laud and his main Irish agent, John Bramhall.
Yet, as McCafferty persuasively argues, it was not that simple. 'The programme of
reconstruction carried out from 1633 to 1640', he contends, 'came close to being a
refoundation of the established Church in Ireland' (p. 223), and that reorganisation
was 'concerned with the visible Church'. Ireland, as a result, became what has
been described in another context as 'Laud's laboratory' where 'the most radical
aspects of the Laudian vision were introduced', and 'much was actually done in
Ireland that could only be contemplated in England and Scotland' (p. 228). In
short, the failure of earlier attempts at Reformation left the way open for this, the
most thoroughgoing attempt at Reformation in Ireland to date. McCafferty makes
a good case. He details the adoption of the Thirty-nine Articles by the Irish Church
in the convocation of 1636, and the struggle between Bramhall and Ussher for
theological supremacy leading to the apparent marginalisation of the archbishop
of Armagh, having achieved the pyrrhic victory of not actually having the older
Irish Articles of 1615 repealed. Again, McCafferty details the appointment of the
new men in bishoprics, and their efforts to enhance their revenues, which they
did very effectively to judge from the figures that he presents (table 4.2, p. 149).
Not all, of course, were happy with these arrangements, and one of BramhaH's
singular achievements was to fragment a Church of Ireland that had managed to
comprehend diverse ecclesiastical tendencies, especially in Scottish-settled Ulster,
by emphasising a common Protestantism at the expense of divisive arguments
about episcopacy.7
All of this is important, and clearly and effectively set out, yet the argument
is conducted in a rather theoretical way, with events viewed from the benches
of convocation or the windows of the episcopal palace. None of this apparently
disturbed the godly Calvinist Protestants, who seem to have been the main listeners to, readers of and supporters of the Calvinist Ussher of Alan Ford's biography.
Protestant Ireland did not explode in a fit of righteous indignation at popish innovations in the way that their English counterparts did in 1640. What does all this
suggest? One possibility is that the Laudian reforms in Ireland were little more
than skin deep, concentrating on the material aspect of the Church's position.
In liturgical terms, McCafferty cites the well-documented case of liturgical and
material improvement at Christ Church cathedral, Dublin. It is worth remembering
that within easy walking distance of this cathedral, the chancel of the cathedral
church of St Patrick was described in 1635 as having 'an earthen floor constantly
drowned in water and this is where the communion table is', and, despite a welldocumented row over the construction of the Boyle tomb, this cathedral seems to
have almost entirely opted out of the Laudian experiment in worship, as did the
cathedrals in Cork and Kildare.8 Again, while changes took place in parish worship
in St John's, Dublin, further along the main street of Dublin - in St Audoen's
- the reverse seems to have taken place, with the removal of the chancel arch.
Such details serve to qualify McCafferty's argument about the effectiveness of
the reconstruction of the Church of Ireland. While landholders and the owners of
7
Phil Kilroy, 'Sermon and pamphlet literature in the Irish reformed Church, 1613-1634'
in Archivium Hibernicum, xxxiii (1975), pp 110-21.
8
Compare Raymond Gillespie, "The crisis of reform, 1625-60' in Kenneth Milne (ed.),
Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin: a history (Dublin, 2000), pp 195-202 with Raymond
Gillespie, 'An age of modernization, 1598-1690' in John Crawford and Raymond Gillespie
(eds), St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin: a history (Dublin, 2009), pp 180-4.
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GILLESPIE
- Refraining the Reformation
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impropriations may well have felt the full force of the episcopal crozier, the impact
on the worshipper in the pew may well have been much less significant. This
raises the question of why this should have been so - if indeed it was - and why
the apparently effective execution of Laudian reform failed to produce in Calvinist
Ireland any sort of backlash. There is work here for another intrepid scholar to
build on the sure foundation laid by this book, and to atomise the problems that
it has thrown up.
McCafferty's work ends in 1641, just at the point when it seemed that BramhalPs
contribution to the Church of Ireland would be ephemeral and fleeting. The
outbreak of hostilities late in that year set in motion a retreat from the Laudian
stance that Bramhall advocated. At least some of those who experienced the rising
in Ireland in 1641 and were among John Rogers's Independent congregation in
Christ Church, Dublin, in the 1650s saw that moment as the beginnings of their
questioning of the position of the Church of Ireland. For some, the rising of 1641
was a judgement of God for the sins committed by the Church of Ireland, particularly the sin of toleration of Catholicism.9 Admittedly, these early indigenous
'dissenters' were small in number, and were soon swamped by more vociferous
Cromwellian religious radicals, but their appearance does suggest that cracks
were quickly appearing in whatever shaky edifice Bramhall had created. For
sceptics, however, the triumphal return of the Church of Ireland in the 1660s with
Bramhall at its head - now refined in the fire of exile with the king in the 1650s
- confounded such fears, and seemed to guarantee the triumph of the Arminian
view of the world espoused by Laud and Bramhall among others. Yet, despite this
apparent triumph, it was to Ussher that the Church of Ireland, and especially its
ordinands, turned for a view of themselves, their history and their relationship to
wider Christendom well into the nineteenth century. Perhaps it is a reminder, if
one were needed, that questions of influence are trickier than they might at first
seem. However, unpicking those questions can at least now rest on a more reliable
foundation thanks to these three impressive and significant works.
RAYMOND GILLESPIE
Department of History, National University of Ireland, Maynooth
9
John Rogers, Ohel or Beth Shemesh (London, 1653), pp 393-476.
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