Mysteries of Cockley Cley

The open-air museum at Cockley Cley near Swaffham in Norfolk, consisting of a reconstructed Iceni Village, a 17th century farmhouse and an alleged ‘7th century church’ is an eccentric private collection created by Sir Peter Roberts, 3rd Baronet of Cockley Cley Hall, in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Sir Peter appears to have fancied himself as something of an antiquary, and I was delighted to find that the memorial to this gentleman (who died in 1985) in All Saints’ church is one of the few modern examples of a proper heraldic monument, even if its description of Sir Robert as ‘Historian’ is questionable. The late baronet appears to have left more questions unanswered than answered, since Cockley Cley is indeed a fascinating site buried in misinformation.

In the first place, the Iceni village (heralded by a friendly wicker man) has no apparent warrant for its location – the guide to the village merely states that the Iceni lived in villages like this near here. Quite true, but unlike West Stow the village does not seem to be based on any nearby post-hole discoveries. Furthermore, the reconstruction is both small and highly speculative. Its situation, with a little stream forming a moat and a larger stream bubbling behind the village, is thoroughly delightful, and viewed from a distance through trees and reedbeds one can indeed imagine it as an Iron Age settlement. A closer inspection, however, is a little more disappointing. The buildings are constructed using machine cut timber and they are as far from the original building methods as they could be; the tree-post in the roundhouse, for instance, has been haphazardly shored up by pieces of plank from a builder’s yard. The appearance of a ‘longhouse’ is puzzling – yes, there were longhouses in Iron Age settlements but they tend to be associated with high status late Iron Age contexts; the Romanised aristocracy of the south and south east began to favour rectangular architecture before the invasion, and the likelihood of a longhouse existing in an Icenian village is slim. The guidebook describes the ’sharpened posts’ of the pallisade but they look rather more like ordinary flat wooden posts at a modern farm. What we do know about the Iceni is that they tended to rely on earthworks to raise the height of a palisade (even if only low ones as at Stonea), and those are distinctly lacking at Cockley Cley. The gatehouse and guard towers are entirely speculative, and the well in the centre of the village is amusingly filled with gory remnants of sacrifice – the inhabitants clearly not interested in whether they contaminated their water supply. The inhabitants themselves are dubious manikins with pasted on beards and blue paint, draped in tartan picnic blankets and looking very sorry for themselves. Even more unfortunately they have been given Welsh names (e.g. ‘Cynric’ – only a little research would have produced Cunorix).

 

The 17th century farmhouse is likewise a reconstruction of slightly dubious merit; diamond-glazed glass is pinned over Victorian windows and a number of modern features (including a letterbox) intrude. At the top of an avenue of trees is the church claimed to be ‘7th century.’ Sir Peter appears to have based his outlandish claim for the church’s age on the theory that it is ‘Byzantine’ in form, and there was a Byzantine influence on English architecture only for a brief period – from 597 to the arrival of the Celtic missionaries. These Celtic missionaries, Sir Peter argues, built rectangular churches (he is presumably thinking of St. Peter-on-the-Wall). Therefore he extrapolates that the church was built in the early part of the 7th century, 628 to be precise (one expects him to give the date to the very day…). Sir Peter’s grounds for thinking that English architecture was ‘Byzantine-influenced’ in the early 7th century is flimsy indeed – he claims to have found correlations between this building and others in Asia Minor. He goes further and claims that it might have been overseen by a Syrian monk escaping persecution in Persia, a theory in the realm of the truly bizarre. What Sir Peter has not considered is that there was very little point going to the effort of constructing a stone church in the early days of Augustine’s mission, and that apart from the Cratendune episode there is no evidence of a Christian mission being established in East Anglia that would have been sufficiently important to justify a stone structure.

However, I am not willing, as some are, to pour water completely on the idea that the chapel of St. Mary is a Saxon church. Yes, certain parts (the door on the south side and the stonework of the chancel arch) are clearly Norman. However, other aspects of the church, in particular the undressed flint windows and the long and short work at the west end, could well be Saxon. Yes, the apsidal east end resembles Norman Hales, but Hales does not have windows as tiny and crude as these. Saxon minsters also favoured an apsidal groundplan, and this church could possibly, notwithstanding the Norman features, be as early as the 9th century. The date of the church needs a great deal more investigation to be established, and for the present the lurid assertions of Sir Peter Roberts go unchallenged.

Cunning rogues in the Scottish Parliament

Wendy Alexander’s sudden change of heart on the issue of a referendum on Scottish independence is likely to be a cunning attempt to hijack the referendum in order to pose a frightening question to the Scottish people. Realising that Labour is losing the argument in Scotland, Alexander is attempting to portray the SNP as sluggish in its referendum plans. I imagine that most people in Scotland will see through yet another flimsy attempt to shore up the rotting Act of Union. The phrasing of the referendum question is crucial; the Labour Party and other Unionists must not be allowed to portray the cause of independence as a nationalist or ethnic issue.

The argument advanced by Unionists against independence are beginning to sound worryingly like the arguments used by the British government to secure Dominion status within the British Empire for the Irish Free State, or indeed the arguments used to justify punitive action against the Highlands in 1746; the protection of commerce and trade. With any luck, such arguments are now wearing thin with the Scottish people.

Male Primogeniture and the Act of Succession

Two issues related to the royal succession have surfaced in the media recently – first, the abolition of male primogeniture and secondly the ban on Catholics in the line of succession.

The abolition of male primogeniture seems, in 21st century eyes, an entirely reasonable measure. However, before jumping to the conclusion that the exclusion of first-born females is an injustice it is worth considering the reasons male primogeniture exists in the first place. It is not an equality issue; English succession law has clearly acknowledged, at least since the reign of Mary, that a woman can succeed to the throne. The Empress Matilda contended for the throne on the understanding that England lay outside the scope of the Salic Law that dominated much of Europe. Matilda had a better right to the throne than Stephen because she was the heir of Henry I’s body, and thus took precedence over a male cousin; furthermore, it was Matilda who initiated a new dynasty when her son Henry of Anjou succeeded rather than Stephen’s son William of Blois. The reason why the female issue of a king did not succeed before a male issue was not sexism (the view that women made weaker monarchs, or some such) but dynastic and genealogical concerns. The right to kingship must be as unambiguous as possible; this could be guaranteed (theoretically) through inheritance in the female line but historically it is through inheritance in the male line. This means that a daughter who is the only issue of a male line will continue that male line (e.g. Margaret of Scotland continued the House of Wessex). The one thing that is not possible is for succession to be in both the male and the female lines; if a female heir took precedence, each male heir would produce rival lines. One only has to consider the Carlist Wars in 19th century Spain to see the problems that a change to succession law can cause.

Of course, in a world of constitutional monarchy none of this matters. And it is only because this does not matter that a change in the law is contemplated. If the monarch had power the identity of the monarch would matter; and consequently the dynastic succession would matter.

It has been widely reported (e.g. The Daily Telegraph, 10th April) that a repeal of that part of the Act of Succession that bans a Catholic from a place in the line of succession could lead to the succession of the de jure King, Franz of Bavaria. Sadly, this seems unlikely. Succession legislation has traditionally been couched in terms of succession from a specified ancestor; for instance, the Act of Succession itself defined the ‘legitimate’ royal house as that which descended from Sophia of the Palatinate. If succession legislation were left open to retrospective application then numerous spurious claims could be made. The best new Act of Succession would define the royal house as the senior descendents of James I; this would be the Wittelsbachs, where the Windsors are the junior descendents (being descended from Elizabeth of Bohemia). However, I suspect that in reality the new Act of Succession will permit Catholic descendents of Elizabeth II to succeed, and thus will not herald a Jacobite springtime…

This is the letter I wrote to The Daily Telegraph on the issue:

Sir,

Male primogeniture in the succession to the English crown is not, and never has been, an issue of equality and it is ignorant of politicians to believe it is. The reason for male primogeniture is a dynastic, not a sexist one. It has been established since the reign of Mary Tudor that a woman can be Queen; in the 12th century a civil war between Stephen and Matilda was fought over this issue, and it was Henry of Anjou, Matilda’s son, who became king after Stephen’s death. However, succession to the throne cannot be ambiguous and must, therefore, be through either the male or the female line. If it is through a mixture of the two, rival lines could be created in every generation. Admittedly, in a constitutional monarchy the likelihood of pretenders and usurpers is slim, but the monarchy remains part of the British constitution and consequently the identity of the monarch must be clear.

The Jacobite

Chorea Gigantum

 

From early childhood I have longed to see Stonehenge, yet the opportunity never arose until this Easter – and then the weather proved so bad that a visit to the monument itself proved impossible and a brief drive-by view was all I was permitted. The visitor is warned that a first sight of Stonehenge may be an anticlimax but for me this was far from the case; the long drive up the desolate A360 from Salisbury had prepared me, perhaps, for the otherworldly nature of Stonehenge itself. Salisbury Plain is an abandoned place; no wonder that it has stimulated so many overactive imaginations over the centuries. I was impressed not by the massiveness of Stonehenge but by its alien nature. Was this a place of worship? A little earlier that morning I had visited Salisbury Cathedral, a successor to the temples of the Romans and even the sacred groves of the Britons – an enclosed place of contact with the gods. Churches follow a culturally familiar temple theme at least three millennia old; and yet here, at Stonehenge, is something altogether other – set far outside any centre of population, as it were deliberately in the centre of a desolate wasteland, by a people to whom a pantheon of anthropomorphic gods and even a seasonal cycle would have been meaningless – a culture of the most extreme, almost cubist abstraction (as the lozenge on the chest of the Amesbury Archer demonstrates). What language did these people speak (an ancestor of Basque, perhaps)? What gods did they worship, if any? What were their social structures? The modern observer may believe that, in contrast to William Stukeley, he has thrown off the straitjacket of ‘historical’ thinking that led the 18th century antiquary to attribute the structure to the Druids. Yet we still feel uneasy once far removed from our historical reference points. 800BC means Homer, 1400BC the fall of Troy – but what does 2500BC mean? Stonehenge seems needlessly, uncomfortably old when we know so little still about our more recent ancestors, the Britons. The builders of Stonehenge are more distant from us than Australian Aborigines or stone age tribes in New Guinea – for them we have no point of reference; we cannot trace the links (are there any?) between their culture and ours. The Englishman surveying the ruins of Rome enjoys Roman culture, a Roman-influenced language, Roman laws, Roman government – to all intents and purposes he is still a Roman. The Englishman surveying Stonehenge might as well be gazing into the stars; he knows as little and has as little in common with the mysterious culture that gave this monument birth, even before one considers the questions of why and how Stonehenge was built. His Roman and British ancestors would have gazed at Stonehenge with the same wonderment and confusion that he, with all available archaeological knowledge, still cannot shake off. Prehistory is usually hidden; to investigate it is a choice, and a difficult one; but Stonehenge is prehistory that refuses to be hidden and obscure. Whoever built to last millennia purchased immortality at the price of a frustrating anonymity.

Jacobite Rome and the Church of St. Edmund

          

There are more sites of Jacobite interest in Rome than in any other European city, although on my recent visit there I saw only one or two of them. The Venerable English College remains a den of Jacobite sympathy – or at least it was a few years ago when I last visited, albeit the seminarian who showed me around this time gave me a blank look when I pointed out the portrait of Henry IX. I photographed this portrait and the arms of King Henry, for whom Pius VII made an exception when he prohibited the display of coronets on Cardinals’ coats of arms.In St. Peter’s I paid homage to the monument to the Stuart kings and the monument to Queen Clementina; later I passed the tomb of James III in the crypt (he seems to be the only non-Pope buried down there) but I was unable to photograph it. It is a fittingly distinguished burial place, although I should still prefer him to be in Westminster Abbey…

Another aim I had in Rome was to track down any remains of the Church of St. Edmund on Campo dei Fiori, recorded by J. B. Mackinlay in 1893 as having been founded either in 1300 or 1350 by a Mr and Mrs Whyte as the chapel of a hostel for English pilgrims; it was absorbed into the Hospital of the Most Holy Trinity and St. Thomas of Canterbury (now the English College) in 1463 (hence the appearance of Edmund in the Hospital seal and later in the Martyrs’ Picture) but a pediment bearing the Plantagenet arms survived near the Church of the Genoese and the Church of St. Cecilia until about 1888 if Mackinlay is to be believed. Unfortunately, there do not appear to be any churches now on Campo dei Fiori at all – the nearest is St. Bridget of Sweden on Piazza Farnese.

The Horrid Thirtieth

 

The Horrid Thirtieth returns again, once a day of national repentance and Tory pride, now unmarked by anyone except the Society of King Charles the Martyr. A recent glance at a 1734 Book of Common Prayer revealed that the service for the 30th January remained, as did the Gunpowder Plot service albeit unhappily joined to a commemoration of the landing of the Prince of Orange on the same day as the ‘Deliverer from Popery.’ In fact, I am not sure when the service for the 30th ceased to be appended to the Prayer Book, although I have no doubt that by 1734 it was rarely used. By 1858, when Lord Stanhope petitioned for its removal, it was doubtless the sole preserve of pretentious Tractarians. The last great flowering of the 30th as a day of Tory political theatre was surely the reign of Queen Anne, when members of the ‘October Clubs’ maintained the Divine Right of Kings in a vain attempt to stave off the abomination of a Hanoverian succession.

The question of what King Charles represented, and why a feast day was initiated in his honour, is an important one insofar as the celebration of his feast day today can all too easily become no more than a legitimist or Anglo-Catholic festival. The extent to which Anglo-Catholics can claim any inheritance from the seventeenth century I discussed in an earlier post. Certainly, the petititions for the prayers of King Charles (who was never known as St. Charles, incidentally) were never part of the official liturgy. Furthermore, it would be a travesty for the 30th January to have merely a cosmetic religious significance – a way of giving honour to legitimism and not to God.

Charles I was a Protestant through and through; it was on this fact that he fought the Civil War, resenting the implication that his court and his religious policy was infected with ‘popery.’ Charles’ belief was that the episcopal order was Scriptural, and that it best effected the godly order of the English nation. As such, he differed in no way from Elizabeth in his religious policy. Charles was martyred not for ‘Popish prelacy’ as his enemies would no doubt have claimed, but for the episcopal order as established by Scripture, as the preface to the 1559 Prayer Book makes clear. Charles understood better than anyone that the Church of England was imperfect and needed reform; perhaps his reform moved too quickly and antagonised too many, but he lived and breathed the eirenic world of early 17th century utopian Protestantism, which had emerged from the hostile reaction of the 16th century and now longed for the re-union of Christendom in a new culture of freedom. This was his father’s dream and yet for Charles’ sons such a vision would be inaccessible, prompting their eventual conversion to Catholicism (although James II never forsook the dream of toleration).

When Charles’ commemoration was included in the Prayer Book in 1660 it was after careful theological consideration. The commemoration of martyrs with feasts was recognised by antiquaries as a custom of great antiquity in the Church, going back to the apostolic period, and therefore the fact that Charles had been a martyr eased his passage into the Prayer Book. Furthermore, in a national church as the Church of England then was, the only figure who could command universal reverence (and who was effectively uncontroversial) was the King who was Supreme Governor. Consequently, as King and Martyr Charles could be commemorated without theological issues arising (the apostles whoe feasts occurred in the Prayer Book were martyrs, too) and without overt political controversy.

The Horrid Thirtieth is a day on which we remember the challenge posed to the apostolic constitution of the Church of England by the tyranny of Parliament, and inevitably our thoughts are also drawn to the more subtle dismantlement of the Church of England’s integrity in 1688. Charles was the Church of England’s first martyr; by the end of the century there was no Church of England left for which to die.

O LORD, our heavenly Father, who didst not punish us as our sins have deserved, but hast in the midst of judge­ment remembered mercy; We acknowledge it thine especial favour, that, though for our many and great provoca­tions, thou didst suffer thine anointed blessed King Charles the First (as on this day) to fall into the hands of violent and blood-thirsty men, and barbarously to be murdered by them, yet thou didst not leave us for ever, as sheep without a shepherd; but by thy gracious providence didst miracu­lously preserve the undoubted Heir of his Crowns, our then gracious Sovereign King Charles the Second, from his bloody enemies, hiding him under the shadow of thy wings, until their tyranny was overpast; and didst bring him back, in thy good appointed time, to sit upon the throne of his Father; and together with the Royal Family didst restore to us our ancient Government in Church and state. For these thy great and unspeakable mercies we render to thee our most humble and unfeigned thanks; beseeching thee, still to continue thy gracious protection over the whole Royal Family, and to grant to our gracious Sovereign a long and happy Reign over us: So we that are thy people will give thee thanks for ever, and will alway be shewing forth thy praise from generation to gene­ration; through Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour. Amen.

At the tomb of Sancroft

A few days ago I visited the church of St. Peter and St. Paul, Fressingfield in order to view the tomb of William Sancroft. He is buried outside the north side of the chancel, in death as in life refusing to enter a church whose prayers for a usurping tyrant he considered sinful. Thus the last Archbishop of the true Church of England lies in the humble country churchyard of the church in which he was baptised.

Time for Tories to unite against the Union

The suggestion of Murdo Fraser, the Deputy Leader of the Scottish Tories, that the United Kingdom should become a ‘federal’ state seems to have caused great concern to David Cameron, who has jumped to the defence of the Union. The Scottish Tories are supposed to be ‘too close’ to the SNP. If only we could believe that were true! Fraser’s federalism sounds pretty crass but at least it is better than the unthinking, dogmatic Unionism one sees in Gordon Brown and David Cameron.

So many Tories in England are opposed to the Union because they are possessed of a ‘coarse, narrow nationalism’ (as David Cameron said today) that rests on a dislike of the Scots and a ‘little England’ mentality. Unfortunately, that ‘nationalistic’ agenda also prevents them forming an alliance with anyone else, non-English, who opposes the Union. None of this foolishness would exist if only opposition to the Union were on constitutional, rather than quasi-nationalistic grounds. The intrusion of nationalism always gives so much ammunition to Unionists, who cannot after all defend a Union that, on any reading of history, was formed without the consent of the people with no other purpose than to prevent a Stuart succession north of the border – so the Unionists are forced to resort to ad hominem attacks on those opposed to the Union, which sadly is not always a difficult task to accomplish.

On a related note, all parties now seem united on the issue of removing the infamous third verse, with its reference to Marshal Wade and rebellious Scots, from the national anthem. What most have failed to realise is that the words of the first verse were stolen from the Jacobites, and are first recorded on a Jacobite glass discovered at Oxburgh Hall.

The place of the Non-Jurors in Anglican tradition

The Anglican tradition is an elusive concept, fought over by many competing interests. However, I would contend that the fact the very soul of Anglicanism can now be fought over is an inheritance of the weakness of the Church of England in the 1830s that allowed it to be overwhelmed first by the theology of the Oxford Movement and then by liberalism. Of course, that weakness was itself the outcome of 150 years of stagnation and fossilisation since the Revolution. Before the 1830s, Anglicans might not have been able to say what the faith of the Church of England was, but I doubt very much that any of them would have defined it in a way congenial to either Anglo-Catholics or liberals. The faith of the Church of England between 1688 and 1830 was an evangelical and reformed faith, intellectually and morally disembowelled by the Enlightenment. Until the appearance of the Wesleys in the 1750s (for whom the Church of England was in any case not ready), the only Anglicans who stood against the vacuity of the Established Church were the Non-Jurors. This is an important point missed by commentators on Anglican identity such as Richard Turnbull, who in his otherwise excellent book Anglican and Evangelical? fails to recognise the significance of the Non-Jurors.

The internal disputes that tormented the Non-Jurors – first the usage vs. non-usage debate over the use of the 1549 Prayer Book and then the Bangorian Controversy spilling over into the juring Church – have been seen by too many historians as evidence for the weakness of the Non-Jurors as a movement. In the long view of history, however, it is perhaps more accurate to see them as the only important doctrinal and canonical disputes within Anglicanism in the first three quarters of the 18th century, and as such an indication that theology still mattered to the Non-Jurors where it had ceased to matter to the Latitudinarians who occupied the bench of the Lords Spiritual. In other words, the Non-Jurors were not an eccentric strand of 18th century Anglicanism – they were 18th century Anglicanism at a time when other Anglicans had lost any sense of identity. Like Anglicans at any time of history, the Non-Jurors were divided – and this, too, is a point sometimes missed by historians, who are too ready to imbibe the myth perpetuated by Anglo-Catholics that the Non-Jurors were a proto-Anglo-Catholic movement. Anglo-Catholics are understandably anxious to establish a lineage pre-Pusey, but their ownership of the Non-Jurors, like their ownership of the Caroline divines, is on shaky ground.

Hickes, especially in his posthumous work, was certainly heading towards a strongly Catholic position on the ministerial priesthood. However, whilst he may have been the key figure in the movement, Hickes was not the only one. Nathaniel Spinckes opposed the ‘usages’ of the 1549 Prayer Book – which, most controversially, included prayer for the dead – on Protestant grounds. The Non-Jurors were no less Protestant as a body, and no more ‘Catholic’, than their brethren in the established church. However, the Non-Jurors did develop certain distinctive ideas and practices whose influence was lasting.

After the ordination of Hickes as Suffragan Bishop of Thetford and Thomas Wagstaffe as Bishop of Ipswich, the second generation of Non-Juring bishops did not take territorial titles. They were ‘bishops at large’ rather like the Catholic Vicars Apostolic of the period. Hickes’ maintenance of the sacredness of the episcopal order had, ironically, resulted in a significant innovation to the episcopacy; not since the days of Celtic Christianity had Britain seen bishops without sees. It was Hickes’ profound conviction that the episcopal order had the authority of Scripture behind it – and the Bangorian Controversy began when Benjamin Hoadly challenged Hickes in the most radical way by denying that Scripture licensed any form of church government. For very different reasons, Hoadly was taking up the view of earlier Puritans who had advocated the abolition of episcopacy in the Church of England on the grounds that it was unscriptural. The difference now was that Hoadly – a territorial bishop – was maintaining the unscriptural character of the episcopacy against Non-Jurors without territorial bishops. The old Puritan objection to ‘prelacy,’ that the cathedral foundations simply perpetuated Popish practice, lost its force against the Non-Jurors, who no longer enjoyed the privileges of the established church that had always tempted insincerity for the sake of advancement. The Non-Jurors maintained episcopacy for its own sake as the apostolic form of church government.

This, then, was a major heritage of the Non-Jurors – the maintenance of episcopacy not as a political but as a theological position, the separation of episcopal church governance from territorial jurisdiction and a rediscovery of the true role of a bishop.

The Non-Jurors have been seen as intolerant, insofar as their origin lay in Sancroft and the Seven Bishops’ rejection of James’ Declaration of Indulgence. However, the evidence suggests that the Bishops were in favour of tolerance as a principle but opposed to toleration as a method. In other words, Sancroft would rather have seen comprehension of dissenters (of the sort attempted under William in 1689) than open toleration. He was right, perhaps, in seeing James’ concept of toleration as one primarily focussed on Catholic emancipation; he was also right to see that the only way in which Catholics could take part in English political life was through universal toleration, since given the presuppositions of Catholic ecclesiology, the comprehension of Catholics was plainly impossible. In the case of the dissenters, it was obstacles such as the surplice and the sign of the cross in baptism that stood in the way of comprehension – not a fundamental questioning that the Church of England was the true church of Christ. The Prayer Book project of 1689 was, then, an enterprise in line with rather than anathema to the principles of the early Non-Jurors. Historians are right to see it as the last attempt to make the Church of England a truly national church. With the abandonment of Prayer Book revision came the implicit acknowledgement that a return to James’ policy of toleration was the only way in which to keep the nation together; thus we have the Toleration Act of 1689, albeit excluding Catholics.

The idea of England as a Christian nation united by faith was an aspiration shared, albeit in different ways, by Puritans and Catholics. For the Catholics, the aim was the re-conversion of England and her re-incorporation into Christendom. For the Puritans, it was the aim of creating a new Jerusalem, a godly nation. In 1689 the Church of England decisively abandoned the vision that had been cherished by so many of its first founders, and thus the insincere ‘conformity’ of the 18th century was initiated.

The Non-Jurors are a difficult body to pin down, in doctrine or practice; their influence spread beyond the confines of their own movement, as demonstrated by Wesley’s admiration for William Law. However, it is fair to say that as the Church of England entered one of its darkest periods, the Non-Jurors represented a vital, if polemical Anglicanism.

William Sancroft and Toleration

 

I fear that I may have been unfair to William Sancroft in my last post regarding his position on toleration. Reading Patrick Collinson’s excellent article on Sancroft (“William Sancroft, 1617-93: A Retiring Disposition in a Revolutionary Age” in From Cranmer to Sancroft, Continuum 2006) I find a reference to the possibility that Sancroft might have considered ‘comprehension’ for the Dissenters: “For it is possible that if [the Non-Jurors], and Sancroft in particular, had stayed on board, playing an active role in Parliament and Convocation, the revolution settlement would not have merely tolerated Protestant Dissent but would have accommodated the more moderate Dissenters, especially the Presbyterians, within a more broadly defined national Church. That was implicit in the greater measure of latitude and ‘tenderness’ which Sancroft’s Church, assisted by more moderate churchmen and some of the leading Dissenters themselves, had improvised at the trial of the Seven Bishops” (pp. 192-3).

The trial of the Seven Bishops had the potential to unite all English Protestants, in spite of the fact that the Bishops were opposing a measure of toleration for Dissenters, so in order to bring the Dissenters on board the Bishops sought to extend the hand of friendship to them. Even James II himself acknowledges this; he records that the clergy of Chester, who sent in an address thanking him for the Declaration of Indulgence, ‘could not but with trouble of mind hear of the proceeding of the Seaven Bishops, who tho’ they tenderly promised the dissenters something, yet refused to do their part about the Declaration least they should be parties to it’ (Clarke pp. 167-8).

Sancroft’s concern, it seems, was with toleration for Catholics rather than toleration of Dissenters. Interesting in this regard is Sancroft’s conversation with James about the conversion of Charles II, also recorded in his memoirs:

Some few days after the late King’s death, his Majesty looking into the papers he had left behind him found two relating to Controversie, one in the strong box, the other in the Closet, both writ in his own hand, they were short but solid, and shew’d, that tho’ his Conversion was not perfected til a few houres before his death, his conviction was of a longer date: The King thought fit to shew them one day to the Archbishop of Cantorburie in his Closet, no body being by, who seem’d much surprised at the Sight of them, and pawsed almost half an houre before he said any thing; at last tould the King, He did not think his late Majesty had understood controversie so well, but that he thought they might be answer’d: If so, sayd the King, I pray let it be done gentleman like and sollidly, and then may it have the effect you so much desire of bringing me back to your Church; to which the Archbishop replyd, It would perhaps be counted a disrespect to him to contradict the late King, but his Majesty reassured him in that point, by telling him the change it might produce in himself (if answer’d effectually) was of that consequence as to out ballance any other consideration, and therefore desired he might see a reply either from him or any other of his perswasion; but tho’ he, My Lord Dartmouth, and others, were several times reminded of this matter and earnestly press’d to it, never any formal reply was produced during the four years of his Majesty’s reign in England…it is probably the Arch Bishop dispair’d of answering it so effectually as to bring his Majesty back to their Communion, whereas the publishing a reply would have own’d and published the papers too; and he had reason to apprehend, that the authority and arguments of their dying Prince would influence more persons to that Religion, than his answer would perswuade to relinquish it.

James and Sancroft went on to discuss the Coronation, with the King insisting on a modified Anglican ceremony – note that it was not Sancroft who pressed for this (there is no evidence, that I have found at least, to support Andrew Gant’s assertion that James had a ‘Catholic’ coronation in St. James’ before that in Westminster Abbey, or that he disdained the Protestant ceremony). The two men’s conversation reveals how far James was prepared to go for his belief in toleration (insisting that Sancroft write a refutation of his own beliefs) and how disinclined Sancroft was to bring religious controversy into the public domain. He was deeply distrustful of religious freedom, which makes his ‘tenderness’ at the time of the trial all the more remarkable.

Sancroft is one of the great figures of the 17th century church; he is unjustly neglected and George D’Oyly’s 1821 biography remains the only one. Furthermore, Sancroft is one of Suffolk’s greatest sons and he has received little recognition for this; Collinson, as an East Anglian scholar, rightly acknowledges the importance of Suffolk and of Fressingfield to Sancroft, who attended the Bury Grammar School and unusually went up to Emmanuel instead of Caius (more usual for Burians) because his uncle was master. The antiquary Thomas Tanner, who inherited Sancroft’s voluminous papers, appears to have acquired even copies of Sancroft’s school exercises, which would give valuable information about the nature of the curriculum at the Bury Grammar School in the 1630s. John Battely was, of course, one of Sancroft’s chaplains – and it is a shame that whilst Henry Wharton gets a mention in Collinson’s article Battely is left out. I am not sure whether Ufford Hall in Fressingfield, where Sancroft was born and died is still in existence – but his tomb on the exterior of Fressingfield church is certainly still there and I intend as soon as I am able to make a pilgrimage to see it.