Brutum Fulmen

Dated 1681 - The oldest artefact in the Gardner collection

1 Brutum Fulmen

Brutum Fulmen - (“unfeeling thunder”; empty threat) Written by 1607-1691, in 1680 (our copy is dated 1681)

Our document is damaged with no back or front cover. Wrapped in brown paper and tied up with rough string. The paper has the name and address of Mr Gardner 172 Galliard Rd. Written on it. Thomas Barlow - Bishop of Lincoln

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Thomas Barlow (1607–1691) was an English academic and clergyman, who became Provost of The Queen's College, Oxford and Bishop of Lincoln. He was considered, in his own times and by Edmund Venables writing in the Dictionary of National Biography, to have been a trimmer, a reputation mixed in with his academic and other writings on casuistry. His views were in fact Calvinist and strongly anti-Catholic, and he was one of the last English bishops to identify the Pope as the Antichrist. He worked in the 1660s for the 'comprehension' of nonconformists, but supported the crackdown of the mid-1680s; and declared loyalty to James II of England on his accession, having strongly supported the Exclusion Bill which would have denied the Catholic James the succession. In 1675, he became bishop of Lincoln, through the good offices of the two secretaries of state, Sir Joseph Williamson and , both graduates of Queen's College, the latter having been his pupil; was opposed. Barlow's consecration (27 June) did not take place in the customary Lambeth chapel, but in the chapel attached to the palace of the Bishop of Ely (then ) in Holborn, and of Winchester was the consecrating prelate. Barlow resided mostly at Buckden Palace, near Huntingdon, and was charged with never having entered his cathedral. The Bishop's Palace at Lincoln had still not been repaired from damage done in the , but George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax remonstrated with Barlow on the subject in 1684. Barlow told his friend Sir Peter Pett that the real ground of hostility was not his absence from Lincoln, but his continuing hostility to Catholicism. In 1678, when forwarded his theory of a Popish Plot, Barlow had publicly declared his bitter enmity to the papists, and to their supposed leader, James, Duke of York. On the introduction of the bill enforcing a test against popery which excluded Roman Catholic peers from the House of Lords, Gunning of Ely having defended the church of Rome from the charge of idolatry, Barlow answered him vehemently. In 1680, while the Popish Plot panic was still at its height, he republished, under the title of Brutum Fulmen, of the papal bulls of Pius V and Paul III pronouncing the excommunication and deposition of Queen Elizabeth and of Henry VIII, with inflammatory comments, and learned proofs that 'the pope is the great Antichrist, the man of sin, and the son of perdition.' In 1682 appeared Barlow's answer to the inquiry 'whether the Turk or pope be the greater Antichrist,' giving the palm to the latter, and in 1684 his letter to the Earl of Anglesey proving that 'the pope is Antichrist'.[2]

2 The Package Addressed to MR. GARDNER*. 172 Galliard Rd. N9

Visible part of the handwritten inscription in the margin legatus a viro reverendo Joanne Bowes Google translates Latin to English as: ambassador from her husband, the reverend John Bowes Alternatively as: ambassador by the man the reverend John Bowes

Signed ? Bowes

*Mr Gardner of 172 Galliard Rd, is either Percy Frank Gardner or Percy William Gardner Why either should own this document is a mystery

3 Elizabeth I Pius V The life and times of Thomas Barlow, Bishop of Lincoln

Date Reign (Stuarts) Thomas Barlow

Pope Pius V issued bull 1570 excommunicating Elizabeth I

1572 Pius V dies

Elizabeth I dies (last of the Tudors) 1603 James I & VI (first English Stuart) 1607 Born 1626 Charles I 1649 Charles I executed 1653 Cromwell 1660 Charles II 1675 Made Bishop of Lincoln Wrote Brutum Fulmen 1680 (identifying the pope as Antichrist) 1685 James II 1689 William & Mary 1691 Dies

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