Sir Robert Harley, K.B., (1579-1656) and the 'Character' of a Puritan
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SIR ROBERT HARLEY, K.B., (1579-1656) AND THE 'CHARACTER' OF A PURITAN EALES IN February 1621 Thomas Shepherd caused a furore in the House of Commons hy attacking the bill Mbr the Punishment of divers Abuses on the Sabaoth-day' at its second reading. It was, he said 'very inconvenient and indiscreete' and 'it savours of the spirrit of a Puritan', and he called Walter Earle, who had preferred the bill, a 'perturbator of the Peace \^ The Commons were so scandalized that Shepherd was ordered to withdraw from the debating chamber, and his angry outburst and high words were widely reported, both in parliamentary diaries"^ and by men who were not members of the Parliament. In a letter to Sir Dudley Carleton, the English ambassador in the Hague, his correspondent John Chamberlain noted ' yesterday one Shepheard, a lawier, was throwne out of the house and disabled for euer beeing there, for a speach the day before against a bill concerning the sabaoth, wherin girding and glauncing at the puritans, and seeking to make them ridiculous, him self grew foolish and profane'. In a draft letter to Sir Horace Vere, who was commanding the English volunteer force in the Palatinate, the Herefordshire gentleman. Sir Robert Harley of Brampton Bryan, recorded that 'one Shepharde, a lawyer that was of the lower house, made an Intemp[er]at speech ag[ain]st a bill, \v[hi]ch was to restraine the profanatio[n] of the sabboth, & Inveyed w[i]th some bitter[ncs]s ag[ain]st puritanes sayinge that there were many snares to catch poore pa[pists], but not so much as a mouse trap to catch a puritane. Whereupon the house put hym out, & because I think the p[ar]liament will not proceede to define a Puritane, I take the bouldness to present y[ou]r Lo[rdshi]p w[i]th his Caracter, w[hi]ch bill if it should pass the lower house, the upper would never lett it come to the hassard of receauing Royall assent. '•* Sir Robert's interest in this incident is underscored by his own uncompromising stance on strict observance of the Sabbath. He supported the Sabbath Bill that was introduced in the 1628 Parliament and nearly three decades later the congregation at his funeral was told how Sir Robert, in his capacity as a magistrate, would 'vindicate the Sabbath from contempt. Prophannesse durst not appear upon the face of it, by this means the Congregations were frequented on the Lords dayes, and many thousand soules, prevented from their sinfull sports, sate under the droppings of the word."* Although he was clearly concerned to see the passage of the Sabbath Bill in 1621, Harley was also alarmed by Shepherd's invective against puritans and as an 134 Fig. I. Sir Robert Harley. Engraving by George Vertue, after the miniature by P. Oliver. By courtesy of the Trustees of the Brtttsh Museum accompaniment to his letter to Vere, he also drafted some rough notes in which he set out his own definition of a puritan.^ Harley was obviously well aware that many of his contemporaries would have regarded him as a puritan and his notes constitute a defensive summary of some of his own religious attitudes. His sympathetic use of the term is in itself highly revealing, for in general it was a word that carried connotations of stigma and abuse; contemporary usage was at times so imprecise that some historians have seen fit to outlaw its use as a meaningful analytical tool altogether. As Patrick CoUinson has perceptively observed, for the historian ' there is Httle point in constructing elaborate statements defining what, in ontological terms, Puritanism was and what it was not, when it was not a thing definable in itself, but only one half of a stressful relationship'.^ Sir Robert Harley's description, or as he himself termed it 'Character', of a puritan presents us with an incomparable insight into the dynamics of that relationship at a point in time when, it might be argued, the tensions between puritanism and the Church establishment had reached a peaceful watershed, marking a lull between the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean drive against non-conformity and the anti-Calvinist backlash engineered by the Arminians from the mid-1620s onwards. Nicholas Tyacke has observed that 'Calvinist doctrine provided a common and ameliorating bond that was only to be destroyed by the rise of Arminianism', and as a result the 'non-conformist element in the former Calvinist partnership was driven into an unprecedented radicalism'. In this context it is notable that Harley made no mention 135 in his notes of the doctrine of predestination, which was central to the puritan view of the elect, those chosen by God for salvation, as a beleaguered minority assailed on all sides by the efforts of the Devil and the reprobate to tempt them to sin. When he wrote his description, however, differing interpretations of the doctrine of predestination remained primarily an issue of clerical debate. It was not until the publication in 1624 of Richard Montagu's A Gagg for the New Gospel? No. A New Gaggfor an Old Goose, that the Arminian attempt to equate predestinarian beliefs with puritanism reached a wider lay audience and aroused the wrath of a vociferous band of M.P.s in the Parliament of that year.' Sir Robert Harley's pen-portrait of 1621 displays instead the characteristic puritan stress on a scrupulous conscience, combined with a reliance on scriptural guidance in religious matters, which formed the basis of the non-conformist argument against a wide range of ceremonial and symbolic practices. Sir Robert's description of a puritan is thus highly personalized, although he was clearly following the literary genre of the Theophrastan ' Character', which had only recently been popularized in English with the publication in 1608 of Joseph Hall's Characters of Vertues and Vices.^ The subsequent appearance in 1614 of a collection of'many witty Characters' written by Sir Thomas Overbury and 'other learned Gentlemen his friends', which entered its tenth impression in 1618, marked the beginning of a vogue for satirical characterizations that was to retain its popularity throughout the seventeenth century.^ In using the tightly argued framework of the 'Character', which was conventionally a few hundred words in length, in order to display the positive nature of puritanism, Harley was inverting a literary form which was increasingly associated with irony and sarcasm. Yet Harley's own 'Character' does not attempt to refute popular anti-puritan stereotypes, such as the puritan's supposed hypocrisy (and in particular the sexual hypocrisy), which playwrights such as Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton and Thomas Freeman exploited to such comic effect and which formed the background to numerous ballads and other anonymous works, both of verse and prose, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.^** The Overburian collection, which was undoubtedly known to Harley, contained the character of a puritan, whose 'greatest care is to contemne obedience, his last care to serve God handsomely and cleanely'. This picture of the puritan as an opponent of order in the Church was commonplace and increasingly spilt over into the political sphere, where puritans were commonly branded as enemies of peaceful government and even of specific policies of the Crown.'^ These were accusations that Harley did take pains to reject, but there remains an unresolved tension in his description. On the one hand he presents a picture of an individual who is obedient, 'willing to obey all law com[m]ands', who 'Honors & obeyes' his superiors and 'esteemes' the civil magistrate, and, on the other, reveals a strong undercurrent of dissent, revolving specifically around the rejection of the use of the sign of the cross in baptism. ^^ These ambiguities should perhaps cause no surprise, since these notes are very clearly a first draft. In writing to Vere, Sir Robert was addressing a close friend, whose religious views were very near to his own and who would have appreciated the need to tone down the more radical aspects of the characterization, lest it fall into the wrong hands. It is accordingly a remarkable 136 document - a self-conscious, approving description of a puritan by a leading godly gentleman. In his draft Sir Robert dwelt partly on traditional matters of puritan discontent, which were not in themselves overly controversial, such as the problems of non-preaching and non-resident clergy, as well as addressing more contentious issues. The role of the preacher as the channel for the word of God was of central importance to the godly and in her commonplace book Lady Brilliana Harley noted that 'the markes of the true Chruch [sic] is the pure preaching of the word of God'; while to Harley the 'Dumbe Minister' was like 'a drie nurse, not able to feede god's childre[n]'.^"^ Puritan pressure for a trained preaching ministry did make an impact at the highest levels and at the Hampton Court Conference in 1604 King James himself had promised to 'plant preachers'. Recent research on the Jacobean episcopate has revealed many of the Bishops to have been frequent preachers, yet despite such official sanction for preaching some places remained poorly served in the years before the Civil War. Harley's home county, Herefordshire, was one of the areas which Christopher Hill has depicted as 'the dark corners of the land' in this respect. An official report drawn up for the King in 1603 shows that there were 313 parishes in the diocese of Hereford, which covered the whole of Herefordshire, southern Shropshire and part of Worcestershire, but within the diocese there were only eighty-one licensed preachers.