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CLERGY Jps in ENGLAND and WALES, 1590–1640 The Historical Journal, 47, 2 (2004), pp. 233–259 f 2004 Cambridge University Press DOI: 10.1017/S0018246X04003693 Printed in the United Kingdom CLERGY JPs IN ENGLAND AND WALES, 1590 –1640 CHRISTOPHER HAIGH AND ALISON WALL Christ Church, Oxford ABSTRACT. In the 1621 parliament members of the House of Commons clashed with the king over the issue of clergy as JPs: there were suggestions that no clergyman should sit as a JP, or that only bishops and deans should be appointed. Why were there complaints at that time, and were they justified? Was the nomination of clergy as justices an element in ‘the rise of clericalism’? This analysis of clergy JPs between 1590 and 1640 shows that they had been increasing slowly in number from 1590, and more rapidly towards 1617 under Lord Chancellor Ellesmere. But the major expansion in their ranks came under his successors Francis Bacon 1617 to 1621, and especially Bishop John Williams 1621 to 1625. However, there was no systematic central policy behind appointments, and local interests and the normal processes of patronage were important. Perhaps precedence among the justices and the exercise of secular authority by clerical JPs were sometimes troublesome issues. But, despite continuing complaints from MPs, the proportion of clergy to lay JPs was always small – at its highest in 1626, with 7.6 per cent. Thereafter Lord Keeper Thomas Coventry allowed the clerical presence to decline, both absolutely and proportionately. If there was a ‘rise of the clergy’ after 1625, clergy JPs were not part of it. On 25 April 1621 the House of Commons appointed a committee to consider a reform of the commissions of the peace, with a suggestion ‘that no clergyman should be a justice’. The main concern of Sir Dudley Digges, who had raised the reform issue, was the overall size and composition of the benches – ‘divers very unworthy persons have been put in, and divers of the best desert left out’. But some members seized on the issue of clerical justices. Sir William Stroud claimed ‘divers spiritual men put in against their wills’, and asked ‘that, this distracting them from their studies, they may be spared from that service’. Sir Edward Peyton argued that a bishop should not be involved in condemning a man, and therefore should not be a justice. Sir William Spenser mentioned the position of diocesan chancellors who were JPs: they sat in secular and ecclesiastical courts, ‘and so striketh with both hands’. The committee was to consider these points: ‘that there might be not so many clergymen, thereby causing distraction from their callings’, and ‘that bishops’ chancellors might be left out, who thereby take occasion to strike with both swords’.1 James I was furious. He apparently thought that the Commons proposed to proceed with a bill for the removal of all clergy from commissions of the 1 Commons debates, 1621, II, p. 319, IV, p. 254; Commons journals, I, p. 590. 233 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Athens, on 28 Sep 2021 at 13:01:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X04003693 234 CHRISTOPHER HAIGH AND ALISON WALL peace – which he interpreted as an attack on his prerogative and on the dignity of the clergy. James sent a warning to the House on 1 May, ‘to be very careful what they did in this, for if they neglect the clergy it would be a scandal to religion’. He explained that ‘he means not that every parson or vicar should be a justice, but doctors of divinity and some other of the graver sort’. ‘He intends that no mean curates etc. shall be put in, but all bishops and some worthy doctors of divinity.’ Digges and the others were now on the defensive, insisting that they had intended a petition not a bill, and a reduction not an exclusion of clergy: ‘for divines, they allow bishops and deans, but they thought that such as have parochial cures might be spared from that trouble’. The king should be told that in County Durham there were thirteen ‘ministers or officers under them’ on the bench, and only twelve laymen. There was a clear difference of opinion: MPs thought that only ecclesiastical dignitaries should be JPs, and the king wanted to have some senior parish clergy. Secretary Calvert reported that James would consider the composition of commissions, but ‘For bishops and some grave doctors of divinity, doubteth not that the king will think fitting.’2 This clash may look like a short step along the high road to civil war. Aggressive MPs were seeking to limit the crown’s freedom of action, and the king leapt to defend his prerogative. There was suspicion on both sides: suspicion that the crown was stuffing toady clergymen on to local benches, and suspicion that MPs wanted to control the composition of commissions and do down the church. And perhaps there was anger that the parish clergy were getting above them- selves. The issue was not a new one, and in the parliament of 1614 it had come up in a debate over clerical pluralism and non-residence. Sir John Sammes complained about the vicar of a busy port, ‘justice of the peace and quorum, which keeps him from the church upon sabbath days’. He proposed that ‘no spiritual man with cure of souls under the degree of a bishop or dean of a cathedral church may be a justice [of the] peace’ – the position adopted by Digges in 1621. Sir Henry Anderson, MP for Newcastle, protested that he ‘lives in a country where the churchmen [are] the governors’ – the Durham problem again. And Sir George More ‘would have no clergyman of the peace’.3 At the end of July 1621 the crown office in chancery produced a liber pacis, ‘for the Commons House of Parliament’ – presumably to inform discussion of the peace commissions when the House reassembled. This liber (a county by county list of JPs) does not survive, but it can be reconstructed.4 Clergy then held 2 Commons debates, 1621, VI, p. 396, III, pp. 111–2, IV, pp. 283–4, II, p. 334, V, p. 125; Commons journals, I, p. 599. 3 Proceedings in parliament, 1614 (House of Commons), ed. Maija Jansson (Philadelphia, 1988), pp. 216, 217, 221. 4 Public Record Office (PRO), C231/4, fo. 127v. The lost book is reconstructed from PRO, C193/ 13/1 (a liber pacis of November 1621, subtracting those clergy whose appointment to commissions between July and November are recorded in the doquet book PRO, C231/4. Here and hereafter, the terms ‘clergy’ and ‘clergymen’ refer to priests of all ranks, including bishops; the term ‘ministers’ is used for priests other than bishops. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Athens, on 28 Sep 2021 at 13:01:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X04003693 CLERGY JPS IN ENGLAND AND WALES 235 122 places on commissions in England and Wales: between them the 24 bishops had 46 places, deans held 17, archdeacons 8, vice-chancellors 2, doctors of divinity 37, and other clergy only 12. So when king and Commons clashed over clerical justices, both were right. More than four-fifths of the clerical places were held by bishops or doctors of divinity, as James wished – but nearly half of the total held parochial cures, as MPs feared. Clerical justices were a tiny proportion, however: forty-nine places on the commissions were held by parish clergy, as against roughly two thousand held by knights and gentlemen. So why was there such a fuss about the clergy? If the problem really was pastoral care, only a hundred or so parishes were affected. If the issue was clerical power, the clergy were out- numbered twenty-to-one by the gentry. What was so worrying? Perhaps it was the novelty of parish ministers as justices that shocked laymen, and the anxiety that they were the thin end of a thickening clerical wedge. Perhaps what they thought they saw was the rise of clericalism. And it has been plausibly argued by Andrew Foster that they were right.5 But were they? I The clerical presence on commissions had been changing. The bishops now held far fewer places than they had done, and there had been a big expansion among the ‘other ranks’. In 1590, 95 places had been held by clergy, 78 of them by bishops (and 13 of these by Bishop Hughes of St Asaph).6 The number of places held by other clergy then drifted slowly up: 17 in 1590, 19 in 1596, 29 in 1604, and 43 in 1608 – by the addition of more deans and appointments in Cambridgeshire, Oxfordshire, Durham, Kent, Middlesex, and the Isle of Ely, where there were particular clerical interests. But then the number of episcopal appointees fell, and the ministers became more numerous – from holding 43 places in 1608 to 49 in 1613, 67 in 1618, and 80 in 1620. Between 1608 and 1613 Lord Chancellor Ellesmere nominated ministers to 17 places – 7 held by deans, 5 by archdeacons, 4 by doctors of divinity, and 1 in Caernarvonshire by Arthur Williams, clerk. When Sir John Sammes and the others raised the issue in 1614, they were 5 Andrew Foster, ‘The clerical estate revitalised’, in Kenneth Fincham, ed., The early Stuart church, 1603–1642 (Basingstoke, 1993), pp. 148–50, 156–8, to which we are indebted. The subject of clergy JPs has been often commented on but little studied.
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