Jeremy Taylor Week: Taylor, Ussher, and conformity to the Book of Common Prayer

In Belfast Cathedral depictions of luminaries of the Church of Ireland gaze down on the congregation from the pillars of the nave.  On the two front pillars, closest to the choir and chancel, are found portrayals of two of the most influential figures of Irish Anglicanism: Jeremy Taylor and James Ussher.

It was on Maundy Thursday of this year, during the renewal of ordination vows, as I looked at these two figures, that the idea came for the subject of this year's Jeremy Taylor week on laudable Practice. I posted on 'X' at the time:

At the Renewal of Ordination Vows in Belfast Cathedral, with the Laudian Jeremy Taylor and the Reformed Conformist James Ussher both looking down on us, with their shared commitment to episcopacy, Reformed Catholic national church, and Prayer Book. pic.twitter.com/l4Sv4D71IU

— laudablePractice (@cath_cov) March 28, 2024

Next week, on the 13th August, sees the commemoration of Jeremy Taylor. This week, posts on the blogs will consider the similarities between Taylor the Laudian and Ussher the Reformed Conformist.  Underpinning this series of posts, as suggested by the above posting on 'X', is the conviction that what Laudians and Reformed Conformists held in common was much more significant than their differences. This can be seen in when we consider the thought of Taylor, the Laudian champion, and Ussher, the leading intellectual force of the Reformed Conformists. 

We begin today by considering their shared commitment to the authorised liturgy of the Churches of Ireland and England, the Book of Common Prayer. 

We have ... a holy Liturgy, excellent Prayers, perfect Sacraments.

So said Taylor in 'A Letter to a Gentlewoman' who had left the Church of England for the Roman Catholic Church. What amiss, he asked this lady, "did you find in the Doctrine and Liturgy and Discipline of the Church of England?" Convinced of the excellency of the Prayer Book when contrasted with the Roman liturgy, Taylor similarly defended the Prayer Book against those who demanded its 'reformation'. In his Apology for Authorised and Set Forms of Liturgy against the Pretence of the Spirit (1649) - dedicated to the King - he echoed episcopalian petitions of the early 1640s defending the liturgy, with their claims that the authors of the Prayer Book were, in some manner, guided by the Holy Spirit:

the Lyturgie of the Church of England, which was composed with much art and judgement, by a Church that hath as much reason to be confident She hath the Spirit and Gifts of Prayer as any single person hath.

When he was appointed to the episcopate at the Restoration, he contrasted the peaceable way of conformity to the Prayer Book with Presbyterian agitation against the liturgy and its modest ceremonies:

Is it not a shame, that the people should be filled with sermons against ceremonies, and declamations against a surplice, and tedious harangues against the poor airy sign of the cross in baptism? These things teach them to be ignorant; it fills them with wind, and they suck dry nurses; it makes them lazy and useless, troublesome and good for nothing. Can the definition of a Christian be that a Christian is a man that rails against bishops and the common prayer-book? and yet this is the great labour of our neighbours that are crept in among us; this they call the work of the Lord, and this is the great matter of the desired reformation; in these things they spend their long breath, and about these things they spend earnest prayers, and by these they judge their brother, and for these they revile their superior, and in this doughty cause they think it fit to fight and die.

Ussher the Reformed Conformist would have agreed with Taylor's call for conformity to the authorised liturgy. As Ussher's chaplain and biographer Nicholas Bernard stated:

He was a constant assertor and observer of the Liturgy of the Church of England to the last. In the Church it was (by his approbation) as duly observed by myself; we had there an organ and a quire, on Sunday the service was sung before him, as is used in Cathedrals in England. Anthems were sung very frequently, and often instead of a psalm before sermon. He came constantly to the Church in his episcopal habit and preached in it, and for myself (by his approbation) when I officiated I wore my surplice and hood, administered the communion, and at such occasions preached in them also. And for all other administrations they were fully observed in each rite and ceremony according to the rubric of the Book of Common Prayer. And for the Protestant inhabitants that were refractory in the northern parts of Ireland (where the Scotch had mingled with the English) he did his utmost to reclaim them in his provincial visitations, which I was a witness of, and employed by his directions among them for that end.

Likewise, another biographer and chaplain, Richard Parr, noted in his 1686 work:

Nor was his care confined only to the conversion of the ignorant Irish Papists; but he also endeavoured the reduction of the Scotch and English Sectaries to the bosom of the Church, as it was by Law established, conferring and arguing with divers of them, as well Ministers as Lay-men, and shewing them the weakness of those Scruples and Objections they had, against their joyning with the publick Service of the Church, and submitting to its Government and Discipline.

Ussher's commitment to the Prayer Book and conformity should not be in the least surprising. As Stephen Hampton has demonstrated in his excellent study of Reformed Conformity in the Jacobean and Caroline church, Reformed Conformist bishops routinely disciplined clergy who refused to conform to the liturgy and its ceremonies. What is more, as Hampton points out, it was leading Reformed Conformist Thomas Morton (consecrated to the episcopate in 1616, appointed to the see of Durham in 1632) who wrote A Defence of the Innocencie of the Three Ceremonies of the Church of England (1618), defending against Puritan attacks the surplice, the sign of the Cross in Baptism, and kneeling to receive Holy Communion. To quote Norman Sykes' excellent 1956 article 'Ussher as Churchman':

Ussher's sentiments could be paralleled from contemporary Elizabethan and Jacobean bishops of the Church of England.

Taylor and Ussher were united in requiring conformity to the Prayer Book's ceremonies. Nor did Taylor's Laudianism propose advanced ceremonial. Indeed, he took care to direct his clergy during his primary visitation in 1661 that ceremonies were to be restricted to those required by the authorised liturgy:

Let no Minister of a Parish introduce any Ceremony, Rites or Gestures, though with some seeming Piety and Devotion, but what are commanded by the Church, and established by Law: and let these also be wisely and usefully explicated to the people, that they may understand the reasons and measures of obedience; but let there be no more introduc'd, lest the people be burdened unnecessarily, and tempted or divided.

Likewise, while Ussher was one of those Reformed Conformist divines who, amidst the gathering storm of 1641, proposed revisions of the liturgy, such revisions were modest and fell very far short indeed of Puritan demands and the later Westminster Directory. If the revisions had been accepted - and, in fact, some were in 1662 - the Prayer Book would have remained in place, with no doctrinal change and, bar an alternative suggestion that the sign of the Cross could be omitted at Baptism, little ceremonial change. What is more, Ussher's understanding of conformity and ceremonies was precisely that seen in Taylor's directions to his clergy. As Bernard notes, 

he did not take upon him to introduce any Rite or Ceremony upon his own Opinion of Decency, till the Church had judged.

The commitment of Ussher the Reformed Conformist and Taylor the Laudian to the rites and ceremonies of the Book of Common Prayer was also evident in that which they shared in death. Ussher was famously given a state funeral by Cromwell, with permission granted that it would be according to the then prohibited liturgy: permission which quite clearly indicates recognition of Ussher's commitment to the Prayer Book. Following the sermon by Barnard, Ussher was, in the words of Parr's biography, "buried by the said Dr. according to the Liturgy of the Church of England". The very same words could be used to describe Taylor's funeral. The sermon at Taylor's funeral was given by his friend Dr. George Rust. And Taylor the Laudian, like Ussher the Reformed the Conformist, was laid to rest according to the words of the Book of Common Prayer. 

Ussher and Taylor lived in an age when agitation against the Prayer Book, its rites and ceremonies, reached a violent apogee (as predicted by Hooker in his Preface to the Lawes). Decades of Puritan assaults on the Prayer Book, and rejection of the canonical requirements of conformity, amidst the breakdown of constitutional authority in the early 1640s, succeeded in prohibiting the Prayer Book. In the words of the Preface of 1662:

By what undue means, and for what mischievous purposes the use of the Liturgy (though enjoined by the Laws of the Land, and those Laws never yet repealed) came, during the late unhappy confusions, to be discontinued, is too well known to the world, and we are not willing here to remember.

Ussher and Taylor stood against those unhappy confusions, defending the rites and ceremonies of the Prayer Book, a sign of the shared commitment of Laudians and Reformed Conformists to this "holy liturgy".