Jeremy Taylor Week: Taylor, Ussher, and defence of the Royal Supremacy

... whosoever shall hereafter maintain, that the Kings-Majesty hath not the same authority in causes Ecclesiastical, that the godly Kings had amongst the Jews, and Christian Emperors in the Primitive Church, or impeach in any part his Regal supremacy in the said causes restored to the Crown, and by the laws of this Realm therein established, let him be excommunicated, and not restored but only by the Archbishop of the Province, after his repentance, and publick revocation of his error.

So declared the Canons adopted by the Convocation of the Church of Ireland in 1634. It was Ussher, as Archbishop of Armagh, who had insisted that the Irish Church should have its own Canons, rather than - as the Laudian Bramhall had desired - merely adopt those of the Church of England. What was never in question, however, was that the Irish Canons would robustly affirm, like the English Canons of 1604, the Royal Supremacy. 

Ussher's commitment to the Royal Supremacy was already evident through his role in drafting the Irish Articles of 1615, with their explicit statement:

We do profess that the supreme government of all estates within the said Realms and Dominions in all causes, as well Ecclesiastical as Temporal, doth of right appertain to the King’s highness.

He continued to faithfully affirm the Royal Supremacy even as Crown's civil and ecclesiastical authority was challenged and then collapsed in the face of the agitation of the early 1640s. I.W.S. Campbell's excellent paper 'Calvinist Absolutism: Archbishop James Ussher and Royal Power' points to the Archbishop of Armagh defending the Crown's authority amidst the crisis:

Later that year or early in 1640 when Ussher came to Dublin, he was asked by Wentworth (created earl of Strafford in January 1640) to preach in Christchurch cathedral on the same subject. Ussher again complied, and gave his two sermons at the opening of the Irish parliament on 16 March 1640. Pleased by their content, Strafford told Ussher that it was his desire and the king’s that the sermons be published in some form. It was then that Ussher wrote his most substantial political work, 'The Power Communicated by God to the Prince'.

In that work, Ussher invoked numerous examples from churches of the first millennium recognising monarchs governing the temporal and ecclesiastical estates:

the bishop and clergy of Nicomedia begin their letters unto [the emperors Marcian] and Valentinian in a like style; "God hath justly granted unto you to reign and rule over all, for the welfare of the world, and the peace of the holy churches": the six Armenian bishops theirs unto the emperor Leo, thus: "God, who glorifieth them that glorify him, hath graciously given unto you, Christian prince, power over all men without any prohibition": and Ahalaric king of the Goths his unto the clergy of the church of Rome in this manner: "We owe so much the more to the Deity, by how much we have received greater things than other men: for what correspondent thing can he repay to God, who by his gift enjoyeth an empire?"

More pointedly, referring to the contemporary crisis, Ussher, in the preface to The Power Communicated by God to the Prince, took direct aim at those clergy denying the Royal Supremacy:

That the ministers of that party, who, in their prayers before and after sermon, do not usually shew themselves over studious of brevity, are generally observed when they pray for the king, (whether for fear of offending their grandees, or as a discriminating character or shibboleth, whereby to distinguish themselves from men of different principles from them, or for whatever other reason it is) to omit in reciting his Majesty's royal titles that clause which in former and peaceable times was generally used, "in all causes and over all persons, as well ecclesiastical as temporal in his dominions Supreme Governor.'

With what boldness some of the said ministers do, in their ordinary prayers and sermons, openly asperse the king and his government?

This was also robustly declared in his 1644 sermon 'The Sovereign's Power and the Subject's Duty', on the text Romans 13:1, 'Let every soul be subject to the higher powers'. Ussher challenged those who reinterpreted the text in such a manner as to deny the King's supremacy in governing the ecclesiastical state:

For some are ready to thrust in, and shroud under this Title, Bishops and all Spiritual Governors: others, who mainly oppose that, labour to make all temporal Governors equal sharers; both which are repugnant to the Apostle's meaning, and both equally dangerous. Let spiritual power be here supposed, and (if they be not subject) yet shall temporal Princes have no command over the Clergy.

The fact that the sermon identified such a rejection of the Royal Supremacy with Anabaptist and Papal claims provides some idea of Ussher's hostility to such a stance:

But the Clergy of Rome, aiming at the same privilege, & managing their purposes more craftily; have wrested it from some Princes, which they have now so successfully improved, that against Kings, by violent practise of it, and against all disputers, by argument they challenge it as their proper inheritance; & maintain that the Pope cannot, if he would, submit himself to any civil Power.

This, Ussher declared in the sermon, was entirely contrary to patristic readings of the text:

That our Apostle intended this Precept to the Clergy as well as to the Laity, if the words themselves cannot persuade, hear the Ancients' exposition of them. S. Chrysostom saith, Let every soul be subject, yea, though he be an Apostle, yea, though he be an Evangelist, or a Prophet, or whosoever. 

The same themes can be detected in Taylor's exposition of and commitment to the Royal Supremacy. In Ductor dubitantium (1660), he critiqued the destructive claims of Papacy and Presbytery over the civil magistrate:

From the Church of Rome we have many learned men, servants of the Pope, who affirm that all Government Ecclesiastical belongs to him; that he only can make laws of Religion, that in that he hath a compulsory over Kings, who are his subjects, dependent upon him, by him to be commanded in matters of religion; to which all temporalties are so subordinate, that if not directly, (as some of them say) yet indirectly, as most of them say, in ordine ad Spirituale bonum, for the good of the Church and of religion he can dispose of them ...

But as for the other pretenders (viz. those of the Presbytery,) to a power superior to Kings in Ecclesiastical Government; they have not yet proved themselves to have received from Christ any power at all, to govern in his Church; and therefore much less by virtue of any such power to rule over Kings. I do therefore suppose these Gentlemen not much concerned in this question, because they are uncapable of making claim ... because Religion is no pretence to Regalities, and that Spiritual power is of a nature wholly different from the power of Kings.

As with Ussher, Taylor also saw the authority of monarchs over the ecclesiastical state demonstrated in the churches of the first millennium:

besides those things in which God hath declar'd his will, the things of the Church, which are directly under no Commandment of God, are under the supreme power of Christian Princes. I need no other testimony for this but the laws themselves which they made, and to which Bishops and Priests were obedient and profess'd that they ought to be so. And this we find in the instance of divers Popes who in their epistles gave command to their Clergy to observe such laws which themselves had received from Imperial edicts ...

And therefore the great Prelates of the Church, when they desir'd a good law for the Churches advantage should be made, they presently address'd themselves to the Emperor, as to him who alone had the legislative power. 

When, at the Restoration, Taylor preached to the newly assembled Parliament of Ireland - both preacher and parliamentarians all too mindful of the chaos and bloodshed of the 'late unhappy confusions', when the King's government of both the temporal and ecclesiastical states had been denied - he drew (in Hookerian fashion) the lesson from those troubled years:

If you suffer the Authority of the King to be lessened, to be scrupled, to be denied in Ecclesiastical affairs, you have no way left to silence the tongues and hands of gainsaying people.

The peace of the Church and the Realm required the Royal Supremacy, the Crown's authority in matters ecclesiastical. Ussher had likewise emphasised this in The Power Communicated by God to the Prince, noting - amidst the civil and ecclesial uncertainties of the early 1640s - that the "former and peaceable times" had been secured by the Crown's authority over the temporal and ecclesiastical estates.

Ussher, of course, unlike Taylor, would not live to see the Restoration. Both, however, knew the bitter experience of the rebellion against the Crown and the terrible chaos which ensued. It is not without significance, that their experience was similarly described. In a letter to Bramhall of Derry in 1641, Ussher referred to "the present storm". Bernard, Ussher's chaplain and biographer, described his tentative plan for reform of episcopacy as "proposed in the tempestuous violence of the times as an accommodation by way of a prevention of a total shipwreck". When Taylor preached at Bramhall's funeral in 1663, he described those years as a time when "The storm quickly grew high". In the sermon at Taylor's funeral, his friend George Rust referred to Taylor's experience of the time: "a fearful Tempest arose ... he and his little fortune were shipwrackt in that great Hurricane, that overturn'd both Church and State".

Through tempestuous times, years when the Three Kingdoms were torn asunder by sectarian conflict, rebellion, and religious war, Taylor the Laudian and Ussher the Reformed Conformist were both loyal servants of the Crown and wise, devoted advocates for the Royal Supremacy in the Church, the means of securing the peace of Church and State.