'As a National Church, limited by law': the Hookerian case for episcopacy and Restoration Episcopalian discourse

In a recent post addressing Jeremy Taylor's understanding of episcopacy at the Restoration, I sought to demonstrate that the maximalist Laudianism (to use Peter Lake's terminology) of his 27th January 1661 consecration sermon was not reflected in his attempts to reconcile both the political nation and his dioceses to episcopacy. Instead, I characterised these attempts as defined by the Hookerian Conformist case for episcopacy: an emphasis on the antiquity of episcopacy, but not making jure divino claims; the relationship between episcopacy and ecclesiastical and political stability, after "the late unhappy confusions"; and how the exalted claims of jure divino presbytery contrasted with the fidelity of the bishops to the Royal Supremacy. 

Taylor's deployment of the discourse of Hookerian Conformity placed him firmly within the Restoration Episcopalian mainstream. Laudian jure divino claims for episcopacy were not characteristic of how the restored Church and Monarchy sought to bind up the wounds of the previous decades and reconcile opinion to episcopal order. Mindful of the controversy provoked by such jure divino claims in the 1640s, and the dislike then demonstrated by Episcopalian lay opinion for those claims, a Restoration reliance on the more modest Hookerian Conformist case for episcopacy was wise and prudent.

In terms of the Church of Ireland, this was perhaps most famously seen in the Letters of Ordination provided by Bramhall, Archbishop of Armagh 1661-63 and ally of Taylor, to those who had received presbyteral ordination under - as Boulton puts it - "the late powers". The Letters of Orders included the following statement:

Non annihilantes priores ordinis (si quos habult) nec validitatem nec invaliditatem eorundem determinantes, multo minus omnes ordines sacros Ecclesiarum Forinsecarum condemnantes, quos proprio Judici relinquimus; sed salummodo supplentes quicquid prius defuit per canones Ecclesiae Anglicanae requisitum, et providentes paci Ecclesiae ut Schismatis tollatur occasio, et conscientiis Fidelium satisfiat, nec ullo modo dubitent de ejus Ordinatione, sut actus suos presbyteriales tanquam invalidos aversentur: In cujus rei Testimonium.

In his History of the Church of Ireland from the Reformation to the Revolution (1839), Mant translates this addition to the Letters of Orders:

that he did not annul the minister's former orders, if he had any, nor determine their validity or invalidity; much less did he condemn all the sacred orders of the foreign Churches, whom he left to their own Judge: but that he only supplied whatever was before wanting, as required by the canons of the Anglican Church; and that he provided for the peace of the Church, that occasion of schism might be removed, and the consciences of the faithful satisfied, and that they might have no manner of doubt of his ordination, nor decline his presbyterial acts as being invalid.

This statement does not necessarily contradict a Laudian jure divino understanding of episcopacy, but it was far from being an explicit statement of such a view. No judgement was made of the validity of presbyteral orders. As for the orders of the non-episcopal Reformed churches, Bramhall - as he had also indicated elsewhere - was not condemning them. Instead, his concern was canonical order and the peace of the ecclesia Anglicana. (It is worth noting that this formulation was proposed in the 1689 Liturgy of Comprehension as a means of reconciling Non-Conformists to the Established Church.)

The extent to which Bramhall did not invoke a jure divino concept of episcopacy in order to reconcile this with presbyterian orders to episcopacy is seen in the account given by John Vesey, who became Archbishop of Tuam in 1678, of Bramhall's meeting with such ministers. Mant quotes this account:

Whereupon the question immediately arose, 'Are we not ministers of the Gospel?' To which his grace answered, that that was not the question: at least he desired for peace sake, of  which he hoped they were ministers too, that that might  not be the question for that time. 'I dispute not,' said he, 'the value of your ordination, nor those acts you have exercised by virtue of it: what you are, or might do, here when there was no law, or in other churches abroad. But we are now to consider ourselves as a National Church, limited by law, which among other things takes chief care to prescribe about ordination: and I do not know, how you could recover the means of the Church, if any should refuse to pay you your tithes, if you are not ordained, as the law of this Church requireth. And I am desirous, that she may have your labours, and you such portions of her revenue, as shall be allotted you iu a legal and assured way.'

As with Taylor's conference with the Presbyterians of Down and Connor, it is very clear that Bramhall did not invoke jure divino episcopacy but, rather, set forth a modest claim for episcopacy as the legal order of the National Church, with the aim of reconciling those with presbyterian orders. 

This was also reflected in the thinking of one of the key architects of the Restoration settlement, the Earl of Clarendon, Charles II's chief minister. Regarding the provision in the 1662 Act of Uniformity requiring episcopal ordination to serve in the Church of England, Presbyterian opponents in the House of Lords claimed "that it would lay a great reproach upon all other Protestant Churches, who had no Bishops; as if they had no ministers, and, consequently, were no Churches". Clarendon summarised the case against this:

That the Church of England judged none but her own children, nor did not determine that other Protestant Churches were without ordination. It is a thing without their cognizance; and most of the learned men of those Churches had made necessity the chief pillar to support that ordination of theirs. That necessity cannot be pleaded here, where ordination is given according to the unquestionable practice of the Church of Christ; if they who pretend foreign ordination are His Majesty's subjects, they have no excuse of necessity, for they might in all times have received Episcopal ordination; and so they did upon the matter renounce their own Church; if they are strangers, and pretend to preferment in this Church, they ought to conform, and to be subject to the laws of the kingdom, which concern only those who desire to live under the protection [thereof.] 

Again we see what is missing: there is no invocation of jure divino claims for episcopacy. Instead, Clarendon's summary points to the twin pillars of the Hookerian Conformist case: that episcopacy was, since the Primitive Church, the means of ordering the Church catholic; and that episcopal ordination was required by the legal order of the National Church. As with the Hookerian Conformist case, this was not passing judgement on the non-episcopal Reformed churches of the Continent and the necessity argument: it was, instead, maintaining the "the laws of the kingdom". 

What Clarendon here sets forth was the discourse employed by Bramhall and Taylor as they sought to reconcile the political nation and those of moderate presbyterian opinions in their dioceses. That Bramhall and Taylor held to a Laudian view of episcopacy is, of course, well established - albeit that, as with Laud himself, this embraced nuanced views of both Continental superintendency and non-episcopal orders. This, however, only makes it more significant that Bramhall and Taylor employed distinctly non-Laudian discourse - set forth by Clarendon, that cautious and wise restorer of Church and Realm - as they promoted the cause of episcopal order in the restored Church and Kingdom of Ireland.

Indications of this had been provided early in the Interregnum when Edward Hyde, who would become Earl of Clarendon at the Restoration, requested in 1652 that John Cosin - then serving as chaplain to the exiled court of Charles II - write an account of the faith and practice of the Church of England. As Frederick Meyrick stated in his preface to the 1892 edition of this work:

It was intended for a manifesto in the face of Christendom as to the true character of the Church of England, which ... was misapprehended through ignorance, or misrepresented by unscrupulous controversialists. With this view it was composed in the Latin language, and addressed to all Christian kings, princes, and orders.

In his account of the order and discipline of the Church of England, Cosin - himself, of course, closely identified with the Laudian movement - avoided Laudian jure divino notions of episcopacy and wrote in the reconciling Hookerian tones which would be invoked at the Restoration:

Our Clergy consist of Deacons, Priests, and, above them, Bishops, duly ordained, and such as have been recognized from all Antiquity. We know nothing of Lay Presbyters, - persons unheard of by the Apostles and the ancient Church - nor have we deacons not in Holy Orders, officiating for a year or two, and then giving up their office. Nor have we a Clergy without Bishops, for our line of Bishops has never been interrupted, nor have we ever neglected the Apostolic or Nicene Canon in their consecration; for we accept and maintain Orders as they have been received by the Church from the time of the Apostles through the whole Christian world; and, indeed, nothing can be more agreeable to the regulations of Holy Scripture and to the precedents which we find in it, or more suitable to the constitution of Church and State.

Apostolic; agreeable to Scripture; appropriate for ordering of Church and State. This was the voice of the Hookerian Conformist defence of episcopacy, the consensual voice which had been heard in the petitions presented to Parliament in the early 1640s, gathering support for episcopacy a range of Episcopalian constituencies, from moderate Puritans to traditional Reformed Conformists to those who attracted to a Laudian sensibility. As Richard Cust has stated in his exploration of the Rutland Petition (in which Taylor had a significant role - a story for another day), these petitions were "exercises in coalition-building, seeking a lowest common denominator so as to present the broadest possible front against the destruction of the established church". Such was the value of the Hookerian Conformist case for episcopacy, in contrast to the divisive and partisan Laudian jure divino claims.

The Restoration was also an exercise in coalition-building, amidst the ecclesiastical and civic ruins, tensions, and uncertainties left by the Interregnum. In Clarendon and Bramhall, and as anticipated in Cosin's 1652 work, there was a recognition that building support for the restored episcopacy required a discourse with a significantly broader appeal and less likely to provoke controversy than was the case with Laudian jure divino claims. When Taylor, therefore, deployed Hookerian Conformist discourse before the Dublin Parliament and University, and in his dioceses, in order to attract support for episcopal order, he was giving expression to a wider, wiser Restoration Episcopalian strategy.