Gunpowder treason and plot: raging against the mellow light

And why? their communing is not for peace : but they imagine deceitful words against them that are quiet in the land - Ps.35:20.  Psalm 35 is one of the proper Psalms appointed in 'A Form of Prayer with Thanksgiving to be used yearly on the Fifth day of November'.

"Mellow light". It is the phrase Eamon Duffy uses to describe "the church of George Herbert".  Herbert was ordained in 1629, early in the reign of Charles I.  He was, in other words, ordained into a Church profoundly shaped by James VI/I, in which the influence of Jacobean Anglicanism was pronounced.  The "mellow light", then, of Herbert's Church was Jacobean light.

It was in the Jacobean Church that, in the words of Diarmaid MacCulloch, "the obscure and slightly controversial figure of Hooker was being transformed into an iconic ... authority".  It was in the Jacobean Church that the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes were heard.  And so, as T.S. Eliot put it:

The intellectual achievement and the prose style of Hooker and Andrewes came to complete the structure of the English Church ... the achievement of Hooker and Andrewes was to make the English Church more worthy of intellectual assent.

The Jacobean Church was also the arena for the sermons of John Donne, demonstrating a native piety at once rational and deeply heart-felt, learned and popular, catholic and reformed, by which - as Donne stated in one of his sermons - "papistry was driven out, and puritanism kept out".

That native piety, contra both papal and puritan ambitions, was protected by James VI/I when at the Hampton Court conference he rejected what his subsequent proclamation (16th July 1604) would describe as those motivated by "pretended zeal of reformation":

no apparent or grounded reason was shown why either the Book of Common Prayer or the church discipline here by law established should be changed ... we have thought good once again to give notice thereof to all our subjects ... there appeareth no cause why the form of the Service of God wherein they have been nourished so many years should be changed.

The Canons of 1604 embodied this defence of the worship and good order of the reformed ecclesia Anglicana.  Royal Supremacy, Prayer Book, the wearing of "a decent and comely surplice", copes in cathedrals, sign of the Cross in Baptism, bowing at the Lord's Name, were all maintained, with the affirmation that the ecclesia Anglicana was "a true and apostolical church".

This mellow light of the Jacobean Church was to find at least part of its fulfilment in the place "Where prayer has been valid":

So, while the light fails
On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel ...

Nicholas Ferrar was ordained deacon (by Laud) and established the community at Little Gidding in 1626, the year after the death of James VI/I.  Here was the outworking of Jacobean piety: decent, comely, reverent, ordered, celebrated by Herbert in his 'The British Church'.

A fine aspect in fit array,  
Neither too mean nor yet too gay,  
Shows who is best.

It was this "mellow light" which the Gunpowder conspirators sought to extinguish.  Or, as one of the collects for 5th November puts it, "the ruin of thy Church among us".  Their failure should be a cause of thanksgiving.  The Church of Hooker, Andrewes, and Donne was delivered, its rich patrimony of wisdom secured for the generations; the decent rites and ceremonies of the Prayer Book continued to minister to souls, shaping them in a native piety; and parish churches on winter afternoons even now, centuries later, echo with "Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord".

To give thanks for the failure of Gunpowder treason and plot is to give thanks for the mellow light of the ecclesia Anglicana.

(The second picture is of a November sunset at Little Gidding.)