Chaplains in early modern England: Patronage, literature and religion

By Manchester University Press

Who were early modern chaplains and what did they do? Chaplains are well known to have been pivotal figures within early modern England, their activities ranging from more conventionally religious roles (conducting church services, offering spiritual advice and instruction) to a surprisingly wide array of literary functions (writing poetry, or acting as scribes and editors). Chaplains in early modern England: Patronage, literature and religion explores the important, but often neglected, contributions made by chaplains of different kinds – royal, episcopal, noble, gentry, diplomatic – to early modern English culture. Addressing a period from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, it focuses on chaplains from the Church of England, examining their roles in church and politics, and within both domestic and cultural life. It also shows how understanding the significance of chaplains can illuminate wider cultural practices – patronage, religious life and institutions, and literary production – in the early modern period.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: May 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781526110688

Book preview

Chapter 1

Introduction

Hugh Adlington, Tom Lockwood and Gillian Wright

In the years after he became domestic chaplain and private secretary to Charles Berkeley, the 2nd Earl of Berkeley, Jonathan Swift thought hard about a chaplain’s responsibilities and opportunities, making him a particularly good example of the wider situations that this collection of essays explores. Before returning to England early in April 1701, Swift spent nearly two years in Berkeley’s Dublin household, engaged in a number of activities, most of which seem to have displeased him at one time or another, as his later writings in various ways recall. Not the least of the immediate causes of Swift’s dissatisfaction was having been so swiftly displaced from his position as secretary to Berkeley by Arthur Bushe, whom even many years afterwards he would not name.¹ Swift wrote over thirty years later in his manuscript ‘Family of Swift’ that he had ‘acted as Secretary the whole Journy to Dublin. But’, as he later recalled, ‘another Person had so far insinuated himself into the Earls favour, by telling him, that the Post of a Secretary was not proper for a Clergyman, nor would be of any advantage to one who aimed onely at Church-preferments, that his Lordship after a poor Apology gave that Office to the other’. Bushe’s secretarial appointment relegated Swift to the duties in and of the household; Berkeley’s official chaplains, among them Dr John Bolton, took responsibility for the public and state functions associated with his position as lord chief justice. And even ‘Church-preferments’ were not forthcoming. As if, Swift grumbled, to emphasise the power and financial opportunity that his new position gave him, Bushe, having taken (Swift alleged) a bribe from Bolton, appointed him rather than Swift to the deanship of Derry when it fell vacant under Berkeley’s disposition, leaving the disappointed Swift with a depreciated and lasting historical grudge, ‘put off’, as he put it, ‘with some other Church-livings not worth above a third part of that rich Deanry, and at this present time, not a sixth’.²

Though his expectations of patronage and preferment were disappointed, not all of Swift’s occupations as chaplain in Berkeley’s household can have frustrated him. Certainly, he had time to translate from their French and Latin originals much of Sir William Temple’s correspondence, and to carry forward the editorial work for his edition of Temple’s Letters, published late in November 1699.³ He found less congenial the domestic cares and duties that fell to him in Dublin. Attending on one or other of the Berkeley women – either Elizabeth, Countess of Berkeley, or her daughter, Lady Betty, later Germain – Swift is reported to have grown tired of reading to her from Boyle’s Meditations. To extricate himself from future obligations, Swift composed his own mock Meditation upon a Broom-Stick and planted it on his unwitting victim, who praised it, either in private (as one account suggests) or in public (as another has it), to her subsequent embarrassment.⁴ ‘This had the desired Effect’, George Faulkner later drily noted, ‘as Mr. Swift never was called upon again to read to her Ladyship’.

If, in different ways, Berkeley’s household offered his chaplain more or less welcome opportunities to participate in its textual culture, Swift seems later to have found his place in its social culture far harder to regulate, at least as far as the uneasy jokes of his Directions to Servants suggest. Some of the fierceness with which their parody operates may be in proportion to the distaste with which they look back on a young man’s social awkwardness and disappointment. The chaplains of Swift’s Directions are regularly the straight men to the larger comedy of the household. Be ‘pert and sawcy to all Mankind, especially to the Chaplain’, Swift advises the Footman; ‘if you happen to be young with Child by my Lord, you must take up with the Chaplain’, he counsels the Waiting Maid; and, reserving perhaps his bitterest directions for the Butler, thus:

If an humble Companion, a Chaplain, a Tutor, or a dependent Cousin happen to be at Table, whom you find to be little regarded by the Master, and the Company, which no Body is readier to discover and observe than we Servants, it must be the Business of you and the Footman, to follow the Example of your Betters, by treating him many Degrees worse than any of the rest, and you cannot please your Master better, or at least your Lady.⁵

If such was the experience of a domestic chaplain, even the royal chaplains, as Swift reported in his Journal to Stella, fared little better. ‘I never dined with the chaplains till to-day’, he wrote – before adding with deadpan timing: ‘it is the worst provided table at court’.⁶ Such experience can only have confirmed his reasons for declining the offer of a chaplaincy extended to him, by ‘a second hand’, from the Earl of Oxford in 1711: ‘I will be no man’s chaplain alive’.⁷

I

If Swift, as we have seen, thought hard about chaplaincy, so it is clear that he thought little of it. But, as his example shows, chaplaincy interacted with a fascinating range of institutions and activities in the early modern period, interactions in which patronage, literature and religion are all in different ways involved. Even in his short and generally discontented tenure, Swift demonstrates the ways in which a chaplain’s position could be deeply enmeshed in early modern networks of civil and ecclesiastical patronage and preferment. His experience with Temple’s Letters and Boyle’s Meditations shows some of the ways in which a chaplain might, as an editor and as an imaginative writer, participate in the overlapping textual economies of print and manuscript in the book trade and the household. At the same time, his awkwardness about placement in the household and its metonymic table reveal something of the lasting difficulties of properly locating the chaplain, his role and his many activities both in early modern culture and in more recent scholarly writing. If, in the early seventeenth century, John Rastell’s Les Termes de la Ley (1624) could state that a ‘Chapleine, is hee that performeth Divine service in a Chappell’, such a narrowly technical definition hardly begins to reflect the range and variety of the chaplain’s duties and occupations.⁸ This collection of essays, by contrast, aims to provide a fuller, more detailed account. As well as recording the numerous types and functions of early modern chaplains, it also explores the important, but often hidden, contributions made by chaplains of different kinds and in different locations – royal, episcopal, noble, gentry, diplomatic – to early modern English culture.

As the essays that follow make clear, such contributions encompass not only the spiritual guidance and companionship offered by chaplains to their patrons, but also their activities as political and literary agents. While in theory chaplains occupied a relatively subordinate status in early modern society, in practice many enjoyed a surprisingly extensive degree of influence and agency in households and institutions. Chaplains to leading figures in the Church, nobility and government might play a prominent role in offering spiritual or political counsel to their patrons, or acting as representatives for the latter in fields as diverse as ecclesiastical politics, licensing and censorship of books in print, construction and maintenance of epistolary networks, and cultural patronage. Chaplains within noble or gentry families might act as power brokers within the local community, and as spiritual guides to male or female patrons, encouraging certain forms of personal devotion and discouraging others, or advising on regimes of prayer and religious reading or the spiritual care of a large household. The office of chaplain could give a young man access to networks of power at an early stage of his career, and offer him the opportunity to advance his own interests as he advanced his patron’s. It could also provide him with the means to develop his own literary and intellectual interests, whether independently or in conjunction with his patron; many chaplains during this period wrote poetry or acted as literary amanuenses for their employers, producing texts that are now key documents of the instrumental uses to which verse could be adapted, and, in their manuscript and printed forms, vital evidence for the textual and social milieux within which these men moved. Yet alongside the many opportunities afforded by the position, the role of the chaplain was also profoundly ambiguous and potentially problematic. Chaplains who stood to gain from the success of their patrons might also share in the downfall of patrons who suffered disgrace or scandal. The role also gave rise to potentially delicate power relationships, given that chaplains were often younger – and in some cases, of a lower social background – than the patrons over whom they, in theory, exercised spiritual authority.⁹

The early modern English chaplain, however, for all his cultural significance, remains a little studied figure, and may have been so even at the time. ‘Bishops or Presbyters we know & Deacons we know, but what are Chaplains?’, asked Milton.¹⁰ To date, just one single-volume study of the early modern chaplain has attempted an answer. William Gibson’s A Social History of the Domestic Chaplain, 1530-1840 (1997) charts the rise and fall in the status of domestic chaplains in England over three centuries, the period in which such chaplains were regulated by law. The present volume seeks to complement Gibson’s pioneering work, addressing a more restricted historical period, from the late sixteenth century to the first years of the eighteenth, and laying greater emphasis on literary and cultural matters and such topical issues as the role of chaplains as spiritual advisers to elite women. With its focus on fresh research and new contexts for understanding, Chaplains in Early Modern England: Patronage, Literature and Religion stands alongside recent interdisciplinary collections that examine early modern educational and professional institutions such as the Inns of Court.¹¹ It also complements existing studies of the clerical profession,¹² as well as two sustained studies of particular kinds of chaplain, in particular historical circumstances – parliamentary army chaplains, in Anne Laurence’s study of the years 1642–51, and royal chaplains, in Peter McCullough’s study of Elizabethan and Jacobean preaching.¹³ Discussion of the literary and cultural activities of chaplains also draws on recent scholarship on the role of secretaries – similarly pivotal figures within early modern cultures, with whom chaplains had much in common.¹⁴ Chaplains and their patrons, like secretaries and theirs, operated within ‘the complex ethics of obligation and reward’, and were active participants in the kinds of household knowledge economies familiar to scholars of textual transmission, patronage and the early modern household.¹⁵

The bibliographical sources available for reconstructing the lives and activities of chaplains are abundant, yet scattered and often incomplete. There is no single, major collection of manuscripts, for instance, which helps us to understand the duties and cultural influence of chaplains, nor are there printed manuals or popular guides comparable to those written about and for early modern secretaries, such as Angel Day’s The English Secretorie (1586). The dispensation rolls of the court of chancery and the lord chamberlain’s warrant books constitute the primary manuscript sources for the identification of chaplains, as Kenneth Fincham and David Crankshaw’s chapters make clear, while the documentary evidence of the activities of chaplains, in manuscript and print, is as extensive as the range of activities themselves, explored by our other contributors. Sermons, devotions and disputations, ecclesiastical and diplomatic papers and correspondence, commendatory and commemorative poems, plays and prose fiction, biographies, and even love letters – the entire spectrum of kinds of writing in the period, in fact – are all testament, as the following pages show, to the distinctive contribution of the chaplain to early modern life and culture. Lastly, two modern digital resources are indispensable aids for the study of early modern chaplains: the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which provides a departure point for more detailed biographical enquiries, and the Clergy of the Church of England Database 1540–1835 (CCEd), which offers a searchable consolidated archive of the principal records of clerical careers in England and Wales from the Reformation to the nineteenth century.

II

The ten chapters in this volume are arranged in broadly chronological order, and each treats in a different way the central question of how interactions in literature, patronage and religion made forms of cultural agency available to early modern chaplains, primarily in England. In each contribution, the question of how and why chaplains act as agents – on whom, for whom, and with whom – is framed in such a way as to make clear the extent to which they were also acted upon, by others, by circumstances and by events. Together, the contributions to our book open out the detail of the case studies of different, overlapping early modern cultures around and within which individual chapters are organised. While the volume is primarily concerned with chaplains within the Church of England, chapters by Kenneth Fincham, Hugh Adlington, Tom Lockwood and Grant Tapsell also provide glimpses of what such chaplains might do outside England, and Fincham’s chapter glances additionally at the role of Presbyterian and Independent chaplains to the Cromwellian court during the interregnum.

Chaplains in Early Modern England aims both to shed light on the complex legal and procedural basis for early modern chaplaincy and to expand our understanding of what chaplains, in practice, actually did. Early chapters by Kenneth Fincham and David Crankshaw draw on statutory and case-study evidence to survey again the different types of chaplaincy current during the early modern period, the processes through which chaplains were appointed, and the rules and expectations which governed a chaplain’s activities. As they show, chaplaincy was subject to strict regulations on such matters as the numbers of chaplains that could be retained by patrons of different roles and ranks, the licensing of private chapels, and the right of chaplains to hold multiple appointments. Equally important to the life of a chaplain, as these chapters make clear, were the cultural assumptions which helped determine his place within ecclesiastical and social networks, shape his relationship with his patron, or establish the range and remit of his intellectual or literary interests. At the same time, the fact that chaplaincies, to some extent, fell outside the main structures of church authority – chaplains were not, for instance, directly licensed by a bishop¹⁶ – offered scope for individual clerics and their patrons to redefine the position according to their own circumstances and priorities, both spiritual and secular. Such factors, formal and informal, combined to produce a complex role with the potential not only to exercise a chaplain’s theological and pastoral skills but also to develop his intellectual abilities or draw him into local, national and even international politics.

The numerous case studies discussed in Chaplains in Early Modern England include instances of both the public and the more private aspects of chaplaincy. Attending to the more public domain, Mary Morrissey’s chapter, ‘Episcopal chaplains and control of the media’, focuses on the responsibility of the bishop of London’s chaplains for pre-publication censorship of the press, while Hugh Adlington’s ‘Chaplains to embassies’ examines the part played by ambassadorial chaplains such as Daniel Featley within wider networks of international diplomacy, interconfessional rivalry and print polemic. At the more domestic end of the spectrum, Erica Longfellow’s study of the Isham family and their clergy uncovers a diverse range of roles and relationships. As Longfellow shows, John Dod’s success in advising the Ishams on both spiritual and more worldly matters contrasts not only with Samuel Rogers’s less happy experience as chaplain to Lady Margaret Denny but also with Daniel Baxter’s unexpected and counter-productive emotional dependence on his patron, Judith Isham. Other chapters illustrate how appointment to a chaplaincy could enable a clergyman to contribute to contemporary political, theological or intellectual debates, promote the interests of his friends and family, or indeed further his own advancement.¹⁷ Tom Lockwood tells, for instance, how an early appointment as chaplain to Francis Bacon contributed, albeit problematically, to the launching of William Lewis’s long and intermittently prosperous ecclesiastical career, while Grant Tapsell’s discussion of the ‘reluctant’ William Sancroft highlights the importance of Sancroft’s appointment as chaplain to John Cosin, Bishop of Durham, in re-establishing a career unsettled not only by the interregnum but also by his own personal qualms and reservations. Like Jonathan Swift, Sancroft was keenly aware of the lowly status often suffered by chaplains to the laity, and, as Tapsell shows, touchily alert to the many small humiliations to which they might be vulnerable. Chaplaincy to a bishop, by contrast, afforded Sancroft a position of unquestionable dignity from which he could publicly promote his own strongly held views on Anglican episcopacy. It would subsequently prove a crucial step in his rise to the very top of the Restoration Church of England.

Patronage – the first issue emphasised in our subtitle – was evidently key to determining the roles, activities and significance of early modern chaplains. Unsurprisingly, patrons often chose chaplains whose interests and priorities, whether theological or secular, were similar or complementary to their own. Cosin’s patronage of Sancroft, whose elevated conception of Church and priesthood closely resembled his episcopal master’s, is an obvious case in point, as Tapsell’s chapter shows. This question and exploration of affinity is continued in the chapters by Angus Vine and Christopher Burlinson, which explore in related ways how Francis Bacon’s choice of William Rawley and Richard Corbett’s of William Strode as chaplains issued in, and may have resulted from, shared philosophical and poetical interests. Yet the benefits – or, indeed, disbenefits – produced within these patronage relationships did not merely flow in one direction. As Vine makes clear, the young William Rawley obviously had much to gain from his appointment as chaplain to the wealthy, influential and erudite Francis Bacon. Yet Bacon himself evidently benefited even within his own lifetime from Rawley’s ability to share and support his philosophical, scientific and literary activities, and would benefit still further, posthumously, from his erstwhile protégé’s steadfast dedication to editing, publishing and promoting his late patron’s work. In Christopher Burlinson’s account of the relationships between Corbett and Strode we see how the relationship of patron with client might rest as much on texts and information withheld as on the kind of exchanges that Rawley shared with Bacon. Equally, notwithstanding the social subordination so much deplored by Swift and Sancroft, an adept, persistent or strategically positioned chaplain might also stand to influence his patron’s theological or political views and practice. As Longfellow shows, the advice and example of the venerable John Dod undoubtedly helped to consolidate the more puritan aspects of the Isham family’s devotions; comparably, as William Gibson speculates, Samuel Willes’s views on politics and theology may have contributed to shaping the beliefs and public behaviour of his patron, the earl of Huntingdon. Episcopal chaplains, as Kenneth Fincham reveals in his wide-ranging chapter, also had a politically significant role in keeping lay patrons loyal to the Church of England during the interregnum.

Complicating the picture still further are those other chaplains who failed to live up to their patrons’ expectations, or vice versa. William Sancroft, as Tapsell’s chapter invites us to conclude, was no doubt disappointed when his chaplain Henry Wharton, formerly a close theological ally, proved willing to take the oath of allegiance to William and Mary so publicly refused by Sancroft himself. At a more local level, as Gibson demonstrates, the Earl of Huntingdon seems also to have been disappointed when Samuel Willes’s performance at an important service did not reach a sufficiently high standard. Conversely, as Longfellow shows, Samuel Rogers’s years as chaplain to Lady Margaret Denny were rendered difficult and unproductive by what the high-minded Rogers saw as poor devotional standards among his patron’s family. These chapters separately and together make clear that how such differences were, or were not, resolved also tells us much about the balance of power within chaplainpatron relationships. The elderly and disempowered Sancroft remained on good terms with Henry Wharton, who helped him stay in touch with public life after his deprivation. Samuel Willes, relatively secure in his chaplaincy, urged Huntingdon to give him more notice of such important duties in future. The young Samuel Rogers, despairing of the recalcitrant Dennys, moved on to the much more congenial household of Lady Mary Vere.

Finally, alongside patronage and religion, this volume also considers the diverse array of literary activities undertaken by early modern chaplains. In terms of print publications, these activities range from Daniel Featley’s polemical treatises The Grand Sacrilege of the Church of Rome (1630) and Transubstantiation Exploded (1638) – both produced for self-evidently theological reasons, as Hugh Adlington’s chapter argues – to the more secular, scientific and historical interests represented by Rawley’s editions of Bacon. Chaplains were also involved in, and took advantage of, the culture of manuscript transmission and exchange that flourished in the 1620s and 1630s, especially around such male-dominated cultural institutions as the universities and Inns of Court. As Christopher Burlinson’s rich account makes clear, Richard Corbett, chaplain to King James, and his own episcopal chaplain, William Strode, were both deeply involved in the prolific manuscript networks centred on Christ Church, Oxford, featuring variously as subjects, producers, transmitters and hoarders of occasional poetry. Meanwhile, as Lockwood argues, the case of William Lewis shows how a less well-known and comparatively untalented poet might nonetheless try to exploit the conventions of manuscript circulation to further his own ecclesiastical career. Chaplains’ relationships with literature, as with their patrons, were complex and creative, and did not always follow predictable patterns.

Chaplains, then, were everywhere and did everything: inside the household and out, at home and abroad – teaching, preaching, reading, writing, advising and animadverting. Rarely occupying a leading role, chaplains, like secretaries, were the versatile, ubiquitous and, until now, largely unsung, supporting actors of early modern cultural life. Though they may have been stock figures of avidity on stage – memorable examples include Tourneur’s Languebeau Snuffe, the hypocrite ‘Puritane’ in The Atheist’s Tragedy (1611), and the obliging Parson Will-doe, servile chaplain to Sir Giles Overreach in Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1633) – chaplains in life, in all the kinds and variety witnessed in the contributions to this volume, bore only fleeting resemblance to their traditional caricature. Even the present account, however, is by necessity selective. Clerical service to gentry and aristocratic Catholic families, for example, falls outside the scope of this book.¹⁸ Chaplains to the army and navy, to merchant and livery companies, to Oxford and Cambridge colleges, to the Inns of Court, to the Warden of the Cinque Ports, or to the lord chief justice of the court of King’s Bench all await detailed exposition. This volume, then, stands rather as an introduction than as a conclusion to this important area of study; begin to examine any aspect of early modern life and we find, to paraphrase the Latin-speaking, large-bellied chaplain in Richard Brome’s A Jovial Crew (1652), that the chaplain ‘est ad manum’ (is at hand).¹⁹

NOTES

1     I. Ehrenrpeis, Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age, 3 vols, corrected edn (London: Methuen, 1983), 2.5–15.

2     H. Davis and others (eds), The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, 16 vols (Oxford: Blackwell, 1939–74), 5.195, citing Trinity College, Dublin, MS 1050, fols 1–10 (IELM, SwJ 407).

3     C. Probyn, ‘Swift, Jonathan (1667–1745), ODNB; on Swift as an editor of his own works see A. Williams, ‘The difficulties of Swift’s Journal to Stella’, Review of English Studies, 62 (2011), 758–76; on Swift’s edition of Temple’s Letters see A. B. Irwin, ‘Swift as translator of the French of Sir William Temple and his correspondents’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 6 (1966), 483–98, and N. F. Lowe and W. J. McCormack, ‘Swift as publisher of Sir William Temple’s Letters and Miscellanea’, Swift Studies, 8 (1993), 46–57.

4     The Meditation was published in 1710: see J. Swift, Hoaxes, Parodies, Treatises and Mock-Treatises (The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift, vol. 2), ed. V. Rumbold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2013).

5     Swift, Hoaxes, Parodies, Treatises and Mock-Treatises.

6     J. Swift, Journal to Stella, ed. H. Williams, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948), [2].377–8.

7     Swift, Journal to Stella, [1].280.

8     J. Rastell, Les Termes de la Ley; or certaine difficult and obscure words and termes of the common lawes of this realme expounded (1624), fo. 60v. This is the earliest appearance of a definition for ‘chapleine’ in the many editions of Les Termes de la Ley.

9     For discussion of the respective ages of patrons and chaplains, see D. Crankshaw, ‘Chaplains to the Elizabethan nobility: activities, categories and patterns’, pp. 36–63, in this volume.

10     J. Milton, Eikonoklastes in answer to a book intitl’d Eikon basilike, the portrature of his Sacred Majesty in his solitudes and sufferings (1649), p. 192.

11     See J. E. Archer, E. Goldring and S. Knight (eds), The Intellectual and Cultural World of the Early Modern Inns of Court (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011).

12     T. Webster, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England: The Caroline Puritan Movements c.1620–1643 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); R. O’Day, The English Clergy: The Emergence and Consolidation of a Profession 1558–1642 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1979).

13     A. Laurence, Parliamentary Army Chaplains, 1642–1651 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press for the Royal Historical Society, 1990); P. McCullough, Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

14     See A. Stewart, ‘Instigating treason: the life and death of Henry Cuffe, Secretary’, in E. Sheen and L. Hutson (eds), Literature, Politics, and Law in Renaissance England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 50–70; A. G. R. Smith, ‘The secretariats of the Cecils, circa 1580–1612’, English Historical Review, 83 (1968), 481–504; P. E. J. Hammer, ‘The uses of scholarship: the secretariat of Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, c.1585–1601’, English Historical Review, 109 (1994), 16–51.

15     E. Spenser, Selected Letters and Other Papers, ed. C. Burlinson and A. Zurcher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. liv. For textual transmission, see H. Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), and J. Eckhardt, Manuscript Verse Collectors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). For household knowledge economies, see M. McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).

16     See K. Fincham, ‘The roles and influence of household chaplains, c.1600–c.1660’, p. 13, in this volume.

17     For discussions of the first two possibilities, see respectively A. Vine, ‘His Lordships First, and Last, CHAPLEINE: William Rawley and Francis Bacon’, C. Burlinson, ‘Richard Corbett and William Strode: chaplaincy and verse in early seventeenth-century Oxford’, and G. Tapsell, ‘The reluctant chaplain: William Sancroft and the later Stuart Church’, and also W. Gibson, ‘A chaplain and his patron: Samuel Willes and the 7th Earl of Huntingdon’, in this volume.

18     See M. Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, c.1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), esp. pp. 293–330.

19     R. Brome, A Joviall Crew; or, The Merry Beggars presented in a Comedie at Drury-Lane, in the yeer 1641 (1652), 4.1.

Chapter 2

The roles and influence of household chaplains, c.1600–c.1660

Kenneth Fincham

In her diary for 1617–19, Lady Anne Clifford recorded some revealing contacts with two household chaplains. With one, Richard Rands, she began reading through the Old Testament until her husband, the 3rd Earl of Dorset, ‘told me it would hinder his study’. Clifford was engrossed in a dispute with Dorset over her inheritance, and had ‘much talk’ with another chaplain, Geoffrey Amherst, about the gossip in London following her decision to reject James I’s offer of arbitration. Rands acted as peacemaker between her and a servant she suspected of taking her husband’s side; Clifford agreed that ‘as I was a Christian I would forgive him’ and as a result chaplain and patron had ‘some hours speech’.¹ Household chaplains evidently fulfilled a variety of roles, in this case as instructors, informants and mediators, and what these entries disclose about domestic religion and the politics of the household makes it surprising that chaplains have been so little studied.² The probable explanation for this neglect is their sheer ubiquity, relative invisibility in the formal record, and performance of very diverse roles. This essay suggests that chaplains deserve critical attention. It focuses on three sorts of household chaplain: to the crown, the episcopate and the laity. Although they had features in common, each moved in a rather different world in terms of status, duties and influence. As we assess influence, we need to distinguish between that conferred by the post and that brought to it by a new appointee. It will also be suggested that a chaplaincy was an important office in the clerical profession, both for the opportunities associated with the post and for its central place in patronage and advancement. Moreover, for all the scholarship devoted to diocesan government, we have not fully grasped the importance of episcopal chaplains to the workings of the established Church. Most significantly for the period 1600–60 is new evidence on Archbishop Laud’s attempt to regulate domestic chaplaincies to the gentry, which underscores the radical character of the Laudian reformation of the 1630s. Finally, chaplaincies in the 1640s and 1650s indicate how the office effectively adapted to those ‘broken times’ and, in particular, helped to sustain the episcopalian cause. The chapter falls into six sections. A discussion of the sources is followed by an analysis of our three types of household chaplain, and then the focus moves, from themes to chronology, to assess the reforms of the 1630s, and thereafter the challenges posed by the civil war and interregnum.

I

It is no easy task to identity all those who held household chaplaincies. There are two principal sources for studying chaplains in this period: the dispensation rolls of the court of chancery, which contain the names of household chaplains qualified to hold livings in plurality under three Acts of Parliament of 1529–45, and the lord chamberlain’s warrant books, which note the appointment of royal chaplains.³ This evidence, however, has three major limitations. First, it is incomplete. Dispensation rolls survive for 1595–1638 and warrant books for 1627–44, which means that we have both for only eleven years, 1627–38, and neither for 1645–60. Secondly, the dispensation rolls are not a complete list of chaplains, merely a record of those who chose to hold multiple livings and could be dispensed according to the Henrician legislation. The Pluralities Act of 1529, supplemented by statutes in 1534 and 1542, specified how many chaplains holding pluralities could be employed by the aristocracy and their widows, the episcopate and major office-holders: eight by archbishops, six by dukes and bishops, four by viscounts, three by barons, two by widowed duchesses, countesses and baronesses, two by the king’s principal secretary and the master of the rolls, and so on.⁴ The legislation, however, made no mention of non-pluralist chaplains, whose number remained unregulated and whose names do not appear in the dispensation rolls. There was clearly a considerable number of them: between 1614 and 1623 Archbishop Abbot of Canterbury had sixty-one domestic chaplains, certainly more than eight at any one time, but only six of these are entered in the dispensation rolls as qualified to possess livings in plurality.⁵ Thirdly, these sources never record the names of chaplains to the gentry. Some can be recovered by resorting to a miscellany of sources: printed literature, especially dedicatory epistles to patrons, letters of appointment, household accounts, correspondence and wills, which incidentally also disclose names of some non-pluralist chaplains to the aristocracy and bishops.

Diocesan archives, perhaps surprisingly, do not help much. Bishops’ registers occasionally record the appointment of episcopal chaplains, whose presence may also be noted at ordination or consecration ceremonies. A few surveys of the ministry in 1603, and exhibits books compiled for visitations, state that an incumbent was also a household chaplain, although this can repeat information available from the dispensation rolls.⁶ The explanation for this meagre yield is that household chaplains to the Crown and the laity were appointed by their patrons and not by the ecclesiastical authorities, and were effectively extra-diocesan, linked