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Chapter Title: A British Patriarchy? Ecclesiastical Imperialism under the Later Stuarts
Chapter Author(s): Grant Tapsell

Book Title: The Nature of the English Revolution Revisited

Book Editor(s): Stephen Taylor, Grant Tapsell
Published by: Boydell & Brewer, Boydell Press. (2013)
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 11

A British Patriarchy? Ecclesiastical Imperialism

under the Later Stuarts*

Grant Tapsell

Twenty years ago John Morrill offered a searching and combative account
of the interactions between the state Churches of England, Scotland,
and Ireland under the early Stuarts in a festschrift for Patrick Collinson.1
Conrad Russell was wrong to delineate efforts to achieve English ecclesi-
astical hegemony across the British Isles: there was simply no court-based,
Laudian plan to entrench a ‘British patriarchy’ that would subordinate the
Churches of Scotland and Ireland to control from Canterbury. In keeping
with Morrill’s broader thinking on ‘the British problem’, this was certainly
not to deny significant and increasingly controversial interactions between
the three kingdoms.2 James VI & I may not have sought a clear union
of the three Churches, but he did become ‘sloppy’ about protecting the

* I am grateful to John Morrill for quietly striking out with his own pen the word
‘England’ in my draft doctoral proposal, circa November 1998, and inking in ‘British
monarchies’ instead. Some of the research for this chapter was undertaken during a
period of leave from the University of St Andrews, partly funded internally, and partly
with an Early Career Fellowship from the AHRC that I am happy to acknowledge here.
I am also indebted to George Southcombe and Stephen Taylor for their comments on a
draft version of this chapter.
1 John Morrill, ‘A British Patriarchy? Ecclesiastical Imperialism under the Early Stuarts’,

in Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain. Essays in Honour of Patrick
Collinson, ed. Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 209–37. On
this theme, see also Joong Lak Kim, ‘Firing in Unison? The Scottish Canons of 1636 and
the English Canons of 1640’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society, 28 (1998),
55–76.
2 Amongst many other works, see esp. his introductory chapters to The Scottish National

Covenant in its British Context, ed. John Morrill (Edinburgh, 1990), pp. 1–30, and The
British Problem, c.1534–1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago, ed. Brendan
Bradshaw and John Morrill (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 1–38. For developments in his
thinking, see more recently “Uneasy Lies the Head that Wears a Crown”: Dynastic Crises
in Tudor and Stewart Britain, 1504–1746 (The Stenton Lecture: Reading, 2005 for 2003)
and the forthcoming version of his 2006 Ford Lectures, ‘Living with Revolution’.

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 GRANT TAPSELL

autonomy and equality of the state Churches beyond England as he strove

for ‘congruity’.3 Charles I did not aim to impose complete uniformity of
religious practice throughout the islands of Britain and Ireland, but he did
have a ‘British policy’, one that placed a common stress on the discretionary
powers of the crown.4 In this account, Laud aided and instructed Charles
in how best to achieve his goals within each kingdom, but did not covet
immediate personal powers over Scottish and Irish clergy. Furthermore,
Laud’s influence beyond England varied considerably. In Ireland he enjoyed
a close personal relationship with Wentworth, and could rely on active
support from John Bramhall, bishop of Derry. But in Scotland he had to be
‘far more circumspect’ in his activity.5
This chapter will extend coverage of Morrill’s theme into the later Stuart
period. In order to do so, two important questions will be addressed in turn.
First, how much contact was there between the episcopates of England,
Scotland, and Ireland in the Restoration period? And, secondly, how signifi-
cant was that contact, both in terms of the wider course of public affairs and
what it reveals about the thinking of those at the apex of the Restoration
regime? Relatively little attention has been paid to such issues under the
later Stuarts, despite the resurgence of interest in the era over the last two
decades.6 This partly reflects an increasing general concern amongst early
modern historians with ‘popular politics’, ‘political cultures’, and image-
making, at the expense of high politics and ecclesiastical history.7 More
specifically, it also reflects the tangled religious histories of Scotland and
Ireland. As a result of the abrupt political resurrection of a presbyterian
structure for the established Church after the Williamite revolution, the
episcopal Restoration years could look like a violent and doomed depar-
ture from the longer-term character of post-Reformation Scottish religious
affairs.8 The ‘debilitated and introverted’ Restoration Church of Ireland has
also seemed pallid by comparison to vibrant new Irish protestant dissenting
communities, and to the enduring numerical dominance of roman catholics,
whose leaders formed ‘the Internal and Mystical Government of Ireland’,
whatever the outward appearance of state-sponsored protestantism might
suggest to incoming English administrators.9 Finally, from an English histo-

3 Morrill, ‘A British Patriarchy?’, pp. 218, 216.

4 Ibid., pp. 225–6.
5 Ibid., p. 231.
6 Capped by Tim Harris’s two magisterial volumes Restoration: Charles II and His

Kingdoms, 1660–1685 (2005) and Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy,
1685–1720 (2006).
7 For astringent commentary on parts of this trend, see C. S. L. Davies, ‘Representation,

Repute, Reality’ [review article], E.H.R., 124 (2009), 1432–47.

8 For correctives, see Clare Jackson, Restoration Scotland 1660–1690: Royalist Politics,

Religion and Ideas (Woodbridge, 2003); Alasdair Raffe, The Culture of Controversy:
Religious Arguments in Scotland, 1660–1714 (Woodbridge, 2012).
9 T. C. Barnard, ‘Protestants and the Irish Language, c. 1675–1725’, Journal of

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 A BRITISH PATRIARCHY

riographical perspective more attention has probably been paid to the post-
1660 relations of the Church of England with other protestant Churches in
continental Europe than with her sister Churches in Scotland and Ireland,
though there are signs that this is beginning to change.10
Despite these problems, we are fortunate to have substantial extant
collections of relevant documents to illustrate the interactions of the three
established Churches. The key Stuart satraps of Scotland and Ireland – the
dukes of Lauderdale and Ormond – have left vast runs of richly revealing
correspondence. So too have leading members of the episcopates of the
three kingdoms, many surviving within the papers of archbishops Sheldon
and Sancroft.11 Making heavy use of these papers, it will be argued in what
follows that a paradox may be observed: far less concerted effort was made
explicitly to render the three Stuart Churches ‘congruent’ in the Restora-
tion period compared to the pre-civil war Caroline era; but in practice the
power and influence of successive archbishops of Canterbury was actually
even greater than Laud had enjoyed thanks to the relative decline in confi-
dence and resources of the episcopal hierarchies of Scotland and Ireland.

His Majesty when he was restored to his Crown, God did assist him to restore
the Bishops to their Sees, and the Churchmen to their Cures in England, Scotland
and Ireland … (Edward Wolley, bishop of Clonfert, 1673)12

Ecclesiastical History, 44 (1993), 266; Sir William Petty, The Political Anatomy of
Ireland... (1691; repr. Shannon, 1970), pp. 38–9. Key modern accounts of the Church
of Ireland in our period include As By Law Established. The Church of Ireland Since the
Reformation, ed. Alan Ford, James McGuire, and Kenneth Milne (Dublin, 1995); Toby
Barnard, ‘“Almoners of Providence”: The Clergy, 1647 to c. 1780’, in The Clergy of the
Church of Ireland, 1000–2000, ed. T. C. Barnard and W. G. Neely (Dublin, 2006), pp.
78–105; Kenneth Milne, ‘Restoration and Reorganisation, 1660–1830’, in Christ Church
Cathedral, Dublin. A History, ed. Kenneth Milne (Dublin, 2000), pp. 255–97.
10 For the best recent account, see Clare Jackson ‘The Later Stuart Church as “National

Church” in Scotland and Ireland’, in The Later Stuart Church, 1660–1714, ed. Grant
Tapsell (Manchester, 2012), pp. 127–49; and, much more briefly, Grant Tapsell, The
Personal Rule of Charles II, 1681–85 (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 177–9.
11 Although I use the original letters from Bodl., MSS Tanner throughout this chapter,

useful printed collections include: The Lauderdale Papers, ed. Osmund Airy (3 vols,
Camden Soc., new ser., XXXIV, XXXVI, XXXVIII, 1884–5), II, app. A (‘Letters from
Archbishops Sharp and Burnet to Archbishop Sheldon’); A Collection of Letters Addressed
by Prelates and Individuals of High Rank in Scotland... to Sancroft Archbishop of Canterbury,
ed. William Nelson Clarke (Edinburgh, 1848); The Tanner Letters. Original Documents
and Notices of Irish Affairs in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. Charles McNeill
(Dublin, 1943).
12 Edward Wolley, Altare Evangelium. A Sermon Preached at Christ-Church in Dublin...

(Dublin, 1673), p. 34 [Wing W3263].

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 GRANT TAPSELL

Now this excellent government [of bishops in Scotland] is indeed restored, but
alas its not animat wt the ancient spirit... hath the king and parliament restored
yow only for the name of Episcopacy?
(Gilbert Burnet, future bishop of Salisbury, 1666)13

Bishops were at the heart of ‘England’s troubles’, and Britain’s, throughout

the seventeenth century.14 They were the basis for some of the most promi-
nent catchphrases, conflicts, and causes célèbres of the era: ‘no bishop, no
king’ (James VI & I); the Bishops’ Wars (1639–40); the trial of the Seven
Bishops (1688). Charles I had died a martyr for the episcopal Church of
England.15 The return of Charles II to England in 1660 foreshadowed the
return of bishops in not one, but three kingdoms. This episcopal recovery
was undoubtedly contested, its translation into local reality varied, and its
long-term prospects uncertain, but it nevertheless featured some spectac-
ular set pieces. On 27 January 1661, two archbishops and ten bishops were
consecrated in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. The sung anthems empha-
sised that crown and mitre had fallen and risen together; the sermon simi-
larly proclaimed that ‘Episcopacy is the great stabiliment of Monarchy’.16
This reassuring core message of stability was further propagated through
the printed texts describing the day’s events, not least the appearance of
significant numbers of nobles and vast, well-behaved crowds that were said
to have displayed ‘extraordinary reverence’ to the new bishops.17 Although
they could not quite match this powerful reassertion of episcopal Church
government, three of the four new Scottish bishops who had earlier been
consecrated in Westminster Abbey entered Edinburgh in spring 1662 ‘as

13 Gilbert Burnet, ‘A Memorial of Diverse Grievances and Abuses in this Church’, in

‘Certain Papers of Robert Burnet, Afterwards Lord Crimond, Gilbert Burnet, Afterwards
Bishop of Salisbury, and Robert Leighton, Sometime Archbishop of Glasgow’, ed. H. C.
Foxcroft, in Miscellany of the Scottish History Society, II (Edinburgh, 1904), p. 342.
14 Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles. Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability

in European Context (Cambridge, 2000) tends, though, to focus more on ideas than
institutions. Brian P. Levack, The Formation of the British State. England, Scotland, and the
Union 1603–1714 (Oxford, 1987), ch. 4 (‘religious and ecclesiastical union’) is weak on
the 1660s–80s.
15 The importance of the myth can be traced in Andrew Lacey, The Cult of King Charles

the Martyr (Woodbridge, 2003), even if we now appreciate how the efforts Charles I
made to save his monarchy involved compromising on bishops, to the fury of some
contemporaries: Anthony Milton, ‘“Vailing his Crown”: Royalist Criticism of Charles
I’s Kingship in the 1650s’, in Royalists and Royalism During the Interregnum, ed. Jason
McElligott and David L. Smith (Manchester, 2010), pp. 85–105.
16 An Antheme Sung at the Consecration of the Arch-bishops and Bishops of Ireland... (1661)

[Wing A3472]; Jeremy Taylor, A Sermon Preached at the Consecration of two Archbishops
and ten Bishops, in the Cathedral Church of S. Patrick in Dublin, January 27. 1660 (Dublin,
1661), p. 33 [Wing T391].
17 Dudley Loftus, The Proceedings Observed In Order to, and in the Consecration of the

Twelve Bishops... (London, 1660[/1]), p. 8 [Wing L2826].

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 A BRITISH PATRIARCHY

in triumph’, greeted by the lord chancellor, nobility, privy council, and

city magistrates.18 Small wonder that those predisposed to dislike episco-
pacy were stimulated to new denunciations when they sensed the way the
ecclesiological wind was blowing. According to the Scottish presbyterian
Robert Baillie in June 1660: ‘It’s a scorne to tell us of moderat Episcopacy,
a moderat Papacy! the world knows that Bishops and Popes could never
keep caveats: The Episcopall faction... were never more immoderat than
this day.’19 An independent minister in Dublin in 1660 similarly denounced
prelacy as ‘the image of that beast the papacy’.20
Old habits of mind, old arguments, and old hopes and fears were inevi-
tably central to a process of Restoration after 1660 that set so much store by
recovering an old world after a period of upheaval and crisis. The continued
prominence of controversial figures from the pre-civil war era naturally
provided particular grounds for argument. Baillie’s anxieties in the summer
of 1660 were stoked by news of the activity of Matthew Wren, bishop of Ely,
‘the worst Bishop of our age after Dr Laud’.21 Other aged bishops returned to
their places at the helm of the national Churches, notably William Juxon
in England, and John Bramhall in Ireland.22 For much of Charles II’s reign
public affairs were dominated by clerics and laymen whose outlook had been
shaped by the civil wars and interregnum. Baillie himself was one such;
at the other end of the spectrum, so were Gilbert Sheldon and William
Sancroft. The octogenarian bishop of Rochester, John Warner (d. 1666),
was so scarred by the disruptive activity of Scottish presbyterians in the
1630s and 1640s that he left provision in his will for £80 p.a. to go to Balliol
College, Oxford to support scholarships for Scots so that, as he acidly noted,
‘there may never be wanting in Scotland some who shall support the ecclesi-
astical establishment of England’.23 When the duke of Lauderdale (b. 1616)

18 Burnet’s History of My Own Time, ed. Osmund Airy (2 vols, Oxford, 1897–1900), I,
248, 251–2. The fourth bishop, Robert Leighton, avoided the ceremonial entry as ‘he
hated all the appearances of vanity’. Ibid., I, 251.
19 The Letters and Journals of Robert Baillie, ed. David Laing (3 vols, Edinburgh, 1842),

III, 406: Robert Baillie to earl of Lauderdale, 16 June 1660.

20 Samuel Mather, quoted in S. J. Connolly, Divided Kingdom: Ireland 1630–1800

(Oxford, 2008), p. 140.

21 Letters and Journals, ed. Laing, III, 405.
22 For searching analysis of Bramhall’s pre-civil war career, see John McCafferty, The

Reconstruction of the Church of Ireland: Bishop Bramhall and the Laudian Reforms, 1633–
1641 (Cambridge, 2007). Even the eminent preacher at his funeral noted Bramhall’s great
age and decline after the Restoration: Jeremy Taylor, A Sermon Preached in Christ-Church,
Dublin: at the Funeral of... John, Late Lord Archbishop of Armagh (1663), p. 38 [Wing
T395]. Juxon (b. 1582) has recently been described as ‘out of touch’ at the Restoration,
and ‘overshadowed’ by Sheldon: Brian Quintrell, ‘William Juxon’, O.D.N.B.
23 Quoted in Edward Lee-Warner, ‘John Warner’, D.N.B. For the marquess of Atholl’s

effort to solicit English support for one of his friends to gain this scholarship, see Bodl.,
MS Tanner 39, f. 67.

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 GRANT TAPSELL

was alarmed by calls from provincial synods in 1674 to call a national synod
of the Church of Scotland, he chose to express that alarm in what for him
was the most pointed way possible: invocation of the covenanting past. The
current agitation was simply a repeat of the tumultuous petitioning of 1638:
‘I wish some may not be intending the same Play over again, but a burn’d
Child dreads the fire.’24
The recent past, and its ‘British’ dimension, was ecclesiastically inescap-
able, sometimes in surprising and submerged ways. The pioneering work of
Ken Fincham and Stephen Taylor has demonstrated that huge numbers of
clerics sought episcopal ordination even during the dark days of the inter-
regnum.25 Much of that work was undertaken by Scottish and Irish bishops,
the field having been partially ceded by English episcopal death, decline,
or despair. The Church of England after 1662 thus owed a significant, but
rarely acknowledged, debt for its survival to clerics from beyond its terri-
tory.26 Scottish and Irish clerics would also long continue to spend time in
England due to adverse conditions at home. ‘About twenty’ conscientious
Scottish ministers of the Church of Scotland came to England after passage
of the controversial Test Act of 1681, where Gilbert Burnet busied himself
finding them employment.27 During the crisis of 1688/9 clerics were amongst
the protestant exodus from Tyrconnell’s aggressively re-Catholicising regime
in Ireland, notably the bishop of Kilmore, who by December 1690 was desti-
tute in Jermyn Street, London.28 Scottish episcopal ministers who had been
‘rabbled’ out of their livings by vengeful presbyterians sent agents to lobby
at the royal court.29 Some English commentators across the seventeenth
century predictably expressed anxiety that English church resources (espe-
cially those in the metropolis) would fall prey to impecunious Scottish and
Irish clergy.30 Nevertheless, geographical mobility was an ongoing feature
of clerical life during the Restoration. Most obviously, numerous English

24 Lauderdale Papers, ed. Airy, III, 52–3: Lauderdale to archbishop of Glasgow, 18 June
1674. See also ibid., II, xvi–xvii; II, ii–iii.
25 ‘Episcopalian Conformity and Nonconformity, 1646–1660’, in Royalists and Royalism

During the Interregnum, ed. McElligott and Smith, pp. 18–43; ‘Vital Statistics: Episcopal
Ordination and Ordinands in England, 1646–60’, E.H.R., 126 (2011), 319–44.
26 See the chapter by Fincham and Taylor in this volume for the activity of Scottish and

Irish bishops in England during the period 1660–2.

27 Burnet’s History, ed. Airy, II, 318. For the context, see Jackson, Restoration Scotland,

pp. 149–52; Gillian H. MacIntosh, The Scottish Parliament under Charles II, 1660–1685
(Edinburgh, 2007), pp. 194–7.
28 Harris, Revolution, p. 427; Raymond Gillespie, ‘The Irish Protestants and James

II, 1688–90’, Irish Historical Studies, 28 (1992), 129–30; Bodl., MS Tanner 27, f. 231;
Richard Bagwell, rev. James McGuire, ‘William Sheridan’, O.D.N.B.
29 T. N. Clarke, ‘The Scottish Episcopalians 1688–1720’, University of Edinburgh

Ph.D., 1987, pp. 30–2, 55–6.

30 Levack, Formation of the British State, pp. 118–19. For resentment in Ireland about

English and Scottish clerical interlopers preying on the resources of the Church of

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 A BRITISH PATRIARCHY

clerics gained livings and appointments in Ireland, including on the epis-

copal bench.31 For some, this represented being fobbed off in dead-end posts
like Raphoe, ‘this bad corner of the world’, this ‘barbarous village’, or a
perceived life-sentence in ‘a Bogg’; for others, a welcome escape route from
their prior difficulties in the English localities.32 The ecclesiastical bounda-
ries between the three Stuart Churches remained porous after 1660, even
though there may not have been efforts as enterprising as those initiated by
James VI & I to use the ecclesiastical personnel of one kingdom to improve
another, notably Andrew Knox, simultaneously bishop of the Isles in Scot-
land and Raphoe in Ireland.33 It seems clear that high-level clerical interac-
tion was a common, if not quite quotidian, aspect of the Restoration era.
This may be further illustrated at two levels, the epistolary, and the courtly.

II

The letters that were written by, and often passed between, the hierarchies
of the three established Churches during the Restoration were focused pre-
eminently on rebuilding the political, social, and economic cachet that had
been lost in the 1640s and 1650s. Scottish and Irish bishops faced massive
problems of authority in their respective localities, and needed the help
of secular government within those kingdoms if they were to survive and
prosper. Lauderdale and Ormond, in particular, were deluged with syco-
phantic clerical praise. The former was lavishly thanked by eleven arch-
bishops and bishops in September 1667 for his favour and care of the
Church, which was crucial because ‘wee find our interest how wigorously
soever imployed insufficient to prevaile’ over the forces hostile to them.34
More than a decade later, Lauderdale was still called ‘the great patron of the

Ireland, see Toby Barnard, A New Anatomy of Ireland: The Irish Protestants, 1649–1770
(New Haven and London, 2003), pp. 99–100.
31 By January 1661, the re-stocked bench of twenty-one Church of Ireland bishops

featured nine men born in England, as well as two Welsh and four Scots. Jackson, ‘Later
Stuart Church as “National Church”’, in Later Stuart Church, ed. Tapsell, p. 129.
32 Bodl., MSS Tanner 37, f. 116: bishop of Raphoe (Ezekiel Hopkins) to Sancroft,

Raphoe, 13 Aug. 1680; 36, f. 127: same to same, Raphoe, 3 Oct. 1681; ibid., 34, f. 179:
Dr Robert Huntington to Sancroft, Dublin, 13 Oct. 1683 (the bog could have been a lot
worse – it was Trinity College). For a cleric eager to escape Bristol, see Bodl., MS Tanner
39, f. 98.
33 James Kirk, ‘Andrew Knox’, O.D.N.B. I learned of Knox’s dual service from Alan

Ford, ‘Divergent Reformations in early seventeenth-century Gaelic Scotland and Ireland’,

paper delivered at the Early Modern Britain Seminar at Merton College, Oxford, 3 Nov.
2011.
34 Lauderdale Papers, ed. Airy, II, 60: Scottish bishops to Lauderdale, Edinburgh, 16

Sept. 1667. For eleven members of the Irish episcopate similarly joining forces to praise
Ormond in 1661, see Bodl., MS Carte 45, f. 59.

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 GRANT TAPSELL

Church next under God and our Royall Master’ by a bloc of bishops.35 For
his part, Ormond thanked the bishop of Meath, Henry Jones, for an eloquent
sermon, and urged him to print it, whilst claiming to find the praise of his
own actions, as being the ‘great Hand’ to whom the Irish Church and state
owed most for its settlement ‘next and unto His Majesty’, excessive: ‘What
you are pleased to say of me in your epistle to me is the only questionable
parte of the worke: but if I have not been what you say, you teach me what
I should be.’36
Supporters of the Churches of Scotland and Ireland appreciated that
their ingratiating efforts might most effectively be pursued via powerful
proxies: senior figures within the Church of England. Sheldon and Morley
of Winchester took care to praise Ormond’s actions on behalf of the
Church of Ireland.37 Successive strongmen at the helm of Scottish govern-
ment attracted similar attention. James Sharp, archbishop of St Andrews,
expressed satisfaction to Lauderdale that the duke and Archbishop Sheldon
‘keep kindnes and freedom’ at court in London, and promised ‘to further
it what I can’.38 Sancroft would later receive calls from the archbishop of
Glasgow openly to thank Lauderdale at court for his care of the Scottish
Church at a time when visiting discontented nobles might be expected to
brief the king against him.39 After Lauderdale’s political demise, and the
arrival of the king’s brother, James, duke of Albany and York, in Scotland,
the bishops seamlessly transferred their praise to the heir to the throne.
Sancroft was told that James was continuing his father’s work and concern
for the Scottish Church, and that he had redeemed the episcopal order
north of the Border from contempt and ruin.40 In this particular game of
call and response, the English bishops took care to reply with jointly signed
letters of thanks.41
For all this apparent harmony, the interactions of the three Churches
could certainly create strains and tensions. Ormond’s experiences offer a
particularly good case study. His friend George Morley, bishop of Winchester,
praised him as a colossus bestriding the Stuarts’ territories: ‘noe one person
in any of ye 3 kingdomes is able to doe God and ye king & ye Church, and

35 Lauderdale Papers, ed. Airy, III, 175: Scottish bishops to Lauderdale, Edinburgh, 18
July 1679.
36 Henry Jones, A Sermon Preached at the Consecration of the Right Reverend Father in God

Ambrose Lord Bishop of Kildare (Dublin, 1667), sigs. C[r–v]; Bodl., MS Carte 147, f. 3:
Ormond to bishop of Meath (Henry Jones), 16 Aug. 1667 (copy). (Ormond’s letter was
reprinted by Jones between the epistle dedicatory and the preface to his sermon.)
37 Bodl., MS Carte 45, ff. 147, 151.
38 Lauderdale Papers, ed. Airy, I, 195: Sharp to Lauderdale, Edinburgh, 21 Apr. 1664.
39 Bodl., MS Tanner 39, f. 70.
40 Bodl., MS Tanner 35, ff. 211, 219.
41 E.g. Bodl., MSS Tanner 38, ff. 119r–v (pr. in A Collection of Letters, ed. Clarke, pp.

6–8); 37, f. 33 (pr. in ibid., pp. 10–12)

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 A BRITISH PATRIARCHY

ye state more service then yo[u]r Grace’.42 But if Ormond received praise
from English bishops, he also had to respond to their efforts to solicit plum
Irish ecclesiastical appointments for their friends.43 Such tensions went right
to the top. It is particularly intriguing to see his developing relations with
Sheldon as archbishop of Canterbury. In the summer of 1663, newly nomi-
nated as primate of all England, Sheldon was capable of adopting a rather
high hand with regard to Irish clerical appointments, merely informing
Ormond of a likely episcopal translation from Ferns and Leighlin to Bangor,
and unsubtly lobbying to fill the vacancy with his own choice.44 Over the
next three years, though, the tone of Sheldon’s correspondence changed
to a more deferential register, with emphasis placed on early and frequent
consultation across St George’s Channel: ‘I shall readily comply w[i]th y[ou]
r Graces desires’.45 It was nevertheless necessary for Ormond to continue to
manage Sheldon robustly. A persistent concern of the Irish chief governor
was to advance deserving clerics of Irish birth – ‘yonger and very worthy
men of the birth and breeding of this Kingdome’ – a cause not best served by
interventions from London.46 Here epistolary skill was of great importance
to a chief governor usually based in Dublin, or on his family estates in Kilk-
enny. In one bravura performance in January 1666, for instance, Ormond
superficially acceded to Sheldon’s suggestion of promotion in Ireland being
given to an English cleric, before setting out at great length the qualifica-
tions that anyone aspiring to be bishop of the diocese under discussion would
require. Ormond’s implication was clear: the see needed an Irishman, and
a tough one, to combat difficult local circumstances. His closing comment
– ‘And so I leave that affayre entirely to your Graces direction’ – could
not have been taken at face value by any able contemporary politician.47
Sheldon’s reply offered a similar mix of acknowledgment and implicit direc-
tion. After denying any partiality for the English candidate for the see, the
archbishop went on: ‘as long as you have so worthy men w[i]th you, and
make so very good <choyce> of ye best, w[hi]ch I am confident you will ever
doe, I shall endeavour to keep you free from any recom[m]endations from
hence’.48 This was agreement, but conditional agreement, and very far from
a patronage blank cheque.

42 Bodl., MS Carte 45, f. 109: Morley to Ormond, Hampton Court, 24 July 1662.
43 E.g., H.M.C., Ormonde, n.s., IV, 306–7; Bodl., MS Carte 50, f. 279.
44 Bodl., MS Carte 45, f. 169.
45 Bodl., MS Carte 45, f. 179: Sheldon to Ormond, All Souls College, Oxford, 5 Dec.

1665.
46 Bodl., MS Carte 45, f. 181v: Ormond to Sheldon, Dublin, 4 Jan. 1665/6 (copy).

For Boyle’s similar concern to avoid losing out to London-based agendas, see H.M.C.,
Ormonde, new ser., IV, 194.
47 Bodl., MS Carte 45, f. 181: Ormond to Sheldon, Dublin, 4 Jan. 1665/6 (copy).
48 Bodl., MS Carte 45, f. 183: Sheldon to Ormond, All Souls College, Oxford, 13 Jan.

1665/6.

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 GRANT TAPSELL

Anglo-Scottish ecclesiastical connections could also prove double-edged.

In the first years of the Restoration, Sharp had expressed reluctance to allow
significant interference by the Church of England in ecclesiastical affairs
north of the Border despite, or because, of his acquiescence in receiving
episcopal orders at the hands of Gilbert Sheldon when he was bishop of
London.49 Nevertheless, he rapidly graduated to peppering Sheldon with
letters urging him to praise the activities of lay ministers of state on behalf
of the Church of Scotland. In 1674, for instance, his response to co-ordi-
nated petitions from provincial synods for the calling of a national synod
– a campaign that would have undermined his own control of the Church
of Scotland – was to write to Sheldon as ‘My dear Lord and brother’. Sharp
raged against the ‘sones of our owne bosome who, viper lyke, seek out to
destroy that quhich produced them’. Without support from England, Sharp
feared imminent ruin: ‘Iff I be not supported by his Majesteis speciall favor
through your Graces recommendatione I will inevitablie suffer shipwracke.’
He was also quick to couch his call to action in terms that would evoke
memories of the Scottish and Irish triggers for the mid-century upheavals
within England:

I hope your Grace will consider your owne hazard and quhat disorders followed
in England upone our distempers in Scotland. Quhen our neighbours house is on
fyre it is then tyme to look to our owne.50

Warnings about likely ‘contagion’ or ‘infection’ of Church of England affairs

from Scottish upheavals would frequently be used by clerics urging ecclesi-
astical solidarity in hostile times, and struck a chord with ‘very apprehen-
sive’ English bishops.51 Indeed this was an even more potent theme than in
the pre-war period: the hierarchy of the Church of England was only too
aware of the fact that Charles II did not share his father’s whole-hearted
commitment to the established Church.52 Episcopal solidarity across the
three kingdoms could be a matter of political self-interest as well as chari-
table sentiment.
Episcopal letters from the period clearly demonstrate the extent to which
bishops were deeply entangled in contemporary politics. This was a matter
of regret not only to many lay politicians, who directed powerful fire at

49 Lauderdale Papers, ed. Airy, I, 43; John Spurr, ‘Gilbert Sheldon’, O.D.N.B.
50 H.M.C., Laing, I, 396: Sharp to Sheldon, June 1674.
51 Lauderdale Papers, ed. Airy, I, 58; III, 243: archbishop of Glasgow (Burnet) to

Lauderdale, London, 27 Apr. 1678.

52 Jeffrey R. Collins, ‘The Restoration Bishops and the Royal Supremacy’, Church

History, 68 (1999), 549–80; Jacqueline Rose, Godly Kingship in Restoration England: The
Politics of The Royal Supremacy, 1660–1688 (Cambridge, 2011), ch. 3.

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 A BRITISH PATRIARCHY

the whole exercise of ‘priestcraft’, but also to a number of clergy.53 Perhaps

most obviously, Robert Leighton, archbishop of Glasgow, who spent years
trying to retire from the high office he had reached, decried an obsessive
focus on ‘our little wretched interests and humors’, the pursuit of which
he thought nothing nobler than ‘a drunken scuffle in the dark’.54 He even-
tually retired to an English parish and a life that mixed meditation and
bitter letters about the deepening failure of episcopal government of the
Church of Scotland.55 For others, though, engagement with secular affairs
was a natural concomitant of high office within the Church. The simul-
taneous holding of key offices within the state and the Church may have
been a declining feature within England, after the Laudian high noon of
the 1630s,56 but it remained an aspect of Scottish and Irish affairs for long
after 1660. Although it did not come to pass, contemporaries fully expected
a cleric to be appointed Chancellor of Scotland in 1664.57 Michael Boyle
did actually spend two decades as lord chancellor of Ireland alongside his
episcopal duties. His actions have attracted some sympathy from modern
commentators, but faced considerable contemporary criticism, and his posi-
tion was heavily based on support from Ormond, who thought him ‘a man
of honour as well as piety learning and prudence’.58 Boyle’s dominance of
Irish high offices led to criticism within England, especially when he was
raised to the Irish primacy during the deteriorating political environment
triggered by the Popish Plot, and some peers in the house of lords decried
his efforts to ‘engross the great charges of Church and State in his own
family’ through promoting relatives.59 But he had nevertheless recently been
viewed by a commentator as well placed as the clerk of the privy council to

53 Justin A. I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and its
Enemies, 1660–1730 (Cambridge, 1992).
54 ‘Certain Papers’, ed. Foxcroft, p. 362: Leighton to Gilbert Burnet, Bradhurst, 23 Jan.

[c.1681–4]; Letters and Papers, ed. Airy, III, 76: Leighton (as archbishop of Glasgow) to
Lauderdale, 17 Dec. [1674].
55 Rev. D. Butler, The Life and Letters of Robert Leighton, Restoration Bishop of Dunblane

and Archbishop of Glasgow (1903), ch. XIII.

56 Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘Laudianism and Political Power’, in his Catholics, Anglicans, and

Puritans (1987), pp. 40–119; Brian Quintrell, ‘The Church Triumphant? The Emergence
of a Spiritual Lord Treasurer, 1635–1636’, in The Political World of Thomas Wentworth,
Earl of Strafford, 1621–1641, ed. Julia F. Merritt (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 81–108.
57 H.M.C., Laing, I, 342.
58 H.M.C., Ormonde, old ser., II, 266: Ormond to Sir Robert Southwell, Dublin, 18 Dec.

1677. James McGuire’s account – ‘Michael Boyle’, in Dictionary of Irish Biography, ed.
James McGuire and James Quinn (9 vols, Cambridge, 2009), I, 722–7 – is rather more
positive than Toby Barnard, ‘Michael Boyle’, O.D.N.B.
59 H.M.C., Ormonde, new ser., V, 39: Henry Coventry to Ormond, Whitehall, 8 Apr.

1679. For Boyle’s lengthy defence of his position and actions, see ibid., V, 45.

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 A BRITISH PATRIARCHY

be a serious contender for the archbishopric of Canterbury after the death

of Gilbert Sheldon.60
North of the Border it was widely noted that many Scottish bishops spent
extended periods of time in Edinburgh rather than residing in their sees,
even though the Scottish parliament met far less frequently than its English
counterpart.61 For many of the ‘hard-faced, ambitious, and energetic’ men of
Scottish government in the Restoration era, this was a source of regret, or
outright scorn.62 The earl of Tweeddale, for one, was felt by many bishops to
be too sympathetic to presbyterians, something that led to episcopal hostility
during the 1670s, and his weary comment to Gilbert Burnet ‘that more than
two parts in three of the whole business of the government [of Scotland]
related to the church’.63 Lauderdale’s vast correspondence is particularly
revealing in this regard. To key clerics – notably Sharp – Lauderdale was
capable of alternating between warm support and scarcely veiled threats.64
But to lay allies the mask slipped, and mocking nicknames –‘L.F.’ for ‘longi-
facies’, or ‘long nez’, for Alexander Burnet, archbishop of Glasgow – were
exchanged in letters marked by disdain for clerical pretension.65 Reacting
to his tone, or more generally sharing his views, other Scottish politicians
derided the ‘meddling’ of bishops in state affairs, or else mocked Sharp’s
tendency to panic in the face of difficult events.66 The bishop of Edinburgh’s
incessant efforts to ingratiate himself with the town authorities of his see,
and to ameliorate excise demands from the centre, led John Drummond
of Lundin – the future earl of Melfort – sneeringly to describe him as ‘Mr
Pious’ or ‘Pope Pious’.67 Small wonder that the Scottish episcopate so often
felt the need for support from their English counterparts.
Such ties deepened across the 1680s – part, perhaps, of a wider trend that
Toby Barnard has delineated of increasing imperial connections across the
three kingdoms during this crucial decade.68 The Scottish bishops took to

60 H.M.C., Ormonde, new ser., IV, 385, 388.

61 Lauderdale Papers, ed. Airy, II, 114. Leighton was an exceptionally diligent figure
within his dioceses: Miscellany of the Scottish History Society, VI (1939), 236; Butler, Life
and Letters, esp. pp. 366–413. W. R. Foster sets the bar pretty low in order to argue
that Scottish bishops discharged their diocesan duties reasonably diligently: Bishop and
Presbytery: The Church of Scotland, 1661–88 (1958), pp. 36–8.
62 Ronald Hutton, Charles II: King of England, Scotland and Ireland (Oxford, 1989), p.

413.
63 Burnet’s History, ed. Airy, I, 442.
64 Contrast, for instance, Lauderdale Papers, ed. Airy, II, 41, and ibid., II, 171–2.
65 Lauderdale Papers, ed. Airy, I, 248 & n. b; II, 76–7, 83, 90, 105; Miscellany of the

Scottish History Society, VI, 163.

66 H.M.C., Buccleuch, II, 125; H.M.C., Laing, I, 381.
67 H.M.C., Buccleuch, II, 133, 141: John Drummond of Lundin to marquess of

Queensberry, Winchester, 13 Sept. 1683, London, 3 Oct. 1683. For scurrilous popular
criticism of Paterson, see Raffe, Culture of Controversy, pp. 159–60.
68 T. C. Barnard, ‘Scotland and Ireland in the Later Stewart Monarchy’, in Conquest

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 GRANT TAPSELL

sending frequent collectively signed letters to Sancroft, emphasising their

close links and mutual regard – letters that were carefully reciprocated. This
‘fraternall correspondence’, as the Scots put it, was part of a lofty ideal:

we shall not faile (Since the happiness of a perfect union, twixt the tuo sister
Churches, in this Island, is through the unhappines and distraction of the tymes,
Denyed us) by frequent Communicative Letters, to improve our mutuall affec-
tion and communication …69

Anglo-Irish links were not quite so prominent, but the archbishop of Armagh
was nevertheless grateful to Sancroft for his ‘protection’ in deflecting criti-
cism of the widespread pluralism of the Irish bench – in their eyes, an inevi-
table product of the extreme poverty of many of the sees:

we live here at a distance from ye Court, and may be misrepresented, & perhaps
<yt misrepresentation> to[o] much credited in such an age as this, before wee
can be heard to speake for our selves; but wee are in a greate measure secured
against any reall mischiefe by any untrue suggestions or surprize while wee are
taken under yr Grace’s patronadge70

These archipelagic associations are again suggestive of the greater vulner-

ability, and decline in self-sufficiency, of the Scottish and Irish Churches
over the seventeenth century.

III

Epistolary connections across the three kingdoms were important for the
established Churches, but these were supplemented and buttressed by crucial
personal contacts at the royal court. This was obviously the great clearing
house of patronage, and the home of the supreme governor of the Churches
of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Charles II was only too well aware of the
attractions of access to the royal person. In his capacity as a royal chaplain,
Gilbert Burnet claimed to have heard the king railing against bishops ‘for
neglecting the true concerns of the church, and following courts so much,
and being so engaged in parties’.71 Charles certainly entertained mordant
views on what clerics really cared about. He expressed sardonic surprise in

and Union: Fashioning a British State 1485–1725, ed. Steven G. Ellis and Sarah Barber
(Harlow, 1995), p. 259.
69 Bodl., MS Tanner 37, f. 64v: 8 archbishops and bishops of Scotland to Sancroft,

Edinburgh, 9 July 1680.

70 Bodl., MS Tanner 37, f. 199a: archbishop of Armagh (Boyle) to Sancroft, Dublin, 9

Nov. 1680.
71 Burnet’s History, ed. Airy, II, 28.

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 A BRITISH PATRIARCHY

1678 that the bishop of Rochester refused to become archbishop of Dublin

and chancellor of Ireland since the post was worth £4,000 per annum: ‘he
believed most Bishops would think that gain is great godliness’.72 And he
was said to have rewarded a chaplain he described as a ‘blockhead’ with an
Irish bishopric – part of a broader indifference to the Church of Ireland that
fed Ormond’s vexation that a client of his eldest son was being run close
in his race for an Irish see by ‘one of the most inconsiderable men in the
Church, taking in vicars and curates’, thanks to outside influence.73
Contempt for, or indifference to, importunate clergy came easily to a
man of Charles’s sardonic character, but his views were also the product of
prolonged experience of clerical courtly activity. Senior clerics were amongst
the most active and determined lobbyists at the Stuart court. The convoca-
tion of the Church of Ireland was not a dynamic presence in the reign of
Charles II. In 1661 it nevertheless showed a clear-sighted appreciation of
political reality in deputing two bishops to act as ‘procurators’ at court ‘to
take care of ye interest of ye ch[urc]h’, voting a tax of £665 to support their
expenses.74 Individual Church of Ireland clerics were also illusionless about
where they needed to direct important appeals. Jeremy Taylor immediately
recognised the degree of local hostility he faced from Scottish presbyterians
in the north of Ireland, and learned that they were abstracting statements
from his published works to send to ‘their agent in England’ in an effort
to stymie his activity as bishop of Down and Connor. Taylor enlisted the
support of Ormond to see off these endeavours.75 Clouds of place-seekers for
Irish appointments certainly hovered around London.
All this activity was, however, dwarfed by the systematic and sustained
pressure applied by the Scottish bishops. Despite repeated flattery of Laud-
erdale, and thanks for his care of their interests, the Scottish bishops gradu-
ated from sending letters to London in the 1660s to appearing themselves
during the 1670s and 1680s. Already by 1675 the archbishop of Glasgow
could plainly tell the archbishop of St Andrews that ‘Your attendance at
Court is certainly more necessary and usefull for us then your presence here’
in Scotland.76 Despite superficial appearances, this was not a back-handed
compliment but a simple reflection of the power dynamic within the three

72 H.M.C., Ormonde, new ser., IV, 149: earl of Arran to Ormond, London, 15 June 1678.
73 Burnet’s History, ed. Airy, I, 464–5; H.M.C., Ormonde, new ser., IV, 323: Ormond
to earl of Ossory, Dublin, 13 Feb. 1678/9. (Lauderdale reported Sharp’s sycophantic
laughter when he joked that he would propose translating Alexander Burnet, archbishop
of Glasgow, to an Irish see in order to get him out of the way in 1668: Miscellany of the
Scottish History Society, VI, 163.)
74 Bodl., MS Carte 64, f. 287. (The clergy also voted a gift of £100 to Sir George Lane,

Ormond’s secretary, intending half of it to cover the cost of writing and posting letters,
and the other half for Lane to buy plate for himself: Bodl., MS Carte 45, f. 63.)
75 Bodl., MS Carte 45, f. 38.
76 H.M.C., Laing, I, 406: John Paterson, archbishop of Glasgow, to Sharp, Edinburgh, 3

July 1675.

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 GRANT TAPSELL

kingdoms. Scottish bishops stayed in London for extended periods of time

by the later 1670s, regularly dining at Lambeth or Fulham at the behest of
the archbishop of Canterbury or bishop of London, and mingling there with
the English bishops then in the capital.77 Compton was described as ‘firme
as a rocke’ to the interests of the Scottish Church, and Morley was similarly
described as ‘Worthy Winchester’.78 When the archbishop of Glasgow met
the archbishop of Canterbury and other bishops in the spring of 1678, he
was easily able to agree ‘upon the method we are to observe in our corre-
spondence’, and confidently blessed God that ‘I find it no difficult worke to
persuade them to owne and affect our interest’. This was important because,
just as Jeremy Taylor had faced opposition from presbyterians in the north
of Ireland with access to agents at court, so too the Scottish bishops needed
to confound ‘restlesse and vigilant sollicitors, very diligent in promoting
strange stories, who are severe in their reflections upon us who attend
here’.79 Loitering with intent around the royal court was of course hardly a
new development in the Restoration. John Maxwell, bishop of Ross, had,
for instance, played a very active role dashing up and down the Great North
Road to liaise about a new prayer book for Scotland in the 1630s.80 As in so
many other things, Restoration practice represented an extension or inten-
sification of pre-civil war political activity.
This activity became most pointed at the very end of the 1670s and
throughout the 1680s. The access that the Scottish bishops enjoyed to the
corridors of power in England was greatly boosted by the time that James
spent in Edinburgh during his exile from London at the height of the Exclu-
sion Crisis.81 His support for the Scottish episcopate within Scotland was
typically uncompromising and clear. In his eyes they were the guardians
of the Church established by law, and thus a key support for Stuart power
against anti-monarchical covenanting rebels. As the bishop of Edinburgh
eagerly informed Sancroft in March 1683, James ‘so fullie understands
the state of this kingdom and that the Church is so necessarie a support
to the monarchie, that he openlie and upon all sutable occasions, makes
our enemies know, that he looks upon all who would hurt the former as
destroyers of the latter’.82 This powerful backing extended to influencing

77 Lauderdale Papers, ed. Airy, III, 119, 123, 125.

78 Lauderdale Papers, ed. Airy, III, 243: archbishop of Glasgow (Burnet) to Lauderdale,
London, 27 Apr. 1678.
79 Lauderdale Papers, ed. Airy, III, 244: archbishop of Glasgow (Burnet) to Lauderdale,

London, 30 Apr. 1678.

80 Gordon Donaldson, The Making of the Scottish Prayer Book of 1637 (Edinburgh, 1954),

pp. 41–2, 44, 47–8, 57.

81 Harris, Restoration, ch. 6; Kathleen Mary Colquhoun, ‘“Issue of the Late Civill Wars”:

James, Duke of York and the Government of Scotland 1679–1689’, University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign Ph.D., 1993, esp. chs 2–3.
82 Bodl., MS Tanner 35, f. 211: bishop of Edinburgh (Paterson) to Sancroft, Edinburgh,

7 Mar. 1682/3.

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 A BRITISH PATRIARCHY

perceptions of the Scottish bishops in England. Although James could criti-

cise episcopal ‘meddling’ in some of his private letters, in general he worked
to deflect criticism of visits by Scottish bishops to London, and cooperated
with episcopal efforts to ‘prepare’ his royal brother’s opinion over Church
preferments.83
Such a close alliance with the royal family was paralleled by ongoing
efforts to cultivate William Sancroft as archbishop in succession to Sheldon.
As a keen student of his predecessor’s papers, Sancroft cannot have been
surprised by the volume of letters he received from beyond England, espe-
cially from the archbishops of St Andrews, Glasgow, Armagh, and Dublin.
These were pre-eminently concerned with gaining Sancroft’s goodwill and
services as a broker at the royal court in London. When congratulating him
on his rise to the English primacy, the archbishop of Dublin was careful to
spell out a subservient agenda:

wee who live in this North parte of ye world may perhaps bee looked upon as
somewhat remoate from yr Grace’s more imediate care and consideration, But
Relligion is ye Comon Interest of us all; and though wee are at some distance
from ye Roote, wee are yet under ye shelter of yr Branches; and wee reckon upon
yr Grace as ye Greate protector of this church under his M[ajes]ties Government
…84

Such subservience became even more pointed from the Scottish episcopate
after the scare they collectively received from the assassination of the arch-
bishop of St Andrews by radical covenanters in 1679. The archbishop of
Glasgow made clear his view that ‘we will undoubtedly perish’ without the
support of the English episcopate, begging Sancroft for advice and assuring
him that ‘your commands shall be exactly observed and obeyed’.85 It has
rightly been noted that the Irish hierarchy lacked a really powerful person-
ality at its highest levels after the death of John Bramhall in 1663 (at least
until the rise of William King).86 Much the same could be said of Scotland
after the death of Sharp.

83 H.M.C., Buccleuch, I, 190; II, 124.

84 Bodl., MS Tanner 40, f. 188: archbishop of Dublin (Boyle) to Sancroft, Dublin, 6 Feb.
1677/8.
85 Bodl., MS Tanner 38, ff. 21, 29: 8 & 22 May 1679.
86 McGuire, ‘Policy and patronage’, pp. 118–19. For King, see Philip O’Regan,

Archbishop William King of Dublin (1650–1729) and the Constitution in Church and State
(Dublin, 2000); Archbishop William King and the Anglican Irish Context 1688–1729, ed.
Christopher J. Fauske (Dublin, 2004).

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 GRANT TAPSELL

IV

The Churches of England, Scotland, and Ireland evidently maintained

substantial connections across the Restoration period. Large numbers of
letters between clerics, and frequent meetings in London, helped to main-
tain a sense of common purpose in the face of opposition from protestant
dissenters, catholics, and Erastians. How significant were such interactions
for the course of public affairs?
Powerful contemporaries were in no doubt that Scottish and Irish Church
affairs mattered, and they attracted discussion across the three kingdoms.
Attention has already been drawn to the hostility of some members of the
English house of lords to the promotion of Michael Boyle to the archbish-
opric of Armagh whilst he was still chancellor of Ireland. This reflected
two currents of wider political criticism. The first, well delineated by Mark
Goldie, is a ‘country’ or ‘whig’ disdain for clerical pretension, in particular
the extent to which bishops as members of the house of lords worked to
buttress the position of favoured ministers of the crown in England like
Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby.87 Criticising Boyle tapped into a long-term
anti-clerical impulse. It also reflected a more specific English anxiety about
the entrenchment of Stuart power in Scotland and Ireland, and the way
that those countries might be used to overawe opponents of crown policy
within England.88 The maintenance of crown power in an archipelagic sense
had certainly always been at the forefront of Lauderdale’s mind when he
dominated Scottish politics. The passage of the Scottish Supremacy Act
in 1669, which allowed the crown, amongst other things, to translate or
dismiss bishops at will, prompted Lauderdale’s boast to his royal master that
this situation gave the king greater power than he enjoyed over the Church
of England: it ‘makes you Soveraigne in the Church ... no meeting, nor
Ecclesiastick Person in it, can ever trouble you more unles you please’.89
In reality, things were never quite so simple, either within Scotland or
elsewhere. Archbishop Sharp was deeply troubled by the impact of the 1669
Supremacy Act on the Church of Scotland.90 According to Lauderdale’s
sardonic account, as soon as Sharp saw a draft of the Act ‘he tooke the
alarum wondrous haisty, and said wilde things to E[arl] of Tweeddale, that
all King Henry the 8ths ten yeers’ work was to be done in 3 days, that 4

87 Mark Goldie, ‘Danby, the bishops, and the Whigs’, in The Politics of Religion in
Restoration England, ed. Tim Harris, Paul Seaward, and Mark Goldie (Oxford, 1990), pp.
75–105.
88 Tapsell, Personal Rule, pp. 159–60; George Southcombe and Grant Tapsell, Restoration

Politics, Religion, and Culture: Britain and Ireland, 1660–1714 (Basingstoke, 2010), pp.
109–17.
89 Lauderdale Papers, ed. Airy, II, 164: Lauderdale to Charles II, Holyroodhouse, 16 Nov.

1669.
90 For the context, see MacIntosh, Scottish Parliament, ch. 4.

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 A BRITISH PATRIARCHY

lines in this act were more comprehensive than a hundred & odd sheets
of H[enry] 8’. Sharp went so far as to argue that Lauderdale could not in
himself exercise the royal supremacy in his capacity as high commissioner
if there was not a parliament sitting, ‘for the supremacy is personal and can
not be delegat’. Or else, if it could be delegated, it could only go to the
archbishop of St Andrews as primate ‘to be his wicar [vicar]’.91 Efforts to
re-write the bill in narrower terms were easily seen off by Lauderdale. But
he was nonetheless anxious about the capacity of the Scottish bishops to
appeal over his head to their southern brethren, and he urged his agent at
court, Sir Robert Moray, to ‘Guard well against any assaults from the English
Clergie’ – it helped that Moray was on good terms with Sheldon.92 Such
fears reflected an awareness that English bishops might be nervous about a
wholly untrammelled exercise of royal supremacy over the Church in Scot-
land as it could set a precedent for England.93 Even at a time of considerable
political success for the Church of England in the early 1680s, Scottish poli-
ticians found that their efforts to get the troublesome bishop of Edinburgh
transferred to Ross as a means of shutting him up excited alarm amongst the
English episcopate: they were ‘allermed at the precedent’, it ‘not being for
ther turne’.94 The archbishop of Canterbury did not in the end aggressively
engage with the issue, but his anxiety about translating a bishop purely on
the grounds of political expediency nevertheless proved frustrating to lay
Scottish observers, and led the politicians to claim they would settle for
getting him off the Scottish privy council.95
This incident is suggestive of the extent to which Scottish and Irish
political operators recognised that they needed to handle successive arch-
bishops of Canterbury carefully. The extent of the archbishops’ powers need
not be exaggerated here, not least as Sheldon endured periods of deep royal
disfavour, and virtual exile from court. But nor should we ignore the extent

91 H.M.C., Laing, I, 372–3: earl of Tweeddale to Lauderdale, Edinburgh, 22 July 1669.

Although they did not attract significant attention, efforts were made in a matter of
Church discipline in 1682 to claim that ‘his Majesties power did not reach that far to
medle with the power of the keys and intrinsick government of the Church’. Ibid., 425
(fragment of a diary detailing the case of Vivian Paterson, minister at Libberton).
92 Lauderdale Papers, ed. Airy, II, 152–3: Lauderdale to Sir Robert Moray, Holyroodhouse,

2 Nov. 1669. Frances Harris notes the personal strains on the Lauderdale/Moray
relationship at this time, but the level of Lauderdale’s political confidence in his friend
was evidently still high: ‘Lady Sophia’s Visions: Sir Robert Moray, the Earl of Lauderdale
and the Restoration Government of Scotland’, The Seventeenth Century, 24 (2009),
129–55, esp. 143–9.
93 For careful discussion of the English episcopate and the supremacy, see Rose, Godly

Kingship, ch. 3.
94 H.M.C., Buccleuch, II, 147: John Drummond of Lundin to marquess of Queensberry,

London, 12 Oct. 1683; ibid., 146: same to same, London, 8 Oct. 1683. See also Tapsell,
Personal Rule, p. 179.
95 H.M.C., Buccleuch, II, 151.

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 GRANT TAPSELL

to which the three episcopates worked according to certain shared goals

and priorities, most importantly the defence of the Church establishments
against all-comers. Sheldon is well known as a parliamentary and courtly
operator, but Sancroft too maintained Lambeth as a significant headquarters
for the operations of a ‘church interest’ in Restoration London, even if he
proved unwilling or unable to spearhead it during the most crucial time of
all over the winter of 1688–9.96 Prudent archbishops of Canterbury did what
they could to pre-empt problems and likely sources of lay criticism of the
established Churches across all three kingdoms. Sheldon successfully lobbied
Ormond to get the Irish parliament to legislate against clerics holding
livings in both Ireland and England, claiming that he had been diffident
about introducing such legislation first in England for fear that critics of the
Church would use it as an excuse to ‘doe more then we desire they should’.97
In the other direction, Michael Boyle carefully briefed Sancroft about the
extent of episcopal poverty in Ireland in order to help him deflect English
parliamentary criticism of the rampant pluralism on the Irish bench.98 For
all the vulnerability of the various Church hierarchies, they were nonethe-
less deeply enmeshed in the parliamentary politics of their respective states,
the English and Irish bishops sitting en bloc in houses of lords, the Scottish
bishops playing a significant role as the first estate in Scotland, not least in
helping to choose the lords of the articles who were so significant in organ-
ising and controlling parliamentary affairs north of the Border.99
Such transnational personal and political connections as existed between
the three episcopates should ultimately be viewed as a mixed blessing for
the later Stuart monarchs.100 At times of crisis, events in one kingdom
could certainly be used to political advantage in others. When the arch-
bishop of St Andrews was assassinated, Charles II was said to have ‘took
notice’ of the ‘barbarous murder’ in the English house of lords, ‘particularly
to my Lord Wharton’.101 Wharton was a former leading parliamentarian
peer and ongoing sympathiser and spokesman for English nonconformists
in parliament: the king’s baleful glare clearly hit a carefully chosen target
in a polemical environment where the excesses of protestant zealots in

96 James Jones, ‘The Friends of the Constitution in Church and State’, in Public and

Private Doctrine: Essays in British History Presented to Maurice Cowling, ed. Michael
Bentley (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 17–33; Robert Beddard, ‘The Unexpected Whig Revo-
lution of 1688’, in The Revolutions of 1688, ed. Beddard (Oxford, 1991), p. 44.
97 Bodl., MS Carte 45, f. 169: Sheldon to Ormond, Lambeth House, 22 Aug. 1663.

(The legislation took time: see ibid., f. 181v, and was then tweaked by the English parlia-
ment, ibid., f. 185.)
98 Bodl., MS Tanner 37, f. 199a.
99 MacIntosh, Scottish Parliament, pp. 38–9, 48, 52.
100 For recent emphasis on issues of ‘cross-border representation and misrepresentation’

in terms of religious polemic, see Raffe, Culture of Controversy, pp. 19–20.

101 H.M.C., Ormonde, new ser., V, 88–9: Col. Edward Cooke to Ormonde, London, 10

May 1679.

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 A BRITISH PATRIARCHY

one country could be used to ram home their dangerous unreliability in

another.102 Charles was also grandstanding in an English political context
then enlivened by a parliamentary battle to impeach the earl of Danby,
whose champions were eager to maintain the English bishops’ right to vote
(in his favour), even in cases of potential judicial bloodletting.103 To draw
attention to the ultimate outcome of hostility to bishops in Scotland at such
a juncture was polemically powerful.
Nevertheless, in other circumstances, leading figures in Scotland and
Ireland could go out of their way to nerve the English episcopate to stand
up to overbearing monarchical activity. During the ‘seven bishops’ crisis
in the summer of 1688, the Scottish lord advocate Sir George Mackenzie
took care to write with news of support for the English bishops from an
unlikely quarter: Scottish presbyterians.104 As events darkened towards the
end of that critical year, Sancroft received frantic calls for help from the
other established Churches. The archbishop of Armagh begged for advice
on how to ensure that the Church of Ireland would act in a unanimous way
with the Church of England; the archbishop of Glasgow desperately sought
assistance from Sancroft with the Prince of Orange to help episcopacy and
episcopal ministers in Scotland.105 Sancroft’s psychological paralysis at this
time meant the calls were unavailing, but they represented a natural exten-
sion of earlier contacts and dialogues between the clerical elites of three
kingdoms that faced common problems, albeit mediated by different local
circumstances.

In the final analysis, we lack any extensive account by Sheldon or Sancroft

of how they imagined their status as archbishops of Canterbury to relate to
the ‘other’ Churches established by law within the Stuart kingdoms. This
lack of systematic thinking does ‘feel’ rather different to the early Stuart
situation discussed by Morrill. The changed character of the relationship
between the three Churches and their supreme governor was clearly crucial:
Charles II simply lacked his father’s ultimately self-destructive drive to
impose systems and forms on his kingdoms that would alike magnify royal
authority. Instead he tended to pursue divide-and-rule schemes, promoting
interactions between the kingdoms in an opportunistic way only when they
served to help extricate him from political problems generated primarily

102 Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘Andrew Marvell and the Lord Wharton’, The Seventeenth

Century, 18 (2003), 252–65; Sean Kelsey, ‘Philip Wharton’, O.D.N.B.

103 Goldie, ‘Danby’, pp. 90–6.
104 Bodl., MS Tanner 28, f. 113.
105 Bodl., MS Tanner 28, ff. 294, 334.

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 GRANT TAPSELL

within England.106 In such a context, Sheldon and Sancroft often needed

all the allies they could get, and were helped in their pursuit of such by the
weakness of the Scottish and Irish hierarchies. The upheavals of the mid-
century period had eroded still further their already relatively weak posi-
tions within society and public life in general. Although Scottish bishops
under the early Stuarts had not been serious rivals in terms of wealth to the
senior English sees, many had nevertheless possessed significant resources.107
By the early 1670s, however, the bishop of Brechin claimed that his see
was worth only around £150 p.a., and was reduced to pathetically peti-
tioning the crown for payment of the arrears of a pension.108 Furthermore,
the accidents of birth and death threw up relatively few really significant
and impressive archbishops of Armagh, Dublin, St Andrews, or Glasgow to
dilute or impede the practical primacy of Canterbury.
Lacking extensive and programmatic documents, we must infer a good
deal from the actions and incidental remarks of archbishops of Canterbury
and their interlocutors. At times of pastoral difficulty, for instance, those
anxious for the spiritual welfare of non-English lay peers evidently thought
it appropriate to solicit the intervention of the English primate as some
kind of higher authority.109 Sheldon clearly regarded himself as exercising a
supervisory, or admonitory, function over senior members of the Irish clergy.
After the death of Jeremy Taylor, for instance, Sheldon expressed admira-
tion for his learning, but lamented his temper: ‘I have had till of late yeares,
much to doe w[i]th him to keep him in order, and to find diversions for
him.’110 Sancroft spent significant time and effort organising and expressing
the English episcopate’s sense of solidarity with the Scottish bishops. The
extensive correspondence between bishops across the three Stuart king-
doms, and the deepening personal contacts they maintained in London
by the 1680s, all point to a good deal of de facto co-operation and shared
agendas. A single monarch, usually based in London, remained the centre of
political gravity – and patronage – for all three Church hierarchies.
Robert Baillie’s fears in the spring of 1661 that the reintroduction of epis-
copacy in Scotland would bring ‘bak upon us the Canterburian tyms, the
same designs, the same practises’ were natural for a man of his presbyterian
beliefs, but did the activity discussed in this chapter justify his alarm about
pan-Britannic ecclesiastical governance from Canterbury?111 It is tempting
to dismiss Baillie as too partial an observer. One of the few scholars to inves-

106 I hope soon to argue this point further in relation to ecclesiastical affairs in an article

on the commission for ecclesiastical promotions of 1681–4.

107 Walter Roland Foster, The Church before the Covenants: The Church of Scotland 1596–

1638 (Edinburgh, 1975), pp. 43–4.

108 H.M.C., Laing, I, 385; Foster, Bishop and Presbytery, pp. 35–6.
109 Bodl., MSS Tanner 37, f. 39; 34, f. 252.
110 Bodl., MS Carte 45, f. 222: Sheldon to Ormond, 27 Aug. 1667.
111 Quoted in Jackson, Restoration Scotland, p. 107.

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 A BRITISH PATRIARCHY

tigate the relations between the Churches of England and Scotland in this
period in any detail has emphasised the continuing differences in structure
and worship between them, and the absence of claims for English canonical
authority over the northern Church: ‘Except for the fact that it derived its
episcopal succession from the Church of England, the Church of Scotland
was no more Anglican than was the Church of Sweden.’112 More generally,
leading historians have emphasised the extent to which England and Scot-
land diverged in the Restoration period, not least because of contemporaries’
awareness that ‘British’ problems resulting from close interaction might
once more trigger a descent into political crisis and civil war.113 We have
already seen the regret collectively expressed by many Scottish bishops that
there was no ‘perfect union, twixt the tuo sister Churches, in this Island’.114
One dimension of that was the lack of a uniform liturgy for the Churches
of Scotland and England: the Book of Common Prayer was only made
permissible for use in family worship by the Scottish Privy Council as late
as 1680.115 Visiting members of the Church of England would have found
most services in Scottish churches in the 1660s and 1670s to be alien to
their own religious experience. Less obvious are the often low-key diver-
gences between the Churches of Ireland and England. Raymond Gillespie
has noted, for instance, that the short prayers for everyday events such as
going to bed or beginning work that are given in the Irish Book of Common
Prayer after 1662 do not precisely echo those set out in the English version.116
And ongoing research into national prayers and thanksgivings suggests that
although the Churches of Ireland and England promoted many of the same
fast days – for instance after the plague of 1665, or the Great Fire of London
– in Ireland there were no set forms of prayer for such days until the 1679
fast day to mark deliverance from the Popish Plot.117 Just as Morrill empha-
sised the different character of Anglo-Scottish and Anglo-Irish ecclesias-
tical links in the pre-civil war era, so we must certainly avoid describing an
un-nuanced ‘three kingdoms’ experience after 1660.
Nevertheless, it is possible to conclude with more emphasis on religious
contacts between England, Scotland, and Ireland, and even a sense of
growing congruity in religious practice, to set alongside the political and

112 Foster, Bishop and Presbytery, pp. 162–73 (quote at p. 172).

113 Notably Mark Goldie, ‘Divergence and Union: Scotland and England, 1660–1707’,
in British Problem, ed. Bradshaw and Morrill, pp. 220–8.
114 Above, p. 273.
115 G. D. Henderson, Religious Life in Seventeenth-Century Scotland (Cambridge, 1937),

pp. 148–54.
116 Raymond Gillespie, Devoted People: Belief and Religion in early Modern Ireland

(Manchester, 1997), pp. 21 and 36 n. 9.

117 Here I am entirely dependent on the generosity of Stephen Taylor in sharing the

developing findings of the AHRC-funded project on ‘British state prayers, fasts and
thanksgivings, 1540s–1940s’, hosted at Durham University.

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 GRANT TAPSELL

patronage-based engagements within the hierarchies that have been the

main focus of this chapter. Again, the 1680s seem to have been particularly
significant. The prominent contacts between Scottish and English bishops
helped to foster anxiety in presbyterian circles that pre-civil war efforts to
promote the English liturgy north of the Border might be resurrected.118
This may not have been simple paranoia. Contemporary English visitors to
Edinburgh reported that ‘great numbers’ of Books of Common Prayer were
being sold there in 1681, while recent scholarship has discerned increasing
support for fixed forms of prayer and ceremony in several parts of Scotland
at this time.119 In Charles II’s western kingdom, the long-term historical
development of the Church of Ireland continued to prompt close relations
with the Church of England in terms of ecclesiastical personnel, structures
of ecclesiastical government, and worship. In part due to the zeal of a small
number of vigorous bishops, ‘English in origin or by extraction, royalist in
politics and high church in ethos’, the Restoration period witnessed signifi-
cant use of the Book of Common Prayer in Ireland.120 This may have under-
pinned an increasing emphasis – at least in some decently documented
parishes within Dublin – on frequent communion.121 That would certainly
have reflected the clear and consistent pressure for the provision of regular
communion in prominent Church of England settings during the 1680s that
was maintained by Sancroft.122
Religious dynamics in the pre-civil war three kingdoms rested crucially
on the close working relationship between an exceptionally vigorous arch-
bishop of Canterbury, and a monarch obsessed with imposing monarchical
authority. There was no re-run of this relationship after 1660. Sheldon and
Sancroft were in general simply too busy rebuilding the Church of England
after the upheavals of the 1640s and 1650s to resurrect all of Laud’s broader
ambitions and projects during the 1660s and 1670s. Charles II’s engagement
with Scottish and Irish affairs was more fitful than his father’s, and his views
on clerical hierarchies much less sympathetic. Paradoxically, however, cler-
ical weaknesses, monarchical irresolution, and external threats combined by
the 1680s to promote very significant and multi-faceted interactions between
the three established Churches. Sancroft lacked Laud’s overtly domineering

118 Tapsell, Personal Rule, p. 178 and the sources cited there in n. 135.
119 Ibid., p. 179; Raffe, Culture of Controversy, pp. 50–1; Tristram Clarke, ‘Politics and
Prayer Books: The Book of Common Prayer in Scotland, c. 1705–1714’, Edinburgh Biblio-
graphical Society Transactions, 6 (1993), 58.
120 Jim Smyth, ‘The Communities of Ireland and the British State, 1660–1707’, in

British Problem, ed. Bradshaw and Morrill, p. 250; Gillespie, Devoted People, pp. 26–7, 95;
Raymond Gillespie, ‘Lay Spirituality and Worship, 1558–1750: Holy Books and Godly
Readers’, in The Laity and the Church of Ireland, 1000–2000: All Sorts and Conditions, ed.
Raymond Gillespie and W. G. Neely (Dublin, 2002), pp. 140–6.
121 Gillespie, Devoted People, pp. 97–9.
122 Tapsell, Personal Rule, p. 126 and the sources listed there in n. 16; R.A.P.J. Beddard,

‘William Sancroft’, O.D.N.B.

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