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On Misidentifying Puritans: The Case of Thomas Adams

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2017

J. Sears McGee
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Extract

On the titlepage of his collection of sermons, The Happinesse of the Church (1618), Thomas Adams styled himself “preacher” at St. Gregory’s, London. The term could indicate puritan leanings, and in the nineteenth century Robert Southey went so far as to call Adams “the prose Shakespeare of puritan theologians… scarcely inferior to Fuller in wit or to Taylor in fancy.” Adams often used the word “puritan” pejoratively. Historians, however, have classified as puritans people who rejected the term for themselves, just as political analysts-sometimes justly-classify as “liberals” or “conservatives” politicians who cavil at these terms. The problem, as always, is one of definition, and Adams affords an excellent opportunity to test the adequacy of our definitions. Like “humanist” or “republican,” “puritan” is one of those terms that have come to have a meaning that transcends the circumstances in which they originated. I argue that Adams was not a puritan; he was instead a mainstream Calvinist episcopalian of the kind so convincingly described by Patrick Collinson in his Ford lectures. Nevertheless, an attempt to place Adams in the spectrum of religious opinion has a value beyond merely getting one individual situated. Scholars have contradicted each other in their placing of Adams, and this analysis, by getting him right, will throw light on our understanding of the varieties of Calvinism in early Stuart England.

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 30 , Issue 3 , Fall 1998 , pp. 401 - 418
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1998

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Footnotes

*

For helpful comments on earlier versions of this essay, I would like to thank David Schmidt, Paul Christianson, Kevin Sharpe, Judith Maltby, and especially Paul Seaver.

References

1 Unfortunately, no one has discovered just where Southey wrote this. See the discussion in Hedges, James Laurence, “Thomas Adams and the Ministry of Moderation,” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Riverside, 1974)Google Scholar. (Hereafter cited as Hedges, “Thomas Adams.”)

2 the Religion of Protestants (Oxford, 1982), pp. 81—91. See also Fincham, Kenneth Prelate as Pastor (Oxford, 1990)Google Scholar and the introduction to Fincham, ed, The Early Stuart Church, 1603—1642 (Basingstoke, 1993).

3 Parliaments and English Politics, 1621—1629 (Oxford, 1979), p. 13. Adams dedicated Mysticall Bedlam (1615) to Lord Chancellor Ellesmere, whose clerical clients included puritans. See Knafla, Louis A. Law and Politics in Jacobean England (Cambridge, 1977), p. 54CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The Happiness of the Church was dedicated to another lawyer, Henry Montagu (later first earl of Manchester), who was Coke’s successor as chief justice of King’s Bench in 1616. Montagu was not an admirer of Laud. See Cope, Esther S. The Life of a Public Man (Philadelphia, 1981), p. 154Google Scholar.

4 See Sharpe, Kevin The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, 1992), pp. 334—35Google Scholar.

5 The Works of Thomas Adams (Edinburgh, 1861—62). The author of the “memoir” of Adams was Joseph Angus, D.D., Principal of the Baptist College, Regent’s Park, London.

6 Haller, , The Rise of Puritanism (New York, 1938), p. 31Google Scholar; Bush, , English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century (2d ed.; Oxford, 1962), p. 314Google Scholar; Mitchell, , English Pulpit Oratory From Andrewes to Tillotson (New York 1962), p. 213Google Scholar; New, , Anglican and Puritan (Stanford, 1964), pp. 36, 101Google Scholar; George, , The Protestant Mind of the English Reformation (Princeton, 1961), pp. 405—06Google Scholar; Hill, , Change and Continuity, in Seventeenth-Century England(Cambridge, Mass.,1975), p. 96Google Scholar.

7 Like Angels from a Cloud: the English Metaphysical Preachers, 1588—1645 (San Marino, 1986), p. 100.

8 On Historians (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), p. 238.

9 Hedges, “Thomas Adams,” p. 164. This conclusion comes at the end of a lengthy chapter in which Hedges discusses a number of writers who have called Adams a puritan.

10 Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge, 1982), p. 282. For some seventeenth-century examples of the emphasis upon mutual recognition, see my Godly Man in Stuart England (New Haven, 1976), pp. 173—89.

11 An important source for puritan animus against “idolatry and superstition” was Calvin himself. See Eire, Carlos M. N., War Against the Idols(Cambridge, 1993)Google Scholar.

12 Venn, Alumni Cantabrigiensis, 1: 6. See Hedges, “Thomas Adams,” p. 7, for the evidence on Adams’s birth and death dates.

13 Levack, Brian P., The Civil Lawyers in England, 1603—1641 (Oxford, 1973), p. 192Google Scholar. Except for Pembroke and Marten, Adams’s dedicatees are obscure.

14 He may have owed St. Bennet’s to Pembroke, who arranged for him to preach at Whitehall in 1625 and to whom he dedicated other works. His first benefice was the curacy of Northall, Beds. from March 1605 to 1611 (my thanks to Judith Maltby for this information). By 1612 he was “a preacher of the Gospel” at Willington, Cambs, and on 21 December 1621 he moved to Wingrave, Bucks as vicar, a benefice he owed to Lord Ellesmere. His lectureship at St. Gregory’s seems to have lasted from 1617 or 1618 until 1623. Hedges, “Thomas Adams,” p. 8.

15 John Walker, An Attempt… (1714), Pt II, p. 164. Grosart cites the reference in Newcourt. D.N.B.

16 Matthews, , Walker Revised (Oxford, 1948), p. 42Google Scholar.

17 Hedges, “Thomas Adams,” p. 11. Adams was also listed as sequestered in the rabidly anti-Puritan pamphlet, Persecutio Undecima (London, 1646). For evidence that he stayed in the rectory at St. Bennet’s, despite his sequestration, see Matthews, Walker Revised, p. 42. He may also have continued to participate in the administration of the sacraments. On this possibility, see Hedges, “Thomas Adams,” pp. 12—13.

18 Hexter, On Historians, p. 238n.

19 Seaver, Paul, The Puritan Lectureships (Stanford, 1970), pp. 236—38Google Scholar for the connections among London puritans. My thanks to Paul Seaver for additional information about St. Gregory’s and St. Bennet’s. One cannot help wondering whether there was some other network of clergy in which Adams participated, but I have found no evidence on this point For an impressive study of Caroline puritan clerical networks, see Webster, Tom, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 John Chandos, who included substantial excerpts from Adams in his valuable sermon anthology, In God’s Name (Indianapolis and New York, 1971), opined that Adams was “one of the more considerable buried literary talents of the seventeenth century. [Adams] was endowed with the equipment to have made a playwright of distinction, and, when he went into the pulpit, the forces with which he was charged could not be suppressed…” (pp. 156—57). Chandos argued that Adams deserved to be placed close to “the other two high masters of the narrative sermon” in the period, John Donne and Jeremy Taylor. Grosart thought him “surprisingly eloquent and brilliant, and much more thought-laden than either [Jeremy Taylor or Thomas Fuller].” D.N.B.

21 The Happiness of the Church (1618), I: 69. (Hereafter cited as Happiness.) The book is in two parts, each separately paginated. Part numbers will be indicated by Roman numerals. For a similar use of the word “puritan,” see Peter Lake, “Matthew Hutton, a Puritan Bishop?” in History 64 (June 1979): 189.

22 Ibid., pp. 241—42, 433. For more examples, see Hedges, “Thomas Adams,” pp. 100—09.

23 A Commentary upon the second epistle of St. Peter (1633), pp. 665—66, 670. Hedges, “Thomas Adams” (p. 104) argues, on the basis of a few dates in the margins and other internal evidence, that this work was written in chronological order and that this section was written between 1621 and 1624 (see Hedges, “Thomas Adams,” pp. 32—33). On zeal, see Lake, Peter, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 147—50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Lycanthropy; or, The Wolf Worrying the Lambs (1615), pp. 26, 24.

25 The Black Devill, p. 35; The Fatal Banket (1614) in Works, p. 185.

26 ”Meditations Upon Part of the Creed,” in Works (1629), p. 1087. Cf., p. 1164, where he compares popish to pagan idolatry, in which “the glory of a Church [is] like the glory of a Play-house, where every man is courting his owne Mistresse.”

27 Happiness, I, 419; II, 311. Cf. “our upholding of Theaters, to the contempt of Religion…,” Works, p. 40.

28 Hedges, “Thomas Adams,” p. 10.

29 Criticism and Compliment (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 11—14.

30 Five Sermons (1626), pp. 46—47 (cf. p. 50).

31 Happiness, I, 205, 419. But Adams rejected extreme Sabbatarianism: “There is a Pharasaica Justi-tiae, a Puritane righteousness: not to endure an houres recreation on the Sunday, yet to robbe the Church by usurpations,” p. 142.

32 Quoted in Parker, Kenneth L., The English Sabbath (Cambridge, 1988), p. 45CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Parker demonstrates that puritans were far from being the only advocates of the Sabbatarianism described by the homilist.

33 ”The Barren Tree,” in Five Sermons (1626), pp. 48—49. “The Barren Tree” and “The Temple” are the last two sermons in this collection. They have their own title-pages and are paginated separately. Hereafter I will cite them by their titles.

34 Works, p. 40. See also Happiness, I, 13, 173; II, 306.

35 Ibid., pp. 342—46. Cf. Works, p. 1038. The dangers of wealth and worldly reputation were favorite themes for Adams. Cf. Happiness, II, 233—34: “A great name of worldly glory is but like a peale rung on the bels: the Common people are the clappers: the rope that moves a popularitie: if once you let goe your hold & leave pulling, the clapper lies still…. The world it self is not unlike an Hartechoke: Nine parts of it are unprofitable leaves, scarce the tythe is good.” Adams was not, however, advocating asceticism: “Riches and honour are Gods gifts, therefore themselves not evill…,” pp. 251—52.

36 Ibid., I, 73. Similarly, I, 18—19, 234; II, 27, 91, 52, 241, 249, 336, 344.

37 Ibid., p. 85. Cf. p. 122: “The infallible certaintie of a true Christians salvation is knowne to himself.” This is not to say that the godly did not have to strive to increase their assurance-see II, 328—30.

38 See, for example, Happiness, I, 34, 46, 126, 141, 145, 162, 207, 249, 288; II, 91, 97, 104, 113, 125, 270, 310, 329, 348; “The Temple,” pp. 17, 39.

39 Works, pp. 365, 367, cf., p. 27.

40 A Commentary upon the Second Epistle by St. Peter (1633), p. 24.

41 Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists (Oxford, 1987). I am not convinced by the argument advanced by White, Peter in Predestination, Policy and Polemic(Cambridge, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a recent sketch reasserting Tyacke’s position, see Kenneth Fincham, ed., The Early Stuart Church, 1603 — 1642 (London, 1993), ch. 1.

42 Five Sermons, p. 33.

43 Ibid., pp. 34—35.

44 The Temple, p. 8. Cf. Happiness, I,58, 60.

45 Happiness, II, 13, 14. See also Hedges, “Thomas Adams,” p. 105ff.

46 For his blasts at the Separatists and Anabaptists (both also called “Schismatickes”), see, for example: Happiness, I, 57, 66—68, 76, 217, 262; II, 10—12, 100 (“There was a great fire of An abaptisme; a grosse, perverse, and sottish sect, that hadde washed off their font-water, as uncleane”), 108—09, 118—19 (“The Schismaticke meets with the Romanist, in superstition another way”), 236, 306, 370—71.

47 Happiness, II, 101. For another attack on the Anabaptists, see Works, pp. 1006, 1133. For the Brownists, Works, p. 185; Sectaries, Novelists and Humorists, pp. 187, 208, 1203; “affecters of innovation,” p. 1059.

48 Ibid., 14.

49 Ibid., 109.

50 Five Sermons, pp. 29—30. Further: “Let us keepe the substance; for the shadow, God hath kept us at libertie.” Cf. Happiness, II, 133: “It is wittily observed, that the over-precise are so thwartingly crosse to the superstitious in all things, that they will scarce doe a good worke, because an Hereticke doth it.” The context is a passage in praise of charity, but one suspects Adams might have applied it here as well. Conformists were fond of charging their “precise” critics with uncharitableness. For examples, see my Godly Man in Stuart England, pp. 213—19.

51 Works, p. 1010 (from a 1630 sermon, “Eirenopolis: the Citie of Peace”).

52 Happiness, II, 116. See also Commentary, pp. 144—45, 390; Works, pp. 187, 1076.

53 “The Temple,” p. 41. This sermon is largely devoted to the theme of popish idolatry.

54 Happiness, II. 52—53.

55 First published in Works (1629), pp. 1120, 1139, 1203. In his Commentary on Peter’s second epistle, he complained that “many sit in the Church as at a Theater: their hands are too idle to uncover their heads, their knees too stiffe to bow to Christ,” p. 147. This was not a new concern appearing only in the Commentary (1633) and the Meditations. In a 1612 Paul’s Cross sermon he reminded his hearers that they would lose the value of their prayers if “when the ground hath your knee, the world hath your conscience.” In Works, p. 48.

56 Commentary, p. 147. Lake, “Lancelot Andrewes, John Buckeridge and Avant-Garde Conformity at the Court of James I,” in Linda Levy Peck, ed., The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 118, 128—30.

57 Ibid., pp. 325—26.

58 Works, p. 1162. God could, he admitted, save souls other than through preaching, but in his “ordinary, not extraordinary operations,” he “usually worketh this in our hearts by his word” (p. 1021). Although he denounced those who stayed at home from public prayer when there was no sermon, he also said that “it is not enough to weare a decent Surplisse, &c (though some out of their curiositie thinke that too much) when the peoples soûles are starved for the bread of Heaven.” Heaven and Earth Reconcil’d (1613), sigs. D3r, v. He also castigated a practice Puritans defended: sermon-gadding, sig. C4v.

59 Works, p. 38. The White Devill had five editions between 1613 and 1617. Adams was, like Laud, appalled at the church’s declining endowments but, unlike Laud, more troubled by the consequence for preaching than for sacraments. For other examples of his hatred of the sacrilegious behavior of impropriators, see Lycanthropy (1615), pp. 16—17, 29; Heaven and Earth Reconcil’d (1613), sigs. E4v, F4v, Glv; Works, pp. 52 (“Ministers cannot now play the theeves with the Livings, they have nothing left to steale”), 185, 1024, 1060, 1206.

60 Ibid., I, 240. Cf. Commentary, p. 4 (“commonly the mst lewd Cardinali is chosen Pope”); Works, p. 171, 205, 210 (“Priests are licensed their Concubines, though inhibited Wives. Adulterie is reckoned among their pettie sinnes…. The whole Citie [Rome] is become a meere Stewes”). For his opposition to vows of “Poverty, Virginity, Pilgrimage,” see Happiness, I, 216. Cf. Works, p. 215; Heaven and Earth Reconcil ‘d, sig. F4r.

61 Ibid., I, 181; II, 336. Cf. I, 382; Five Sermons, pp. 58—59; Works, pp. 50, 208, 1049—1050.

62 Ibid., I, 153—54. Cf. “The Temple,” pp. 31—43; Works, pp. 1197, 1224—27.

63 Ibid., II, 53. Cf. Works, p. 170.

64 Works, pp. 236, 508, 1207, 1215; Commentary, p. 145, 390; The Black Devill (1615), p. 66.

65 On transubstantiation, see Happiness, I, 65, 156, Works, pp. 508—09, 1087, 1109, 1120, 1153. On merit, The Black Devill, p. 23; Works, pp. 185, 1034. On supererogation, Happiness, I, 266—67; II, 174. On infallibility, Happiness, I, 62; Works, p. 1213. On indulgences, Happiness, I, 395—96; Works, p. 210; “The Temple,” p. 50. On prayer to saints, Happiness, I, 151, 253, 266—67; II, 116, 336, 363; “The Temple,” p. 42.

66 John Morrill has shown that Oliver Cromwell’s schoolmaster, Dr. Thomas Beard, for all of his vigorous anti-Catholicism (he wrote one tract arguing that the Pope was the Antichrist), was certainly no puritan. “The Making of Oliver Cromwell,” in Morrill, John, ed., Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (London, 1990), pp. 27—28Google Scholar.

67 “The Significance of the Elizabethan Identification of the Pope as Antichrist,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 31 (April 1980): 161. See also his “Anti-popery: the Structure of a Prejudice” in Cust, Richard and Hughes, Ann, eds., Conflict in Early Stuart England (London and New York, 1989)Google Scholar.

68 “Matthew Hutton-a Puritan Bishop” in History 64 (June 1979): 182. The parallels between Hutton’s attitudes as Lake identifies them in this article and Adams’s views are striking. For Hutton’s hatred of “oppression” of smallholders by landlords, see p. 190; cf. Adams, Happiness, I, 172, 241, 335, 345, 387, 415—16; II, 40, 118, 142, 207, 256, 314. On Hutton’s resistance to lay encroachment on the church’s wealth, pp. 192—93; cf. Adams, ibid., I, 52, 77, 79—80, 118, 144, 174, 203—04, 214, 226, 240, 262, 379, 385. On Hutton’s attitude toward the Puritans, pp. 298—99 and the discussion of Adams’s attitude above.

69 Happiness, I, 58—59.

70 Ibid., p. 57. He was fond of comparing the Anabaptists and other “extreme” Protestants with the Papists. See, for example, Works, pp. 34, 185, 189, 401—02 (“it is good to flye from the Gulfe of superstition, but withall to avoid the shallow of separation”).

71 Works, pp. 412, 508—09.

72 Happiness, I, 174—75. For other attacks on the Jesuits and “Seminaries” as the traitors, see ibid., I, 63, 233, 396; II, 81, 88, 101, 114ff, 203; Five Sermons, p. 59; “The Temple,” p. 47; Works, pp. 45, 198, 412, 1059, 1159, 1168, 1200.

73 McCabe, Richard, Joseph Hall: a Study in Satire and Meditation (Oxford, 1982), p. 208Google Scholar. My thanks to Paul Christianson for bringing this work to my attention. Other Calvinist Episcopalians to whom Adams could be compared are Robert Sanderson and Humphrey Sydenham. On Sanderson, see Lake, Peter, “Serving God and the Times: the Calvinist Conformity of Robert Sanderson,” in Journal of British Studies 27, 2 (1988): 81—116Google Scholar. On Sydenham, see McGee, The Godly Man in Stuart England, and Milton, Anthony, Catholic and Reformed (Cambridge, 1994)Google Scholar.