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Walton's Redaction of Hooker

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Frederic E. Pamp Jr
Frederic E. Pamp Jr
Affiliation:
Smith College, Northampton, Mass
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Extract

Richard Hooker's Of The Laws of Ecclesiasticall Polity is in many ways the great explicit crystallization of the whole philosophic scheme by which Elizabethan England lived. Historically it represents the doctrinal “Thus far and no farther” which the English monarchy flung at the forces of the Reformation. Published at a moment of crisis in 1593, the first four Books provided a base upon which the hard-pressed Anglicans could rally against the renewed attacks of Presbyterianism. With the Fifth Book (published in 1597) they remained the great touchstone of Anglican doctrine throughout the seventeenth century. It is no small weapon in controversy to have your doctrines demonstrated so unanswerably as Hooker did the Anglican to be the logical manifestation of the one great integrated scheme of the universe which all parties already accept as valid.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , June 1948 , pp. 95 - 116
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1948

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References

1 Note the sense of erisis, almost of a cause already lost, in the opening words of the Polity: “Though for no other cause, yet for this; that posterity may know we have not loosely through silence permitted things to pass away as in a dream, there shall be for men's information extant thus much concerning the present state of the Church of God established amongst us, and their careful endeavour which would have upheld the same.”

2 C. J., Sisson points out, in The Judicious Marriage of Mr. Hoooker (Cambridge, 1940)Google Scholar, how the publication of the first four Books of the Polity, as now established, in 1593, was probably part of a carefully worked.out legislative program with the Conventiele Act of that year.

3 Houk, Raymond Aaron, Hooker's Eoclesiasticall Polity, Book VIII (New York, 1931)Google Scholar. Sisson and Houk are in general agreement, except on the question of the form in which Hooker left the Polity at his death. Professor Craig, Hardin (“Of the Laws of Ecclesiasticall Polity…First Forni,” Journal of Me History of Ideas, V (1944), 91ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar) supports Houk's contention that the entire eight Books were in a form ready for publication in 1593. Sisson claims that Hooker's death interrupted the actual composition of the last three Books.

4 Hallam, Henry, The Constitutional History of England (1876), I, 220–21.Google ScholarColeridge, H. N., ed., The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London, 1838), III, 10–20.Google Scholar Both reprinted in Sisson, 186–187.

5 In 1589, in a sermon at Paul's Cross. John, Keble ed., The Works of … Mr. Richard Hooker, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1863), I, lxv ff.Google Scholar

6 Houk, , Pokty, 73–74.Google Scholar

7 Keble, , Works, III, 108ff.Google Scholar; Sisson, , the Judicious Marriage, 100.Google Scholar

8 Quoted, by Houk, , Polity, 113.Google Scholar

9 Sisson, , The Judicious Marriage, 94.Google Scholar

10 Ibid., 104.

11 See also Houk, , Polity, 77.Google Scholar

12 Sisson, , The Judicious Marriage,108.Google Scholar

13 John, Gauden, The Works of Mr. Richard Hooker … with an Account of his Holy Life and Happy Death (1662), 14.Google Scholar

14 Lives, by Izaak Wahon (Oxford, World's Classics), 235.Google Scholar

15 (After the Civil War) “English churchmen were in the mood to accept, and even to enforce, a theory of the episcopal office which would have been generally rejected before.” Henson, Herbert Henley, The Church of Engiand (Cambridge, 1939), 122.Google Scholar

16 “… all or most of which, I have seen written,” 201.

17 One might add the considerations I note below: that some of the practises of Hooker as a parish priest, taken as beyond dispute by Walton, are actually matters of argument in the Polity, and the clear misrepresentation of Hooker's position on the social contract and apostolic succession, which Walton could never have accomplished so confidently had he read the Polity, even in an edition he distrusted. Keble (see below) cites grounds for the same conclusion.

19 See Sehutt, Marie: Die Englische Biografik der Tudorzeit (Hamburg, 1930).Google Scholar

20 Butt, John, “Izaak Walton's Methods in Biography,” Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, XIX (Oxford, 1934), 70.Google Scholar

21 Paity, II, xiii, 2.Google Scholar

22 Keble, , Woriks, I, ii.Google Scholar

23 Keble, in a note on this passage in the Life, notes that ceremony as “a usage excepted against by the Puritans,” but there were many more important points that Walton might have chosen to bring out, on which Hooker disagreed with them.

24 Reprinted by Thomas, Zouch in his edition of the Lives (1817), II.Google Scholar

25 Walton, , Life of Herbert, 418.Google Scholar

26 It is interesting to note that Gauden seems to have been aware of this title, for in his Life of Hooker he says: “Here this great Master of the Assembly not onely drives home to the head these Clavos Trabales, strong nails, which by the hammer of Reason he forged on the Anvil of Religion, but he clencht them so fast that they are not to be drawn out.” If we consider that Barnard has “drawn out” of context passages to indicate a meeting at variance with Hooker's total meaning, we may conclude that Gauden was using this edition of Hooker as a discreet vehicle for opposition to the tendency of High Church doctirne to take its own way with the Church. There were several issues of the Gauden edition, as Houk makes clear (pp. 121ff.), the later one clearly necessitated by the appearance of Clavi Trabales. There is something to be saud, I believe for the hypothesis that Gauden was commenting on the nature of the prupose behind Clavi Trabales in the above passage.

27 Keble claims that: “It seems rather as if he had found a copy, made by or for the archbishop, (and that an unfinished one) of certain portions of the treatise” (I,96n).

28 Clavi Trabales is essentially an apologia for Ussher in some of the Same Terms as Walton's Life is for Hooker. Barnard uses the same historical argument as Walton to Explain Ussher's compromise proposal of 1640 for “Reduction of Episcopacy to the form of Synodical Government” as “occasioned by the present Tempestuous Violence of the Times” (p. 54). Both these books may be seen as part of a concerted effort on the part of the Restoration Church to shore up its new intransigency by at once refurbishing the leading figures of the past generation, and narrowing the scope of their doctrines. Guaden's position in this campaign may be deduced from Jordan's, W. K. notice of him in The Development of Religious Toleration in England (Cambridge, Mass., 1940), IV, 426 n.Google Scholar

29 Gauden claimed that the manuscripts he used were in the hand of Hooker.

30 Polity, 73ff.

31 The quotations in Clavi Trabales are all from the Eighth Book!

32 Paiity, 31.

33 Hooker, , Polity, VII, xi, 11.Google Scholar

34 Ibid., VII, iv, 4. Italics mine.

85 Keble, , Works, I, p. lxxvii.Google Scholar

36 Ibid., I, p. lxv.

37 Sisson, , The Judicious Marriage, 10.Google Scholar

38 Italics mine.

39 It is perhaps significant that Hooker and Saravia and the defence of episcopacy are also joined in Clavi Trabales, which contains the text of a letter by Saravia to his former parishioners on the Channel Islands, arguing for the rights of the episcopal courts.

40 Keble, , Works, I, p. lxvii.Google Scholar

41 Keble obviously does not entirely accept the strength of his own statement, for he goes on to attribute to Hooker the opinions (and inferentially the authorship) of an anonymous Latin treatise, Querimonia Ecclesia. He must then confess, a few pages later (xcv), that there are no grounds at nil for assuming Hooker to be the author.