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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 December 2015
A title such as this hardly suggests one is breaking new ground. But I edge into print on the subject, stirred by the interesting Speaker's Lecture given by the outgoing Second Estates Commissioner, Sir Tony Baldry, in December 2014, and published in the May 2015 edition of this Journal. It reads as the enthusiastic, even romantic, expression of the State–Church relationship by an almost doctrinaire establishmentarian; and I use the word ‘doctrinaire’ deliberately, for I have spent a lifetime of bumping up against leaders of both Church and State, from Enoch Powell to George Carey (let alone Derek Pattinson and Philip Mawer), who exude a firm conviction that the establishment of the Church of England is entrenched somewhere in the Apostles' Creed. Sir Tony continues in this tradition as he serenely asserts ‘We come then to the reign of Henry VIII. I think the important point here is that the Church of England is the creation of Parliament.’ But would not Augustine, Anselm and the drafters of Magna Carta (who are cited in Baldry's previous paragraph) all be turning in their graves? And what apoplexy would have come upon Newman, Pusey and Keble to have learned that their Church was thus created? Or, more to the point, is the ecclesiastical action of Parliament in the days when church and nation were co-terminous of any relevance to whether and how an unbelieving Parliament should hold control of a Christian body today? However, it is his brief section on ‘Parliament and Anglican liturgy’ which prompted the present submission.
1 T Baldry, ‘Parliament and the Church’, (2015) 17 Ecc LJ 202–214 at 203.
2 The point here is that he says that the 1662 Book was ‘but an Annexe of a Statute’ (ibid, p 205, my emphasis), as though it were an afterthought or an appendix and the substance of the Act lay in the text of the Act, whereas in fact the two were surely interdependent: the Act would enact nothing without the Annexe; the Annexe could not be authorised without an Act.
3 That is not to say that people who could see which way the wind was blowing – no difficult task – were not anticipating the change in law and getting the Latin mass back into currency.
4 The actual uses in the last year of Henry's reign were, of course, unreformed. But they were – as soon emerged when he died – reformable: they were subject to Parliament.
5 Convocation was, as usual, convened the day after Parliament in January 1559, and put its stance very clearly into the public arena by the convinced, if quixotic, adoption of five Articles, three of them conserving their unreformed doctrine of the mass, the fourth asserting papal supremacy and the fifth their independence of Parliament. Restoring the 1552 Prayer Book was not going to figure on their agenda.
6 It is worth noting for later reference that the Act of Uniformity 1559 provided the first example of a confusion which runs to the present day, namely that the 1552 Act revised and brought together two liturgical books which had previously been enacted separately, viz the Book of Common Prayer (1549) and the Ordering of Bishops Priests and Deacons (1550). These remained legally separate books, however much they were bound together in a single volume. The single volume could then easily but erroneously be called (as it has been to the present day) the Book of Common Prayer. However the 1559 Act, by sheer inadvertence, only revived the Book of Common Prayer authorised in 1552, and in so doing failed to revive legally the ordinal of 1552. The knock-on from this is described in J Tomlinson, The Prayer Book, Articles and Homilies (London, 1897), pp 269–283, and one result still visible is the form of Article XXXVI affirming the legitimacy of orders conferred under the Edwardine ordinal. The Act of Uniformity 1662 carefully distinguishes between these two books (and includes the Psalter as a third item in the authorised package); but the distinction has never been sustained in popular speech, and even reference here to ‘the Annexed Book’ refers to a single volume containing three separate items, only one of which is the Book of Common Prayer.
7 The 1559 Act, by its sheer presence in the Prayer Book annexed to the Act in 1662, is by law the first of the contents of the 1662 book, and, though this is neither well known nor observed, it should be in every printed copy of that book today.
8 Did Elizabeth herself ever act on this? F Brightman, The English Rite, vol I (London, 1915) pp clxxii–clxxiii, records an early change in the lectionary on her instruction; another possible outcome was the later quiet restoration of a panel of post-biblical saints (solely in a ‘black-letter’ capacity) into the calendar.
9 The text is in E Cardwell, A History of Conferences and Other Proceedings Connected with the Revision of the Book of Common Prayer (second edition, Oxford, 1841) p 217, and in my own C Buchanan, The Hampton Court Conference and the 1604 Book of Common Prayer (London, 2009), p 40.
10 In Scotland Charles I went further and, lacking any warrant for Scotland comparable to the clauses in the Act of Uniformity, simply ordered the 1637 Book of Common Prayer off his own bat as a royal command. It did not prove a successful strategy.
11 I normally use the term ‘Puritans’, as Baxter and his companions at the Savoy Conference were prepared in principle to belong to an episcopal church, and the liturgical issues concerned were not directly ones of church polity but of the theological content and formation of liturgy.
12 The count of the particular exceptions varies with different authors as some exceptions raise two issues at once. The count usually proffered is 77 or 78, but the 83 here is my own count in C Buchanan, The Savoy Conference Revisited (Cambridge, 2002).
13 Curiously, no direct responsibility for the House of Lords' restraint can be attributed to the bishops, for they had not yet been re-instated to the House, a matter which had been the subject of a Bill in May and June, which, duly enacted and then going for Royal Assent after the adjournment, led to their being restored when Parliament re-assembled in November.
14 This is from the introduction to Wren's ‘Advices’, the title by which his undated manuscript is usually known. A modern reader may smile at noting the presupposition that, if church people do recognise that a change is being proposed, they can be relied upon to resist it: autres temps, mêmes moeurs.
15 The actual changes desired, and the theological implications of them, lie outside the terms of the present enquiry. They are charted in wonderful detail by that prince of modern scholars, G Cuming, in The Durham Book (Oxford, 1961). The point here is that pressures for change were leading towards revision in Convocation and there was a corresponding policy to delay or sideline the Bill waiting in the Lords.
16 The account is in E Cardwell, Synodalia, vol 2 (Oxford, 1842), pp 238 ff. Although the term ‘Convocation’ is used in the singular, the northern bishops sat with the Upper House, among them Cosin, the scholar whose proposals are set out seriatim in Cuming, The Durham Book.
17 Quoted from R Bosher, The Making of the Restoration Settlement (revised edition, London, 1957), p 244, where he is citing C Swainson, The Parliamentary History of the Act of Uniformity (London, 1875) pp 15–16. The full text of Charles's letter is in J Parker, An Introduction to the History of the Successive Revisions of the Book of Common Prayer (Oxford, 1877), p lxxxvi; in it, Charles cites his own mandate of June (part of which is quoted above) and thus now specifically identifies as touching the Prayer Book the more general charter he had given them before.
18 The process of both the commissioning and the delivery of the revised Prayer Book is recorded within the final Act of Uniformity: ‘[the Convocations have revised the Prayer Book and the ordinal] … and have exhibited and presented the same unto his majesty in writing, in one book [Prayer Book, Psalter and ordinal are then listed] … all of which his majesty having duly considered, hath fully approved and allowed the same, and recommended to this present Parliament that the said [books] … be the book which shall be appointed to be used [in all places of worship]’. In that phrase ‘be the book’ one can see how the one comprehensive volume can easily, though erroneously, come to be described simpliciter as ‘The Book of Common Prayer’.
19 It was probably also amended in small respects. One feature of the new Prayer Book which was almost certainly incorporated by the Privy Council is the ‘Declaration on Kneeling’, also known as the ‘Black Rubric’, which had been in the 1552 Prayer Book but, probably because it was not in that annexed to the 1552 Act of Uniformity (which was the text that Elizabeth's Act was reviving), it had not been in the 1559 or 1604 Prayer Books. In the manuscript Prayer Book it is written in a wholly different hand from the rest of the text and, hardly surprisingly for a late addition, it follows all the other rubrics at the end of the Holy Communion service.
20 Baldry, ‘Parliament and the Church’, p 205. Baldry continues with the odd wording ‘but the Parliamentary Archive still has a copy of one of the original books of Common Prayer that was annexed to the Bill’, which suggests in a slightly muddling way that he thought there were several ‘original’ Books, one of which was annexed to the Bill, whereas the one Annexed Book is the one ‘original’ text which was imposed by the Act of Uniformity 1662, and itself presumably exists within the Parliamentary Archive.
21 The quotation is from Cardwell, History of Conferences, p 378. It is not clear whether this was to be done by a committee (though the modern reader has to recall that the Annexed Book only existed in one manuscript copy and that consideration in plenary had to be done by reading aloud – or relying instead on a committee verdict). However, another more recondite issue raised by Cardwell may lie under this order for ‘comparison’ – that is, that, whereas the 1604 Prayer Book originally annexed to the Bill by the Commons had been a genuine 1604 printing, the Convocation Book and the manuscript rendering of it were based upon a 1636 printing of the 1604 original. There had been constant complaints that, when Laud was Archbishop of Canterbury, he had slipped various contentious alterations into the text of the Prayer Book, and therefore some worries had been raised in the Commons lest any such texts had, through their point of origin, survived unamended into what was now to become the official and only Prayer Book of the Church of England. One should add that, to a modern reader, the allegations against Laud of tampering with the text hardly add up to a row of beans; certainly the Commons proceeded as though satisfied with the text of the Annexed Book.
22 See T Fawcett, The Liturgy of Comprehension 1689: an abortive attempt to revise the Book of Common Prayer (Southend-on-Sea, 1973).