Canon Estcourt's book is, in all respects, a most remarkable one, and can hardly fail to make an era in the controversy. It is a monument, not merely of successful research, but of that intimate acquaintance with a very complicated and difficult subject which nothing but the assiduous labor of years can give. It is perfectly calm and judicial both in its tone and in its conclusions; for learning, like charity, is long-suffering. It does not contain, we believe all parties will admit, a single instance of overstrained or ad captandum argument, whilst moving with measured pace to its unassailable conclusions. So studiously gentle has Canon Estcourt been throughout in his language, and so scrupulous in his choice of weapons, that we can hardly wonder if some of his Catholic readers are startled as though the trumpet had given an uncertain sound, and if Anglicans, like the executioner's victim in the story, hardly know at first that the fatal blow has been struck.
The scope which Canon Estcourt proposes to himself (p. 3) is to ascertain the value of Anglican pretensions to orders as judged by the standard of Catholic theology. Anglicans have professed themselves anxious that the Holy See should reconsider their case. They insist that the practice of ordaining converts from the Anglican ministry who aspire to the priesthood is, upon Catholic principles, inconsistent with any real knowledge of the history of Anglican ordinations.
Few things, we suppose, would surprise a Catholic more than to find that the authorities of the church had been pursuing a course in regard to Anglican orders which, though morally justified by a host of suspicious circumstances, yet was not in accordance with the real facts of the case. Still, such a misfortune, however improbable, is not inconceivable. There is nothing incompatible with the principles of the Catholic faith in the supposition that the Holy See may have been practically misled in a matter of historical evidence, where such misleading could involve no misrepresentation of truth and no fatal mischief. It would have been otherwise had a formal decision been given upon any point of doctrine, as, for instance, the validity of this or that form; or, again, if the decision, though merely practical in its form, yet, like the admission of Greek orders at Florence, had held an integral portion of church life dependent upon its correctness.
[pg 468]We think Canon Estcourt has proved that Anglican orders, regarded in the light of the latest research into their documentary history, are thoroughly untrustworthy; and that any reconsideration of their case by the authorities of the church could only result in a confirmation of the ancient practice. He shows, 1st, that the consecration, under any form, of Parker's consecrator, Barlow, is doubtful, and that it is exceedingly doubtful if the assistance of Bishop Hodgkin at Parker's consecration would make up for the inefficiency of the consecrator. 2d. That, although certain deficiencies in the Anglican form for the priesthood, upon which various Catholic controversialists have laid stress, are not in se invalidating, yet that, regard being had to the genesis and context of the form, and to the theology of those who framed and first used it, it cannot be regarded as an implicit signification of the Catholic doctrines of the priesthood and the sacrifice—such as a form consisting of the same words might be, amongst Greeks or Abyssinians—but as an implicit denial of the same. Thus the Anglican form is substantially different from any form which the church has accounted as even probable, and is quite inappropriate for conferring the “potentiam ordinis.”
Before proceeding to examine Canon Estcourt's treatment of the two main points of the question, the status of Parker's consecrator, and the value of the Edwardine form, it will be well to consider an objection that may be brought against him from the Catholic side. It may be urged that, in his anxiety to do justice to his opponents, he has allowed them to assume a better position than they have any right to occupy. Anglicans owe the assumed assistance of a duly consecrated bishop at Parker's consecration, and the assumed use of a form as Catholic as the Edwardine, to the assumed correctness of the Lambeth Register. This document records that on the 17th of December, 1559, Parker was consecrated at Lambeth, according to the rite of Edward VI., by Barlow, Coverdale, Scory, and Hodgkin. Of these, Coverdale and Scory had been consecrated by undoubted bishops, using the Edwardine rite; Hodgkin by an undoubted bishop, using the Catholic rite. This Register was first produced by Francis Mason in 1616; and even Canon Estcourt, whilst granting the truth of its main statements, denies that it can be accepted as “an authentic and contemporaneous account of the facts as they occurred.” On the other hand, there is a time-honored account which has long passed current amongst Catholics, and which still finds able and zealous defenders amongst their number.101 According to this account, at a meeting held at the Nag's Head inn in Chepeside, Scory alone performed the ceremony upon Parker and sundry other ordinandi, by laying the Bible upon their head or shoulders, and saying, “Take thou authority to preach the word of God.” Here, whatever may be said of the consecrator, the form is confessedly insufficient.
Canon Estcourt, following Lingard and Tiernay, simply rejects the Nag's Head account as controversially worthless, and accepts that given by the Lambeth Register as substantially correct. We think that he is amply justified in so doing. Of course, however, each account must stand upon its own basis, and the rejection of the one does not involve the admission of the other.
[pg 469]As Canon Estcourt, in his enumeration of sources of evidence (p. 11), remarks, “A story that has passed from person to person merely by verbal tradition, even if names are quoted as authority, but without written testimony, cannot be accepted as evidence, nor allowed to have weight as an argument, even it considered probable as an historical fact.” Now, it is notorious that the Nag's Head story depends merely upon hearsay testimony, without a particle of documentary evidence. Whatever vague rumors may have been current, there is no proof that the story ever assumed a “questionable shape” until F. Holiwood (Sacrobosco) published it in 1604. Stapleton, one of our most learned and vigorous controversialists, in a work published only five years after the date assigned to the Nag's Head consecration, does not mention it; and, moreover, says in so many words that the Anglican bishops were consecrated according to the rite of Edward VI. Neither has Saunders a word of it among all his well-merited vituperation of the “Parliament bishops,” in his Clavis Davidica; nor Rischton, the continuator of his De Schismate. These writers certainly lacked neither information nor courage. It is true that when once the Nag's Head story was brought out, controversialists on either side were apt to interpret the expressions of the earlier Catholic writers as referring to this particular charge; but when we turn to them, we find nothing more than the general charge of invalidity.102
Dr. Champneys, who wrote in 1616, relates the story upon the authority of F. Bluett, a prisoner in Wisbech Castle, who said he had it from Mr. Neale, the eye-witness. This last-named person, being at the time Bishop Bonner's chaplain, was sent by him, so the story runs, to inhibit Kitchen of Llandaff from consecrating, and thus witnessed the whole irregular proceeding. All the threads of tradition—with one exception, which we shall notice further on—appear to centre in F. Bluett. He told Dr. Champneys; he told, so says Dr. Champneys, F. Holiwood, who printed the story, in a condensed form, in 1604. Dr. Kenrick thought he had discovered from Pitts103 another mouth-piece of Neale's in Neale's friend, Mr. Orton; but it is not so. Pitts, in his biographical notice of Neale, after stating that various particulars, which he gives, are upon the authority of Orton, proceeds to say of Neale: “This was the very same man who was sent by Bonner,” etc., emphatically marking off the Nag's Head story as not being one of the things he had heard from Orton, though otherwise sufficiently notorious.
Of Bluett nothing is known, except that he was for a long while prisoner for the faith, which of course speaks volumes for his honesty. But a lengthened imprisonment is not unfavorable for delusions, especially of a religious character. When we come to consider the character of the reputed first-hand in the line of tradition, Mr. Thomas Neale, we find ourselves upon very different ground. If F. Bluett's lengthy imprisonment is deservedly reckoned in his favor, what shall we say of a man who was able, on the accession of Elizabeth, after having been Bishop Bonner's chaplain, to take a public professorship in Oxford, and who, on his giving this up, was in a position to build [pg 470] himself a house opposite Hertford College, long known by the name of Neale's Buildings? These facts, admitted on all hands, sufficiently bear out Anthony à Wood's account of him: that his religion “was more Catholic than Protestant,” that he dreaded being called in question “for his seldom frequenting the church and receiving the sacrament.” À Wood is certainly not writing with a controversial purpose, and this is hardly the line that a Protestant depreciation of a hostile witness would take. The defenders of the Nag's Head story have had to meet the objection that Bonner dared not, whilst a prisoner, have taken the bold step ascribed to him, by an appeal to his notorious fearlessness. On the other hand, every one admits that Neale was an arrant coward; “of a timorous nature,” says à Wood; “of a nature marvellously fearful,” says Pitts. Now, if Bonner showed his courage by inhibiting, what must have been the courage of the man who ventured into the lion's den to execute the inhibition, and stood doggedly by to see how far it was obeyed? Surely we should have reason to be surprised if, after such an exhibition of courage, Neale had been afraid to put the matter on paper, or to breathe a word of it except to F. Bluett.
It has been attempted to establish the Nag's Head story upon another line of tradition, independent, not only of Bluett, but of Neale. Mr. Ward, in his Nullity of the Protestant Clergy, when mentioning the well-known examination of the Lambeth Register, in 1614, by certain Catholic priests then in confinement, at the request of Archbishop Abbot, continues: “But Mr. Plowden, yet living, does depose that he had it from F. Faircloth's own mouth, with whom he lived many years an intimate friend, this ensuing answer of F. Faircloth's to Abbot: My lord, said he, my father was a Protestant, and kept a shop in Chepeside, and assured me that himself was present at Parker's and the four Protestant bishops' consecration at the Nag's Head in Chepeside,” etc. This is mere hearsay, but we confess that we see no grounds for doubting that F. Faircloth made just the answer attributed to him. He was doubtless a firm believer in the Nag's Head story as related by Bluett, and his father, who had been a shopkeeper in Chepeside, was able to tell him that the Nag's Head Inn was no myth; nay, that there had been a meeting of bishops there; that he, Faircloth senior, had seen them. Who does not know how often and how honestly ocular evidence for an unimportant item is accepted as evidence of the whole? If old Faircloth had been able to give any real confirmation of the story, surely more would have been made of him.
Even if it be admitted that a consecration of some sort did take place at the Nag's Head, there is an important discrepancy in the versions given by Holiwood and Champneys of the Neale and Bluett story, which is fatal to it as an accurate account of what took place. Holiwood says that Scory “caused John Jewell to rise up Bishop of Salisbury, and him that was Robert Horn before to rise up Bishop of Winchester, and so forth with all the rest.” If this is to be taken as an exact account of what took place, no specific form at all was used; and F. Fitzsimon follows to precisely the same effect: “Scory orders them all to kneel down; then, taking the hand of Parker, says, ‘Rise, Lord Bishop of Canterbury’; in like manner to Grindal, ‘Rise, Lord Bishop of London,’ ” etc. But, according to Dr. Champneys, “Having the Bible in his hand, they all kneeling [pg 471] before him, he laid it upon every one of their heads or shoulders, saying, ‘Take thou authority to preach the word of God sincerely’ ”—a very distinct form indeed, however invalid.
We reject, then, the Nag's Head story, 1st, as lacking all but hearsay evidence, and hearsay evidence is at the command of any cause; 2d, as exhibiting various notes of intrinsic improbability; 3d, as wholly irrelevant, in the present aspect of the controversy, to the question of Anglican orders. It is irrelevant, because, whatever was or was not done at the Nag's Head, it is quite clear that the parties concerned, the government, and the bishops were no more satisfied with it than Catholics would have been, but continued to move for Parker's consecration precisely as if nothing had been done. At the same time, we protest against the notion that the Nag's Head story was a gratuitous lie. For, first, it is admitted that the bishops did meet at this identical inn for purposes convivial or otherwise, and to such meeting—viz., the confirmation dinner—both Fuller and Heylin, Strype and Collier, trace the story.104 Secondly, the well-known disbelief in orders prevailing amongst the Protestant party; their repeatedly shrinking from the Catholic challenge to produce their proofs; their insistence, when speaking of their episcopacy, that ordination by a priest was valid, when taken together, justified Catholics in the growing suspicion that there was a terrible flaw somewhere, an irregularity which even an Elizabethan conscience stickled at. No one who reflects upon the genuine horror and contempt which the sight of the hen-pecked bishops of England, with their woman-pope, excited throughout Christendom, can regard the Nag's Head story as an extravagant or gratuitous outcome of Catholic imagination.
The principal interest of the fable lies in the fact that it fairly got through the Anglican skin, and forced the production of the Lambeth Register. All the denials of their orders by controversialists like the Jesuit Harding, all Saunders's taunts about petticoat government, affected them no whit. Orthodoxy and honesty might go to the winds, but one virtue they did set store by, and that was Christian gravity; and this tavern-story so stung them that they could keep their counsel no longer.
We shall now proceed, taking Canon Estcourt as our guide, to examine, in chronological order, the various documents connected with Parker's consecration.
On the 19th of July, 1559, Elizabeth issued the congé d'elire to the Chapter of Canterbury, that see having been just seven months vacant after the death of Cardinal Pole. On the 9th of August the election took place. September 9, a royal commission was issued for the confirmation and consecration of Parker, to whom letters-patent of the same date were addressed. The commission was addressed to Tonstall of Durham, Bourne of Bath and Wells, Pole of Peterborough, and Kitchen of Llandaff, being four out of the five remaining Catholic bishops, Turberville of Exeter being the only one omitted. But joined with the above four were the returned refugees, Barlow and Scory. Of the four Catholic bishops, the first three positively refused to consecrate, and were shortly after deprived. Kitchen of Llandaff, unfaithful though he was, somehow managed to get out of it; perhaps [pg 472] on the score of his weak sight—the excuse attributed to him in the Nag's Head story.
Next in order comes a paper yet remaining in the State Paper Office, which may be called the programme of the consecration. Canon Estcourt gives a fac-simile. It details the various steps to be taken for the consecration of Parker, and contains marginal notes in the handwritings of Cecil and Parker. Cecil's notes are significant. Upon the direction in the text, in accordance with a statute of Henry VIII., that application should be made for consecration to some other archbishop within the king's dominions, or, in default of him, to four other bishops, he remarks: “There is no archb. nor iiij bishopps to be had; wherefore quærendum, etc.” Upon the direction that King Edward's ordinal be used, he remarks: “This booke is not established by parlement.”
The second commission, December 6, 1559, was addressed to Kitchen, Barlow, Scory, Coverdale; Hodgkin, the Suffragan of Bedford; Salisbury, Suffragan of Thetford; and Bale, who had been Bishop of Ossory. It concludes with the following dispensing clause: “Natheless supplying by our supreme royal authority of our proper motion and assured knowledge, if there be or shall be aught wanting (in those things which, according to our aforegiven mandate, shall be done by you, or any of you, for performing the aforesaid) of what is requisite or necessary, whether according to the statutes of this our realm or the laws of the church, the quality of the times and the pressure of circumstances demanding it.” Canon Estcourt produces a fac-simile, “taken from the original draft extant in the Public Record Office, with the autograph signatures of the civilians giving their opinion that the commission ‘in the form pennyd’ may be lawfully acted on.”
The Lambeth Register testifies that, in accordance with the commission, “four of those named—viz., Barlow, Scory, Coverdale, and Hodgkin—did, on the 9th of December, confirm Parker in Bow Church, the elect appearing by his proxy, Nicholas Bullingham; and that, on the 17th, the same four bishops performed the ceremony of consecration in accordance, save in one particular, with the ritual of Edward VI. We thus summarize Canon Estcourt's summary of the reasons for giving credence to the above facts recorded by the Register: 1. The official minute with Cecil's and Parker's notes. It was never used in the controversy until referred to by Lingard. It can be no forgery, for the forger would not have been such a fool as to forge Cecil's remarks as to the illegality of the proceeding. This document shows the intention of the parties concerned to proceed as the Register says they did proceed. 2. The letters-patent issuing the commission of December 6, 1559, are enrolled in Chancery on the patent-rolls, the highest official test of genuineness. The original draft of the commission is still preserved in the State Paper Office, with Cecil's writing on it, and the autograph signatures of the civilians. This paper has never been produced in the controversy, and no forger would have taken such useless trouble. 3. In the recently discovered diary of Henry Machyn, a merchant tailor in London, we find the following entries: The xxiii day of June [1559] were elected vi new Byshopes com from beyond the sea, master Parker Bysshope of Canturbere, master Gryndalle Bysshope of London, docthur Score Bysshope of Harfford, Barlow [of] Chechastur, doctur Bylle of [pg 473] Salysbere, doctor Cokes of Norwyche.”
... Upper part of page burnt away.
“Parker electyd bishope of Canterbere.”
“The xvii day of Desember was the new byshope of [Canterbury] doctur Parker, was mad ther at Lambeth.”
“The xx day of Desember afornon, was Sant Thomas evyn, my lord of Canturbere whent to Bow Chyrche, and ther wher v nuw byshopes mad.”
The genuineness of these entries is beyond all suspicion. Had they been made for a controversial purpose, they would have been used earlier in the controversy. Although the diary contains various inaccuracies—e.g., the date assigned to Parker's election, which is before the real date of his congé d'elire, and the loose use of the term “mad,” which, in regard to the bishops at Bow Church, should stand for confirmation, and in Parker's case for consecration—still, it is evidence that on the date given in the Register something was done to Parker which could be described as “being made bishop.” Bow Church was the regular place for confirmation, Lambeth for consecration. The fact that the five, or rather six, bishops were consecrated on S. Thomas's day, on the eve of which they had been confirmed, although this last was at Lambeth, and not at Bow Church, makes the confusion in their case not unnatural.
4. There is a detailed memorandum of the consecration, in a contemporary hand, preserved among the MSS. of Foxe, who died in 1587, “probably nearly of the same age as the Register itself, perhaps even older”—i.e., older than the Register in the condition in which we now possess it. This document has been but recently introduced into the controversy, and will be again appealed to when the actual condition of the Register is under consideration.
5. Stapleton's assertion that “the Bishoppes were ordered, not according to the acte 28 (25) H. VIII., but according to an acte of Edw. VI., repealed by Queen Mary, and not revived in the first year of Q. Eliz.”
6. Act 8 Eliz., cap. 1, not only lays down the law for the future, but enacts that all acts done “about a confirmation or consecration, in virtue of the queen's letters-patent, were good and perfect; and that all persons consecrated bishops according to the order of 5 and 6 Edward VI. were rightly made and consecrated.” This is equivalent to an assertion that such consecration had actually taken place.
In addition to these proofs, there are various incidental references to Parker's consecration on the 17th in contemporary works and letters, which have been carefully collected by Mr. Bailey in his Defensio, p. 19.
Altogether, there is no gainsaying the evidence for the substantial correctness of the Lambeth Register. At the same time, Canon Estcourt shows, we think, conclusively that the existing Lambeth MS., as we have it, is not the original record of what took place, but rather a glossed version thereof, in which certain important and awkward facts are, without being denied, carefully suppressed. Besides the Lambeth MS., there are two others; one in the State Paper Office, the other in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. The former, to judge by its corrections, would seem to have been a rough draft, and was probably submitted to Cecil for approval before the registration. Canon Estcourt thinks that the Cambridge MS. was a transcript from [pg 474] that in the State Paper Office, inasmuch as they agree in giving the form, “Accipe Spiritum Sanctum,” in Latin, whereas that of Lambeth has it in English. Because of this and other variations, neither of these MSS. can be regarded as a transcript from that of Lambeth, or as tending to authenticate its present condition.
Canon Estcourt prints the Foxe MS., of which we have spoken, side by side with the Lambeth Register; and we see that, whilst in the former Barlow is distinctly stated to have been the consecrator, and the rite used that of Edward VI., the latter makes no distinction between Barlow and the other three, and makes no reference whatever to the ordinal of Edward VI.
Whether the Foxe MS. is a commentary upon the Register or upon the rough draft, or, as Canon Estcourt is inclined to think, is taken from the Register as it originally stood, it is, anyhow, the testimony of a contemporary ally of the parties concerned to the existence of important circumstances which the existing Register carefully suppresses.
It is difficult for us—as, indeed, it was for Catholics of the generation immediately succeeding that of Elizabeth's accession—to understand the nervous anxiety that possessed the Protestant party lest they should give their enemies the slightest legal pretext against them. The completeness of Elizabeth's triumph naturally tended to obliterate, in the minds of her victims, the precarious condition of parties in the beginning of her reign. There is, however, ample testimony that this nervousness did exist. When Horne, the Elizabethan Bishop of Winchester, tendered Bonner, a prisoner in the Marshalsea, the oath of supremacy, the latter demurred, on the ground that Horne was no bishop in the eye of the law, forasmuch as he had been consecrated according to the ordinal of Edward VI.—which had never been legalized after its proscription, 1 Mary, sess. 2, c. 2—and had also contravened the statute 25 Henry VIII., c. 20, requiring as consecrators either an archbishop and two bishops or four bishops. As it was notorious that Horne was consecrated by Parker and two other bishops, this last count was understood as tantamount to saying that Parker was not legally archbishop, on the ground that, of the bishops concerned in that ceremony, three had been deprived and the fourth deposed. This bold plea that, to use the words of one of Cecil's correspondents, quoted by Canon Estcourt, p. 119, “there was never a lawful bishop in England, so astonished a great number of the best learned that yet they knew not what to answer him; and when it was determined he should have suffered, he is remitted to the place from whence he came, and no more said unto him.”
After this we can understand the persistency with which controversialists like Jewel, who were in the secret, shirked the challenge, so frequently addressed them by Catholics, to show the steps of their succession.
It is highly probable that the Protestant party, in the anxiety caused by Bonner's onslaught, so far tampered with the Register as to gloss over the vulnerable points. It is noteworthy that this same paper of Foxe's contains a summary upon Bonner's case, showing the connection in the author's mind. It would be unreasonable to admit the mere implication of the Register, that there was no distinction of consecrator and assistants, against the explicit statement of the Foxe MS.
The one point in which Parker's [pg 475] consecration, according both to the Lambeth Register and to the Foxe MS., deflected from the Edwardine ordinal was this: that whilst the latter prescribes that the consecrator alone should hold his hands upon the elect's head during the prayer of consecration, all four bishops are said to have held their hands upon Parker's head.
But, as Canon Estcourt observes, we are not to suppose that, in acting as they did, Barlow and the others had devised something new and unknown before, and which therefore requires exceptional treatment. On the contrary, they were following the rubric of the Exeter Pontifical, which in this point agrees with the Roman rite.
Supposing, then, Barlow and his companions to stand in the relation of consecrator and assistants, would the incapacity, from want of consecration, of the consecrator be supplied by the capacity of an assistant? Mr. Haddan appeals triumphantly to Martène's dictum that “the bishops who assist are for certain not merely witnesses but co-operators.”105 But this goes but a little way. It is admitted on all hands that the assistants are something more than mere witnesses, although they emphatically fulfil that office. They are at least co-operators by the official signification of their approval and support. Those who held up the arms of Moses did something more than witness to the marvels wrought by those up-lifted hands. The comparatively small number of theologians who maintain the necessity of three bishops for a valid consecration are the only ones who maintain that the assistants are, properly speaking, consecrators. Anyhow, the action must be regarded as taking place per modum unius, for the opus is one, not manifold; but once annihilate the principal consecrator, and the ratio by which the assistants coalesce in unum opus is gone. If we may be forgiven a homely phrase in connection with a solemn subject, Tom is doing nothing; therefore those who are merely operative in virtue of their assistance of him are merely helping him to do nothing. We do not know any theologian who has said in so many words, or whose theory requires, that the assistant should be held as compensating for the inefficiency of the consecrator. Canon Estcourt, with characteristic moderation, urges that it is at least probable that no such compensation could take place, and therefore, according to Catholic principles, the safer side would have to be taken, and the ceremony repeated.
It is, then, of vital importance to the Anglican cause that there should be no doubt whatever about Barlow's consecration. Canon Estcourt does not deny that it is probable he may have been consecrated. He does not pretend to do more than show that there are the gravest reasons for doubting the fact of his consecration. We wish to examine fairly the momenta on both sides.
William Barlow had been professed as an Augustinian Canon of S. Osith's Priory, in Essex. He had been early distinguished as the protégé and obsequious servant of Anne Boleyn. “In October, 1534, he was sent as ambassador into Scotland, in conjunction with Thomas Holcroft, in order to persuade King James to renounce the Pope.”106 In the early part of the next year, he was again in Scotland, “in company with Lord William Howard, who conveyed the garter to King James”; and January [pg 476] 22, 1536, for the third time went to Scotland, “on a joint embassy, again with Lord William Howard.” He had been elected to the bishopric of S. Asaph on the 16th, six days before. He was confirmed by proxy either on the 22d or the 23d of February. He remained in Scotland during February and March, and seems to have left in the beginning of April. On the 10th of April, Barlow was elected Bishop of S. David's, and on the 21st was confirmed in person in Bow Church. “The archbishop's certificate of the confirmation is dated on the same day, but makes no mention of consecration, nor is the fact recited, as usual, in the grant of temporalities which was issued on the 26th.” On the 27th, a summons to Parliament is sent: “Reverendo in Christo Patri W. Menevensi Episcopo.” On the 1st of May, he is installed at S. David's, and before the 13th is writing a joint letter, with Lord William Howard, from Edinborough, addressed to the king and Cromwell, in which he signs himself Willmŭs Menev, the style of Bishop of S. David's. He calls himself and is called Bishop of S. David's on and after April 25, but not before. On this account, several of the defenders of his consecration have plausibly conjectured that he was consecrated on April 25, “which,” Mr. Haddan tells us, “was a Sunday, and when he was certainly in London.” Mr. Haddan himself, however, prefers to follow the order of precedence in the House of Lords and in the Upper House of Convocation, which places Barlow after the Bishops of Chichester and Norwich, who were consecrated, the latter certainly, the former probably, upon June 11, 1536. He assigns June 11 as the date of Barlow's consecration. Lord William Howard left Edinburgh for England on or before May 23, and Barlow writes to Cromwell on that same day that he “has protracted his taryaunce somewhat after my lord's departure,” “for a daye or twayne,” at the request of the Queen of Scots. From this Mr. Haddan concludes that on June 11, when a consecration was known to have taken place, he was in London. Canon Estcourt, however, has brought to light a warrant of Cromwell's to the Garter king-at-arms, who had accompanied the embassy, and did not return until June 12, on which day he presented himself to Cromwell. The warrant is dated June 12. The king-at-arms would doubtless have returned, when the embassy was at an end, with Lord William Howard, and therefore before Barlow. But we are not left to conjecture; the warrant speaks of Barlow as “the bishopp then elect of S. Asaph, now elect of S. David's.” Therefore, on the 12th, he was still unconsecrated.
Barlow's episcopal register is wanting both at S. David's, and at Bath and Wells (to which last he was translated in 1541); and at S. Asaph's no register at all exists for the period when he nominally held the see.107 The next consecration of which we have any record—after the 12th of June, when we know Barlow was unconsecrated—took place on July 2; but on June 30, Barlow took his seat in the House of Lords, and from that time acts and is treated as though he lacked nothing of the episcopal status.
We are now in a position to collect and estimate the momenta for and against Barlow's consecration. On behalf of his consecration, it is urged, 1st, that it “must be regarded as certain until it can be disproved”;108 for no adequate motive can be assigned for the omission of a ceremony [pg 477] which could not be omitted without incurring severe penalties, to which the archbishop who neglected to consecrate would be also subject. 2d. That he was acknowledged, both by Parliament and by his brother bishops, to be in all respects a bishop after June 30, 1530, when he took his seat in the House of Lords; and that no syllable was breathed against his consecration, either by friend or foe, from that date until Dr. Champneys first questioned it in 1614, forty-eight years after his death, and eighty from the commencement of his episcopate. 3d. The fact that his consecration is not recorded in the archiepiscopal register is not much to the purpose, since out of thirty-six consecrations, in Cranmer's time eight exclusive of Barlow's, in his predecessor, Warham's, time, six out of twenty-six are not entered.109 4th. His episcopal acts respecting the property of his sees would have been legally invalid in default of consecration; but although these acts were legally disputed, no one suggested the flaw of non-consecration.
On the other hand, it must be remembered that the question is really not whether Barlow's consecration can be “disproved,” but whether, in spite of what may be legitimately urged in its behalf, there are not sufficient grounds for suspecting that it never took place. 1. Neither Barlow nor Cranmer believed in consecration. In their answers to the “questions on the sacraments” which were submitted to the king, they say that, for making a bishop, “election or appointing thereto is sufficient.” Barlow, in a sermon delivered by him at S. David's, November 12, 1536, is charged with having said: “If the king's gr., being supreme head of the Church of England, did chuse, denominate, and elect any layman, being learned, to be a bishop, that he so chosen, without mention being made of any orders, should be as good a bishop as he is or the best in England.” 2. This doctrine was undoubtedly favored by the king; for in another part of this same paper on the sacraments, where the bishops are attempting to take a rather more Catholic line, we have notes in the king's handwriting to this effect. The bishops having answered, “Making of bishopes hath twoo partes, appointment and ordering,” his remark is, “Where is this distinction fonde?” and they continuing, “Appoyntament, whiche the appostels by necessyte made by common election, and sometimes by their owne several assignment, could not then be doon by Christen princes, bicause at that time they were not; and nowe at these days appertayneth to Christen princes and rulers;” the king's note is: “Now sins you confesse that the appostylles did occupate the won part, whych now you confesse belongyth to princes, how can you prove that orderyng is wonly committed to you bysshopes?”
3. Canon Estcourt (p. 69) shows that the other side has no right to assume that Barlow and Cranmer would have incurred any penalties by the mere pretermission of consecration; for the act 25 Henry VIII., cap. 20, declares: “If any archbishop shall refuse or do not confirm, invest, and consecrate, he shall incur a præmunire”; and there is no special mention of the bishop elect among the persons liable to penalties, the clause running in general words: if “any person admit or execute any censures, etc., or other process or act to the contrary or let of due execution of the act.”
The notion that the leases and other episcopal acts connected with [pg 478] diocesan property would not be legally valid in default of consecration is a gratuitous assumption. Certainly neither Mr. Haddan nor Mr. Bailey has attempted to produce any evidence. What the law really takes cognizance of in such questions is the possession of the temporalities, an indisputable right to which is given by the writ of restitution.
The recognition of Parliament, upon which so much stress has been laid, cannot be regarded as any proof of consecration, since it naturally and inevitably ensued upon the issue of this same writ. This is sufficiently proved by the fact that Parliament summoned Barlow to take his seat, and gave him his full episcopal title, when, as has been shown above, he certainly was not consecrated. Doubtless some of the more zealous of the Catholic party might have made a disturbance had they realized the omission; but, as Canon Estcourt observes (p. 78), Gardiner was absent as ambassador in Paris during the whole of 1536 and 1537.
As to Cranmer's register, it is true that it was very carelessly kept; but of the nine unrecorded consecrations, Barlow's would be the only one for which no collateral evidence whatever can be furnished. No document recites it, and every date that has been as yet conjectured for it has been exploded. Barlow's contemporary, Foxe, in his record of the Lambeth consecration, whilst specifying accurately the dates of the consecration of the other bishops engaged, is only able to say of Barlow that he was consecrated “tempore Henrici VIII.”
Canon Estcourt points out that although there was no regular register kept at S. David's—and we know that the breviaries and martyrologies which contained records of episcopal succession were burnt in the next reign as superstitious—yet that it is sufficiently odd that all the chapter books have been lost, and that the Liber Computi, still extant, has a break in it for several years before 1539.
But this is not all. Canon Estcourt has found out, on examining the original document first printed by Mason as the restitution to Barlow of the temporalities of S. David's “out of the Rolls Chapel in Chancery,” that the enrolment had really been made in the office of the exchequer, as though the matter were purely secular, instead of on the patent rolls in chancery. Then, on examining the original form—which Mason reproduced imperfectly, so as to conceal its real character—and comparing it with the normal writ of restitution, it turns out to be, no writ of restitution, but “a grant of the custody of temporalities on account of the vacancy of the see,” with the extraordinary addition of “to hold to him and his assigns during his life.” These grants of the custody of the temporalities of a diocese which had accrued during a vacancy were common enough. The peculiarity of Barlow's grant is that it is a grant of custody made to do duty for a writ of restitution. The grant of custody was ordinarily made as a preliminary to the writ of restitution. No limit was assigned to it, but it naturally and necessarily merged in the restitution, of which it was a gracious foretaste. In the case of Cranmer, indeed, as Canon Estcourt points out, the grant of custody was made after he had received the restitution of the temporalities in the usual form; but the grant is carefully limited to the profits accruing from the commencement of the vacancy to the date of restitution. Barlow's grant is for life, and, by anticipating in its completeness all that the writ of restitution could give, it [pg 479] would preclude the crown from making restitution in the proper form without a surrender of the grant of custody. Before consecration, a bishop cannot sue out a writ of restitution, as the act requires, but the king sometimes ex gratia allowed it; the form, however, of such indulgence is well known, and is very different from that of the document in question.110
The form actually chosen “may be supposed to have saved the necessity of obtaining either the archbishop's mandate or the archdeacon's commission”; in fact, to have made Barlow free of his see at once without any official formalities, and to “secure him in the enjoyment of the temporalities of the see, whether his character of bishop was perfected spiritually or not.”
“The effect of the grant, both in Barlow's own mind and in official quarters, may be seen from what followed. The next day a writ of summons to the House of Lords was issued, and Barlow himself immediately assumed the style and title of bishop.” “It seems highly probable that this special and novel form was deliberately adopted as suiting the views of all parties, and being highly favorable to any ulterior designs which the king might have upon the temporalities of the church at large.”
It must be remembered, too, that many of the arguments tending to show the unlikelihood of the omission, such as its unprecedented character, the want of apparent motive, or, again, the exceedingly imperfect character of the registration, tend to diminish the chances of detection. True, Barlow was not a man inclined to sacrifice much to his convictions; but he had a hearty hatred for sacerdotalism, a strong sense of humor, and, if we judge from his sermon quoted above, the impudence, if not the courage, of his opinions. A competitor for a tyrant's favor must always risk something to keep a front place, and on this point he knew how the king was minded. Altogether, he would seem to be by no means an unlikely man to have played the part assigned to him.
We conceive that these momenta do amply justify grave suspicions of Barlow's consecration, and consequently the repetition of any rites depending for their validity upon his consecration.