Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching by Peter E. McCullough (review)

634BOOK REVIEWS the nunciature in Graz (1580-1622) (Johann Rainer); reports on the reorganization of the archives of the Nunciature of Lucerne in theVaticanArchives (Roger Liggenstorfer) and on the state of research regarding the same nunciature (Urban Fink); and the conflict over the nunciature in Cologne in 1785-1794 (Burkhard Roberg). The contributions are in German, Italian, and French,with brief summaries in German or Italian. Robert Bireley, SJ. Loyola University Chicago Sermons at Court:Politics andReligion in Elizabethan andJacobean Preaching . By Peter E. McCullough. [Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History.] (NewYork: Cambridge University Press. 1998. Pp. xv, 237.) Could 5,000 people attend sermons at Queen Elizabeth's Court? Would they? Peter McCullough convinces us that they could and did by measuring the space of the Whitehall outdoor preaching place, well known from its illustration in Foxe's Book of Martyrs. Matching the measurements with the written evidence , he stimulates new understandings of how preaching at the Court was shaped by its royal auditors, reflecting their personal theological tastes. As its title implies, this book is about sermons, but not so much about their content as their context. Context throws important light on content, intent, and meaning, however, and leads to some interesting arguments about preaching in the Court. For instance, James I followed the Scots' practice of coming to the chapel only for sermons, meaning, given Court custom, that James, and therefore most of his courtiers, missed the prescribed Prayer Book liturgy leading up to the sermon. When the King entered, the service ended, an anthem was sung, the preacher mounted his pulpit, which allowed him to stand face-to-face with the King, and the sermon went forward. This irritated his clergy and led to an increasing demand for the King to attend the whole service as a sign of reverence . James ignored them, but Charles did not, and William Laud, a frustrated Jacobean chaplain, got Charles to institute a new regime of Court worship that emphasized the "beauty of holiness" on Lancelot Andrewes' model. McCullough includes in his study sermons preached to Queen Anne. Given her suspected Catholicism, his exploration of her chapel and chaplains startles, in that he finds that she employed a number of Puritan chaplains, drawing heavily on people who, like her less than puritanical chaplain John Donne, came from the Essex connection. These clergymen, as far as he can tell, did not dare to address the Queen's crypto-Catholicism directly, though he finds evidence that Donne may have done so in one of his sermons. At the same time, McCuIlough 's awareness of the physical arrangements and customs of the Court allows him to explain how Anne's avoidance of Anglican communion, and BOOK REVIEWS635 possible private Masses, would have been almost invisible to the outside world. It was easier for the Queen than for most people to be a crypto-Catholic, since she was never expected to commune in her chapel. On the other hand, it is clear that, whatever her private sympathies, she believed that London was worth more than a Mass, no matter what the papacy thought. By comparing the Elizabethan and Jacobean Courts, McCullough throws the religious preferences and styles of the monarchs into clear relief. Elizabeth faithfully attended the very public sermons held before large crowds during Lent. She sometimes corrected the preachers, but she was there, and she was seen. She also observed morning prayer daily with her household. Her devotion was liturgically oriented, and she used sermons as public occasions to show herself to her people. Ironically,James, who loved preaching, adding extra sermons to the Court calendar and hearing them even in his hunting lodges, did not attend them with the public. In the sermon-mad Jacobean period his people did not see him as participating, even though, as Lori Anne Ferrell establishes in her Government by Polemic.James L, the King's Preachers, and the Rhetoric of Conformity (Stanford, 1998),James deliberately used sermons as an instrument of policy. McCullough is a literary scholar, but this is an historian's book. He takes pains to establish the importance of the preachers' literary production, but to do that, he had to get...