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178 John Howson (1556/7–1632) John Howson’s record of his hearing before King James on charges brought by Archbishop Abbot On June 10, 1615, John Howson, DD, a prebendary of Christ Church, Oxford, obeyed a summons to appear before the King to answer charges of heterodoxy, barratry,1 and high treason brought by Robert Abbot, Master of Balliol and Oxford’s regius professor of divinity—his brother George, Archbishop of Canterbury since 1611, prosecuting the case coram rege. The chance survival of a letter by Bishop Neile discloses that William Laud, then Master of St. John’s, Oxford, also appeared before the King that June to answer similar charges brought by the same accusers. Neile’s letter reveals only the outcome of Laud’s hearing, but Howson wrote a blowby -blow account of his “trial” almost immediately thereafter. The hastily-written manuscript was almost certainly for Howson’s own use—for his own protection; as the account makes clear, Howson had a habit of recording such confrontations immediately after the fact lest his adversaries subsequently misreport his words, or their own. Howson’s account is presumably not impartial, yet sufficient corroborating evidence exists to confirm its basic accuracy. If Howson depicts himself as victor, the aftermath bears out this impression, since, when the Bishop of Oxford died only three years later, the King nominated Howson his successor; equally telling, James named none of the Abbots’ Oxford allies to the British delegation attending the Synod of Dort. Howson’s manuscript, as suggested by its modern editors, Nicholas Cranfield and Kenneth Fincham provides an extraordinary behind-the-scenes view of what would appear to be the moment when the winds at court shifted in favor of the anti-Calvinists (326–27). If so, this would be an unexpectedly early tipping-point, before the Synod of Dort and before 1 Usually refers to the misuse of the courts to harass enemies by vexatious litigation, but can also concern the buying and/or selling of offices, or, more loosely, quarrelsomeness. 179 John Howson the Palatinate crisis. Howson describes a theological landscape in which fissures present from the outset have suddenly begun to deepen, although the conclusion of his narrative suggests why the center might nonetheless have held for a quarter-century. Because the manuscript only reports who said what during a single meeting, some background regarding both the participants and the issues is needed. In 1615 Howson was nearly sixty.2 He had taken his BA at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1578, his MA four years later. In the 1590s, he served as one of Elizabeth’s chaplains and preached twice at Paul’s Cross, while apparently continuing at Oxford, where he took his BD and DD together in 1601. By the next July he had become the University’s vice-chancellor. Preaching at the University church of St. Mary the Virgin that November, Howson set off a firestorm by urging the observance of the Prayer Book’s liturgical calendar, with its saints’ days and Marian feasts, and elevating worship and prayer to an equality with sermons. The puritan provost of Queen’s, Henry Airay, who viewed the Prayer Book ceremonies as the worship of Baal rather than Christ and held that bishops were neither iure divino nor apostolic, denounced the Vice-Chancellor, who in turn suspended Airay from preaching. Airay and a couple of young masters openly defied Howson’s orders, precipitating a crisis that ended up before the Privy Council, which decided in Howson’s favor, although Airay managed to avoid having to make a formal apology. Indeed, in 1606 Airay himself became vicechancellor , and proceeded to make trouble for Laud over a sermon. Between 1610 and 1612 Robert Abbot became a powerful figure on the University stage, George Abbot on the national. The former received the mastership of Balliol in 1610, the regius divinity professorship in 1612, while the intervening year saw the latter elevated to Canterbury. Both were, unlike Airay, conformists of long-standing, but otherwise cut from much the same cloth: namely, Perkins-style old-school double predestinarians of an experimental stripe. From 1610 to 1615 both campaigned vigorously to suppress Oxford’s anti-Calvinist faculty. In 1610–11 George Abbot sought to tar Laud as a papist to keep him from becoming head of St. John’s. Once at Lambeth, Abbot “dedicated himself to defending a narrow interpretation of reformed teaching and practice,” using “his archiepiscopal powers and influential connections to oppose those who challenged this...

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