James Ussher: Theology, History, and Politics in Early-Modern Ireland and England (review)

Alan Ford's new biography of this Primate of the Church of Ireland acknowledges that in spite of the vast scale of Ussher's own learning, which encompassed patristics and theology, Church history and ancient and Biblical languages, Ussher remains best known today for his chronological survey of the world, which led him to date the beginning of the world to 4004 BC. As a result, among the wide body of evidence used by Ford are on-line sources from recent years which have drawn Ussher into Pentecostal American campaigns against the teaching of evolution in public schools. Ford places Ussher's survey of the age of the world in a meaningful context, indicating that it grew out of Ussher's extensive researches and writings on Biblical history and narrative.

Ford divides Ussher's life into three phases: student, professor and bishop, the latter category including Ussher's time as Primate of All Ireland. However, his starting point is to establish the reputation which Ussher enjoyed at the end of his career, where his wide learning but also his moderate and agreeable personality earned him admirers from the likes of William Laud, Thomas Wentworth and Peter Heylyn, but more unexpectedly from a wider body of churchmen and statesmen including Cardinal Richelieu, William Prynne and Oliver Cromwell. Ford in essence starts at the end of Ussher's life, establishing his intellectual pre-eminence in mid-seventeenth-century Europe, before moving to discuss the very origins of the Protestant Church in Ireland which Ussher led.

To make sense of the major strands of Ussher's mature scholarship and churchmanship, Ford places him in both Irish and English contexts. In terms of Ireland, Ford explains that he is dealing with the reception of Protestant ideas among three separate groups: the native Irish, the Anglo-Irish (those settlers dating from the Norman period) and the new English, a term of Ford's own coining and meaning those English who entered Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ussher is introduced by Ford as an eighteen-year-old university student, the only intellectual resource which the Protestant church in Ireland could muster to dispute with the Jesuit professor Henry Fitzsimon.

Ussher in fact drops out of sight for much of the first portion of the text as Ford explains the failings in reformist processes in Ireland, noting the late appearance of Protestantism in Ireland and the absence of any native Irish reformer comparable to Tyndale in England and Calvin in France. Apart from John Ussher in Dublin, father of the Primate, reformist ideas failed to adhere among the native or Anglo Irish and there was no vernacular reform.

In surveying Ussher the Professor, Ford moves him from a marginal figure in a marginal church to a champion of moderate Calvinism. In surveying Ussher as both professor and bishop, Ford offers a highly nuanced reading of both Ussher's reputation and the complexity of his religious position in Ireland and in Jacobean and Caroline England. Although Ussher was an Irish bishop and Primate of the Church of Ireland, much of Ford's study is devoted to Ussher's position in English intellectual and religious life, as Ussher settled permanently in England after 1640. Ford gives an important clarification of Ussher's abiding political philosophy, arguing for his unambiguous adherence to absolute monarchy. Yet set against this stance was Ussher's reputation as a godly bishop, and the favour he achieved among parliamentary leaders including the Earl of Bedford, Pym, Dering and even William Prynne.

So-called 'eminent persons' followed Ussher throughout England who sought from the bishop authoritative statements on matters of political and religious controversy. Ussher was admired by Prynne and despite the bishop's adherence to absolutist rule, parliamentarians came to regard Prynne as the saviour of the godly and, since he was an Irish bishop and therefore not a member of the House of...