John Davenant, The Country Parson, and Herbert's Calvinist Conformity

John Davenant, The Country Parson, and Herbert's Calvinist Conformity by Ronald W. Cooley Treating the thorny issue of kneeling to receive the sacrament in his pastoral manual, A Priest to the Temple, or, The Country Parson, George Herbert declares that "Contentiousness in a feast of Charity is more scandali then any posture."1 Readers have usually read this as an attack on nonconformity, but the matter may not be quite so simple. This paper is part of an attempt to understand The Country Parson as a contribution, admittedly a belated one, to the Jacobean program of clerical reformation and " 'apostolic' episcopacy."2 In one of the best books on Herbert in recent years, Christopher Hodgkins has characterized Herbert's writing as an expression of "regenerative nostalgia" for the Elizabethan Church or England.3 While there surely is something nostalgic about The Country Parson, seen from the vantage point of the early 1630s when James was dead and Herbert was Rector of Bemerton, it is not clear that we have to go all the way back to the 1590s, as Hodgkins does, to find the object of that yearning. We should look first to the Jacobean Church of England in which the Herbert was raised and educated.4 As a preamble to a reading of Herbert's discussion of kneeling for the Eucharist, I will examine the early Stuart Church of England through the career of John Davenant, whose tenure as Bishop of Salisbury (1621-41) included the three years when Herbert was at Bemerton (1630-33). Though we do not know many particulars of the relationship between the two men, a review of Davenant's career illustrates the delicate balancing act performed by many Jacobean clerics, and the difficulty of the transition to a new regime under Charles. This, in turn, may help to clarify what sort of intervention into ecclesiastical politics The Country Parson would have been, had it been published, like The Temple, shortly after the author's death in 1633. Herbert, who was "setting foot into Divinity," by 1617/18 at the latest, would almost certainly have encountered Davenant at Cambridge, where the latter served as Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity until he became Bishop of Salisbury in 1621.5 And he must have known of Davenant's role in the English delegation to the Synod of Dort in 1618-19, the "great theological event of his day."6 2 Ronald W. Cooley Davenant, a Calvinist theologian who defended divine-right monarchy and episcopacy, and Herbert, a conformist pastor who wrote "Calvinist" poems like "The Holdfast" and "The Water-course," faced similar uncertainties, as what had been Jacobean orthodoxy became Caroline "Puritanism." The core of the Jacobean ecclesiastical program was laid down very early in James's reign, at the Hampton Court conference of 1604. In terms of Church government and ceremonial, it offered "little more than an endorsement of the Elizabethan status quo," and to this extent it certainly frustrated the Puritan authors of the Millenary Petition who had hoped, by a moderate and conciliatory approach, to secure some encouragement about further reform in these areas from the new King.7 But as Patrick Collinson points out, if James dashed Puritan hopes for structural change at Hampton Court, he also demonstrated a conception of the ministry quite distinct from that of his royal predecessor: [James's] Calvinism led him to believe that the ministry of the Church ought, as a matter of course, to be a learned preaching ministry. So on the final day of the conference he committed to the Bishops as a weighty matter the provision of sufficient resources to provide for "the planting of a learned and painful minister in every parish."8 In this James was responding to a central Puritan concern, "the wretched condition of the ordinary parish clergy, which they compared unfavourably with the reformed ideal of a 'godly learned preaching ministry' "' He was also, of course pursuing a political agenda. Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake have suggested that James sought, perhaps naively, to "settle the issue of Puritanism once and for all by driving a wedge between the moderate and radical wings of Puritan opinion."10 The King...