Renaissance Forum: Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 1998: Tristan Marshall

Peter E McCullough. 1998. Sermons at Court: Politics and religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean preaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 256 pp. 9 half-tones. ISBN: 0-521-59046-9. £35.00.

James Stuart's predilection for a good sermon is well known. In marked contrast with his predecessor's prayer-centred piety James has been depicted as an ardent admirer of anyone who could put together a piece of ecclesiastical erudition and stir in a healthy dose of showmanship. But such a picture masks the fact that Elizabeth too had her favourite preachers such as Thomas Dove after whose first performance the Queen was reported to have thought 'the holy ghost was discended againe in this Doue'. Sadly none of his sermons have survived for us to unravel the source of such rapture.
In a very real sense sermons were indeed, as Dr McCullough claims in Sermons at Court a literary form, part dissertation, part performance, part political prologue. He even claims that they were 'the pre-eminent literary genre at the Jacobean court', although he'd have a fight on his hands trying to push Renaissance theatrical studies off their pedestal. McCullough asks us to consider the significance of the fact that James's first act upon entering his English realm was to go to Berwick church and hear a sermon. As he points out, this does challenge somewhat the idea that the transformation of the Lord Chamberlain's Men into the King's Men was 'the first literary act' of the reign. The idea of sermons as an art form is actually extremely potent and it is this fact that makes the book such an enormously stimulating read. I would, however, have to question his implication that James was somehow a big fan of plays. He liked his plays in the same way that he liked his sermons -- short. Macbeth was a politic piece of brevity in this respect and while we know that plays were regularly performed at court we don't know if they were of particularly greater interest to the king than, for example, the masques of which he certainly was a fan.
McCullough's book follows on from a string of volumes in this Cambridge University Press series which give Elizabethan and early Stuart ecclesiology a thorough re-appraisal. The attention is welcome indeed, though McCullough's ten page introduction is on the brief side and his concluding chapter on preaching at the courts of Queen Anne and Prince Charles certainly leaves us wanting a great deal more information. At just over two hundred pages it's a slim volume. Its strengths are that it provides a fascinating insight into the political dynamics of preaching. Dr McCullough illustrates the manner in which sermons at the courts of Elizabeth and James could be flattering one day and critical the next. Elizabeth liked a sermon to be succinct but she, like James had to contend with preachers like the un-named cleric who preached the first sermon in Lent 1579, inveighing against marriage to foreigners at the time when Elizabeth was on the brink of marrying Alençon. The queen stormed out before the sermon finished.
We are reminded that court sermons were not necessarily preached before a prince at all but could in fact be delivered before the royal household. Nor were they limited to the formal setting of royal palaces, taking place in Whitehall's outdoor Preaching Place or indeed when the monarch was on progress. In a chapter on the architecture of chapels royal the book adds significantly to our understanding of the mechanisms of access to the monarch in the early Stuart court. While the bedchamber might have been dominated by the Scots, McCullough points out that 'the clerical avenue to the king was a decidedly English one'. Scottish preachers who accompanied the King south in 1603 were rapidly sent back to secure the continuation of what James would later boast to be his government by pen.
For all of his interest in them, James was not actually present at as many sermons as Elizabeth whose attendance record at court sermons during Lent was indeed impressive. In marked contrast, the only thing James abstained from with any regularity during Lent was court. McCullough informs us that if the king frequently spent the period hunting in Cambridgeshire he did continue to hear sermons, given not infrequently by aspiring Cambridge University divines. His later withdrawal from hearing sermons in Whitehall was, however, as much to do with the tenor of preaching and the congregation responses in the 1620s, as public concerns at his pro-Spanish foreign policy increased.
This political dimension to the court sermon prompts the question as to what a preacher was able to say and what was likely to arouse the anger of the monarch. McCullough notes that while the papal court censored sermons before publication the English court did not, though as he notes there could be censorship after the fact, especially when a preacher managed to subvert the two sacred rules: don't criticise the king's character and don't criticise his ecclesiastical policy. The clever preacher could of course do this with impunity so long as he made certain that he actually denied doing it in his sermon and, however judicious his appraisal of the status quo might be, tagged an encomium to the King in at the end. In January 1623, royal chaplain William Loe managed to pull off a sermon strongly critical of James's inaction in the Palatinate while safeguarding his position by announcing it was far from his intention to be so bold as to advise the king: 'ffoule Presumption it were in me, if I should haue anie the least thought, that I were meete in any sorte to advize his sacred Maiestie, whom I Conceave hath the most prudent, and most provident Counsell in the World.' But the reverse was also true, as the book illustrates how publication of sermons remained a potent political weapon in James's arsenal. Indicative of this was his instruction to print as a virtual manifesto the four sermons preached before the Scottish Presbyterians at Hampton Court in 1606 and of another four enjoining Scottish acceptance of the five Articles of Perth in 1617-18.
Perhaps the most interesting section in the book, however, is the concluding piece on the young Prince Charles whose ecclesiastical bodyguards in the 1610s were of a strikingly different ilk to those who held his ear in the 1630s. He inherited a caucus of his late brother Henry's favoured preachers and with them a corpus of staunchly Protestant opinions. McCullough describes how, among others, George Carleton, John Preston and George Hakewill provided Charles with Calvinism, Sir David Murray as a tutor provided Scots Presbyterianism and Clerk of the Closet Henry Burton the potential for Puritan radicalism. Other chaplains to the prince like Thomas Winniffe and George Hakewill were implacable enemies of the Spanish match and the abandonment of the Palatinate in the 1620s. This is the kind of coterie that would have surrounded King Henry IX had he lived past 1612 to inherit the throne and it is therefore most striking that Charles should have shrugged off these reforming enforcers, first heading off to Spain with Buckingham to collect the Infanta then returning to bonfires, bells and belligerence.
So why did the transition occur? McCullough highlights the manner in which James -- albeit with a little prompting from Lancelot Andrewes -- inserted more amenable, pro-Spain counsellors so that the Protestantism of the Prince's people had changed its shape significantly by the early part of 1622. Here again, as if we needed reminding is James Stuart, showing off the colours of the capable politician more associated a generation ago with the rule of his Scottish kingdom than with his English one.
What emerges from this book is a picture of two very similar monarchs seeking the same conformity but with differing slants on the content. My only gripe with the book is its brevity, especially as this prevents Dr McCullough expanding upon his claims. That said, the computer disk which accompanies the book containing a calendar of sermons preached at court during the two reigns is an enormously useful resource. Sermons at Court is a significant and welcome addition to the growing body of study which enlightens our understanding of Elizabethan and, especially here, Jacobean England. But it is also a study which Dr McCullough's fellow literary scholars should consider. They may well have to give a little room on the pedestal for what is an intriguing genre.

TRISTAN MARSHALL