ABBOT, George (1562-1633)

The rise of George Abbot to the see of Canterbury in 1611 was meteoric. An orthodox Calvinist, with administrative experience at Oxford and a promising relationship with James I, Abbot vaulted over the heads of other candidates who had the experience he lacked at parish and diocesan level. Yet where his predecessors Thomas Cranmer^† and John Whitgift^† helped define the post-Reformation ecclesiastical agenda, Abbot, the longest-serving primate between the Reformation and the Civil War, had surprisingly little impact on the Church of England. This was not for lack of vision – he saw the national Church as part of a British and European Reformed community struggling against the popish Antichrist – but because neither of his royal masters fully endorsed his views. King James sought to achieve a balance of theological viewpoints, while Charles I found many of Abbot’s views on theology, ritual, diplomacy and Catholicism repugnant, with the result that the archbishop was sidelined in favour of an anti-Calvinist clique who would eventually cause the Church to rend itself asunder.58 For a similar analysis, see K. Fincham, ‘Prelacy and Pols.: Abp. Abbot’s Defence of Prot. Orthodoxy’, HR, lxi, 36-40, 62-4.

Abbot’s reputation has been affected adversely by the lack of a contemporary biographer. After the Restoration, his rivals William Laud^*, who succeeded him at Canterbury, and John Williams^*, archbishop of York during the 1640s, were eulogized by devoted partisans, who felt no obligation to be even-handed in their comments on Abbot. He was also assailed by Edward Hyde^†, 1st earl of Clarendon, as a puritan with ‘very morose manners and a very sour aspect’, who had ‘introduced, or at least connived at, a negligence that gave great scandal to the Church’. This was because he had failed to proceed against nonconforming ministers, and allowed church fabric to decay.59 Holland, 7-8; P. Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus (1668); J. Hacket, Scrinia Reserata (1693); Clarendon, Hist. of the Rebellion, i. 118-19, 126. Yet this verdict is to dismiss Abbot’s positive attributes: almost unique among post-Reformation churchmen in corresponding with diplomats and princes as often as with Continental theologians, he was, at least until 1626, an important figure in the pan-Protestant party at court.60 Fincham, ‘Prelacy and Pols.’ 49-50. However, the rapid collapse of the Protestant cause in Germany and France in the early 1620s left Abbot adrift in a world of cross-confessional realpolitik, in which English theologians and diplomats were expected to adapt their doctrinal positions in order to further their monarch’s dynastic and strategic aims. To make matters worse, Abbot’s credibility was also undermined by his accidental slaying of a gamekeeper in July 1621: after James saved him from disgrace, it became difficult for him to take a firm stance against the centrepiece of his master’s policy, the Spanish Match. Abbot warmly endorsed the ‘patriot’ cause in 1624-6, but the accession of Charles I, who clearly disliked him, left the archbishop increasingly marginalized. Yet, while some contemporaries and many historians have assumed that Abbot surrendered rather tamely before the advances of crypto-Catholic hispanophiles at court and Arminians in the Church of England, the evidence suggests that, even with Charles’s enthusiastic support, critics like Laud and Richard Neile^* (who eventually became archbishop of York) found him a tough nut to crack.

Early life and academic career, 1562-1610

The fourth of six sons, Abbot was influenced by his father, a clothworker from Guildford, Surrey – reportedly persecuted for his Protestantism under Mary by the chancellor of London diocese – and his school teacher at Guildford, Francis Taylor, later appointed an archiepiscopal chaplain and rector of Lambeth, Surrey. Abbot followed his elder brother Robert^* to Balliol College, Oxford, where he was elected a fellow in 1583. His lectures on geography were published in 1599, and reprinted (with augmentations) eight times during his lifetime. For its time, this tome was well-informed, particularly about English efforts at colonization, about which he may have been advised by his younger brother Maurice^‡, a London Draper and merchant. Chiefly noteworthy for the fact that its author was more suspicious of the motives of the papacy than those of Spain, it ascribed the contemporary division of Italy and Germany into petty principalities to ‘the great policy of the bishop of Rome: who thought it the best way to make himself great, to weaken the [Holy Roman] empire’.61 Holland, 9-12; Jones, 326; Darwall-Smith, 122; G. Abbot, A Briefe Description of the Whole World (1599), sig. A4v-B1, H2-3. The second edition of 1605 was even stronger in its anti-papal rhetoric.

Despite having never held a living with cure of souls, Abbot was provided with ample opportunity while at Oxford to hone the rhetorical skills required of a minister. Either he or his brother Robert participated in a disputation on moral philosophy held before Queen Elizabeth on her visit to the university in 1592,62 Reg. Univ. Oxf. ed. A. Clark (Oxf. Hist. Soc. x), pt. 1, pp. 199, 229. while George himself gave a series of 40 lectures on the book of Jonah, delivered at St Mary’s, Oxford between 1594 and 1599, and first published in 1600. In this latter work, designed for those training for the ministry, he expounded an orthodox Calvinism that owed much to the works of Theodore Beza. He implicitly rebuked those Cambridge divines who cast doubt upon the doctrine of predestination. In so doing he was doubtless influenced by two godly Oxford clerics, John Rainolds and Henry Airay. However, he also warned against the excesses into which the godly might be led by an over-scrupulous application of soteriology:

This is a lesson to the ministers and pastors of the flock, that by God’s own example, they should not be too rigorous upon such as have gone astray, even in the greatest crimes; but when conspicuous tokens of repentance shall be given, to open the lap and bosom of the Church to receive them.63 G. Abbot, An Exposition Vpon the Prophet Ionah (1600), 342; E.M. Dent, Protestant Reformers in Eliz. Oxf. 100-1; Holland, 12-18.

These lectures positioned Abbot as a champion of the Calvinist conformism promoted by Archbishop Whitgift, and it is hardly surprising that he became chaplain to Whitgift’s ally Thomas Sackville^*, 1st Lord Buckhurst (later 1st earl of Dorset), the university’s chancellor, to whom he dedicated the published commentary on Jonah. In 1597, three years before the book went to press, Abbot’s bid for the mastership of University College, in a contest against John Browne, a fellow and benefactor of that house, was clinched by Buckhurst, in whose gift the headship lay, who granted Abbot a dispensation from the requirement that the master be chosen from among members of the college. Any tension which might have arisen at his new college was defused by Abbot’s preoccupation with the politics of the university and the wider Church, which allowed Browne to continue exercising his influence within the college.64 Darwall-Smith, 117-20, 123.

With Buckhurst’s backing, Abbot went on to serve as university vice chancellor three times in six years. In January 1601, during his first term, various divines of both universities were asked by London’s corporation for their opinion on refurbishing Cheapside Cross, which task the Privy Council had repeatedly urged them to undertake. Responding in his official capacity, Abbot considered the decision of climacteric importance, for if the cross were demolished or allowed to decay it would inflict ‘a wound and blow’ on Catholic superstitious practices, whereas if it were repaired it would undermine ‘our religion which is established according unto the canon of Scripture’. ‘Religious magistrates’, he observed, were warranted to suppress ‘graven images’. Indeed, he himself had burned a picture of ‘God the Father over a crucifix, ready to receive the soul of Christ’, the previous summer. However, the letter, endorsed by a group of Oxford divines, ended with a caveat which suggests that Abbot was aware that he might have overreached himself: ‘the advice and consent of superior powers is to be had herein, that all things may be done decently and in order’.65 [G. Abbot], Cheap-Side Crosse censured and condemned (1641); Holland, 20-1, 41; Hist. Univ. Oxf. ed. N. Tyacke, iv. 572. For the burning of the picture at Oxford, see Bodl., OUA, WPβ/21/4, f. 76. His suspicion was well founded, and not simply because the repairs proceeded regardless of Abbot’s intervention. Abbot’s Oxford contemporary, John Howson^* (subsequently bishop of Oxford), later tried to use the incident to undermine his rival’s reputation, recalling that Richard Bancroft^* (successively bishop of London and archbishop of Canterbury), ‘held his grace [Abbot] for a puritan, and said in my hearing that if he were not a dean [of Winchester] already, he should never have dignity in the Church of England. It fell to Thomas Ravis^*, dean of Christ Church, Oxford (and later bishop of London), to reconcile the two men. On preaching Bancroft’s funeral sermon in 1610, Abbot went out of his way to commend the repair of Cheapside Cross.66 Chamberlain Letters ed. N.E. McClure, i. 118; ‘John Howson’s Answers to Abp. Abbot’s Accusations’ ed. N. Cranfield and K. Fincham, Cam. Misc. XXIX (Cam. Soc. 4th ser. xxxiv), 338-9; D. Calderwood, Hist. of the Kirk of Scotland ed. T. Thomson (Wodrow Soc., 1845), vii. 152-3.

Abbot was succeeded as vice chancellor of Oxford in 1602 by Howson, who used his term of office to launch a crackdown on puritan nonconformists at Oxford, including Airay. Howson also caused offence among his Calvinist critics with an Accession Day sermon which insisted that preaching was only one aspect of worship.67 J. Howson, A Sermon Preached at St Maries in Oxford (1602), sig. A3r-v; Chamberlain Letters, i. 185; Dent, 208-18; M.H. Curtis, Oxf. and Camb. in Transition, 1558-1642, pp. 223-4; Hist. Univ. Oxf. iv. 571-2; Holland, 220-1. Abbot, reappointed vice chancellor in July 1603, attempted to redress the balance by attacking a sermon in which the anti-Calvinist, William Laud (then serving as one of the university proctors) asserted that the pre-Reformation Catholic Church was a true church.68 Holland, 21-3; Bodl., OUA, WPβ/21/4 , f. 79v; Heylyn, 53-4; [G. Abbot], A Treatise of the Perpetuall Visibility (1624). However, Abbot’s most significant task was to publish an official refutation of the Millenary Petition, which had been presented to King James by nonconformist ministers shortly after his accession. Drafted by Howson, this tract asserted that the nonconformists planned to introduce presbyterianism, a claim disputed by the more godly fellows of some colleges. However, the preface reproduced a circular letter by Henry Jacob, soliciting signatures for another petition for ecclesiastical reform which had circulated at Oxford shortly after Abbot took over as vice chancellor. The latter’s hand may be seen in this preface, as the involvement of Jacob (later a separatist) tended to discredit the petitioning campaign, without libelling all puritans as subversives.69 Holland, 43; Sloane 271, f. 23; LPL, ms 3203, f. 166; Bodl., OUA, WPβ/21/4, f. 80v; Holland 43; The Answer of the Vicechancelour … (1603), particularly sigs. ¶4v-¶¶; Dent, 228-9; Hist. Univ. Oxf. iv. 572-4.

In January 1604 Abbot attended the Hampton Court Conference as dean of Winchester. His notes were used by William Barlow^* (soon to be appointed bishop of Rochester) in compiling the semi-official record of the conference, at which the conformist position was argued primarily by the bishops, particularly Bancroft and Abbot’s own diocesan, the bishop of Winchester, Thomas Bilson^*. The conference was seen at the time by some as a meeting to discuss remodelling the Church, but Abbot took a contrary view, as he himself explained in 1618:

The cause of the king’s conference was not to decree and ’stablish anything which was unsettled, but to hear the objections of some refragatory [sic] persons against that which was ’stablished. Again it was not about matters of religion, or to touch anything touching faith, but to hear what exception was taken to the ceremonies of the Church.70 W. Barlow, Summe and Substance of the Conference (1604), sig. A3v; British Delegation and the Synod of Dort (1618-19) ed. A. Milton (Church of Eng. Rec. Soc. xiii), 27; Holland, 37.

One significant outcome of the conference was the decision to undertake a fresh translation of the bible. Abbot was one of the Oxford team appointed to handle the Gospels, Acts of the Apostles and Revelations.71 D. Norton, King James Bible, 58-9; Holland, 38.

The Hampton Court Conference diverted attention from the threat posed by Catholicism. Early in 1605, Abbot published a riposte to a polemic of 1600 composed by the Catholic controversialist Dr Thomas Hill.72 T. Hill, A Quatron of Reasons of Catholic Religion (1600). The preface to Abbot’s book is dated 4 Jan. 1605: G. Abbot, Reasons which Doctour Hill hath brought (1604/5), sig.¶4. While pouring scorn upon ‘the gangrene of popery’, Abbot made several points which, while directed against Hill, also reflected areas of disagreement with anti-Calvinists such as Howson and Laud. In particular he insisted that the preservation of the English as the elect nation required a regular diet of anti-Catholic preaching, and that Rome had ceased to be a true church after the reign of Pope Gregory the Great.73 Abbot, Doctour Hill, 35-7, 225, 256; Holland, 60-1, 150-1. The work appeared just as James and Bancroft, newly promoted to Canterbury, demanded conformity to the 1604 Canons. Among the godly divines of Oxford, Airay, possibly with Abbot’s encouragement, subscribed, but John Rainolds, who had, the king believed, promised conformity at Hampton Court, remained obdurate. In August 1605, during a royal visit to Oxford, Abbot, then serving his third term as vice chancellor, was instructed to secure Rainolds’ compliance. Rainolds duly consulted commentaries on the books of the Apocrypha to resolve his scruples, but it is unclear whether he ever fully subscribed.74 HMC Hatfield, xvii. 422-3, 431; Holland, 38, 43-4; Hist. Univ. Oxf. iv. 185-6.

In 1606, James wrote to Abbot, then a member of the lower house of Convocation, to express his disapproval after Convocation passed a set of draft Canons, which were held to be too absolutist in their tone:

You have dipped too deep in what all kings reserve among the arcana imperii. And whatever aversion you may press against God’s being the author of sin, you have stumbled upon the threshold of that opinion, in saying upon the matter, that even tyranny is God’s authority, and should be reverenced as such. If the king of Spain should return to claim his old pontifical right to my kingdom … you tell us … his authority is God’s authority, if he prevail.75 E. Cardwell, Synodalia, i. 332-4n; Anglican Canons, 1529-1947 ed. G. Bray (Church of Eng. Rec. Soc. vi), pp. lxi-lxii, 454-84; Holland, 38.

Although he vetoed the Canons, James held no grudge against Abbot, who was not their author, and was clearly on cordial terms with the king from early in the reign.76 Holland, 46-50.

The death of the earl of Dorset in April 1608 deprived Abbot of his chief patron. However, he soon found another in the Scottish lord treasurer, George Home, earl of Dunbar [S], who presumably took Abbot on as one of his chaplains when he journeyed to Scotland in the summer of 1608. Dunbar presided over the general assembly of the kirk at Linlithgow, at which Abbot’s Calvinist orthodoxy helped to reassure presbyterian ministers who feared James intended ‘to overthrow the discipline and government of the kirk with one blow’. Indeed, he received a vote of thanks from the assembly for a sermon ‘wherein he persuaded us mightily to peace and love towards others’.77 Calderwood, vi. 733-6; Orig. Letters Relating to the Eccles. Affairs of Scotland ed. B. Botfield (Bannatyne Club, 1845), i.147; CSP Dom. 1603-10, p. 450; Holland, 43-6, 65-7. Abbot’s position as Dunbar’s chaplain was recorded much later by T. Fuller, Church Hist. of Britain (1655), xi. 128. While in Edinburgh, Abbot also ministered to the Gowrie conspirator George Sprot before the latter’s execution. An account was published in London in 1609, with a preface by Abbot which recounted Sprot’s repentance for his ‘vile, fearful and devilish treason against my most gracious sovereign’, and enjoined ‘hearty obedience to our sovereign, whom God hath raised up, defended, protected, maintained, upheld with His extraordinary favour to no common end but to the enlarging of his Church, to the further ruin of Antichrist’.78 W. Hart, Examinations, Arraignment and Conviction of George Sprot (1609), 23, 33; Holland, 45-6.

Preferment and the 1610 parliamentary sessions

The prospect of Abbot’s promotion was first discussed in April 1608, before his departure for Scotland. Sir Richard Gifford^‡, mistakenly assuming that Abbot had been chosen as bishop of Lincoln, wrote to Robert Cecil^*, 1st earl of Salisbury recommending a replacement for the deanery of Winchester. In fact, Abbot had no-one to press his candidacy, as his patron Dorset died at this time. The vacancy at Lincoln was therefore filled by Barlow, whose see of Rochester passed to the clerk of the closet, Richard Neile.79 SP14/32/5; WILLIAM BARLOW; RICHARD NEILE. Although this was disappointing, it soon became clear that Abbot was being groomed for promotion nonetheless. During Lent 1609, he preached at court, apparently for the first time.80 P.E. McCullough, Sermons at Ct. (suppl. cal. 152). He was included on Whitgift’s list of prospective preachers in 1603, and scheduled to preach during Lent 1604, but was replaced by Richard Field on this occasion. Ibid. 106, (suppl. cal. 106-7). Moreover, in April, Bancroft informed Salisbury of his intention to seek royal approval for his candidate for the bishopric of Coventry and Lichfield. Abbot was almost certainly the man he had in mind, as the latter’s congé d’élire was sealed in May. However, he was not consecrated until almost six months later.

As bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, Abbot could expect an episcopal income of £633 a year. He may also have hoped to hold his deanery in commendam, but 19 days after his consecration a successor was appointed at Winchester.81 SP14/44/68; 14/49/7; Trans. Congregational Hist. Soc. (1913-15), vi. 56; Fasti, iii. 84. By then, the death of Thomas Ravis, bishop of London, had created a far more important vacancy in the bench of bishops. The prospect of becoming bishop of London caused Neile to decline the see of Chichester. However, it was Abbot who, despite his earlier recent elevation, was translated to London on 20 Jan. 1610, leaving his rival to succeed him at Lichfield.82 SP14/49/7; CSP Dom. 1603-10, p. 570; Fasti, i. 2.

Though Abbot had never sat in Parliament before, his status as bishop of London, together with Bancroft’s declining health, meant that he played a substantial part in the Lords in 1610. He attended almost every day of the spring session, and shared the proxy of Robert Bennett^*, bishop of Hereford, with James Montagu^*, bishop of Bath and Wells. The main business of the session was a major proposal to repair the crown’s finances. In return for a permanent addition to the royal revenue, the crown offered to allow the Commons to buy out various feudal duties. Known to posterity as the Great Contract, debate on this subject was initiated by Lord Treasurer Salisbury at a conference which Abbot was named to attend. The substantive decisions on this issue were taken in the Commons, while the Lords relayed the terms to the king: Abbot was included among the delegation which indicated the Commons’ initial willingness to negotiate; another asking that the commutation of wardship be discussed as part of the bargain; and a third which offered to buy out wardship completely.83 LJ, ii. 550b, 556b, 564b, 579b. Terms for the price of the Contract were then relayed by further delegations on which Abbot served, but the sums involved diverged so far that at first a deal could not be struck. On 26 June, when Salisbury proposed to put the king’s latest offer to the Commons, Abbot observed that an unpalatable offer would risk rejection. He was proved right, as it took another three weeks to reach a deal. On 19 July, when the Lords discussed how to raise the £200,000 that the Commons had provisionally agreed to provide the king with each year, Abbot moved that first the terms of the bargain should be set down in writing, ‘lest the state should be deceived of his [sic] expectation, and the gentlemen not know what they may deliver unto their countries’. He also echoed Salisbury’s demand that the taxes raised should produce a fixed yield, so the crown might avoid seeing this new income gradually eroded. The lord treasurer endorsed his motion, and the terms of the Contract were accordingly copied into the Journal at the end of the session.84 Ibid. 603a, 618a; Procs. 1610 ed. E.R. Foster, i. 113-14, 152-4.

Ecclesiastical legislation was a perennial concern for the bishops, and during this session, puritans in the Commons sent up several bills designed to subvert the post-Hampton Court settlement, chiefly by bringing Church government within the jurisdiction of the common law. When the bill against pluralist and non-resident ministers received its second reading in the Lords on 30 Apr., Bancroft inveighed against a measure which, as he saw it, blamed the Church for problems actually caused by greedy lay patrons. He was seconded by Abbot, who attacked the clause requiring pluralists to pay a minimum stipend to their curates, claiming that parity in Church livings in Scotland ‘hath rooted out almost all learning in that kingdom’, as had a similar initiative in Ireland. He argued that academics like himself would not leave their fellowships for poor livings; indeed, their families would not send them to university ‘when they shall see [no]thing but beggary proposed’.85 Procs. 1610, i. 72-3, 225; Holland, 95. As a result, the bill’s supporters among the lay peerage mounted a more forceful defence on 3 May, when they urged that wealthy livings should go to good preachers – an implicit criticism of the recent deprivations of puritan clergy. Bancroft conceded that ‘everyone should have a sufficient living’, while Abbot defended the removal of nonconformists under the 1604 Canons, which, as he reminded the House, enjoined the clergy to preach regularly: ‘where there is no preaching, the souls of men are in danger’. He was included on the subcommittee to consider further reforms to clerical income which was named at the end of this debate.86 Procs. 1610, i. 75, 78-9, 234; LJ, ii. 587a. Proponents of the bill attempted to hold a fresh debate on 8 June, when ill health kept Bancroft from the House. Salisbury had the debate postponed, and Abbot was asked to procure Bancroft’s notes for use at the next meeting. Bancroft stalled the report on the pluralities bill until 23 June, when the clerical income subcommittee was given further time for investigation; its findings were never reported to the House.87 LJ, ii. 609b, 621a; RICHARD BANCROFT.

Bancroft was reduced to splenetic fury once again on 11 June, at the second reading of the bill to prevent the deprivation of any minister for refusing to subscribe to Canons not ratified in Parliament. This measure, if given retrospective authority, would have reinstated around 80 ministers deprived for failing to subscribe to the 1604 Canons. Neile seconded Bancroft, insisting that the bill questioned the king’s prerogative as supreme governor of the Church, but Abbot tried a less confrontational approach. He began by declaring that, in some respects, the bill was entirely laudable: ‘this bill hath brought no inconvenience to good subjects, but it keeps offenders in awe, and as there is cause gives fitting punishment. Though the laws of this kingdom do differ from the canon law, yet both of them are good in their kind’. However, he went on to repeat his earlier argument that the deprivation of nonconformist ministers did not subvert property rights, as was claimed, and pointed out that ‘the manner of making Canons in this kingdom is the same as is throughout Christendom’. He urged the bill’s supporters to leave discipline to the Church. Despite his opposition to the measure, he was included on the bill committee, and assisted Bancroft in opposing the Commons’ criticisms of the 1604 Canons at a conference on 6 July. It was presumably Abbot’s objections which ensured the bill never emerged from committee.88 Procs. 1610, i. 101-2, 127, n.9; LJ, ii. 611a.

Another measure which vexed the bishops was the bill to bring scandalous ministers under the jurisdiction of the common law courts, which received its first reading in the Lords on 7 July. Abbot, incensed by the ‘vile matter’ alleged against the 1604 Canons at the previous day’s conference, launched into an invective against this fresh measure:

Here is a bill to give justices of assize and justices of peace power to punish the clergy, which is no marvel, though they speak against the Church, seeing in the bill of th’assignment of debts they touch the king’s prerogative. If your lordships give way unto their desires, you shall leave the Church in worse state than in the time of persecuting emperors. This bill is so vile that I think your lordships shall do well to cast it out of the House.89 Procs. 1610, i. 128. Abbot had been named to the committee for the bill to prevent assignment of private debts to the crown on 26 May: LJ, ii. 601b.

Abbot returned to the attack at the bill’s second reading on 12 July, protesting that its enemies would take heart from the fact that the Church ‘divulged unto all the world that the chiefest persons in the church have not care of the clergy, but must have need of temporal power’. He insisted that three scandalous ministers had recently been deprived by the ecclesiastical courts, and another was to lose his living that very day. Despite this intemperate rhetoric, he was named to the committee. The bill was lost at the prorogation.90 Procs. 1610, i. 134-5; LJ, ii. 641b.

Puritan criticism of the ecclesiastical hierarchy offended Abbot because it distracted from the fight against the Church’s main adversary, Roman Catholicism. In May 1610, news of the assassination of Henri IV of France by an ultramontane Catholic prompted the speedy drafting of a draconian bill to punish not just regicides but also their families. At its second reading on 18 July, Abbot declared his support for its penalties: ‘if the father deserve well, the children do participate of the benefits; so likewise on the contrary would I have them to do of the punishment’. However, he suggested that a proviso be added, so that the bill would not cover pretenders to the throne until they were in ‘undoubted possession’. He was included on the bill committee, but the measure was never reported.91 Procs. 1610, i. 147-8; LJ, ii. 649a, 651a.

Abbot was perfectly capable of distinguishing between the various shades of Catholic nonconformity, as he demonstrated on 2 Apr., at the third reading of the bill for restitution in blood of a former Essex rebel, Sir John Davies.92 A namesake of the Irish attorney general, Sir John Davies^‡. Bishop Barlow explained that Davies had attended divine service and taken the oath of allegiance, but had declined to receive communion, which prompted Abbot to speak in Davies’ favour: ‘although there is none more unwilling to give my assent for the heaping of favours upon papists than myself, yet seeing he is come thus far on his way, we should do very ill to give him any cause of distaste’.93 Procs. 1610, i. 62. He was named to the committee for a bill to ensure that Davies’s restitution would not create a precedent, by making communion a prerequisite of naturalization or restitution in blood. Following papal condemnation of the oath of allegiance (the taking of which by all suspected recusants was required by the 1606 Recusancy Act), fresh legislation stipulated that the oath was to be tendered to all adults. On 8 June, Abbot asked to be given instructions on the sanctions he might apply before the bill became law; he was subsequently named to the committee for this bill.94 LJ, ii. 606b, 645a; Procs. 1610, i. 100.

Although new to his diocese, some of the business Abbot was involved with during the session reflected his local and ecclesiastical responsibilities. At the report stage of the bill to incorporate Thomas Sutton’s hospital at Hallingbury, Essex – which lay within the diocese of London – he noted that the hospital’s charter allowed the bishop no visitation rights or control over the appointment of a preacher or schoolmaster. However, Bancroft dismissed this motion, observing that to amend the bill at this stage would mean that it would not complete its passage before the end of the session. As a result, the bill passed unaltered.95 Procs. 1610, i. 138-9. Abbot was also appointed to committees for the bill to secure funding for Chelsea College (the new foundation for London’s conformist preachers); the bill to confirm Salisbury’s acquisition of part of the grounds of the bishop of Durham’s palace in the Strand; and the bill confirming the alienation of two Essex properties by Henry de Vere^*, 18th earl of Oxford.96 LJ, ii. 611a, 616a, 645a.

Though he disapproved of the pluralism bill, Abbot was keen to improve the endowments of the Church. For this reason he was named to committees for bills to unite two Dorset parishes and to divide two Hampshire parishes. When the latter bill was reported on 23 June, Neile and others expressed misgivings about the wisdom of subdividing a small parish, but Abbot disagreed: ‘this disuniting is not unfit, seeing both the livings are competent … and these are a mile-and-a-half asunder, and so little churches that one cannot contain both the parishioners’; the bill was passed on a division.97 Ibid. 563b, 595b, 596b; Procs. 1610, i. 111-12. He was also named to the committee for a bill to confirm a charitable foundation at Thetford, Norfolk, which he reported on 24 May; it was discovered that the clerk had botched the recording of the amendments, requiring a fresh draft of the bill to be committed on 25 May.98 LJ, ii. 569b, 589b, 600a.

By the time Parliament reconvened in October 1610, it was obvious that both crown and Commons had lost their enthusiasm for the Great Contract. On 25 Oct. Abbot was selected to attend a conference at which the Commons were pressed for a definitive statement of their intentions. After the lower House finally rejected the Contract, he was also included on the Lords’ delegation to urge the Commons to consider other forms of supply.99 Ibid. 671a, 678a. However, with Bancroft on his deathbed, Abbot (who held a share in the proxies of four absentee bishops) was kept away from the Lords on at least one occasion by business relating to his diocesan visitation.100 Ibid. 666a, 676a. The failed session generated little legislative business, and consequently Abbot was named to only a handful of bill committees, including those for the preservation of woods and timber, to prevent the export of iron ordnance, and to confirm titles to duchy of Cornwall copyholds.101 Ibid. 669a, 670a, 677a.

Lambeth and the court, 1611-13

Bancroft’s death on 2 Nov. 1610 prompted speculation about the appointment of his successor. However, the king’s decision to house a visiting French diplomat at Lambeth Palace suggested he was not inclined to rush the decision. Several candidates were reported to be under consideration: Abbot, Bilson and Tobie Matthew^*, archbishop of York, all conformist Calvinists; and the leading Arminian, Lancelot Andrewes^*, bishop of Ely.102 HMC Downshire, ii. 396, 407; iii. 32; HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, iii. 245; Winwood’s Memorials ed. E. Sawyer, iii. 239. Rumours of ill health probably blighted Matthew’s prospects, while Andrewes had recently harmed his chances by nearly derailing the king’s cherished plan to bring the churches of England and Scotland into congruence by insisting that presbyterian ordinations were not valid in the Church of England.103 T. Birch, Ct. and Times of Jas. I, i. 110; LPL, Reg. Bancroft, f. 175r-v; LANCELOT ANDREWES. By contrast, Abbot furthered his own cause during the vacancy by engaging in disputations with two imprisoned Catholic priests, and by writing to the king about the need for a new protector for the Kirk following the death of the earl of Dunbar in January 1611, a charge he said he had received ‘from the mouths of my two late and most honourable lords of Canterbury and Dunbar’ as they lay on their deathbeds. He urged James to grant leave to John Spottiswoode, archbishop of Glasgow [S], to come to England to discuss the project, recently begun by Dunbar, to restore full ecclesiastical hierarchy to the Kirk. This tactful indication of his familiarity with the broader context of the Stuart realms seems to have proved decisive, as Abbot’s selection as archbishop was announced only three days later.104 CSP Ven. 1610-13, p. 100; SP15/40/1; Lansd. 92, no. 7; Holland, 40, 48-9.

News of Abbot’s elevation to Canterbury in April 1611 is said to have dismayed the Privy Council. James explained that his choice had been Dunbar’s dying wish, which led George Calvert^‡ to quip, ‘the bishop of London, by a strong north wind coming out of Scotland, is blown over the Thames to Lambeth’. Bancroft too had expressed the hope, in his will, that Abbot would be his successor. However, the final decision rested with the king alone: the appointment of an orthodox Calvinist to Canterbury was an overture for peace with both English and Scottish nonconformists, and a warning to Catholics who refused to take the oath of allegiance.105 Holland, 47-9; Fincham, Prelate as Pastor, 27-9; Birch, Ct. and Times of Jas. I, i. 110; PROB 11/116, f. 318v; CSP Ven. 1610-13, p. 142. Nevertheless, the choice of Abbot allegedly gave rise to discontent among his fellow bishops, ‘being all his seniors, and many of them pretending and hoping for the place’. However, the only cleric who tried to make his life difficult was Neile, who may have decided to pursue the Staffordshire heretic Edward Wightman in 1611-12 in order to see whether Abbot could be blamed for ignoring sectaries during his brief tenure at Coventry and Lichfield.106 HMC Rutland, i. 429; HMC Hatfield, xxi. 294. The news from Lambeth also caused a ripple of alarm among the diplomatic community in London, as Abbot’s anti-Catholic views were well known. Some observers hoped James would mitigate any problems, and the promotion did, in fact, frustrate plans for a crackdown on recusants at the Middlesex quarter sessions.107 Spain and the Jacobean Catholics I: 1603-14 ed. A.J. Loomie (Cath. Rec. Soc. lxiv), 170-1; CSP Ven. 1610-13, p. 125.

In the archiepiscopal vacancy between Bancroft’s death and Abbot’s appointment, James promoted a number of anti-Calvinists: Neile was moved to Coventry and Lichfield, and succeeded at Rochester by John Buckeridge^*; the Arminian Giles Thompson^* was nominated as bishop of Gloucester; and George Montaigne^* (a future archbishop of York) became dean of Westminster. With Abbot destined for Canterbury, this was doubtless intended to ensure that Calvinists did not come to monopolize the Church’s senior ranks. However, Abbot’s influence in the early years of his primacy can be detected in the appointment of his successor at London, John King^*, with whom he had worked at Oxford, and Thompson’s successor as bishop of Gloucester, Miles Smith^*. During this period, he probably exercised greater influence over preferments in the Irish Church, which offered little to tempt the ambitious English careerist. The theological complexion of the Irish episcopate he helped to choose explains why the Irish Articles of 1615 offered a more rigorous statement of Calvinist doctrine than the Thirty-Nine Articles.108 J. McCavitt, Sir Arthur Chichester, 54-5; A. Ford, Prot. Reformation in Ire. 1590-1641, pp. 156-78.

In his first circular as archbishop, Abbot donned the mantle of Bancroft: his subordinates were instructed to report on measures to tackle the ecclesiastical grievances complained of by the Commons in July 1610, and to investigate other matters addressed in Parliament: recusants, nonconformists, pluralists and scandalous ministers.109 Vis. Articles and Injunctions of the Early Stuart Church ed. K. Fincham (Church of Eng. Rec. Soc. i), 98-9. For Bancroft’s earlier instructions, on which Abbot required reports, see ibid. 94-7. He also inherited the problems of his predecessor’s churchmanship, one of which – the prohibitions dispute – developed into a crisis as he arrived at Lambeth. Since 1604, puritan lawyers had been attempting to overturn deprivations of nonconformist ministers by appealing to the common law courts. Sir Edward Coke^‡, chief justice of Common Pleas from 1607, endorsed their narrow interpretation of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction, routinely issuing prohibitions to stop the proceedings of High Commission. In Hilary term 1611, during the vacancy at Lambeth, Coke issued two prohibitions which effectively extinguished High Commission’s claim to jurisdiction over laymen.110 Usher, 180-210; HP Commons 1604-29, iv. 326-7. Abbot responded by encouraging the civil lawyers to petition the king for redress, and in May he defended the ecclesiastical jurisdiction before the Privy Council, arguing that the 1559 Act of Supremacy had empowered Elizabeth to exercise her prerogative as supreme governor via commissioners, and that the court’s jurisdiction was – as even Coke’s own law reports admitted – upheld by the judgement in Cawdry’s Case (1591). Coke replied that as the 1559 act had failed to specify the powers transferred, he was entitled to construe them in a narrow sense. The king settled the dispute, promising to limit the powers of High Commission. However, after discussion with Abbot, the new commission issued in August preserved the court’s controversial jurisdiction over small cases of a non-spiritual nature. At the court’s first meeting in Michaelmas 1611, Abbot ensured that business was taken up with cases of heresy, incest and other ‘enormous crimes’ which Coke had admitted lay within its jurisdiction. Despite this conciliatory overture, the judges refused to take their places on the commission, to which they had been added as a gesture of goodwill.111 Usher, 210-21; HMC Hatfield, xxi. 294; HMC Downshire, iii. 84. On learning that this was because of Coke’s stubbornness, Abbot offered an olive branch: when James sought to have the case against Wightman and another heretic heard by High Commission, Abbot persuaded him instead to refer the case to the judges of King’s Bench, whose number would be reinforced by Coke.112 Egerton Pprs. ed. J.P. Collier (Cam. Soc. xii), 447-8; CSP Ven. 1610-13, p. 294.

In the early years of his primacy, Abbot clearly aspired to a more prominent role in court politics than Bancroft – an ecclesiastical administrator – had enjoyed. These hopes proved ephemeral, partly because of the post-Reformation expectation that bishops would focus on their pastoral role, but mainly because the cause of European Protestantism, which Abbot so vigorously promoted in both the Council and the Church, sat uneasily with James’s cross-confessional diplomacy. Abbot joined the Privy Council only two months after his promotion, ‘to its small satisfaction and on the king’s absolute command’, as the Venetian ambassador claimed. The latter’s informant was probably Abbot himself, a regular visitor to the embassy, who constantly reminded the Venetians (and doubtless others, too) that his status as primate made him ex officio president of the Council.113 HMC Downshire, iii. 199; CSP Ven. 1610-13, p. 183; 1613-15, p. 420; 1615-17, p. 234; 1617-19, pp. 134, 359; 1621-3, p. 98. In fact, the rising star at court in 1611 was not Abbot but Robert Carr^*, Viscount Rochester (later earl of Somerset), who joined the Council at around the same as the archbishop. Abbot was never close to the new Scottish favourite, who ultimately allied himself to the pro-Spanish Howard faction, depending instead upon Prince Henry, who was staking his claim to leadership of the Protestant party at court during 1610-12.114 CSP Ven. 1610-13, p. 142; HMC Portland, ix. 33. R. Strong, Henry, Prince of Wales, 71-85; Holland, 268-9.

Abbot was mentioned as a possible successor to Lord Treasurer Salisbury in 1612; being the son of a clothier, he was presumably familiar with financial accounts. However, when the treasurership was placed in commission in June, he was not included among the commissioners. The rumour that he was being considered for this appointment probably illustrates little more than jockeying for position between court factions.115 Newsletters from the Archpresbyterate of George Birkhead ed. M.C. Questier (Cam. Soc. 5th ser. xii), 142, n.624; Chamberlain Letters, i. 354; HP Commons 1604-29, i. 473; Holland, 269-70.

Prince Henry’s death in November 1612 represented a setback for Abbot, who ministered to the prince in his final hours, and later preached the funeral sermon, in which he ‘praised the loftiness of the prince’s ideas, and concluded by dwelling on the fragility of human life and hopes’.116 HMC Portland, ix. 33; Chamberlain Letters, i. 389-90; CSP Ven. 1610-13, pp. 468-9. Nevertheless, this calamity forestalled a confrontation over the king’s plans to marry Henry to a Catholic bride, the sister of the duke of Savoy. Plans to marry Princess Elizabeth to Elector Frederick V of the Palatinate, leader of the German Calvinist princes, were only briefly interrupted by Henry’s death. Abbot gave the blessing at the couple’s betrothal on 27 Dec. 1612, entertained the Elector’s followers at a banquet in the following month, and performed the marriage ceremony in February 1613.117 Chamberlain Letters, i. 399, 412, 424; CSP Ven. 1610-13, pp. 473-4, 499; HMC Downshire, iv. 2. At his departure, Frederick reportedly gave Abbot plate worth £1,000, and a lesser sum to another leading advocate of a pan-Protestant diplomacy, Lord Chancellor Ellesmere (Thomas Egerton^*, later 1st Viscount Brackley); no other councillor received a gift.118 Chamberlain Letters, i. 442-3, 449.

Shortly after Henry’s death one of the prince’s chaplains, Lewis Bayly^* (later bishop of Bangor), revealed something of the tensions at court by delivering a sermon in which he claimed that his dying master had accused crypto-Catholic councillors of betraying state secrets – presumably relating to the proposed Savoyard Match. Abbot quickly silenced Bayly, but the incident may have provoked a clash at the Council table between the archbishop and Henry Howard^*, earl of Northampton, one of the hispanophile councillors to whom Bayly had alluded.119 Chamberlain Letters, i. 392, 394; CSP Ven. 1610-13, p. 450; Birch, Ct. and Times of Jas. I, i. 210-11; Holland, 270. Fincham, ‘Prelacy and Pols.’, 47. Abbot subsequently tried to undermine Northampton’s standing at court, to frustrate the latter’s ambition to become lord treasurer. In May 1613, two men were tried in Star Chamber for spreading rumours that Northampton and other crypto-Catholic councillors had begged James to allow toleration for Catholics. There is no evidence that Abbot was responsible for circulating these rumours himself, but he evidently took them seriously, as deponents in the case claimed that he and Edward La Zouche^*, 11th Lord Zouche, persuaded James to ignore the Catholics’ plea. The indictment was probably framed to embarrass Northampton, while Abbot’s censure of the perpetrators could also be interpreted as a warning to the king and the Spanish faction: ‘if [the] king should go about to give a toleration, he should not be the Defender of the Faith, but the betrayer of the faith’.120 Newsletters from the Archpresbyterate of George Birkhead, 224-5; Chamberlain Letters, i. 453; Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton ed. L. Pearsall Smith, ii. 22-3; HENRY HOWARD.

Abbot lost much of his credit at court during the summer of 1613, because of the difficulties he made about annulling the marriage of Robert Devereux^*, 3rd earl of Essex to Frances, daughter of Thomas Howard^*, 1st earl of Suffolk, on grounds of impotence. Frances wished instead to marry Rochester, an alliance promoted both by the king and Northampton in order to reconcile the favourite to Suffolk, a leading pro-Spanish courtier. Appointed in May to head the commission of judges in the case, Abbot, it was said, ‘makes much conscience to do that which in law he must do, wherein he shows his spleen, but not his judgement’. The archbishop’s misgivings were also shared by several other divorce commissioners, and as a result sentence was postponed until the end of Trinity term.121 HMC Mar and Kellie, ii. 51-3; Birch, Ct. and Times of Jas. I, i. 254; State Trials, ii. 805-10. The king was dissatisfied, and sought to resolve the issue by dealing privately with the commissioners. He found Abbot, John King, bishop of London and two civil lawyers opposed to an annulment, whereas Andrewes, Neile and others were in favour. This divergence of opinion was founded as much upon expediency as principle: Abbot and his allies aimed to frustrate an alliance between Somerset and Suffolk; while their opponents (including several anti-Calvinists) were keen to fulfil the king’s expectations, and thereby advance their own careers.

Abbot quickly realized that he could not win, but neither could he back down. Under these circumstances, he begged the king to be removed from the divorce commission, being ‘no married man …, no lawyer, and I had not had the time, by reason of my infinite businesses, to read so much of that matter, as other men had’. Instead of taking Abbot up on this offer, James chose to break the deadlock by adding Bishop Bilson and Bishop Buckeridge, to the commission.122 HMC Buccleuch, i. 140; Chamberlain Letters, i. 469; Birch, Ct. and Times of Jas. I, i. 267, 269; HMC Mar and Kellie, ii. 53; State Trials, ii. 813-14; Holland, 271-2. Both newcomers proved compliant to the king’s wishes, much to the disgust of Abbot who, writing in October 1613, waspishly claimed that Bilson resented being turned down for the primacy in 1611, and that Buckeridge had declared in favour of annulment before being added to the commission. However, the king, preferring unanimity to a majority verdict, dispatched Neile and Suffolk to tender appropriate incentives to the doubters, among them the archbishop’s brother, Robert Abbot, who was offered the bishopric of Lincoln. When the commission reconvened on 18 Sept., opponents of annulment came under considerable royal pressure. Nevertheless, at the delivery of the court’s sentence a week later, there were five votes against and seven in favour. The commissioners were not allowed to explain their verdicts to the court, which may explain why Abbot subsequently penned a narrative for private circulation among his allies.123 Birch, Ct. and Times of Jas. I, i. 269; State Trials, ii. 816-29.

The narrow majority for annulment caused a scandal. One commentator reported that the earl and countess of Essex ‘may marry again, but how lawfully, God knows’. James was furious with those who had crossed his wishes, and the first casualty was Abbot’s brother: Neile was promoted to Lincoln in his stead, while the resulting vacancy at Coventry and Lichfield was filled by another anti-Calvinist, John Overall^*.124 HMC Downshire, iv. 214, 216-17, 260; Chamberlain Letters, i. 478; Newsletters from the Archpresbyterate of George Birkhead, 238, 241-2, 248, 255. Some minor patronage still fell to Calvinists during this period: in November 1613, during the vacancy at Lincoln prior to Neile’s translation, Abbot installed the precentor, Roger Parker (a royal nominee), as dean of Lincoln Cathedral; while in June 1614, during an archiepiscopal visitation, William Bridges (son of the conformist John Bridges^*, bishop of Oxford) was collated as archdeacon of Oxford, at his father’s behest.125 Fasti, viii. 84; ix. 7, 24; H. Hajzyk, ‘Church in Lincs. c.1595-c.1640’ (Cambridge Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1980), 17, 60, 69, 237. However, the marked diminution in Abbot’s influence led to rumours ‘that the archbishop must no more have to do with naming any church livings, but some lords in court should dispose of all’. Although this report was false, attempts were then made to commission a publication justifying the annulment, which were abandoned because no-one was willing to undertake it. The news that Continental Calvinists had written two books supporting the archbishop’s stance against the annulment did little to strengthen Abbot’s position.126 State Trials, ii. 829-32; Newsletters from the Archpresbyterate of George Birkhead, 255, 260. Most damaging of all, the controversy was used by Catholics, both at home and abroad, to mock the Church of England.127 HMC Downshire, iv. 379.

During the autumn, Suffolk and Neile attempted to create the impression that the opponents of annulment had been reconciled to the verdict by having them join in enrolling the sentence in Chancery. However, realizing that this would be perceived as giving his retrospective consent, Abbot declined to participate. Neile made a final attempt to secure Abbot’s compliance by urging him to issue a licence for the marriage between Rochester, now earl of Somerset, and Frances Howard, arranged for 26 Dec. 1613. Abbot responded that this task should be left to Bishop James Montagu, as dean of the Chapel Royal, where the banns would ordinarily have been read. He also protested that such a ruse was an ill requital of the tactful silence he had maintained since the decree had been passed. This satisfied the king, and Abbot demonstrated his goodwill towards the couple by attending Somerset’s wedding. He reserved his bile for Neile, whose machinations were exposed in an account of the post-trial manoeuvres which was circulated among his friends.128 State Trials, ii. 833-44; Chamberlain Letters, i. 496; Holland, 257-8.

The Addled Parliament, 1614

Abbot’s discomfiture over the Essex divorce case left him in a weak position to counter the marriage alliance proposed for Prince Charles by the French regent, Marie de Medici, early in 1614. Abbot, who insisted the heir should be married to a Protestant, was omitted from the commission appointed to scrutinize the terms offered by the French in February 1614. The hispanophiles, while equally opposed to a proposal which would cross their own plans for a Spanish Match, pursued a less obstructive course, supporting plans for a fresh Parliament, which might offer a vote of supply sufficient to reduce the crown’s debts without recourse to a French dowry.129 Chamberlain Letters, i. 506-7; HMC Downshire, iv. 310, 318-19; Narrative of the Spanish Marriage Treaty ed. S.R. Gardiner (Cam. Soc. ci), 111-12n; A.D. Thrush, ‘French Marriage and the Origins of the 1614 Parl.’, Crisis of 1614 and the Addled Parl. ed. S. Clucas and R. Davies, 25-35. At the same time, rivalry erupted in Star Chamber between the Spanish and Protestant factions on the Council over Sir Stephen Proctor, who accused Northampton of suppressing evidence about the Gunpowder Plot. Predictably, the verdict in the case was deadlocked along factional lines, with Abbot, Ellesmere, Bishop King and Sir Julius Caesar^‡ all declaring in favour of Proctor, who thus escaped censure, despite being widely held to be ‘void of all honesty’. It was perhaps this confrontation which explains a wild rumour circulating at this time that Abbot was to be placed under house arrest.130 Chamberlain Letters, i. 508-9; Wentworth Pprs. ed. J.P. Cooper (Cam. Soc. 4th ser. xii), 58-9, 61-2; Letters of Philip Gawdy ed. I.H. Jeayes, 176-7; HMC Mar and Kellie, ii. 53.

During the 1614 Parliament, Abbot held the proxy of Henry Robinson^*, bishop of Carlisle, and shared the proxies of three other absentee bishops. He also arranged for his brother Robert to serve as prolocutor (speaker) of the lower House of Convocation, and secured his steward, Robert Hatton^‡, a parliamentary seat at Queenborough, Kent, which lay within his diocese.131 LJ, ii. 686a; Chamberlain Letters, i. 521; HP Commons 1604-29, iv. 593. The most important business transacted by the Lords in the opening weeks of the session was the bill to settle the right of Princess Elizabeth’s heirs to succeed to the crown of England. This was debated on 8 Apr., when Abbot commended Elizabeth in the most effusive terms: ‘an ordinary hearer of God’s word and frequenter of his temple, besides there is no day passeth over her head without reading of some part of the sacred word of God, her attention at sermons and care to have her family religious is admirable’. At the same time, he praised the recently deceased John Harington^*, 1st Lord Harington, whom he regarded as being responsible for the princess’s ‘godly and virtuous education’. He also rejoiced at the security most of the Protestant princes of Germany enjoyed as members of the Evangelical Union, ‘for although there be difference and dissension amongst themselves for some things, which I wish were not, whereby some amongst them are styled Lutherans, some Calvinists, yet thanks be given to God that they concur with all the Reformed churches in Christendom in the material and fundamental points’. The bill was passed with only minor amendments, which Abbot and others explained to the Commons at a conference on 14 April.132 LJ, ii. 692a; HMC Hastings, iv. 237-8.

Abbot was also named to the committee for a bill to avoid disputes over wills of land, which he reported on 19 Apr. as fit only to be laid aside.133 LJ, ii. 694a, 695b; HMC Hastings, iv. 245-6. After Easter, he claimed privilege on behalf of one of his servants. On 4 June he reported a conference with the Commons over the Sabbath bill, at which he himself had reassured MPs that, ‘though some lords spake against parts of the bill … I assure you they are most glad to embrace it’. Nothing further was done in respect of this measure before the dissolution three days later.134 LJ, ii. 703a-4b, 713b, 714b; HMC Hastings, iv. 248-9, 279-80.

The Addled Parliament was wrecked by a confrontation over the legality of the crown’s claim to lay impositions upon trade without parliamentary approval. Having reviewed the case they had made four years earlier against these levies, the Commons asked for a conference on 21 May. Neile opened the Lords’ debate, urging a flat refusal, while Ellesmere moved to consult the judges. Abbot, however, thought that MPs should be allowed to make their case, for ‘the matter is new to us, having as yet not thought of it’. He was supported by Archbishop Matthew, and a consensus was ultimately reached that the Lords would grant the Commons a meeting rather than a full conference.135 HMC Hastings, iv. 249-51; LJ, ii. 705a. Russell suggests that Abbot was being unhelpful to Ellesmere: C. Russell, King James VI and I and his English Parls. 118-19. However, when Ellesmere reported this debate two days later, he insisted that no formal decision had been reached. He repeated his advice, that the judges should be consulted before there was any meeting with the Commons. Privy Councillors and bishops, clearly speaking to a royal brief, endorsed this motion, Abbot included: ‘so must not we forget the king that is the head of the commonwealth, and therefore this being a matter that so nearly toucheth him, I pray your lordships let us hear the judges’. This was duly agreed, but Chief Justice Coke, speaking for the judicial bench, then surprised everyone by arguing that no ruling could be offered on a cause that had not yet been presented. At this, those who wished to confer with the Commons renewed their earlier motion. In vain Abbot tried to effect a compromise, praising the eloquence of both sides, but reminding the House that it was unfit to leave the king ‘in worse case than he is’ by removing impositions. He moved to give the Commons a ‘dilatory answer’, by which he presumably meant that the Commons should be informed of the judges’ response, and left to decide what course to take next. Prospects for further negotiations with the Commons were dashed by a vote which rejected the motion for a conference by 39 votes to 30. The crown secured a majority by means of the bloc votes of councillors and 16 bishops – Archbishop Matthew being the sole dissenter.136 HMC Hastings, iv. 251-5, 257-64; Chamberlain Letters, i. 533; LJ, ii. 706b-7a; Russell, King James VI and I and his English Parls. 119-20.

The Commons expressed their displeasure at this snub by attacking Bishop Neile who, during the course of the Lords’ debate, made inflammatory remarks about the disloyalty of MPs. Abbot, having every reason to seek Neile’s humiliation, called upon the Commons to set down the words his enemy was alleged to have said, ‘and if my lord confess them, there is an end; if otherwise, we may argue the nature of his offence’. Later that same morning (28 May), he and Ellesmere were ordered to draft a message to the Commons to this effect. The Commons subsequently prepared just such a text, whereupon Neile disclaimed any ‘evil intention to that House’ [the Commons]. Abbot, doubtless relishing his enemy’s discomfiture, then put Neile on the spot, calling for him to testify ‘whether he spoke those words or no’. Neile responded with an abject plea for mercy, while at the same time denying that the Commons’ text was an accurate record of his speech. However, if Abbot hoped that the Lords would punish Neile, he was to be disappointed. The peers resolved to accept Neile’s excuses for fear of implicating themselves (they having overlooked the bishop’s remarks when they were made). At the end of this long debate, Abbot was appointed to help draft a message informing the Commons that Neile had not intended to cast any ‘aspersion of sedition’ upon them, and advising them not to accuse a peer on ‘common fame’ alone.137 LJ, ii. 709a-b, 710b-11a, 712b-13a; HMC Hastings, iv. 267-77; Russell, King James VI and I and his English Parls. 121; RICHARD NEILE. The Commons took umbrage at this dismissal of their complaint, and with the prospect of supply vanishing, the king resolved to end the session. Abbot was one of the commissioners appointed to dissolve the Parliament, but the Lords resolved to adjourn until the following morning, giving MPs one final chance to vote supply. This was rejected, and dissolution followed.138 LJ, ii. 716a, 717a.

In an attempt to salvage something from the wreckage of the session, Abbot adopted a motion suggested by one of the bishops after the dismissal of the Canterbury Convocation,

to offer unto his Majesty voluntarily each of them the best piece of plate which they had, or in lieu thereof, to send in so much money as might buy a good piece of plate … we do purpose to move all the wealthy men of the Church of England to yield such a freewill offering. We resolved of this course partly because plate is at this day the greatest superfluity in England, and partly because our example (as we supposed) was like to draw on the Lords and other of the temporality.139 Add. 72242, f. 27v; Bodl., Tanner 74, f. 40; HMC Downshire, iv. 431; Birch, Ct. and Times of Jas. I, i. 323-4; Chamberlain Letters, i. 542, 546; Holland. 274-5.

This benevolence eventually raised around £76,000 in cash and plate, with the clergy contributing £13,000, around two-thirds of a clerical subsidy. Abbot himself collected £1,140 from his own diocese and the civil lawyers practising in the Court of Arches (a Canterbury peculiar), the equivalent of an entire clerical subsidy.140 E351/1950. For the diocesan yields of a clerical subsidy, see SP14/133/13. Cleverly, he used the benevolence to explain to his diplomatic contacts, English and foreign, that rumours of ‘some mutiny or sedition’ following the dissolution were untrue, and that ‘our people generally do love and honour the king, though perhaps his money seem not unto them to be so well employed sometimes, as they do desire’.141 Add. 72242, f. 29v; CSP Ven. 1613-15, p. 431.

The rise and fall of the Howards, 1614-19

The collapse of the Addled Parliament might have rekindled James’s interest in the French Match, but the political unrest which followed the prince of Condé’s rebellion against Marie de Médici in the summer of 1614 caused the French to lay the project aside. Meanwhile, the death of Northampton on 15 June cleared the way for the appointment of Suffolk as lord treasurer, with Somerset succeeding his father-in-law as lord chamberlain. With the Spanish party in the ascendant at court, Abbot gloomily observed ‘there is no expectation of a new Parliament, his Majesty being so triced in the last by persons of whom he had no right to expect it’.142 Add. 72242, f. 30; HMC Downshire, iv. 514; CSP Dom. 1611-18, p. 244. Abbot met Condé‘s secretary in June 1614: HMC Downshire, iv. 428-9. Throughout the summer, Abbot followed the Jülich-Cleves crisis in the Rhineland, assuring Christian IV of Denmark that the likelihood of war in Germany had prompted James to raise troops and disarm the Catholics. He clearly hoped that war would force the king to intervene in support of the forces of the elector of Brandenburg and his Dutch allies – which would almost certainly have required another Parliament – but James opted to assist in the mediation of a settlement.143 HMC Downshire, iv. 457, 502, 511, 514; v. 56-7; 46th DKR, app. 44; P.H. Wilson, Europe’s Tragedy, 252-4.

Abbot’s leadership of the Protestant interest at court led to an attempt on his life in August by a Catholic named Worsley, who brandished a knife in his study at Lambeth, but was overpowered by his servants. Suspected to have been sent by ‘some Jesuited persons who knew the house’, it emerged that Worsley was a servant of Thomas Sackville, a seminary priest and youngest son of the late lord treasurer. He apparently acted on his own, having become obsessed with Ravaillac, the assassin of Henri IV. He was incarcerated, while Sackville was sent into exile.144 HMC Downshire, iv. 512-13; v. 37, 42, 44, 78. Worsley was still railing against Abbot in 1621: Birch, Ct. and Times of Jas. I, ii. 227.

Over the following years, Abbot did his best to undermine the Howard ascendancy at court. At New Year 1615 he attempted to discredit Thomas Howard^*, 14th or 21st earl of Arundel, by insinuating to the king that the earl had consorted with the papal curia during his sojourn in Rome the previous year. In May Abbot sent a dozen of his servants to attend Thomas Erskine, Viscount Fentoun [S] to Windsor for the latter’s installation as a Garter knight, but offered no support to the other new knight, the Howard client William Knollys^*, Lord Knollys (later earl of Banbury). As the secretary of the Venetian embassy remarked, ‘the friend of one must needs be the enemy of the other’.145 Chamberlain Letters, i. 568-9, 599; CSP Ven. 1613-15, p. 481.

Abbot’s relations with the Howards deteriorated rapidly once he, William Herbert^*, 3rd earl of Pembroke and other malcontents began to promote the cause of the young George Villiers^* (later 1st duke of Buckingham) as a rival to Somerset for the king’s favour. Abbot was the first councillor to take up this cause, aiding Sir John Graham in his unsuccessful plan to have Villiers sworn as a groom of the bedchamber in November 1614.146 Letters of John Donne ed. E. Gosse, ii. 61. He subsequently solicited the queen’s backing for Villiers, but was initially rebuffed by Anne, who warned him that ‘the king will teach him [Villiers] to despise and hardly entreat us all, that he may seem to be beholden to none but himself’. However, Anne overcame her initial misgivings – forebodings which Abbot later came to regard as prescient – recommending Villiers for a knighthood and a place as a gentleman of the bedchamber in April 1615. In May, Abbot informed William Trumbull^‡ that ‘some beginning is made, and there is some overture of other matters to follow, which if God do bless as I hope he will, our master may be happy in his elder years’. By the end of the year, Villiers was to be found addressing Abbot as ‘father’ in one of his letters. The archbishop, being 30 years his senior, accepted the accolade, advising his young protégé

daily to serve God; to be diligent and pleasing to your master [King James], and to be wary that, at no man’s instance, you press him with many suits, because they are not your friends who urge those things upon you, but have private ends of their own, which are not fit for you …147 HMC Downshire, v. 224; J. Rushworth, Historical Collections, i. 460-1; G. Goodman, Ct. of Jas. I, ii. 160-1; R. Lockyer, Buckingham, 18-20; GEORGE VILLIERS.

Villiers’ rise provided a timely counterweight to the Howard ascendancy, as it allowed the king to balance the interests of rival factions at court. Thus in July 1615, Bishop Bilson, a Howard client, was denied the keepership of the privy seal, while Abbot’s friend Lord Zouche was appointed lord warden of the Cinque Ports, an office coveted by Somerset. At around the same time, Abbot’s brother was offered the bishopric of Salisbury, surmounting the claims of Richard Field, dean of Gloucester.148 Chamberlain Letters, i. 606, 609-10; HMC Downshire, v. 284; N. Field, Short Memorials concerning … Doctor Richard Field (1717), 15-16. Ecclesiastical patronage was also distributed even-handedly at this time: the Calvinist Thomas Morton^* was consecrated as bishop of Chester, and James Montagu, promoted to Winchester; while the anti-Calvinist Richard Milbourne^* was appointed to St Davids, and Neile (then bishop of Lincoln) collated Laud as his archdeacon of Huntingdon.149 ROBERT ABBOT; THOMAS MORTON; JAMES MONTAGU; RICHARD MILBOURNE; WILLIAM LAUD.

The 1614 benevolence had done nothing to solve the crown’s financial problems, and in September 1615, following a royal lecture about the parlous state of crown finances, Abbot took the lead in proposing that the Council debate the matter and consider whether a fresh Parliament was necessary. Notes of the ensuing meetings recorded widespread (if sometimes disingenuous) agreement that a Parliament offered the only practical solution to the crisis in the royal finances. As the most senior councillor present, Abbot spoke last. He endorsed the emerging consensus for a Parliament, and followed earlier speakers in recommending that a session should be preceded by the ‘removing of obstacles and performing of things grateful and pleasing’. He made only two original suggestions; that the recusancy laws be more strictly enforced, and that the deliberations of subcommittees appointed to discuss various reforms (suggested by Sir Edward Coke) should be kept secret. He reported the findings of this meeting to the king, and was appointed to the subcommittee for discussing the most intractable problem, that of impositions and the Book of Rates.150 Letters and Life of Francis Bacon ed. J. Spedding, v. 194-5, 200, 205-7; J.D. Alsop, ‘Privy Council Debate and Committees for Fiscal Reform, Sept. 1615’, HR, lxviii. 192, 194, 206, 208-9. However, with the king set against a fresh Parliament, nothing came of these proposals, and the crown’s immediate financial needs were solved after the Dutch offered to redeem the ‘cautionary towns’ of Flushing and Brill, garrisoned by English troops for 30 years as a pledge for loans received. Abbot, one of the commissioners appointed to negotiate the transaction, expressed his regrets to Trumbull that the English would thereby lose possession of two strategic fortresses, but he saw no other way out of the crown’s financial problems – ‘that we want money is no secret’.151 HMC Downshire, v. 437, 457.

Debates over finance were eclipsed by the sudden downfall of Somerset. In October 1615, the earl was charged with complicity in his wife’s murder of his erstwhile advisor Sir Thomas Overbury. A few days later, Abbot, Suffolk and the two secretaries of state, Sir Thomas Lake^‡ and Sir Ralph Winwood^‡, were ordered to investigate claims that Somerset’s client Sir Robert Cotton^‡ had been passing state secrets to the Spanish. Abbot, Winwood and Chief Justice Coke all played significant roles in the murder trial, and in his judgement, the archbishop recalled the harsh penalty stipulated in Numbers 35:33: ‘the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it’. James had, in fact, resolved to spare the lives of the earl and countess, but the latter were incarcerated until 1622.152 CSP Dom. 1611-18, p. 322; HMC Buccleuch, i. 13-4; Holles Letters ed. P.R. Seddon (Thoroton Soc. xxxi), 108-9, 124; HMC Downshire, v. 448; S.R. Gardiner, Hist. Eng. 1603-42, ii. 331-63; A.J. Bellany, Pols. of Ct. Scandal in Early Modern Eng. 195, 220.

Somerset’s fall dissolved the bonds of co-operation between his enemies: in June 1616 Abbot was included on a commission to investigate Sir Edward Coke’s latest attempts to interfere with the jurisdiction of the equity courts. Rumours that this presaged Coke’s ‘utter overthrow’ proved to be accurate, as the chief justice was eventually dismissed on 9 November. However, he attempted to restore his fortunes at court in the following year, by marrying his daughter to Buckingham’s mentally incapable brother Sir John Villiers^* (later Viscount Purbeck). The bride objected and went into hiding; the investigation into her disappearance was handled by Abbot, who, with Queen Anne and Winwood, was said to be aiming to reconcile Coke and the king.153 HMC Buccleuch, i. 205; Holles Letters, 178, 180, 190; HMC Downshire, vi. 261; Chamberlain Letters, ii. 100.

Buckingham’s rise affected all forms of patronage at court, including ecclesiastical preferment, an arena in which the favourite first intervened in 1616, securing the bishoprics of Carlisle for Robert Snowden^*, and Bangor for Lewis Bayly. Money certainly changed hands in the latter case, and Bayly later boasted ‘that he had the bishopric in spite of the archbishop’s teeth’ – Abbot had earmarked the diocese for his chaplain, Edward Hughes, who was consoled with the archdeaconry of Bangor. However, the favourite over-reached himself in January 1617, when his attempt to secure the bishopric of Worcester for a kinsman, Henry Beaumont, ‘an obscure prebend of Windsor’, was rejected. Lord Chamberlain Pembroke interceded on behalf of John Thornborough^*, bishop of Bristol, creating a series of vacancies which saw the appointment of Abbot’s Venetian protégé De Dominis as dean of Windsor.154 Chamberlain Letters, ii. 48, 51; NLW, 9055E/763; 9056E/831; Le Neve, Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1854), i. 113; ROBERT SNOWDEN; LEWIS BAYLY; JOHN THORNBOROUGH. Beaumont was appointed dean of Peterborough instead: Fasti, viii. 119.

In the spring of 1617, Abbot was named to help oversee the realm during James’s absence in Scotland, but his anti-Spanish views led to his omission from a commission appointed to negotiate terms for a Spanish Match. The Venetian agent reported that the archbishop was restraining his criticism of a Habsburg alliance for tactical reasons, ‘reserving himself … with the rest of the clergy when they come to the point of religion, upon which, and the manner of bringing up the children and some other questions, there may arise such difficulties that the whole affair may end in nothing yet’.155 CSP Dom. 1611-18, p. 448; Chamberlain Letters, ii. 66; CSP Ven. 1615-17, p. 485. Despite Somerset’s disgrace, the Howards’ influence over the king remained strong: in April 1617 Abbot was one of several anti-Spanish courtiers who unsuccessfully pressed Somerset’s former client Sir Henry Yelverton^‡ to acknowledge Villiers (now earl of Buckingham) as his patron before being formally appointed attorney general. At the same time, Abbot advised Trumbull not to resign his post as English agent in Brussels, for fear that the Spanish faction would nominate as his successor ‘one that shall rather be at the devotion of Spain than at the service of our king’.156 Liber Famelicus of Sir J. Whitelocke ed. J. Bruce (Cam. Soc. lxx), 55-6; HMC Downshire, v. 165-6.

On the death of Winwood (28 Oct. 1617), Abbot mourned the late secretary as ‘a most worthy man for religion, fidelity and love to his country as any hath been in this later age’, and lobbied to secure the vacancy thereby created for the English ambassador to The Hague, Sir Dudley Carleton^* (later viscount Dorchester). However, Buckingham procured the appointment for Sir Robert Naunton^‡, whereupon Abbot advised Carleton to be ‘in no ways be dismayed’, for ‘with us you know sometimes there fall out revolutions’. In fact, another decade passed before the ambassador obtained the post.157 HMC Downshire, vi. 319; SP105/95, ff. 13r-v, 15v-16, 32; Carleton to Chamberlain ed. M. Lee, 247-8; British Delegation and the Synod of Dort, 25, 28.

Shortly after Abbot suffered this minor setback, Suffolk attempted to instal a rival to Buckingham in the king’s affections, which precipitated his own downfall. In April 1618, as the treasurer’s fortunes tottered, Abbot confided in Trumbull that ‘when his Majesty will be pleased to open his ears and express himself, I can let him know diverse things which are now scant imagined’. However, he correctly feared that, even were Suffolk to fall, negotiations for the Spanish Match would continue, due to the influence of the Spanish ambassador, the count of Gondomar, and Sir John Digby^* (later 1st earl of Bristol). After the lord treasurer was sacked in July, Abbot was one of the commissioners appointed to oversee the crown’s finances, a temporary expedient that ultimately lasted 18 months.158 Add. 72242, f. 84; HMC Downshire, vi. 455, 520; THOMAS HOWARD, 1ST EARL OF SUFFOLK. At Suffolk’s trial in Star Chamber in the autumn of 1619, Abbot attacked ‘the abuse of extorting officers who like ill shepherds did tear and not shear their sheep’.159 See Zechariah 11:16 and Jeremiah 23:1-2. He supported the majority view that the earl and countess should be fined £30,000 for their extortions, much less than some others advocated, and claimed ‘none should be more forward than he to mediate with his Majesty for extenuation of their punishment’.160 HMC Hatfield, xxii. 112-13.

Abbot lost a valuable ally with the death of Anne of Denmark in March 1619. He attended the queen on her deathbed, when she assured him that she relied upon ‘the safeguard of Christ’s blood and merits only’ for her salvation, ‘without any other means’, a formula designed to quash rumours that she had died a Catholic. He also preached her funeral sermon in May.161 Add. 72253, f. 18; Add. 72275, f. 46r-v; Chamberlain Letters, ii. 219, 237. During the intervening weeks, the king fell gravely ill. When James recovered, Abbot attended the sermon of thanksgiving preached at Paul’s Cross by Bishop King, following which the two prelates went to see James, then convalescing at his hunting lodge at Royston, Hertfordshire.162 Chamberlain Letters, ii. 329-30.

Religious policy, 1611-21

As primate, Abbot was more than a mere courtier. He also had oversight of the Church of England (albeit subject to constant royal supervision), which meant, inter alia, enforcing standards for doctrine and worship, fostering the development of an educated, preaching ministry and policing the Church against the threats posed by Rome, Arminianism and Protestant separatism. Some of this pastoral role was tangential to his political career, but much was directly relevant, especially during the first decade of his primacy.

Like many Calvinists, Abbot believed that a true church was defined by doctrinal orthodoxy rather than by apostolic succession. His answer to the Catholic slur, ‘where was your Church before Luther?’ was that Rome had been a true Church until the seventh century, when it began to recede, until, at the millennium, Satan was let loose on the world in the form of the Romish Antichrist. In this apocalyptic vision, the faithful had only survived thereafter in western Europe as scattered groups persecuted by Rome. Although Abbot did not disdain the Church of England’s claim to an apostolic succession derived from Rome – one of his protégés laid out the official position in a treatise of 1613 on the consecration of bishops – he regarded the essence of a church as the preaching and teaching of God’s word, rather than the administration of the sacraments.163 Holland, 60-92; A. Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 128-41, 329-30.

The maintenance of an educated, preaching ministry was an important focus of Abbot’s pastorate. Wider responsibilities meant that no archbishop of Canterbury had much time to spend in his own diocese, and Abbot was no exception – he spent the summers of 1615 and 1620 in Kent, ‘in some state’, but his only extended sojourn was an enforced one, during his suspension in 1627-8.164 HMC Downshire, v. 281; CSP Dom. 1611-18, p. 301; Chamberlain Letters, i. 612; ii. 313; Add. 12497, f. 221; Holland, 86-7. He compensated for neglect of his pastoral role in two ways: first, by entertaining the men of Kent at Lambeth at the end of the law terms, before they dispersed to their homes; and secondly, by instituting university graduates to the benefices within his diocese. When he took office, 73 per cent of the beneficed clergy of Canterbury diocese had attended university, a figure which rose to 90 per cent by the 1630s; curates were also preponderantly university educated. It was difficult to reject an under-qualified candidate, but several of Abbot’s metropolitical visitations of 1613-15 required local officials to revive the Elizabethan practice of setting a course of study by which the uneducated could earn a preaching licence.165 Holland, 87-92; G.L. Ignjatijevich, ‘Par. Clergy in the Dioc. of Canterbury’ (Sheffield Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1986), 23-6. High standards were expected, and Abbot was quick to proceed against those who abused their calling by dissolute living or teaching false doctrine. Whatever his personal views, he was naturally expected to promulgate royal initiatives such as the Book of Sports (1617), the use of the king’s full title in prayers (1619), and the preaching instructions of 1622.166 Holland, 98-103, 178; SP14/110/123. Fincham, ‘Prelacy and Pols.’, 58 explains why later reports that Abbot refused to read the Book of Sports are probably mistaken.

Whereas Bancroft had experienced serious problems over clerical nonconformity, his successor did not. This was partly because he used the polemical skills of such men against Catholics – Clarendon described Lambeth under Abbot as ‘a sanctuary to the most eminent of that factious party’ – but also because the subscription crisis of 1604-6 forced these troublesome individuals to decide whether to conform or separate.167 Clarendon, i. 125-6; Holland, 172-5. Abbot was less concerned than Bancroft had been over strict enforcement of the Canons and the rubrics of the Prayer Book. (Although he twice urged Thomas Dove^*, bishop of Peterborough, to ensure that the deprived ministers of Northamptonshire were not allowed to preach, it is likely this was because the king kept a close eye on the shire which had been the epicentre of puritan petitioning in 1605). Indeed, Abbot went to considerable lengths to find common ground with three controversial Northamptonshire preachers, Robert Catelin, Arthur Hildersham and John Dod. He subjected them to rigorous investigation in 1613-14, when his credit with the king was at a low ebb following the Essex divorce case, but re-licensed Hildersham and Dod shortly after James’s death.168 Holland, 177-84; CSP Dom. 1603-10, p. 646; 1611-18, pp. 92, 254; THOMAS DOVE; Fincham, ‘Prelacy and Pols.’, 43. Abbot was not afraid of a confrontation: Edmund Peacham, a Somerset minister whose libel against Bishop James Montagu was passed to him by Sir Maurice Berkeley^‡ in 1614, was initially cited into High Commission, although the case was ultimately tried at the Somerset assizes.169 Holles Letters, 63-4; CSP Dom. 1611-18, p. 263; Chamberlain Letters, i. 612-13; Fincham, Prelate as Pastor, 317; JAMES MONTAGU. In 1624 Abbot blocked the appointment of John Davenport as vicar of St Stephen’s, Coleman Street, the London parish in which his brother Maurice lived. Davenport ultimately embraced separatism and went into exile; however, it was not Abbot, but the appointment of Laud, which convinced him to leave. Abbot had an ambiguous relationship with the puritan lawyer William Prynne^‡, who dedicated a book to him in 1626. Prynne urged Abbot to take a stricter line against Arminians, something the archbishop was hardly in a position to do at the time. However, in 1630 Abbot’s secretary urged another academic to refrain from publishing a riposte to Prynne’s attack on bowing at the name of Jesus, ‘a theme of so small necessity’. Moreover, it was one of Abbot’s chaplains whom, in 1632, licensed Prynne’s Histriomastix for publication, an attack on Queen Henrietta Maria which earned the author his first prosecution in Star Chamber.170 Holland, 188-93; LPL, ms 943, p. 97.

Abbot had no truck with separatists: as one of his chaplains remarked in a visitation sermon, ‘such as are factious, I wish them at Amsterdam’. While Neile prosecuted the heretic Edward Wightman to highlight Abbot’s neglect of Lichfield diocese, his rival discovered in London an Arian heretic, Bartholomew Leggatt, who was put on trial and burned at the same time as Wightman.171 F. Rogers, A Visitation Sermon (1633), 13; HMC Hatfield, xxi. 294; Holland, 175, 194-6. As bishop of London, Abbot refused a preaching licence for the separatist William Ames, chaplain to the English forces in the Low Countries, and later declined to support Ames’s nomination to a chair of theology at Leiden. Abbot also encouraged the English ambassador at The Hague to suppress the publication of separatist works in the Netherlands, with limited success.172 Holland, 196-9; Add. 72275, f. 80; Fincham, ‘Prelacy and Pols.’, 42-3.

For Abbot, both nonconformists and separatists posed a less significant threat to the integrity of the Church than those who questioned its Calvinist doctrinal consensus, which he championed throughout his life. On hearing of doctrinal disputes brewing in the Low Countries in 1617, he recalled similar disputes at Cambridge in the 1590s, opining that ‘those Arminian tricks have been fomented out of England’. He named Bishop Overall and Samuel Harsnett^*, bishop of Chichester (later archbishop of York) as the chief culprits, and correctly surmised that Overall had offered encouragement to like-minded Dutch theologians.173 SP105/95, f. 9v; HMC Downshire, vi. 21; Holland, 214-20; JOHN OVERALL.

Although English Arminianism had its roots at Cambridge, Abbot knew from personal experience, as we have seen, that orthodoxy had its critics at Oxford, too. In 1611, when Bishop Buckeridge nominated Laud as his successor as president of St. John’s, Abbot warned Ellesmere (newly elected university chancellor) that Laud was ‘at the least a papist in heart, and cordially addicted unto popery’. However, Neile interceded with the king to ensure Laud’s election.174 Heylyn, 61; Holland, 256-7. In 1615, Abbot subjected John Howson to a character assassination in the king’s presence, picking over 20 years of Oxford gossip in an attempt to establish that he was a crypto-Catholic who denigrated the work of Calvinists such as Rainolds and Morton.175 Newsletters from the Archpresbyterate of George Birkhead, 191-2; ‘John Howson’s Answers’, 328-9; Fincham, ‘Prelacy and Pols.’, 54-5; JOHN HOWSON. At the same time Laud, recently attacked from the pulpit of St Mary’s, Oxford by Abbot’s brother, received a similar grilling from the archbishop. However, Abbot’s tactic backfired, as these confrontations served simply to bring both men to the king’s attention; within the year, Laud had been promised the deanery of Gloucester, and Howson the bishopric of Oxford.176 Heylyn, 65-7; Works of Abp. Laud ed. J. Bliss, vii. 3-4; Holland, 261-2. By the time the Synod of Dort convened in November 1618, therefore, Abbot had failed to silence the Church’s Arminian critics.

It was not only Arminianism that posed a threat to the Church; so too did Catholicism. Abbot refuted the notion that Rome had any claim to ecclesiological pre-eminence based on the apostolic succession, and mocked in print Catholic devotion to saints. He saw it as one of his prime roles as archbishop to suppress popish error by arresting, exiling or executing missionary priests, and refuting Catholic polemic via a wide range of authors, including Catholic turncoats.177 Reg. Univ. Oxf. vol. ii pt. 1, p. 199; Holland, 115-19.

When Abbot arrived at London in January 1610, news of a papal breve forbidding Catholics from taking the oath of allegiance had recently arrived in England, alarming many who had already done so. Rumours circulated that Bancroft and Abbot had recruited several priests to argue the case for the oath, and a fresh statute ordered it to be tendered to every adult. After the dissolution of February 1611, Catholics feared that the new archbishop had ‘commission to search in any man’s house of what degree soever’, while two leading Catholic peers, Anthony Maria Browne^*, 2nd Viscount Montagu and Edward Vaux^*, 4th Lord Vaux were arrested. However, Abbot’s plans for a crackdown were frustrated by the crown’s revenue problems; some wealthy recusants were allowed to pay to evade the oath.178 Newsletters from the Archpresbyterate of George Birkhead, 67 n.171, 109, 113-14, 120-3, 138, 141-2, 142 n.623, 150, 152-3, 159, 166-8, 189-91; E401/2419; Holland, 138.

Peace with Spain meant that James did not face the strategic imperative which persuaded Elizabeth to execute large numbers of Catholic priests. However, Abbot never doubted the potential of the English Mission to ‘set the whole kingdom into combustion’. In the winter of 1610-11, he staked a claim to the then vacant see of Canterbury by having two priests executed: one said to have been exiled on five occasions, the other to have argued with Abbot. At the same time he reportedly begged the king to expel all priests from England. Upon becoming archbishop he surrounded the Spanish embassy and arrested those English Catholics who attended mass there.179 Holland, 127-9; CSP Ven. 1610-13, pp. 100-1, 136-7; Spain and the Jacobean Catholics I, 170-1. This vigorous pursuit of Catholics quickly faded, but after the death of Lord Treasurer Salisbury in May 1612, Abbot successfully pleaded for the execution of two more priests, despite Spanish opposition. Thereafter, it became customary for Catholic diplomats to take English priests into exile whenever they left England.180 Spain and the Jacobean Catholics I, 194-6; HMC Downshire, vi. 499; Holland, 145-6. He caused another diplomatic rift in November 1613, when he arrested Luisa de Carvajal, a Spanish noblewoman who had established a nunnery in Clerkenwell, Middlesex.181 Spain and the Jacobean Catholics II ed. A.J. Loomie (Catholic Rec. Soc. lxviii), 15-23; G. Redworth, She-Apostle, 199-225.

In May 1615 Abbot and several other councillors urged James to execute some of the priests in London’s gaols, but in the event these prisoners were sent to Wisbech Castle in Cambridgeshire, out of harm’s way. This news caused Abbot to deride the cynicism of the Catholic hierarchy, which liked to pretend that its priests ‘are still under the cross and in persecution’.182 Spain and the Jacobean Catholics II, 46-7; HMC Downshire, vi. 71; CSP Dom. 1611-18, pp. 320-1; Holland, 142. However, the inertia of recusancy policy also frustrated him, because it was the corollary of the king’s reviving interest in a Spanish Match: in April 1618 he complained bitterly to Trumbull that ‘you are not to wonder that the king’s subjects run over [to the Spanish Netherlands], or English money is sent over, or so many monasteries of English be erected, for till the Match with Spain be one way or other resolved, you may expect no other’.183 Add. 72242, f. 83; Spain and the Jacobean Catholics II, 115; HMC Downshire, vi. 349, 609.

Alongside the apparatus of fines, arrests and executions, Abbot orchestrated a polemical war against his Catholic adversaries. He promoted the publication of the History of the Council of Trent (1619) by the Venetian friar Paolo Sarpi, arranging for the manuscript to be smuggled from Italy; while in 1620 the king commissioned Abbot, Andrewes, Sir Robert Cotton, James Ussher, bishop of Meath (later archbishop of Armagh [I]) and others to write an ecclesiastical history of England, which would presumably have served a polemical purpose had it ever appeared.184 LPL, ms 943, p. 69; N. Malcolm, De Dominis (1560-1624), 55-7. Almost all of the 50 authors who dedicated books to Abbot were known to the archbishop, had received or were to receive his encouragement and patronage, and most of their works supported his polemical agenda.185 Holland 30-3, 152-4. The project required intimate knowledge of the writings of Catholic controversialists, and Abbot’s domestic and foreign networks provided a constant stream of intelligence about authors, printers and the book trade. The king was particularly sensitive to attacks on his own works in defence of the oath of allegiance, and in November 1613 Abbot and Ellesmere revealed news of three new polemics published in Spain and the Spanish Netherlands, in support of their case for a crackdown on domestic Catholics.186 CSP Dom. 1603-10, pp. 646, 649; 1611-18, pp. 26, 315; HMC Downshire, v. 532; Add. 72242, ff. 89v-90; Spain and the Jacobean Catholics II, 15-16, 144; Holland, 141, 147. The most effective libel against James, however, was ‘that wicked tract called Corona Regia’, which mocked the king’s penchant for good-looking young men. With Abbot’s encouragement, Trumbull spent a good deal of effort in attempting to identify its author and printer, as well as those involved with another scatological tract, Puteanus.187 HMC Downshire, v. 421-2, 457, 531-2; vi. 20, 71, 211-12, 285, 349; HMC Buccleuch, i. 193.

Some of Abbot’s most effective polemicists were Catholics, both English and foreign, many of whom found shelter and patronage at Lambeth. Like Bancroft before him, Abbot ran the risk of being duped by careerists, whose ambitions he could never fulfil, or charlatans, but he judged the risk worth taking.188 HMC Downshire, vi. 284-5; Spain and the Jacobean Catholics II, 94-6; Holland, 156-7. One of the most effective of his Catholic allies was the Benedictine Thomas Preston, who wrote in support of the oath of allegiance under the alias Roger Widdrington. Abbot hoped Preston’s work would ‘produce as great a break as my Lord Bancroft made between the Jesuits and the Appellant priests in the end of Queen Elizabeth’s days’.189 Add. 72242, f. 90r-v; HMC Downshire, vi. 601; HMC Hatfield, xxi. 343; Holland, 137-8, 154-7. However, the most celebrated Catholic guest at Lambeth was Marc’Antonio De Dominis, archbishop of the Venetian diocese of Spalato, hailed by Abbot on his arrival in December 1616 as a ‘wise, grave and learned man’, whose publications would, he hoped, ‘rouse up’ other Catholic clerics to renounce papal authority.190 HMC Downshire, vi. 71-2; SP105/95, ff. 1v-2. De Dominis’ contacts gave Abbot useful insights into the tensions between the stati liberi of northern Italy and the papacy. However, his genuine hopes for the reunification of Christendom did not suit Abbot’s polemical purposes, nor did his sympathy for the Dutch Arminians; the two men also fell out over his editing of Sarpi’s History of the Council of Trent.191 HMC Downshire, vi. 211, 350; British Delegation and the Synod of Dort, 24; SP105/95, ff. 30v, 31v; Malcolm, 41-65; Holland, 157-8. Although appointed dean of Windsor in May 1618, De Dominis was frustrated in his hopes for a bishopric, and in 1621 Gondomar persuaded him that he would be given fair consideration if he returned to Rome. After some attempts to persuade him to stay – Abbot apparently suggested he should be arrested – he was banished in April 1622.192 CSP Ven. 1621-3, pp. 232, 268, 289; Le Neve, Fasti (1854), iii. 375; Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, ii. 228-9; Chamberlain Letters, ii. 430-1; Add. 72254, f. 101v; Add. 72299, f. 69; Malcolm, 67-74.

University patronage, charitable benefactions, and the wider Church, 1611-18

No archbishop could expect to enjoy untrammelled patronage over the senior ranks of the Church of England. Their royal masters kept themselves well informed about the pool of talent available, particularly King James, who attempted to balance the various cliques and ideological factions within the Church. Moreover, the lord chancellor filled all crown benefices valued at less than £20 a year, taking recommendations from a wide range of patrons.193 Chamberlain Letters, ii. 44; Fincham, Prelate as Pastor, 41-57; McCullough, 101-68; K. Fincham and P. Lake, ‘Eccles. Policies of Jas. I and Chas. I’, Early Stuart Church ed. K. Fincham, 30-40; R. O’Day, Eng. Clergy, 113-25. However, Abbot had greater success in preserving Calvinist influence at Oxford, despite the fact that anti-Calvinists such as Howson, Buckeridge and Laud also maintained a presence in their alma mater. This was because he was able to rely on the support of Ellesmere and Pembroke, university chancellors for most of his primacy, and successive Regius professors of divinity, these being his brother Robert Abbot (1612-15) and John Prideaux^† (1615-42, later bishop of Worcester). Abbot’s attempts to influence the selection of heads of houses were occasionally successful: in 1617 John Parkhurst, a Guildford native, succeeded Robert Abbot as master of Balliol, partly because of his kinship to the late Thomas Tisdale, whose £5,000 bequest (overseen by Abbot) was then sought by the college (see below). However, in the following year the archbishop’s candidate for provost of Oriel College was defeated by William Lewis, Lord Chancellor Bacon’s 26-year-old chaplain.194 Chamberlain Letters, ii. 139-40; J. Jones, Balliol Coll., 92; Holland, 36-40. Abbot had greater success at Merton College (where he was visitor) in 1622: when choosing a new warden from a shortlist provided by the fellows, he picked Sir Nathaniel Brent, his vicar-general and a nephew by marriage, beating off a challenge from Sir Isaac Wake^‡, the candidate of Prince Charles (Stuart^*, Prince of Wales).195 Chamberlain Letters, ii. 425-6; Stowe 176, f. 221; Add. 72275, f. 131v; G.H. Martin and J.R.L. Highfield, Hist. Merton Coll. 199.

At All Souls’, Abbot, as visitor, wielded considerable influence, securing fellowships for Brian Duppa^† (later bishop of Chichester, Salisbury and Winchester) and a son of his former pupil Sir Dudley Digges^‡.196 Oxf., All Souls’ Coll. autograph letters I/114; appeals and visitors’ injunctions I/9, 11, 15; Al. Ox. (Dudley Digges, Thomas Digges). Two wardens were his nominees, one of whom saw off a challenge from Buckingham’s kinsman Henry Beaumont.197 Oxf., All Souls’ Coll., autograph letters I/121, 134-7; Holland, 28. Abbot supported them against any disrespect from the fellows: ‘your founder did not erect his college for quarrellers and wranglers, but for men who should show themselves religious, studious, peaceable and of virtuous conversation’.198 Oxf., All Souls’ Coll., autograph letters I/113, 122, 125, 129-33, 150; II/152, 160, 162, 165; appeals and visitors’ injunctions I/47. Like Bancroft, Abbot constantly criticized the fellows over the size of the dividend they took from the college’s annual surplus: ‘good husbandry is the very life of any corporation, and … societies cannot stand without order and frugality’; he retained close control over college finances until his suspension in 1627-8.199 Oxf., All Souls’ Coll., appeals and visitors’ injunctions I/45, 48; autograph letters I/117, 119, 138-9, 144, 147-8; II/156, 158-9, 161-3, 165, 167, 171.

With an income of over £3,000 a year, and no immediate family to provide for, Abbot could afford to be generous in his charitable donations. He supported the Bodleian library, helping to persuade the civil lawyer Sir John Bennet^‡ to oversee the construction of a building to house its collections. One of the overseers of Sir Thomas Bodley’s will, he apparently chose to suppress an autobiographical tract Bodley left in his custody.200 Hist. Univ. Oxf. iv. 138-9; Chamberlain Letters, i. 413-14, 420. He also bestowed books and plate on University College, and persuaded Lady Elizabeth Peryam to settle lands worth £60 p.a. on Balliol. However, the endowment of £5,000 bequeathed by the Oxfordshire merchant Thomas Tisdale, of which he was a trustee, was ultimately given to Broadgates Hall (re-founded as Pembroke College) rather than University College. The implied snub perhaps stemmed from the fact that Abbot’s successor as master, John Bancroft^* (later bishop of Oxford) was an anti-Calvinist.201 Jones, 85-8; Darwall-Smith, 125-6, 130; Hist. Pemb. Coll. Oxf. ed. D. Macleane (Oxf. Hist. Soc. xxxiii), 147-69.

Oxford was not the only institution which enjoyed Abbot’s patronage, for in 1612 the archbishop was elected chancellor of Trinity College, Dublin. When, in 1613, one of the college fellows, James Ussher, visited him to discuss reforming the college statutes, he urged the wearing of clerical vestments in chapel be enforced, advocated an increase in the stipends of junior fellows, and suggested that some college rents should be collected in kind. In 1615 Abbot persuaded the king to order the foundation of another university near Dublin, with statutes to be modelled on those of Oxford. However, nothing came of this plan.202 Welsby, 55; J. Ussher, Works, xv. 72-3; CSP Ire. 1615-25, pp. 4-5.

In 1611, Abbot was appointed one of the executors of the will of the financier Thomas Sutton, which gave him oversight of the endowments of the Charterhouse hospital and school, the largest charitable foundation in London, where he wielded considerable influence: in 1617 Bishop Harsnett complained that efforts to secure the mastership for his chaplain, the Arminian John Pocklington, had been frustrated by Abbot.203 Chamberlain Letters, i. 323, 463; Add. 39948, f. 184. Between 1613 and 1618 Abbot also ordered national collections to endow Protestant seminaries in Prague and the Valtelline, to build a Reformed church in Jülich-Cleves, and to relieve Protestant refugees in Wesel, in north-western Germany, while in 1617 he issued a plea for funds for the London-based Chelsea college, founded to promote anti-Catholic polemic, ‘that it may not be said that the idolatrous and superstitious papists are more forward to advance their falsehood than we are to maintain God’s truth’.204 Newsletters from the Archpresbyterate of George Birkhead, 219; SP105/95, f. 8; [Abbot], To the right reverend father in God … the Lord Bishop of London (1618); Letters and Dispatches from Sir Henry Wotton ed. G. Tomline (Roxburghe Club, 1850), 35-6; HMC Hatfield, xxii. 57-8; Holland, 151-2.

Abbot’s broad perspective on ecclesiastical affairs meant that he was naturally interested in developments in Protestant churches abroad, while his visit to Scotland in 1608 gave him an insight into the British dimension of the Church of England. His interference in Scottish ecclesiastical affairs would not have been welcome on a regular basis, but in July 1616 a group of Scottish bishops recruited him to assist in solving a crisis which arose when George Gordon, 1st marquess of Huntly [S], an erstwhile Catholic with a cavalier attitude to the Kirk’s discipline, fled to England to escape the jurisdiction of the new Scottish court of High Commission. Abbot absolved Huntly from excommunication, which raised the question of whether the two national churches recognized the validity of each other’s ecclesiastical discipline. When word of Huntly’s absolution reached Edinburgh, Spottiswoode (now archbishop of St Andrew’s [S]) preached an angry sermon expressing his ‘grief, when papists are so far countenanced, not only in the north,205 Huntly’s main estates lay in Aberdeenshire. but also in the very heart of the country’. Abbot responded by acknowledging ‘that the Church of Scotland is entire in itself’, but insisted that his lawyers advised that if Huntly intended to reside in England for some time, he could be absolved there. He also claimed Alexander Forbes, bishop of Caithness [S], had ‘assured me that it would be well taken by the bishops and pastors of the Church of Scotland’, and had witnessed Huntly’s communion, as had Christopher Hampton, archbishop of Armagh [I]. Forbes later denied he had given his approval, but Ludovic Stuart^*, 1st earl of Richmond and 2nd duke of Lennox [S], persuaded the General Assembly at Aberdeen to endorse Huntly’s absolution.206 D. Calderwood, Hist. of the Kirk of Scotland ed. T. Thomson (Wodrow Soc. 1845), vii. 212-14, 218-19, 226, 233; Orig. Letters Relating to the Eccles. Affairs of Scotland ed. B. Botfield (Bannatyne Club, 1851), ii. 272-4, 476-8, 484-6; HMC Downshire, v. 547-8; Chamberlain Letters, ii. 19-20; Oxford DNB, xxii. 884-5.

Abbot took a more regular interest in the affairs of the Church of Ireland, receiving his first intelligence on this subject in July 1611, from Andrew Knox, bishop of the Isles [S], who had recently been appointed bishop of Raphoe [I]. Having attended the Irish Convocation, Knox reported a dearth of preaching ministers, and the lacklustre calibre of the bishops, except for James Ussher. Abbot, impressed by Ussher’s scholarly publications, assisted the latter’s career. However, when John Todd, bishop of Down [I] was reported to have caused scandal by separating from his wife, Abbot reported his ‘foul and scandalous behaviour’ to the Council, prompting his resignation.207 CSP Ire. 1611-14, pp. 80-2, 171; Ussher, xv. 68.

In September 1613, the Privy Council interviewed a delegation of Irish Catholic MPs after the first meeting of the Irish Parliament in almost 30 years was disrupted. The Irish Commons, packed with newly enfranchised plantation towns, opened in May amid uproar, as Catholics MPs elected an ‘anti-Speaker’ in response to the imposition of a Protestant Speaker by the majority. When questioned in London, one Catholic MP, Sir Thomas Luttrell, refused the oath of allegiance, for which he was berated by Abbot – who perhaps hoped to regain some of the credit he had lost with the king over the Essex divorce case – and committed to the Tower. Abbot clearly learned much about contemporary Ireland from the Catholic MPs who were lodged at his palace at Croydon; in a letter to Trumbull in December 1613, he complained about the activities of Irish missionary priests,

not only from Spain and the Low Countries, but some out of France, and diverse from Rome, who have in sermons expressly delivered that they are especially sent from the pope himself … that they must enter into rebellion, or adventure upon any dangerous course, rather than once present themselves at the English service [i.e. Church of Ireland services], which they in direct terms style no better than the word of the Devil.208 SP14/74/50; Spain and the Jacobean Catholics II, 10-11; Newsletters from the Archpresbyterate of George Birkhead, 240, n. 1232; Add. 72376, f. 87r-v. J. McCavitt, Sir Arthur Chichester, 183-9.

His next letter informed Trumbull ‘that now Ireland is exceedingly altered, and there is not one Irishman who may be said to be wild or weareth long hair, after the antique fashion. Civility groweth on fast, and I wish that religion may do so also’. This wish bore fruit years later, for when Abbot had William Bedell (later bishop of Kilmore and Ardagh [I]) installed as provost of Trinity College, Dublin, he gave him instructions to evangelize the native Irish, which were implemented with vigour.209 HMC Downshire, v. 78; Ussher, xv. 365; A. Ford, Prot. Reformation in Ire. 1590-1641, p. 124. When the Dublin Parliament reconvened, Abbot advised Archbishop Hampton about legislation to enforce collection of recusancy fines of 12d. per week. In 1617 he also helped to establish a faculty office in Dublin, thus centralizing grants of dispensations to Irish clerics.210 HMC Downshire, iv. 378-9; v. 57; CSP Ire. 1611-14, p. 536; 1615-25, pp. 173-4; McCavitt, 195.

Abbot also maintained links with overseas churches. By 1616 he was in contact with Cyril Lucaris, patriarch of Alexandria, ‘a pure Calvinist, as the Jesuits in these parts do brand him’, and arranged a place at Oxford for one of his counterpart’s protégés. After Lucaris was toppled in 1623 by a rival who acknowledged the authority of the pope, Abbot persuaded the king to authorize his ambassador at Constantinople, Sir Thomas Roe^‡, to do what he could for him – which was little. However, Roe also had copies of Greek patristic texts made for Abbot’s polemical use.211 Negotiations of Sir Thomas Roe ed. S. Richardson, 102, 134, 146-7, 171, 460; Holland, 66, 125-6.

Abbot’s closest sympathies lay with the Dutch Reformed Church, an inclination he shared with the king. However, he was aware that ‘the permitting of Jews, Arians, the Family of Love, Samosatenians, Vorstians, Socinians, papists and I cannot tell what … doth make nothing certain with them in point of piety … and by the parity of their ministers there is no means to appease the schism’. The Dutch also faced a serious challenge from anti-Calvinist theology – Jacobus Arminius had held the professorship of divinity at Leiden – which erupted into civil strife during the Twelve Years’ Truce (1609-21). Abbot was alerted to these differences by the Dutch contra-Remonstrant (Calvinist) Sibrandus Lubbertus, who wrote to the archbishop in 1611 denouncing the States of Holland for their failure to prevent the appointment of the anti-Calvinist Heidelberg theologian Conradus Vorstius as Arminius’s successor at Leiden. Abbot warned James, who intervened to force Vorstius’ removal. Two years later the king supported attempts to promote a supra-national Calvinist confession of faith, as a bulwark against doctrinal innovation.212 SP105/95, f. 1; F. Shriver, ‘Orthodoxy and Diplomacy: Jas. I and the Vorstius affair’, EHR, lxxxiv. 449-74; Holland, 225-8; J. den Tex, Oldenbarnevelt, 522-34; J.I. Israel, Dutch Republic, 428; Milton, 404-6.

The Dutch Arminians regarded the Church of England as a promising model for a state church which tolerated some degree of theological disputation. In 1613, when their leading polemicist, Hugo Grotius, visited England for trade negotiations, he was privately urged by Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, leader of the peace party in the United Provinces, to dissuade King James from supporting the contra-Remonstrants. Grotius told the king that the Arminians had supporters in England, among them Bishop Andrewes. James, having instructed the bishop not to publicize his doctrinal opinions, sent Abbot to investigate. Andrewes insisted he ‘was much abused by that report’, but the archbishop warned him to avoid any further association with the contra-Remonstrants. Grotius also told the king that Winwood (then ambassador at The Hague)

did deal partially, making all reports in favour of the one side, and saying nothing at all for the other. For he might have let his Majesty know, how factious a generation these contradictors [contra-Remonstrants] are; how they are like to our puritans in England; how refractory they are to the authority of the civil magistrate …

Abbot recounted these exchanges to Winwood, advising him ‘take heed how you trust Doctor Grotius too far, for I perceive him … addicted to some partialities in those parts’.213 Winwood’s Memorials, iii. 459-60; LANCELOT ANDREWES; den Tex, 545-9; Israel, 428-9; Holland, 258-9, 262-3. Den Tex, 534-6, argues that Grotius was right about Winwood’s support for the contra-Remonstrants.

Winwood’s successor at The Hague was Sir Dudley Carleton, who kept Abbot closely informed of the rising tensions between Olderbarnevelt and his enemies, led by the Stadtholder, Prince Maurice. In December 1616 Carleton forwarded Abbot a copy of a sermon by Grotius which revealed that in 1613 James had briefly offered the Dutch Arminians some sympathy. Abbot tartly responded that ‘his Majesty by writing hath done little good amongst them, saving to make his royal name tossed up and down in their vulgar mouths’.214 SP105/95, ff. 1, 3-4; den Tex, 564-6. In the New Year, Maurice suggested a synod be summoned to discuss the differences between the two theological camps. Abbot hoped this meant ‘that peace at last may be among them’, but with the Twelve Years’ Truce with Spain having only four years to run, a meeting was postponed for almost two years. The archbishop lamented the inability of England to offer credible assistance, in the absence of a Parliament:

our reputation doth not stand so upright abroad as I wished it did, which is the cause I fear that the masters where you live, would not so esteem the advices and instructions which our great master may send unto them, touching their differences in religion … this is the fruit of parity in the Church, where there is no superior to direct, nor inferior to obey.215 British Delegation and the Synod of Dort, 8-9; SP105/95, f. 7v; den Tex, 569-75.

During the rest of the year, as the Arminians worked to delay a synod, Carleton supplied Abbot with torrents of polemic pouring from the Dutch presses. He also attempted to mediate a settlement, while the archbishop kept an eye on English Arminians, particularly Harsnett and Overall. Despite overtures from the Dutch Arminians, James was gradually won over to the idea of a synod.216 SP105/95, ff. 8, 15v-16v; British Delegation and the Synod of Dort, 22-7; Holland, 231.

In January 1618 Abbot and seven other bishops drafted a memorandum on the procedures for theological disputations used in England, to serve as precedents for the forthcoming synod. The Dutch Arminians attempted to recruit some of their English sympathisers as delegates, but James chose only Calvinists. Abbot nominated George Carleton^*, bishop of Llandaff, and George Hakewill. James rejected the latter, probably because he would have been too harsh to the Arminians, but when Joseph Hall^* (later bishop of Exeter) fell sick, Abbot’s chaplain Thomas Goade was dispatched to replace him.217 British Delegation and the Synod of Dort, 25-9; SP105/95, ff. 31-2, 34, 36v-7; Bodl., Tanner 74, f. 124; SP14/109/157; Add. 72253, f. 4; Holland, 232-5.

Following the arrest of Oldenbarnevelt in August 1618, the latter’s chaplain sought refuge in England, offering to conform to the Jacobean Church, a promise Abbot scornfully compared to the insincere conversion of the late earl of Northampton. When the British delegation returned to England in May 1619, James pronounced himself delighted with their efforts. Abbot, seeking to capitalize on the king’s good mood, promised George Carleton the bishopric of Norwich as his reward, although in the event Carleton was forced to settle for the less lucrative see of Chichester. However, his attempt to find preferment for George Hakewill was thwarted by his former protégé Buckingham, who secured Llandaff for his client Theophilus Field^* – a second indication (following Bishop Bayly’s preferment in 1616) of a divergence of interests between the favourite and the archbishop.218 British Delegation and the Synod of Dort, 365-6; SP14/109/157; GEORGE CARLETON, THEOPHILUS FIELD.

Like James, Abbot was delighted with the outcome of the Synod of Dort. Writing to Ambassador Carleton, he insisted,

you are not to wonder that your Arminians continue in their pertinacy, notwithstanding the synod; for so did the Arians after the great Council at Nice. But a round and severe hand held by the magistrate will first disgrace them, then weary them, and in the end either reform them or remove them … If the prince [Maurice] persist with courage and assiduity, he shall make that state … as much bound to him, as ever it was unto his father.219 Maurice’s father was William the Silent.

For Abbot, this theological triumph cleared the way to address the growing diplomatic crisis over Bohemia.220 SP105/95, ff. 43v-4v; British Delegation and the Synod of Dort, 363; SP14/109/157; Holland, 239-42; Israel, 448-62.

The Bohemian crisis, 1618-20

The successful conclusion of the Synod of Dort marked a high point in Abbot’s influence over Jacobean foreign policy. However, it made no impact on the king’s determination to pursue a Habsburg marriage alliance, a policy the archbishop openly deplored. In October 1618 Abbot snubbed a Spanish envoy, Padre Maestro, when the latter addressed him in French, informing him that he habitually conversed with diplomats in Latin.221 HMC Downshire, vi. 556. The Venetian secretary Rizzardo remarked on Abbot’s fluency in Latin: CSP Ven. 1615-17, p. 56.

Abbot’s dismissive attitude towards the Spanish Match was coloured by developments in Germany, where the Protestant princes of the Evangelical Union were preparing for a clash with the Habsburgs on the death of the ailing Emperor Matthias. The Spanish promised to support their imperial cousins in a crisis, but Abbot, writing to Trumbull in April 1618, perceived Matthias’s imminent demise as a golden opportunity to oust the Habsburgs from the imperial throne: ‘if at this time they [the imperial electors] do not put by the House of Austria, it cannot be expected that ever hereafter any such thing should be done’.222 Add. 72242, f. 83v-4; Wilson, 257-66. In the following month, the Bohemian nobles revolted against Archduke Ferdinand of Styria, who was, in Abbot’s words, ‘seeking to annihilate the Reformed religion’. This apocalyptic vision informed the archbishop’s strategic outlook for several years, leading him to interpret every success for the Protestant cause as a harbinger of victory, and to downplay any reverse. To Abbot, Ferdinand’s arrest of the emperor’s adviser Cardinal Khlesl in July 1618 thus suggested serious divisions in the Catholic camp. So too did rumours that the duke of Savoy was planning to challenge Ferdinand for the imperial throne, although in this case Abbot admitted that success was unlikely because the duke ‘is dull and heavy, and his councillors for the most part are pensioners of Spain’.223 HMC Downshire, vi. 499; CSP Ven. 1617-19, p. 359; Add. 72242, ff. 76 (which reads ‘duke of Saxe’), 82; Wilson, 274-8.

The death of Matthias in March 1619 convinced Abbot that war was imminent, but he worried that the Spanish had beguiled James by asking him to act as mediator in the Bohemian crisis. In the meantime, the archbishop consoled himself that ‘the king provideth all the forces that he can’. This was a fanciful interpretation of James’s policy – the only English forces sent to Bohemia were volunteers serving at their own expense, and the king had no intention of committing himself to the Protestant cause. Abbot became more convinced of Spanish perfidy over the summer, complaining that ‘we of the [Reformed] religion look on, when the king of Spain useth all means to strengthen his party [in Germany]’.224 Add. 72242, ff. 79, 85; SP14/109/157.

The news, received in September, that the Elector Palatine had accepted the crown of Bohemia from the rebels, delighted Abbot, who informed Secretary Naunton:

methinks I do in this, and that of Hungary, foresee the work of God, that by piece and piece, the kings of the earth, that gave their power unto the beast (all the word of God must be fulfilled)225 Alluding to Revelations 19:11-21. shall now tear the Whore [of Babylon, i.e. Rome] and make her desolate …

While dismayed by ‘the shuffling which was used toward my Lord of Doncaster’ (James Hay^*, later 1st earl of Carlisle) during the latter’s failed attempt to mediate in Germany, Abbot anticipated the creation of a pan-Protestant alliance against the Habsburgs, consisting of the Bohemians, the princes of the Evangelical Union, the Dutch, the Danes and the French Huguenot princes. In a memorandum clearly intended to be passed on to the king, he assumed James would wish to lead this coalition, and that therefore a Parliament would soon meet: ‘the Parliament is the old, and honourable way, but how assured at this time I know not, yet I will hope the best’. Even if no Parliament were summoned, he assumed that ‘if countenance be given to the action, many brave spirits will voluntarily go’.226 Cabala (1691), 169-70; Wilson, 286-7; JAMES HAY.

Although frustrated by James’s reluctance to seize the strategic initiative, Abbot loyally echoed his master’s views in a letter to Trumbull in November 1619: ‘we are here somewhat slow in declaring for the Count Palatine, which I trust will so temper things that it shall not need to grow to a war of religion’. However, he took heart from the fact that even Catholics assumed the Bohemian crisis would wreck any prospect for a Spanish Match:

A popish lord told me that a man could not hastily believe that the king of Spain would bestow two millions to make war against himself, and send his daughter thither [to England] where she should serve but for a ransom to redeem the Count Palatine, if by accident of war he should fall as a prisoner into the king of Spain’s hands.

The leading hispanophile Digby, he crowed, ‘cannot tell what to make of it, he is so far engaged in it, and both God and man do so much oppose it’.227 Add. 72242, ff. 87-8.

In March 1620 Abbot wrote to Christian IV of Denmark an account of diplomatic developments which was clearly intended to persuade the Danes to join the fray in Germany. He dismissed the return of Gondomar to London, ‘laden with deceits and subtleties’, and claimed that quarrels between Louis XIII of France and the Huguenots were merely a pretext for the French to refuse any appeal from the newly-elected Emperor Ferdinand for assistance against the Evangelical Union. Ending on an optimistic note, he announced the raising of donations for the Bohemian cause in England, enticing Christian with the prospect of support if he declared himself.228 46th DKR, app. 46. The benevolence to which Abbot alluded was solicited by Baron Dohna, the Palatine envoy, and allowed by James as an alternative to parliamentary supply. The king urged Abbot, along with Andrewes and Neile, to raise donations from the clergy, provided that this was done quietly and that Frederick was not referred to by his controversial new title, ‘king of Bohemia’ until after his coronation. Over the summer, the archbishop advised Trumbull that, for all the archdukes’ court might scoff at the benevolence, ‘I am not without hope that, before the year come about, this way which they so condemn may bring to the use of the king of Bohemia 100 thousand pounds’; such figures as survive suggest that Dohna received around the value of a subsidy, £70,000.229 CSP Ven. 1619-21, pp. 211, 229; CSP Dom. 1619-23, p. 132; Add. 72242, f. 89; T. Cogswell, Home Divisions, 34-7.

The military reverses suffered by the Protestant cause in the autumn of 1620 were a shock for Abbot. On 18 Oct. he conceded that Trumbull’s warnings of an imminent Spanish offensive against the lower Palatinate had been correct, ‘but God hath sent upon us the spirit of heaviness, that seeing we would not see, and knowing we would not understand’.230 Matthew 13:13: Therefore I speak to them in parables: because seeing they see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand. For Bohemia, he feared ‘that in the purpose of the enemy, the king’s children must be either slain (which God forbid) or taken and conformed, or glad to leave all and fly for their lives’. Without naming the king, he railed at those who continued to rely on the goodwill of Spain:

That great God of heaven who is almighty in his ways and omnipotent in His works make us to see how the enemies of His truth do delude us and abuse us, while they feed us with words, and we giving credit to them, then indeed pursue the destruction of them whom grace and nature doth bind us to take care of.

His prediction of disaster was confirmed only 11 days later, when Frederick’s army was routed at White Mountain, outside Prague.231 Add. 72242, ff. 91-2; Wilson, 294-308.

The imperialist invasion of Bohemia finally persuaded the king to call a Parliament, news Abbot swiftly relayed to Christian of Denmark, assuring the latter of James’s determination to ‘exert himself to the utmost for the recovery of the Palatinate’ in the following spring. He also observed that the Spanish Match had advanced no further than it stood at the time of the Bohemian revolt two years earlier. Writing to Christian again in January 1621, Abbot pleaded more forcefully for assistance:

Things have come to such a state in Bohemia and the Palatinate that they need instant help; for the Spaniard in the last summer has so prevailed not only there, but in the Valtelline also, that the liberty of all Europe will be in danger if he goes on in the same way a year or two longer, and volens nolens [willy-nilly] our Rex pacificus [James] will be compelled to make war.

These assurances of English commitment to the Bohemian cause doubtless helped persuade Christian to make a timely loan of £80,000 to his brother-in-law.232 46th DKR, app. 47-8; F.C. Dietz, Eng. Public Finance, 1558-1641, p. 204. Abbot also informed the Dane that while Louis XIII had asked to be given a free hand against the Huguenots, ‘with a view of separating the Defender of the Faith from affording them any help or encouragement’, James had, ‘thank God,’ firmly given ‘an answer worthy of such a prince’. He naturally avoided mentioning that Secretary Naunton had exceeded his brief in discussing the prospect of a marriage alliance with the French, for which he had been suspended from office. Rumour implicated Abbot in these talks, but on being questioned he managed to give ‘good satisfaction’, and was restored to royal favour. However, it is possible that he was told to cease corresponding with English diplomats overseas at this time, as his letters to Trumbull show an 18 month gap.233 R.E. Schreiber, First Carlisle (Trans. American Phil. Soc. lxxiv), 35-6; idem, Pol. Career of Sir Robert Naunton, 68-70; Chamberlain Letters, ii. 339; Fincham, ‘Prelacy and Pols.’, 52-3.

The spring sitting of the 1621 Parliament

In preparation for Parliament, Abbot approached the corporation at Hull, where (most unusually for a bishop) he had been appointed high steward, to secure the election of his brother Maurice, then abroad conducting trade talks with the Dutch. He subsequently offered assurances that Maurice would be present for the start of the session, but in fact the latter returned two weeks late.234 Hull Hist. Cent., L.168; HP Commons 1604-29, iii. 2. Abbot presumably also interceded with his friend Lord Zouche, who nominated the archbishop’s steward, Sir Robert Hatton, at Sandwich, Kent. However, Hatton’s return was eventually voided by the Commons.235 HP Commons 1604-29, iv. 594.

During the session, Abbot shared the proxies of Archbishop Matthew and three other bishops.236 LJ, iii. 3b-4a. He attended nearly three-quarters of its sittings, and would undoubtedly have come more often were it not for illness; attacks of the gout afflicted him regularly from 1619 onwards.237 Chamberlain Letters, ii. 233; British Delegation and the Synod of Dort, 361; Add. 72242, ff. 81, 85; LJ, iii. 18a, 21a, 25a, 27b. Abbot’s movements can also be gauged from his weekly boat hire: LPL, ms 1730, ff. 125-30. The most pressing business of the session, preparations for war, detained the Lords only briefly. On 8 Feb. Abbot was included on the committee to scrutinize bills to upgrade the arms of the county militia, and to prevent the export of iron ordnance. He reported the militia bill with amendments four days later, but no agreement was reached, and it was sent back to committee, never to emerge. After the Easter recess he called for the ordnance bill to be revived, with the result that it was eventually reported, with many modifications, on 26 November.238 LJ, iii. 13a, 15b, 170a; LD 1621, p. 3; Add. 40086, f. 20.

From the start of the session, the Commons were reluctant to discuss supply without some evidence of royal commitment to an anti-Spanish policy. They therefore drafted a petition to the king asking for the recusancy laws to be enforced. On 14 and 15 Feb. Abbot was among those ordered to attend two conferences with the Commons on this petition, which was criticized for presuming to dictate the text of a proclamation to the king. On 16 Feb. Abbot (who had, in fact, missed the previous day’s conference) lavished praise upon the Commons’ draft. He then urged enforcement of the oath of allegiance, in the hope that this would fuel existing tensions between some secular priests and the Jesuits, and endorsed a proposal to keep all Catholic priests close prisoner, in the process revealing that he had urged the king not to grant Gondomar’s wish to send 15 captured priests into exile. ‘I doubt whether it shall be a help to our friends abroad by weakening ourselves’, he observed. He concluded by drawing a distinction between the persecution of Protestants in Bohemia and the Palatinate, which was done by force, and proceedings against English Catholics, which were bounded by the law. The petition was submitted to James unaltered, who conceded that a new recusancy law was needed.239 LJ, iii. 17a, 18a; CD 1621, v. 458-60; LD 1621 and 1628, pp. 6-9; R. Zaller, Parl. of 1621, pp. 41-4. However, when a recusancy bill reached the Lords after Easter, it ignored the proposals raised in the petition, seeking instead to outlaw trusts used by Catholics to evade recusancy fines; Abbot steered this measure through the Lords, reporting it as fit to pass on 15 May. Another, more wide-ranging bill envisaged by the Commons never reached the upper House.240 LJ, iii. 101a, 123a; Zaller, 130-3.

The debate on recusancy was quickly superseded by an investigation of monopoly patents, including several held by Buckingham’s kinsman Sir Giles Mompesson^‡. The lord chancellor, Francis Bacon^*, Viscount St Alban, who had been implicated in the approval of some of these patents, resolved to use delaying tactics, and on 1 Mar. he encouraged Abbot (who was unaware of Bacon’s ruse) to make an innocuous plea that the Lords should avoid sitting on the same days as Convocation. The adoption of this motion allowed the lord chancellor to adjourn the House for two days.241 Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, vii. 190; LJ, iii. 32b. For further details about the sittings of Convocation, see SURVEY. By the time the Lords reconvened, Mompesson had absconded; Abbot was named to attend a conference to discuss the apprehension of the fugitive. However, illness kept the archbishop away from the Lords during the impeachment proceedings. He made only one speech on this issue before the Easter recess, on the day Mompesson was sentenced, when he insisted on due process over the inquiry into the patent for manufacture of gold and silver thread.242 LJ, iii. 34a; LD 1621, p. 134.

While Buckingham had clearly decided to sacrifice Mompesson and Bacon to save his own reputation, his critics felt their way towards a direct assault on his own failings. Abbot, who must have been dismayed at the support Buckingham was giving to the king’s plans for a Spanish Match, did not join in the hostilities after Easter, but he was distinctly lukewarm in the support he was prepared to offer his erstwhile protégé. Buckingham’s enemies began by investigating the benefits derived from the gold and silver thread patent by his half-brother Sir Edward Villiers^‡. On 17 Apr., when Buckingham answered his critics by insisting that the investigation proceed, Abbot was one of several who endorsed this proposal: ‘we neither acquit nor condemn him [Villiers], but leave him to a trial’.243 LD 1621, p. 2; LJ, iii. 76. A scapegoat was needed to defuse the crisis, and ample testimony had been assembled against the lord chancellor during the recess. On 19 Apr. Abbot and Neile welcomed the reading of witness statements against the chancellor, who pleaded guilty to a long list of charges three days later. On 25 Apr. the archbishop was one of those who urged that the House should move the king to strip Bacon of the great seal. His conjecture that the chancellor would answer the charges against him in writing, rather than at the bar, proved accurate. Five days later, Abbot was one of several peers who moved to verify the signature appended to Bacon’s written confession.244 LD 1621, pp. 9, 21, 41. Several lesser figures were also charged with corruption during the session. On 4 May, Abbot called for a harsh sentence to be imposed upon the alehouse patentee, Sir Francis Michell, and showed no more mercy to the corrupt practices of his own subordinate Sir John Bennet, judge of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury. He called for a guard to be placed on Bennet’s house to prevent the latter fleeing abroad – his wife was Dutch – and urged that the London aldermen be required to enter bonds totalling £20,000 for his appearance. On 2 June, just before the summer recess, Abbot undertook to arrange for repayment of a bribe Bennet had received six months earlier.245 Ibid. 22, 65; LJ, iii. 152b; HP Commons 1604-29, iii. 200.

Evidence from several investigations suggested that Buckingham held a lucrative share in the activities of several patentees, but no-one could be brought to testify against the favourite until 30 Apr., when the disgraced former attorney general, Sir Henry Yelverton, made the damaging claim that Buckingham had bullied him into signing the dormant arrest warrant Mompesson had abused in the execution of his inns patent. However, Yelverton over-reached himself by comparing Buckingham to Hugh Despenser^†, 1st Lord Le Despenser, thereby unintentionally likening James to Edward II. On the afternoon of 2 May, numerous peers claimed that the Lords, rather than the king, had jurisdiction over Yelverton, who had been committed to the Tower by James for his slander. Abbot was mildly sceptical: ‘had it been clear and evident that the king’s honour had been touched, it had behoved us to have even flown into his face, but whether so or no, a question’. It was resolved to ask James to remand the case to their jurisdiction, a message the archbishop delivered on 6 May, and after some hesitation, James yielded to their request.246 LD 1621, p. 56; LJ, iii. 104b, 112b, 114b-5a; Zaller, 119-21. When the Lords discussed on 12 May the punishment to be inflicted on Yelverton, Abbot acknowledged that the accused had spoken ‘indiscreetly, impertinently and with much tartness’, but moved that he be allowed to speak in his own defence before sentence was passed, and that his transgression might be characterized as a ‘great contempt’ rather than treason. Such leniency ostensibly aligned the archbishop with Buckingham’s critics, but it is not clear that it amounted to a serious rift with the favourite, as many peers were inclined to make light of the case in order to downplay their own failure to censure Yelverton’s slur against the king.247 LD 1621, p. 78; Zaller, 123-4.

At the same time as the Lords interrogated Yelverton, the Commons put foreign policy back on their agenda by taking it upon themselves to punish Edward Floyd, a Catholic lawyer who had slandered the Elector Palatine and his wife. The Lords were irritated at this invasion of their right to judicature, and on 5 May Abbot attended a conference at which the Commons were asked why impeachment charges had not been filed with the Lords.248 LJ, iii. 110b; Zaller, 104-12; C. Russell, PEP, 117. Abbot attended another conference on 8 May, at which he tactfully persuaded the Commons to undertake not to ‘invade the privileges’ of the upper House in this manner again. Once Yelverton had been condemned, Abbot moved to examine Floyd’s case; on 25 May he reported the examination of witnesses, which led to a harsh sentence the following day.249 LJ. iii. 116a-b, 119a, 125a, 132a; PA, HL/PO/JO/5/1/1, ff. 108v, 120v; Zaller, 112-15. Many Catholics were dismayed by this outcome, and Abbot reported investigations into the slanders uttered by two of them.250 LJ, iii. 151b, 153a, 157b; Zaller, 115.

Abbot helped to process a substantial amount of legislation during the session, although the abrupt dissolution meant that none reached the statute book. He managed the bill to restrict the scope of monopoly patents and dispensations from the penal laws, which he reported on 1 Dec. as fit to receive a third reading. However, the bill was criticized for undermining the royal dispensing power, while Abbot himself conceded that it made excessive use of the threat of praemunire. As a recommittal was not possible on a third reading, he was ordered to help pen a fresh bill (1 Dec.), the text of which he reported on 10 December.251 Ibid. 137a, 177b-9a, 188a-b; LD 1621, pp. 102-3; Add. 40086, f. 53; C.R. Kyle, ‘Lex Loquens: Legislation in the Parl. of 1624’ (Auckland Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1993), 256-9.

Abbot was named on 17 Apr. to the committee for the bill to restrict the activities of common informers, which he reported two days later as having ‘very many inconveniences’. However, as the Commons had forwarded it with a special recommendation, he moved to arrange a conference at which peers could explain why they had laid the bill aside. A lengthy process of negotiation was only completed on 3 Dec., when Abbot reported that MPs, eager to salvage the bill, had accepted the Lords’ amendments.252 LJ, iii. 75b, 79a-b; Kyle, 210-17. Abbot’s remaining legislative appointments included a committee for the bill to allow crown tenants to compound for concealed lands; another for the bill concerning women convicted of small felonies, which he reported, unaltered, on 11 Dec.; and a third, on 7 Dec., to ban the practice of using men’s names to effect a common recovery for transferring land, without their knowledge, which he reported the same day.253 LJ, iii. 126b, 174b, 185a-b, 190a; LD 1621, p. 113.

Local issues commanded relatively little of Abbot’s time during the session. He was appointed to committees for the revived bill to improve the navigation of the Thames between Burcot and Oxford, which he reported, with numerous amendments, on 4 Dec.; and to the committee for the bill to confirm the foundation of Sutton’s hospital at London’s Charterhouse (of which he was a governor), which he chaired in committee, reporting it on 6 March.254 LJ, iii. 22b, 32b, 38a, 171a, 181a. He was also included on the committee appointed to consider a petition from the mariners of his own diocese against the efforts of the Catholic peer Christopher Roper^*, 2nd Lord Teynham, to overthrow their fishing rights in north Kent.255 Ibid. 102a. Other forms of legislation featured only rarely in Abbot’s parliamentary agenda: on 8 Mar. he was appointed to the committee for the Sabbath bill, and the bill to prevent the abuse of writs of certiorari, used to remand cases to the London courts. He was ordered to attend a conference with the Commons about both bills on 24 May, and four days later he reported they were fit to pass, whereupon they each received a third reading.256 Ibid. 39a-b, 130b, 138b.

With an orthodox Calvinist at Lambeth, godly MPs were disinclined to promote bills against subscription or the ecclesiastical courts, which had been a legislative staple until 1610. Abbot himself pursued only a modest legislative agenda, but it was presumably his idea that the clergy offer the king three subsides, one more than the Commons had voted, which became a precedent for future votes. Ill health kept him from introducing the clerical subsidy bill himself, a task performed instead by Thomas Dove, bishop of Peterborough. Abbot was subsequently named to the committee for the bill to confirm grants of Church lands to Queen Elizabeth.257 Ibid. 50a, 114b.

On 29 May Abbot and other councillors returned from the court with news that James wished to send Parliament home for the summer. After some debate, it was resolved to adjourn presently, rather than rush legislation through in a fortnight. A short bill was prepared to allow the session to remain in being after the Royal Assent had been given to those bills which had already passed both Houses, which measure Abbot reported on 31 May. Three days later, Abbot conveyed to the king Parliament’s decision to adjourn, along with the Commons’ petitions of grievance.258 Ibid. 140b-1a, 155a, 156b-7a; Add. 72332, f. 42. During the final days before the recess, Abbot dealt with some issues of ecclesiastical business: on 30 May, when evidence proved Bishop Field had been ‘a kind of broker for the lord chancellor’s bribes’, the archbishop, having acknowledged Field’s guilt, persuaded the Lords to let him deal with the matter; three days later, he reported that the bishop had received a formal admonition before Convocation.259 LJ, iii. 143a-4a, 153a; Chamberlain Letters, ii. 377. On 4 June, Abbot reported that a charge against a man said to have threatened to pistol Bishop Bayly was not proven. The latter subsequently offended King James by picking a quarrel over Sabbath observance. Examined by Abbot and others over ‘false and erroneous opinion in point of doctrine and religion’, he was committed to the Fleet prison for his contempt to the king, but rumours that he was to be sacked proved untrue.260 LJ, iii. 157b; APC, 1621-3, pp. 10-11; Birch, Ct. and Times of Jas. I, ii. 267; LEWIS BAYLY.

Disgrace and rehabilitation, July to December 1621

In July 1621, Abbot was involved in an accident which permanently undermined his standing at court: on a visit to Bramshill Park, Hampshire to consecrate a chapel for Lord Zouche, he accidentally killed a gamekeeper while hunting with a crossbow. He swiftly paid compensation to the dead man’s family, and was clearly mortified:

what sin of mine it should be, that almighty God hath so exposed me to be the talk of men, to the rejoicing of the papist, the insulting of the puritans, the grief of my friends, the contentment of ill-willers, and I cannot tell what. Some other time it hath been unto me a distraction, how to satisfy the court, how to provide for mine own safety, how to answer objections, and other things of like nature, where often I meet with as many opinions, as I do with persons, and yet it is from none but from my friends. Amidst these wars I strive to go as directly as I can, and yet not without sinister constructions, some saying I take too much care, and some saying I take too little. I hope that God, who brought me into this, will one day bring me out of it …

King James immediately offered sympathy, insisting ‘such an accident might befall any man’, but Lord Keeper Williams advised that the incident required Abbot to be suspended from his episcopal functions.261 Chamberlain Letters, ii. 394-5; CSP Ven. 1621-3, pp. 106-7; SP14/122/97; Heylyn, 87. This advice was ignored: Abbot was promised a pardon, and the king showed continued favour by giving Abbot temporary custody of the Privy Seal while the incumbent, Edward Somerset^*, 4th earl of Worcester, visited his Welsh estates. However, with Europe poised on the brink of war, the potential disgrace of one of the leaders of the anti-Spanish party at court had political implications. Abbot had voiced no public opposition to his master’s policy, but one of his circle, George Hakewill, had offended Prince Charles by writing a tract ‘against marriages with those of a different religion’, and personal sympathy did not rule out the possibility that James might wish to see a potential critic discredited.262 Add. 72275, f. 119v; Add. 72254, f. 47v. His declining stock was also reflected in his dwindling patronage resources: even before the mishap at Bramshill Park, he had no influence over the choice of George Montaigne for London or Buckingham’s advisor John Williams for Lincoln (an adjunct to his appointment as lord keeper). The situation worsened after July, when even Catholics noted that the shifting balance within the established church: the Calvinist John Davenant^* succeeded his brother-in-law Robert Townson^* as bishop of Salisbury, but other preferments went to anti-Calvinists: Valentine Carey^* was appointed to Exeter; Milbourne was promoted to Carlisle, and was succeeded by Laud at St Davids.263 Add. 72254, f. 57; Hacket, i. 68; Chamberlain Letters, ii.407; Stuart Dynastic Policy and Religious Pols. 1621-5 ed. M.C. Questier (Cam. Soc. 5th ser. xxxiv), 135; JOHN DAVENANT; VALENTINE CAREY; RICHARD MILBOURNE; WILLIAM LAUD.

While the king may have had a private agenda, Abbot had rivals at court whose prospects of deriving benefit from his plight were more obvious. Williams’ immoderate thirst for the see of Canterbury was palpable, and when it emerged that the archbishop was not to be sacked, the lord keeper provoked a further crisis by insisting that he could not accept consecration as bishop of Lincoln from a man with blood on his hands. Others (perhaps including Andrewes, who also coveted the primacy) insisted that a pardon was not enough to exonerate Abbot, and that a national synod should decide his fate.264 Autobiog. of Sir Simonds D’Ewes ed. J.O. Halliwell, i. 201; HMC Cowper, i. 113; Chamberlain Letters, ii. 397; Add. 72254, f. 52; CSP Ven. 1621-3, p. 137; Birch, Ct. and Times of Jas. I, ii. 275-6. In October, James ordered bishops Andrewes, Williams, Buckeridge, Laud and Carey, plus several civilians and common law judges, to advise what course he should take. None of these bishops had any particular sympathy for Abbot, but the commission was deadlocked at five votes apiece, with Andrewes unexpectedly supporting Abbot. One report ascribed this to Christian compassion, but Andrewes may have feared that if Abbot were dismissed he might be replaced with Williams. Archbishop Matthew was apparently discussed as a compromise candidate for Canterbury, but the king surprised many by exonerating Abbot, although the latter was required to depute the consecration of Williams and three other bishops-elect to five other bishops.265 Cabala, 12-13; Autobiog. of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, i. 201; LPL, ms 943, pp. 75-7; Chamberlain Letters, ii. 400, 406-7; CSP Ven. 1621-3, p. 168; Hacket, i. 68; Add. 72254, f. 64; LANCELOT ANDREWES. By the time Parliament reconvened on 20 Nov., it had been decided that Abbot – said to have ‘greased the favourite in the fist’ – was to be absolved from the disgrace which had hung over him all summer. While Abbot’s pardon was not signed until 24 Dec., several new peers, including the four recently consecrated bishops, took the oath of allegiance in Abbot’s presence when the parliamentary session resumed.266 LJ, iii. 163a, 171a; Northants RO, Montagu 29/62; Stuart Dynastic Policy and Religious Pols. 1621-5, p. 133; Oxford DNB, i. 23.

With the situation in Germany having deteriorated over the summer, the political focus was on the Commons, where Sir Dudley Digges opened a foreign policy debate on 26 November. His speech had quasi-official status, and he doubtless discussed it with Abbot beforehand. Digges explained that James had ‘to prepare for war, to get that by force and the sword, which he cannot by treaty’, and identified the main enemy as Philip IV of Spain, who sought ‘by war to bring all in subjection to his religion, and, as it is to be thought, to his crown’. MPs therefore had to consider ‘the defence of the Palatinate’ in the broadest sense, ‘not only how to maintain those soldiers who are there, but also to make a war of diversion’. This final phrase, denoting a naval war against Spanish ports and trade, was gratuitously provocative, although it reflected Digges’s and Abbot’s private opinions. Sir James Perrot^‡ and Thomas Crewe^‡ endorsed Digges’s call for a ‘war by diversion’, but were opposed by Edward Sackville^* (later 4th earl of Dorset); while Sir Robert Phelips^‡ and Sir Edward Giles^‡ preferred to focus on the domestic agenda. At the end of the day, Digges (presumably hoping for further guidance) asked for a decision to be deferred until the end of the week, but the debate went on for two more days, concluding with the offer of a single subsidy – enough to fund the Protestant garrisons in the Palatinate until the spring.267 Nicholas, Procs. 1621, ii. 206-16; CD 1621, ii. 445-5; Zaller, 146-51; Russell, PEP, 129-35; C. Russell, ‘For. Pol. Debate in the House of Commons in 1621’, HJ, xx. 297-302; R. Cust, ‘Prince Chas. and the Second Session of the 1621 Parl.’, EHR, cxxii. 431-2.

Meanwhile, Abbot himself, presumably hoping to avoid any more blunders, confined his activities in the Lords to legislative committees and privilege cases. On 30 Nov. he reported on the researches of John Selden^‡ into the privileges of peers; some of Selden’s papers were missing, following their seizure by the crown, but Abbot was confident that they could be replaced; he subsequently delivered Selden’s findings to the House on 15 December.268 LJ, iii. 176a, 196b; LD 1621, pp. 101, 121. On 3 Dec. Sir John Bourchier^‡ tendered a petition against Lord Keeper Williams for delivering a summary judgement against him in a Chancery case. After Williams protested his innocence, Abbot framed the question: ‘whether to reject petitions for justice, or admit of petitions generally against all judges, which will much discourage them?’ Bourchier, he warned, should ‘receive great punishment if the aspersion in the petition be not true’, and he later called for the other judges who had sat in Chancery that day to give evidence. In a private letter to Sir Thomas Edmondes^‡, Abbot insisted that, while no friend to Williams, who coveted his archbishopric,

I think no lord in that House did think otherwise but that I did my lord keeper an honest office … I wish my lord keeper well, and have done him wrong neither in word, deed nor thought, but my lord is not yet well acquainted with Parliament ways … roughness and vehemency in Parliament is not the way.

Abbot chaired the Bourchier investigation, granting additional time to search for precedents, and reporting on 10 Dec. that, except for one petition in 1384 against the then lord chancellor Michael de la Pole^†, 1st earl of Suffolk, the usual form in such cases had been to petition the king. Following testimony by one of the judges the following day, Abbot insisted ‘Sir John Bourchier had no such great cause to complain’, and successfully moved for Williams to be cleared.269 LD 1621, pp. 107-9, 111-13; LJ, iii. 189a-90b; Stowe 176, f. 213. Abbot made one more speech on a privilege issue, on 8 Dec., when he called for Edward Stafford^*, 4th Lord Stafford to end his corrupt practice of selling parliamentary protections.270 LD 1621, p. 111.

Tolerating the Spanish Match, 1622-3

The abrupt end to the 1621 Parliament, following the Commons’ untimely suggestion that Prince Charles should take a Protestant bride, propelled James back into the arms of the Spanish party at court, leaving the Council, as Abbot informed the Venetian ambassador, ‘a mere shadow for ordinary affairs’.271 CSP Ven. 1621-3, p. 229. The revival of the Spanish Match was deeply alarming for Abbot, but outspoken protests would have demonstrated ingratitude to a royal master who had saved him from disgrace; in March 1622 he was still said to be ‘greatly retired’ from public life. The only positive development, from Abbot’s viewpoint, was that James allowed the collection of a benevolence for the Palatine couple, now in exile in The Hague. The archbishop threw himself into promoting this initiative among the clergy, raising £14,700, just over three-quarters of a clerical subsidy; his own diocese performed better than average, yielding a whole subsidy in contributions.272 Chamberlain Letters, ii. 421; Add. 72275, f. 116v; SP14/133/13. In May 1622, Abbot’s lack of influence was illustrated by the king’s choice of Laud and Francis White^* (later bishop of Carlisle, Norwich and Ely) to hold a debate with ‘Fisher the Jesuit’ [John Percy], the priest who had converted Buckingham’s mother to Catholicism. Their emphasis of the apostolic heritage shared by Rome and Canterbury was offensive to Abbot, and in the following year, when Abbot’s chaplain Daniel Featley held his own disputation with Percy, he argued his patron’s case for doctrine as the defining mark of a church.273 Two Biogs. of William Bedell ed. E.S. Shuckburgh, 262-3; P. Milward, Religious Controversies of the Jacobean Age, 220-3; Holland, 72-4.

In July 1622 Abbot wrote to Trumbull, lamenting that his hopes for an anti-Habsburg alliance had turned to despair: ‘God is angry with us, and our sins deserve punishment, which produceth this misery that we see not where we are, nor consider their quality with whom we have to deal’.274 Add. 72242, ff. 93-4. This letter ends an 18 month gap in the Abbot-Trumbull correspondence; Trumbull may have destroyed the letters received in the interim. While he kept silent on the subject of Prince Charles’s marriage, the pulpits resounded with sermons denouncing the Match, and particularly the prospect of a toleration for English Catholics, which the Spanish were assumed (correctly) to be demanding. James, wishing to silence his critics, may have protested to Abbot over the misuse of the pulpit for political purposes; in July Abbot told Trumbull, ‘there is reason of forbearance of letters, till some things be settled’. In August, the king announced the suspension of some of the recusancy laws, and at the same time denounced those who preached ‘unprofitable, unseasonable, seditious and dangerous doctrine, to the scandal of the church, and disquieting of the state and present government’. He also promulgated a set of instructions for preachers, which ordered that clerics under the rank of dean should avoid controversial topics such as polemic, the royal prerogative and predestination, preaching only those doctrines comprehended within the Thirty-Nine Articles and the homilies; that encouragement should be given for afternoon sermons to be replaced by catechism classes; and that the issuing of preaching licences be centralized at the faculty office.275 T. Cogswell, Blessed Rev. 12-53; Add. 72242, f. 93; Vis. Articles and Injunctions of the Early Stuart Church, 211-13.

The Venetian Ambassador, having presumably discussed the matter with Abbot, claimed these instructions were intended to ‘forbid the preachers here to attack the Roman faith, or enlarge upon any disputes and disagreements with the Catholic Church’, which, the ambassador speculated, might ‘sow the seeds of a civil war’. However, the inclusion of predestination among the controversial topics to be avoided by preachers demonstrates that they were also intended to silence polemics against those who within the Church who criticized Calvinist soteriology. Abbot may have played some role in drafting the instructions – the injunction for ministers to catechize on Sunday afternoons echoes his own visitation articles – but he was probably dissatisfied with the final version, which he circulated with a terse covering letter exhorting preachers to confine themselves to ‘Christ crucified, obedience to the higher powers, and honest and Christian conversation of life’. Once the instructions had been dispatched, he retired to his summer residence at Croydon, to recover from an attack of gout.276 CSP Ven. 1621-3, p. 397; Vis. Articles and Injunctions of the Early Stuart Church, 103, 211-12; Add. 72299, f. 90. In his absence, one preacher (probably the royal chaplain Richard Sheldon) railed against the new instructions at Paul’s Cross, while another criticized them in the Chapel Royal. Prodded by James, Abbot issued a further circular in September, in which he acknowledged that ‘some few churchmen and many of the people, have sinisterly conceived … that these instructions do tend to the restraint of the exercise of preaching, and do in some sort abate the number of sermons’. He also explained that the king blamed preachers for ‘soaring up in points of divinity too deep for the capacity of the people’ and other faults such as ‘a venting of their own distastes’ or ‘a rude or undecent railing, not against the doctrine … but against the persons of papists and puritans’. He also stressed that James was ‘much moved’ by the neglect of Sunday afternoon catechism, and ordered that a copy of the instructions be taken by every preacher, and exhibited at the next visitation.277 Birch, Ct. and Times of Jas. I, ii. 329-30; CSP Ven. 1621-3, pp. 403, 465; Vis. Articles and Injunctions of the Early Stuart Church, 213-14; Stuart Dynastic Policy and Religious Pols. 1621-5, pp. 176-7. We owe the identification of Richard Sheldon to Ken Fincham.

While James fiddled, Germany burned: writing to Sir Thomas Roe (ambassador at Constantinople) in November 1622, Abbot reported the fall of Heidelberg, and the impending capture of Mannheim (news of its surrender had not yet reached him). ‘The whole kingdom is much exhausted by the affairs of the Palatinate’, he claimed, insisting he was spending £1,000 a year from his own pocket on this cause; ‘when we shall have an end, only God doth know’. Knowing that his letter was unlikely to be read in England, he voiced his fears more freely than usual:

there is sent into Spain an express messenger, to crave the restitution of the whole Palatinate; but what will be the issue, no man can tell, since the king hitherto hath been nothing but abused in the treaty at Brussels: I much fear we can expect nothing but a war, for which God knows we are unprovided.

Despite the military reverses of the summer, he retained hopes that the German princes would offer assistance, once they discovered ‘that by the House of Austria the liberty of the empire is utterly oppressed, and that under a colour of civil affairs there is intended an extirpation of the Reformed religion’.278 Negotiations of Sir Thomas Roe, 103-4; Wilson, 332-9.

In January 1623 the Spanish finally offered terms for a marriage treaty which James was able to accept. Abbot’s implacable hostility to toleration briefly spawned rumours that he would resign the primacy to Williams, who was assumed to be more amenable.279 G. Redworth, Prince and the Infanta, 51-2; Add. 72299, f. 60v; Stuart Dynastic Policy and Religious Pols. 1621-5, p. 212. These rumours ceased after Charles and Buckingham left for Madrid in mid February, but as the prospect of an agreement grew, so did Abbot’s opposition to toleration. At a visitation sermon in April, one of his chaplains lambasted anti-Calvinists for their opportunistic attitude towards the Catholic Church: ‘the hope of a crozier staff or a cardinal’s hat could make many a scholar in England beat his brain to reconcile the Church of Rome and England’; while in his own sermon before the king on Palm Sunday, Abbot warned against the ‘doubts and waverings’ of older men about their religious allegiance, and women (such as Buckingham’s mother), ‘who by neglecting their distaffs and needles … ran to hear masses, and so changed their religion’.280 Birch, Ct. and Times of Jas. I. ii. 392; McCullough, (suppl. cal. 272).

The terms for a religious settlement which arrived from Spain in June 1623 went well beyond anything James had previously agreed: the marriage was to take place in Spain, the Infanta and her household were to have complete liberty of worship, and Parliament was to repeal the recusancy laws within three years.281 Redworth, 120-6, 181-2. Abbot and his fellow privy councillors were required to take an oath to uphold the marriage treaties, but when the articles of the toleration were debated on around 9 July, Abbot and the French party outvoted the hispanophiles, while the judges, summoned by the Council for their advice, ‘gave answer that the king could not do it by the law and privileges of this kingdom’. Abbot relayed the news of this defeat to the king, who ‘swore bitterly, and asked how he should get his son home again’. It was presumably this outburst of anger which spawned rumours in Brussels that Abbot had been arrested.282 Birch, Ct. and Times of Jas. I, ii. 409, 416; Add. 11043, f. 67; Add. 72255, f. 72v. Chamberlain Letters, ii. 510, misdates this meeting to 16 July.

Shortly after this unhappy encounter, James met privately with Williams, who informed his master that ‘town reports were raised of great opposition among the lords against this swearing’. The keeper claimed that texts of two speeches said to have been made in Council were circulating, one, by himself, in favour of the articles of toleration, the other, attributed to Abbot, against. The latter text offered a forthright critique of royal policy:

Your Majesty hath propounded a toleration of religion … how hateful will it be to God, grievous to your good subjects the true professors of the Gospel, if your Majesty (who have often disputed and learnedly written against these wicked heresies) should now show yourself a patron of those doctrines which your pen hath told the world, and your conscience yourself, are superstitious idolatries and detestable? Add hereunto what you have done in sending the prince into Spain without the consent of your Council, the privity and approbation of your people … so tenderly is his going apprehended that believe it, sir, however his return may be safe, yet the drawers of him to that action so dangerous to himself, so desperate to the kingdom, will not pass away unquestioned, unpunished … I beseech your Majesty … do not draw upon this kingdom in general, and yourself in particular, God’s heavy wrath and indignation.

This address was widely disseminated in manuscript at the time, and was printed in 1642 and 1689.283 Hacket, i. 141; Fincham, ‘Prelacy and Pols.’ 59; Add. 28640, f. 21r-v; Supplication of all the Papists of England to King James (1642), sig. A4r-v (where it is printed as a letter); His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury’s address to his Majesty (1689). Many ms copies of this speech survive. If it was not Abbot’s own work, it was nevertheless clearly penned by someone familiar with his views and the cadences of his speech. He never disavowed it in public, and as one of Trumbull’s correspondents noted, ‘good profit grows of it to his credit, that it thus passeth under his name’. Interestingly, the dissemination of Abbot’s opinions via a manuscript the archbishop never formally acknowledged was a technique he had used in the aftermath of the Essex trial in 1613, and would go on to use during the Sibthorpe controversy in 1627.284 CSP Ven, 1623-5, p. 90; Add. 72276, f. 54; Oxford DNB, i. 24.

According to Williams, the king convened an informal meeting of councillors belonging to the French and Spanish factions at the royal hunting lodge at Wanstead, Essex on 13 July. Abbot, however, was left off the list of invitees, probably by design. James acknowledged that Parliament could never be expected to abrogate the recusancy laws, but asked how Charles might obtain leave to depart from Madrid if the Spanish suspected that the treaty would not be honoured in full. Williams offered the casuistical argument that the intention to establish toleration was more important than its scrupulous implementation, and on this basis, those present accepted the treaty. The entire Privy Council, including Abbot, was subsequently summoned to the Chapel Royal, where they took the oath promising to uphold the marriage treaties on 20 July. At this meeting Abbot, predictably, questioned the patent dispensing officials from their duty to enforce the recusancy laws. He also entered a caveat (similar to Williams’s argument) that it ‘should be of no force to oblige their allowance of the things contained in the articles, unless the king of Spain should precisely perform every point of whatsoever was already promised … by virtue of the treaty in hand’. On this conditional basis, Abbot took the oath, an act which delighted his master, who boasted to Charles and Buckingham (now a duke), ‘now I must tell you miracles: our great primate hath behaved himself wonderful well in this business’.285 Hacket, i. 143; HMC Hatfield, xxii. 185; HMC Mar and Kellie, ii. 175; CSP Ven. 1623-5, pp. 80-1; Add. 72276, f. 56; Letters of King Jas. VI and I ed. G.P.V. Akrigg, 417-18.

The ‘blessed revolution’ and the ‘patriot’ cause, 1623-4

When Charles landed in England on 5 Oct. 1623, both safe and single, he headed for London. His first stop was Lambeth Palace, where Abbot, having been notified of his impending arrival, had alerted the City, which mounted a spontaneous feu de joie.286 Add. 72255, f. 80r-v; CSP Ven. 1623-5, p. 135; Cogswell, Blessed Rev. 6-9. The prince’s brief visit to Lambeth signalled an important policy shift: Charles and Buckingham returned from Madrid convinced, as Abbot had been from the beginning, that the Spanish were not negotiating in good faith. The archbishop’s new closeness with the prince was illustrated in November, when he persuaded Charles to suspend judgement over a complaint against Lord Zouche until the latter had been given an opportunity to explain himself.287 SP14/154/39.

While Charles and Buckingham strove to assemble a ‘patriot’ coalition within the Privy Council, at court and in Parliament, in order to fund a war against the Habsburgs, Abbot, who needed no persuasion to subscribe to this cause, busied himself reviving both polemical and legal proceedings against recusants. As the Spanish Match was predicated upon a papal dispensation requiring a toleration of English Catholics, a resumption of persecution necessarily quashed any hopes for a marriage alliance. Thus when the French ambassador’s chapel at the Blackfriars collapsed on 26 Oct., killing a large number of English Catholics, two of Abbot’s chaplains wrote an account of the catastrophe which emphasized God’s providential judgement.288 Add. 72276, f. 66; A. Walsham, ‘“The Fatal Vesper”: Providentialism and Anti-Popery in Late Jacobean London’, P. and P. cxliv. 36-87. Catholic correspondents noted Abbot’s determination to capture William Bishop, the Catholic ‘bishop of Chalcedon’. He also formulated plans to issue fresh commissions to pursuivants, whose activities had been held in abeyance since 1622, but these were reportedly quashed by the hispanophiles on the Council.289 Stuart Dynastic Policy and Religious Pols. 1621-5, pp. 228, 241.

As in 1621, Abbot intended to ask Hull to provide a parliamentary seat for his brother Maurice, but his staff forgot to send the letter. However, the assistance he had provided during the previous year, when the townsmen had unsuccessfully lobbied the Council over a trade dispute with York, meant that the corporation returned his brother without prompting, a compliment he undertook to requite as necessary. At around the same time, Sir Robert Hatton was returned at Sandwich again, on the recommendation of Lord Zouche.290 Hull Hist. Cent., L.190-1, 198, 203-4; Bench Bk. 5, f. 54v; HP Commons 1604-29, ii. 492-3, 537-8. In the Lords, Abbot held only one proxy, that of Archbishop Matthew.291 LJ. iii. 212a.

With the fate of true religion at stake, Abbot hardly missed a day of the session, the first half of which saw attempts by the so-called patriot coalition to secure the support of both the Commons and the king for an end to the treaties with Spain, and preparations for a war. In this endeavour, Abbot naturally played an important role. After Spanish diplomats complained that Buckingham, who opened the proceedings on 24 Feb. with a lengthy relation of the breakdown of the negotiations in Madrid, had insulted their master, Abbot commended both the duke for ‘his pains and hazard to bring these things to light’ and the prince for ‘the discovery’ of Spanish perfidy. Moreover, after Buckingham was formally cleared by separate votes in both Lords and Commons, it was Abbot who reported from a conference between the two Houses on 1 March.292 LD 1624 and 1626, pp. 3, 16; LJ, iii. 238a-b; Russell, PEP, 158-9, 162. When, on the afternoon of 27 Feb., Henry Montagu^*, 1st Viscount Mandeville (later 1st earl of Manchester), asked whether they should continue to negotiate with Spain, Abbot reframed the question to make it more specific: ‘whether the king should continue his treaty of the match or no?’ In a keynote speech, Abbot insisted that it was the custom of the House not to enter into discussion of matters of great importance until invited to do so (clearly a reference to the debacle of the autumn of 1621), but on this occasion, he observed, it was James himself who had asked ‘to be advised by his people’. As for Philip IV of Spain, he urged that they avoid criticizing a youthful monarch, whose business was ‘handled by the ministers’. The key issue, he insisted, was the Spanish marriage treaty, on whose fate hinged all proposals for recovery of the Palatinate. ‘We have been deceived’, he claimed, ‘shall we be more deceived?’ The prospects for a cross-confessional marriage alliance were, he argued, slim: negotiations for a Spanish bride for Prince Henry had ‘ended in smoke, as this: either to leave his religion, or to have no match’. On hearing this, Prince Charles intervened to insist that main priority was, in fact, the restoration of the Palatinate. However, Abbot disregarded this objection, and the next morning moved the question: ‘whether to advise the king to proceed no further in the treaty, neither for the [Spanish] Match nor Palatinate?’ Once the House decided that the marriage negotiations should be broken off, a conference was arranged to inform the Commons, with Abbot being named as one of the reporters.293 PA, HL/PO/JO/5/1/2, f. 19; LD 1624 and 1626, pp. 5-6, 10; LJ, iii. 238a; Russell, PEP, 163-4.

As anti-Spanish MPs (including Digges) worked to persuade the Commons to recommend that the marriage negotiations be ended, Abbot took the initiative in preparing the Lords to submit this advice to the king. Indeed, he drafted a list of reasons for believing that the Spanish had not negotiated in good faith, which he presented to the House on 3 March. Named to the joint committee which redrafted the text that was to be submitted to the king, he reported on 4 Mar. that all mention of the threat posed to the Protestant religion by the Spanish Match had been dropped, because the king insisted ‘that religion should not be the ground of the war’. Besides, there was no need to mention religion explicitly, as ‘all our [other] reasons had a dependency upon religion’.294 LD 1624 and 1626, pp. 16-19; LJ, iii. 242b, 243b, 244b, 246a-7v; Add. 40087, ff. 49v-50v, 53-4v; HMC Buccleuch, iii. 232; SP14/160/33; R.E. Ruigh, Parl. of 1624, pp. 189-93; Cogswell, Blessed Rev. 181-4. Abbot presented the petition at Theobalds on the afternoon of 5 Mar., with a brief address stating that the Parliament had unanimously concluded that the king should end the treaties with Spain, ‘out of consideration for his own honour, for the safety of the realm, for the needs of his children and the interests of his allies’. However, James, after expressing his gratitude that the decision for a breach with Spain had been taken unanimously, observed that a diplomatic rift raised the prospect of war, which would require substantial funds. As the Commons had held an anxious debate about the likely cost of a war earlier that same morning, the hopes of the ‘patriot coalition’ were suddenly cast into doubt.295 LJ, iii. 250a-1b; Add. 40087, ff. 58, 60r-v; Ruigh, 199-202; CSP Ven. 1623-5, p. 248; Add. 72255, f. 123; Russell, PEP, 176-83; Cogswell, Blessed Rev. 183-7.

Abbot, apparently distressed at the king’s response, took to his bed following the audience at Theobalds. In his absence the two Houses compiled an account of the meeting, which Mandeville reported on 8 March. That same morning, Abbot moved that the lord treasurer, Lionel Cranfield^*, 1st earl of Middlesex prepare a report on the king’s financial needs, which was delivered on 11 March.296 LJ, iii. 248b, 250a-1b; Add. 40087, ff. 55v, 60v; HMC Buccleuch, iii. 232. The treasurer, firmly opposed to a war on financial grounds, outlined the scale of recent expenditure on diplomacy and military expeditions, but claimed that the financing of a war against Spain would prove ‘very feasible’; Prince Charles then promised that any funds voted would be spent on war with Spain rather than used to pay off the king’s debts. Abbot seconded the prince, assuring the House that the king would not solicit their advice and refuse it – as he had in the autumn of 1621 – and pronouncing a war ‘now feasible and possible if we put to our helping hands’. However, when Henry Wriothesley^*, 3rd and 1st earl of Southampton, and Lord Keeper Williams called for a conference to urge the Commons to a swift vote of supply, Abbot – given leave to speak a second time in a debate on the floor of the House, contrary to custom – suggested that the request be postponed until the following morning. Presumably warned by Digges that a vote of supply was not a foregone conclusion, the archbishop suggested that ‘every private man may move his friend [i.e. in the Commons] that expedition is fit’. However, the Lords spurned his advice, voting to approach the Commons immediately, whereupon Abbot reported the text of a message offering assurances that the king intended any funds voted to be allocated to a war.297 LD 1624 and 1626, pp. 25-8; PA, HL/PO/JO/5/1/2, f. 33; Ruigh, 202-4; Cogswell, Blessed Rev. 193-4. At the ensuing conference, the Commons, instead of offering a concrete sum, proposed merely to assist the king ‘in a parliamentary way’ once he broke off the Spanish Match. Abbot reported this deeply unsatisfactory response on 12 Mar., and was ordered to deliver it to the king. The Commons subsequently insisted on vetting the preamble he proposed to deliver, presumably because they feared he might promise more than his brief allowed.298 Add. 40087, f. 74r-v; LJ, iii. 259a-b, 261a-b; LD 1624 and 1626, pp. 29-32; CJ, i. 736a-b; Ruigh, 208-10; Russell, PEP, 184-5; Cogswell, Blessed Rev. 194-5.

The king’s response to this second petition, delivered at Whitehall on 14 Mar., ‘caused a great dejection to all the hearers’. James now declared that the price of his compliance was five subsidies and ten fifteenths towards a war, and one subsidy and two fifteenths annually to pay off his debts. He also took Abbot to task for putting words into his mouth, in claiming that he agreed with Parliament’s conclusions about ‘the insincerity of those [the Spanish] with whom I have had lately to deal’. As he reminded those present, he had not yet pronounced his opinion on the Spanish Match.299 HMC Buccleuch, iii. 234; LJ, iii. 265b; Ruigh, 210-14; Russell, PEP, 185-7; Cogswell, Blessed Rev. 195-6. Abbot may have passed a copy of the king’s answer to the Venetian ambassador, as the latter echoed the archbishop’s opinion that ‘in some sense he [James] gives the lie to the prince and Buckingham in what they reported about the negotiations with Spain, and practically to himself also, as at the opening of Parliament he admitted the fraud, while he now denies the knowledge of any injury’. The situation was retrieved by Buckingham who after confronting his master in private that evening, secured a royal undertaking to reduce the number of subsidies demanded. He also agreed to initiate a rupture with Spain, and to seek a French alliance as being (in the words of the Venetian ambassador) ‘less serious for religion than Spain’.300 CSP Ven. 1623-5, pp. 254-5, 257.

Armed with this reassurance, on 20 Mar. the Commons voted three subsidies and three fifteenths – around 40 per cent of what the king had originally demanded – in the face of objections from a vociferous minority of sceptics. Abbot reported this offer to the Lords two days later, where it was accepted with only one dissenting voice – Buckingham’s Catholic father-in-law, Francis Manners^*, 6th earl of Rutland; the latter’s refusal to be browbeaten forced the archbishop to find a form of words to convey the all but unanimous assent of the House.301 LJ, iii. 273b; Add. 40087, f. 104r-v; LD 1624 and 1626, pp. 39-40. Abbot had one final opportunity to influence James’s decision about the breach with Spain, on Palm Sunday (21 Mar.), when he preached before the king at Whitehall. His text, Matthew 22:37, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart’, allowed him to attack Catholics, claiming ‘a settled commonwealth’ was incompatible with ‘such trash’. He urged that the recusancy laws should be enforced with the same vigour as they had been under Elizabeth. As for the infanta, he warned, ‘let not a [queen of] Sheba in’.302 McCullough, (suppl. cal. 281-2).

Abbot delivered the offer of supply on 23 Mar. to the king, who (having been shown the text the previous night by Buckingham) accepted it gracefully: ‘it is without example, that ever any Parliament, for a beginning, gave to a king so great a supply, to be levied in so short a time’. After James finished speaking, Abbot knelt (a notable effort for his gouty legs) and said that he ‘should not rest on his Majesty’s declaration therein’, rising only when James undertook to dispatch a messenger into Spain to break off the treaties.303 LJ, iii. 275a, 282b; LD 1624 and 1626, p. 49; Ruigh, 228-32; Russell, PEP, 189-90; Cogswell, Blessed Rev. 215-17. News of this agreement prompted celebrations on the streets of London, but amid these, some of the Spanish embassy staff were mistreated; on the following morning, Buckingham urged the Lords to deal with these offenders, while Abbot moved ‘that no speeches be uttered in the pulpit by any preacher, in disgrace of that king [Philip] or his ambassadors’. The House resolved that the ‘speedy and condign punishment’ enjoined by a proclamation of 8 Mar. would suffice to punish any offenders. The archbishop subsequently made a formal report of James’s acceptance of the subsidies offered, including his promise to send a dispatch to Spain to break off the treaties.304 LJ, iii. 280a; Add. 40087, f. 118v; Stuart Royal Proclamations I: Jas. I ed. J.F. Larkin and P.L. Hughes, 589.

Other parliamentary business, 1624

When Parliament adjourned for Easter on 25 Mar., the ‘blessed revolution’ Abbot had long sought seemed to be on the verge of completion. However, it took a further 18 months for the ‘patriot’ agenda to be realized in full, largely because of royal misgivings. Having announced his intention to break with Spain, James awaited a counter-offer from Madrid, which never arrived; instead, he was told by the Spanish ambassadors that Buckingham planned to take over the reins of government and force him to retire to a country estate. Most of the Council urged James to punish the outgoing Spanish ambassador, Inijosa, but Abbot, ‘with a moderation adapted to the king’s character’, advised his master to ask Philip IV to punish his own envoy.305 CSP Ven. 1623-5, pp. 311-12; SP14/164/58; Ruigh, 256-302.

As in 1621, those who advocated war against Spain used the king’s attitude towards recusancy as an indicator of royal intentions. Abbot’s opinions were not in doubt: in 1624 he reprinted a chapter from his 1604/5 polemic against Dr Hill, on the visibility of the Church, which argued that continuity of doctrine was the crucial question, and that Rome was the Antichrist. This was published anonymously, but with the arms of Canterbury on the title page.306 [Abbot], A Treatise of the Perpetuall Visibilitie … (1624); Fincham, ‘Prelacy and Pols.’ 58. Abbot was no less strident in Parliament: on 1 Mar., amid calls to disarm recusants, the archbishop moved ‘to confine them also’. Five days later, Bishop Neile moved that Abbot, then sick, should be notified of the arrival of the recusancy bill in the Lords; he was included on the committee, and reported it, without amendments, on 24 March.307 LD 1624 and 1626, p. 14; Add. 40087, f. 57; LJ, iii. 278b. When the Commons reported Catholic plans to export large amounts of bullion, it was Abbot who moved to alert the London goldsmiths. His name was subsequently included on the list of the committee assigned to this purpose, but then deleted.308 LD 1624 and 1626, p. 28; Add. 40087, f. 77v.

After Easter, those who sought to gauge the king’s sincerity over a breach with Spain promoted a petition to enforce the recusancy laws. On 3 Apr. Neile and Abbot moved to remind the Commons of their promise to hold a conference on this issue; but a delegation of MPs arrived for this very purpose before anything was resolved. Abbot attended the conference, and when the draft petition was read on 5 Apr., he welcomed it in the warmest terms: ‘the motion of the spirit of God put this into the mind of the Commons, and it doth concur with the wisdom of the state and assembly now gathered, for if religion be neglected, no blessing to be expected’. He spoke of the threat from the bishop of Chalcedon who, the previous summer, had held public processions in Staffordshire; of the exodus of both money and Catholic children to seminaries overseas; and of the resort of thousands to ambassadorial chapels in London. This was a particularly bold endorsement, as, in the two days since the petition had been drafted, James had expressed disapproval of its stridently confessional tone. (Both Lord Keeper Williams and Prince Charles urged that the preamble be altered to place greater emphasis on matters of state rather than private conscience). Abbot agreed that it could be dispensed with if it proved unpalatable to the king, and was included on the committee appointed to amend the draft.309 LD 1624 and 1626, p. 51-7; LJ, iii. 287b; SP14/162/12; Ruigh, 239-43; Cogswell, Blessed Rev. 232; L.A. Underwood, Childhood, Youth and Religious Dissent in Post-Reformation Eng. 93-7. He reported the amendments on 6 Apr., when he explained that he intended to show the Commons that the Lords ‘have not altered this petition from theirs, though they have contracted the same’. Those who attended the ensuing conference became deadlocked over whether to demand the enactment of the petition via a proclamation (as requested in 1621), but Abbot concealed this disagreement, merely telling the Lords that their amendments were being considered.310 LJ, iii. 291b-2a; LD 1624 and 1626, pp. 58-9; ‘Spring 1624’, p. 183; Holles 1624, p. 64; SP14/162/46; Ruigh, 244-5. On 10 Apr. Abbot reported another conference, which had raised the issue of whether suspected recusants might be disarmed as well as those already convicted. Abbot supported this motion: ‘the same course may be taken for disarming them as formerly hath been’. He also urged ‘there should be no proclamation of the strict enforcement [of the recusancy laws], as there had been none of the connivancy’. The final draft, which Abbot presented to the king on 14 Apr., omitted the demand for a proclamation, and the call to disarm suspected recusants. The archbishop eventually delivered the text on 23 Apr., when the king undertook to enforce the laws in his own way, and asked Abbot to vouch for the steps he had taken to encourage the conversion of Catholic children.311 LJ, iii. 297b, 298b, 304a, 317b; LD 1624 and 1626, pp. 62-3, 65. Towards the end of the session, the Commons drafted a petition to remove officeholders who were either ‘justly suspected’ of being Catholic themselves or had family members who were certainly papist. Abbot delivered this document to the Lords on 20 May, and helped draft a reply which asserted that failure to observe due process in examining those accused would give ‘his Majesty and the whole world occasion to think that we did both judge and condemn before we had heard’. Although he declared his support for the petition’s aims, Abbot suggested that Prince Charles should approach the king privately about this grievance. The prince agreed, but the Commons insisted on presenting the petition regardless.312 LJ, iii. 394a-6a, 397b-8a; Add. 40088, ff. 117, 120v; LD 1624 and 1626, pp. 99-101; HP Commons 1604-29, v. 55.

Besides the enforcement of the anti-recusancy laws, those who supported conflict with Spain also took some interest in practical measures to assist the war effort. On 1 Mar. Abbot was included on the committee for munitions, which was instructed to review the defences of the realm. He was clearly active in its proceedings, as on 8 Mar. he moved to reschedule its next meeting.313 LJ, iii. 237b; LD 1624 and 1626, pp. 14-15; Add. 40087, f. 61v. On 1 Apr., when Buckingham urgently appealed for funds for the Navy, which lacked the cash to put to sea, Abbot provided two precedents to show that loans could be raised in anticipation of subsidies which had been agreed in principle, but not yet passed into law. The archbishop was included on the delegation sent to seek the agreement of the Commons, but MPs protested that the House was still too thin after the Easter recess, and the matter was allowed to rest.314 LJ, iii. 285a; SP14/162/12; Cogswell, Blessed Rev. 230-1.

With the breach with Spain and preparations for war underway, Buckingham aimed to eliminate his most inveterate enemies among the Spanish party. However, the first complaint, made against Lord Keeper Williams, was probably not promoted by the favourite. It was certainly strongly opposed by Abbot, who condemned a petition received from the London woodmonger Thomas Morley as libellous on 17 March. Two days later, Abbot asked that the House ban the printing of parliamentary petitions and breviats, which had allowed Morley to spread his libel with ease. On 22 Mar. he found Morley guilty, and expressed fears about the harm the allegation had done to Williams’ reputation. On the following day he called for the printer who had published the petition to be imprisoned.315 HMC Buccleuch, iii. 234; LJ, iii. 269a; LD 1624 and 1626, p. 42.

The prime scalp claimed by the duke in 1624 was that of Lord Treasurer Middlesex. The investigation began when the munitions committee uncovered evidence of Middlesex’s personal gains from a complex land transfer intended to settle debts owed to the Ordnance Office by the late Sir Roger Dallison^‡. On 2 Apr. Abbot discreetly reported to the Lords that allegations had been made ‘which concerned the honour of a lord of this House’; he was one of the subcommittee appointed to examine witnesses, and on 10 Apr. he reported to the House that charges had been drafted. Two days later, Abbot introduced Williams’ report of the witness statements, accusing the treasurer of ‘wilful neglect’ over the supply of munitions, and moving that the Dallison family should also be given a copy of the charges.316 LJ, iii. 286a, 299b-301a; LD 1624 and 1626, pp. 49-50, 65-70; PA, HL/PO/JO/5/1/3, ff. 15-16; HMC Hastings, ii. 65; M. Prestwich, Cranfield, 392-400; LIONEL CRANFIELD. On 15 Apr. the Commons sent up a much fuller list of charges against Middlesex. Abbot was named to the subcommittee appointed to carry out an investigation, and reported the examinations of witnesses over the next two weeks. Middlesex, hoping to gain access to the king, played for time, but by 11 May, Abbot, like many of his fellow peers, had lost patience with his feigned illness, and he was required to appear in his own defence the following day.317 LJ, iii. 311a, 318a-19b, 325b, 329a, 341a, 346a-9b; PA, HL/PO/JO/5/1/3, f. 44. Middlesex was subsequently condemned. During the sentencing on 13 May, the archbishop criticized the lord treasurer for having failed to render any accounts as master of the great wardrobe, and demanded that the ‘foul crime’ of receiving a bribe from the customs farmers receive ‘heavy censure’. He also attacked Middlesex’s stewardship of the Ordnance Office, deplored the use of a dry stamp of his signature in the court of Wards, and observed that it was Sir Thomas Vavasour^‡, not Middlesex, who had initiated financial reforms of the household. Indeed, he offered as severe a judgement as any: ‘look upon his fault, the complaint against him, and what you will leave him, an earl of higher honour and rich? What punishment?’, to which he himself supplied the answer – ‘£50,000’ – the fine ultimately agreed by the House.318 LD 1624 and 1626, pp. 75, 79, 82-3, 86, 90; PA, HL/PO/JO/5/1/3, ff. 71v-2v; Prestwich, 458-60. Abbot was subsequently included on a delegation sent to inform the king of this sentence, and another to ask James to send for Middlesex’s staff and seals of office.319 LD 1624 and 1626, p. 91; Add. 40088, f. 105; LJ, iii. 384b, 386a.

As archbishop, Abbot had an informal oversight of all ecclesiastical legislation which came before the Lords. In the past such legislation had been copious, but godly MPs had little interest in provoking such an orthodox archbishop as Abbot, and the agenda was rather sparse in 1624. A bill to bring scandalous ministers under the jurisdiction of the common law courts (which Digges had criticized in 1621) was introduced into the Commons, but expired in committee, as did another to regulate the leasing of church lands to the families of clerics, which failed because Sir Peter Heyman^‡ inserted a proviso that non-residents should be excluded from its terms. A third bill, which Abbot doubtless welcomed, sought to fine those who failed to present their children for weekly catechism. A bill to place restrictions on the leasing of episcopal estates received a single reading in the Lords, late in the session (22 May) and was then laid aside, as was the bill to prevent simony in appointments to college fellowships, which made slow progress through the Commons, and only received its first reading in the Lords on 20 May.320 Kyle, 330-7; Russell, PEP, 191; Two Biogs. of William Bedell, 261.

Abbot was actively involved in the passage of several other ecclesiastical measures. When the bill against swearing was reported on 12 Mar., he indignantly noted that, contrary to promises made by Sir John Davies^‡, one of the Lords’ legal assistants, no provision had been made to preserve the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts. Despite his objections, the bill was passed as it stood, on a majority vote.321 Add. 40087, f. 76v. Abbot chaired the committee for the Sabbath bill, which he reported on 9 Mar., noting that the question of whether the exercise of arms might be allowed after evening prayer had been referred to the judges, who ruled that any sport not explicitly forbidden by the bill would be permitted.322 LJ, iii. 252b; LD 1624 and 1626, p. 22. The committee for the bill to confirm the exchange of York House in the Strand – now Buckingham’s London residence – for various crown lands in Yorkshire was chaired by Abbot, who reported on 15 May that it was ‘beneficial to the bishop’ [Archbishop Matthew], whose rental income would be greatly improved, but noted that it lacked the consent of the dean and chapter. It was passed without alteration.323 LJ, iii. 384a; LD 1624 and 1626, pp. 94-5. Abbot also reported a private bill to confirm the endowment of three London divinity lectures by Thomas Whetenhall, who, in his will of 1616, had assigned a rent charge of £40 p.a. to this purpose.324 PROB 11/129, f. 61; LJ, iii.342a, 387a; Add. 40088, f. 107v.

The Canterbury Convocation outdid the Commons in voting four subsidies towards the war effort, and on 24 May Abbot tabled the bill to confirm this supply in the Lords. He assured the House that a similar bill was pending at York, but despite his motion for it to be given a first reading, the measure was left to await the lay subsidy bill from the Commons, which arrived at the end of the day. As was customary, the clerical subsidy was waved through the Lords without committal on the following afternoon, but the lay subsidy bill was committed, with Abbot among its membership.325 LJ, iii. 403b-4a, 406b; Add. 40088, f. 126v. Convocation also resolved to commission a revised edition of the works of the Church Fathers, a measure drafted for Abbot by William Bedell.326 Two Biogs. of William Bedell, 262.

Two serious complaints were made against anti-Calvinist clerics during the session. The first was against Bishop Harsnett, a client of the earl of Arundel rather than a member of the Durham House clique, which looked to Bishop Neile for patronage. On 14 May Abbot was included on a delegation which heard the Commons’ charges against Harsnett, which were based upon complaints from ministers in Norwich diocese. Harsnett offered a robust defence, and as a result the case was referred to the court of High Commission. Harsnett immediately counter-attacked with a petition against his chief tormentor, Thomas Stoakes, a hispanophile who (as Abbot reported) had offered to drop his complaint in return for appointment as archdeacon of Norfolk. Abbot was asked to deal privately with this complaint.327 LJ, iii. 384b, 388a-90a; Add. 40088, ff. 111, 112v-13; SP14/164/46, 86; 14/165/21, 34; 14/167/10; SAMUEL HARSNETT.

The second complaint was against Richard Montagu^* (later bishop of Chichester and Norwich), who had recently published A New Gagg for an Old Goose, a response to a Catholic attack on the Canons of the Synod of Dort. Like Laud and De Dominis before him, Montagu undercut the premise of his Catholic opponent by denying that the Calvinist tenets agreed at Dort were Anglican doctrine.328 N. Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, 125-8; Brit. Delegation and the Synod of Dort, 297-321; R. Montagu, A New Gagg for an Old Goose (1624); Milward, 40. Montagu subsequently learned that one of the complaints brought against him in the 1624 Parliament originated with two of Abbot’s chaplains, Daniel Featley and Thomas Goade. The archbishop, he noted, ‘loveth me not so ill, nor can spare so much time as to think of such inferior employments for them’. On 13 May John Pym^‡ reported the complaint against the New Gagg, a tract he condemned as being ‘full fraught with dangerous opinions of Arminius, quite contrary to the [Thirty-Nine] Articles established [by law], in five several points’. Pym, Digges, Hatton and two other godly MPs were subsequently sent to acquaint Abbot, who promised to ‘take such order in it, as shall give … satisfaction’. With another session promised for the autumn, this gave Abbot time to decide upon a course of action.329 Cosin Corresp. ed. G. Ornsby (Surtees Soc. lii), 17, 21, 50-1; CJ, i. 788b, 790a; H. Schwartz, ‘Arminianism and the Eng. Parl. 1624-9’, JBS, xii. 43-6; Tyacke, 146-50; Fincham, ‘Prelacy and Pols.’ 57.

As a senior member of the upper House, Abbot was naturally involved with a variety of other business during the course of the session. Named to the committee for the monopolies’ bill on 18 Mar., he reported the measure on 3 Apr., urging the House to seek a conference with the Commons about the kinds of patent exempted from the bill, and the many petitions received requesting further exemptions. Nothing more was done until 7 Apr., when his second motion for a conference was adopted. On 20 May, towards the end of the lengthy revision process, Lord Keeper Williams protested at the clause making it praemunire for a privy councillor to order a suspension of proceedings against monopolies outlawed by this legislation. Prince Charles and Arundel agreed, but Abbot stated, ‘the Commons said, their main aim is that such letters be subject to a praemunire’; the bill received the Royal Assent without the proposed omission of the clause regarding privy councillors.330 LJ, iii. 267b, 287a; LD 1624 and 1626, pp. 50, 59, 95; Add. 40088, f. 19v; Kyle, 69-75. On 28 Apr., at the report stage of the usury bill, Abbot moved ‘that the judges might consider whether this bill did not tacitly allow of usury to be taken (which is against the word of God), for that it might then be a scandal to our religion’. The judges concurred, and a proviso was inserted stating that the bill did not ‘allow the practice of usury in point of religion or conscience’.331 LJ, iii. 325a; Kyle, 143. On 22 May, Abbot secured a conference with the Commons about the expiring laws continuance bill, at which it was complained that the Lords had struck out the clause repealing the 1553 Act for sale of wines by retail, the basis of a patent for issuing wine licences held by Charles Howard^*, 1st earl of Nottingham. Prince Charles persuaded the Commons to allow this patent to continue until Nottingham’s death, as the king had promised.332 Add. 40088, f. 123v; LJ, iii. 400b-1a; Kyle, 505-6.

Abbot took an active role in the passage of several private bills. On 12 Mar. he was once again named to the committee for the Thames navigation bill, which he reported ‘with two small amendments’ four days later. He also chaired the bill for the endowments of Wadham College, Oxford, which he reported on 24 March.333 LJ, iii. 257b, 263b, 275a, 278b. On 16 Mar. he reported Prince Charles’s estate bill, which prevented duchy of Cornwall leases from expiring on the death of the incumbent duke, and he subsequently did the same for estate bills for Henry de Vere, 18th earl of Oxford and Viscount Montagu.334 Ibid. 253b, 254b, 263b, 266b, 304a; Add. 40087, f. 94v; LD 1624 and 1626, pp. 33-4. At the second reading of the estate bill for John Ramsay^*, earl of Holdernesse, on 15 Apr., Abbot explained that the lands in question, formerly owned by the recusant Sir Henry James, had been forfeited when the latter refused the oath of allegiance. They escheated to Abbot, as the diocesan bishop, who had then given them to the crown; the archbishop now asked that his tenure as a feudal lord should not be extinguished by the bill, which he reported on 28 Apr., with several amendments and a proviso.335 LJ, iii. 305a-b, 325a; H. Bowler, ‘Sir Henry James of Smarden, Kent and Clerkenwell, Recusant (c.1559-1625)’, Studs. in London Hist. ed. A.E.J. Hollaender and W. Kellaway, 289-313.

Throughout the Parliament, Abbot was involved with several bills on hospitals. On 24 Feb. he reported a bill to revive the 1597 Act for the foundation of hospitals and workhouses, which had been passed in 1621; ‘it agrees with the former’ he noted, offering one minor amendment. In fact, a major drafting error was spotted the following day, which had to be corrected in the Commons.336 LJ, iii. 216b; Add. 40087, f. 20v; Kyle, 383-4. Abbot was also included on the committee for another bill to confirm titles to hospitals and free schools, which he eventually reported, without amendment, on 10 May. This measure, intended to protect charitable foundations from concealed land patentees, failed for lack of time. He was also named to the committee for a third bill, for ‘better maintenance of hospitals’. He recommended that Chief Justice Sir Henry Hobart^‡ act as a legal assistant to the committee, and called upon Lord Treasurer Middlesex to give his attendance.337 LJ, iii. 219a, 268a, 364a; Add. 40087, f. 82r-v; Add. 40088, f. 61. Shortly before the end of the session, on 27 May, the Lords authorized Abbot to take up a national collection for redeeming prisoners held in north Africa.338 LJ, iii. 413a.

From Spanish to French alliance, 1624-5

Although felled by another attack of gout after the end of the session, Abbot at last had good news to convey to his friends abroad. King Christian of Denmark was informed:

some years have passed since we in England were so blinded with Spanish darkness that we hardly knew where or what we were, but God has at length dispelled this darkness. In the seven months since Prince Charles returned from Spain, we have rejoiced. Blessed be the name of Jehovah for all time, who has shown such respect to his miserable Church, and saved this adolescent [Charles] from such perils.339 Chamberlain Letters, ii.565; Negotiations of Sir Thomas Roe, 251; 46th DKR, app. 49.

Sir Thomas Roe was given a fuller account of the crisis of the previous year:

such hath been the mercy of God toward us, that … the secret departure of our prince into Spain, hath proved unto us the most behoveful and beneficial of any thing whatsoever. The prince saw … their irreconcilable hatred to our religion, their frauds in deluding us, and of drawing on a pretended match for eight years, without any intention to conclude it, or perfect it. His Highness found there in direct terms told him, that all the treaty which had been in England was but verbal, and not real; … devices to set the papists in England at liberty, to procure a toleration for them, and nothing but oaths required upon oaths from the king here, his Council and all men in authority, that nothing should be urged against them.

Abbot naturally trumpeted the ‘liberal support’ offered by Parliament, ‘which is to be bestowed upon the Palatinate, and the strengthening of the kingdom, and our allies, that so religion and safety among us may be maintained’. He mentioned diplomatic overtures to the Dutch, Count Mansfeld, the Danes, Swedes, German and Swiss Protestants, Venetians and Savoyards, and even brought himself to speak approvingly of the French Match.340 Negotiations of Sir Thomas Roe, 251-3; Cogswell, Blessed Rev. 274-81; Wilson, 364-5. He clearly relished the prospect of war: when the Council warned London merchants to withdraw their assets from Spain, he told them ‘they had a fair warning to seek harbour before the storm fell; and if they neglect it, they must be held authors themselves of their own shipwreck’.341 Add. 72276, f. 106.

Recusants naturally feared the worst, and on the face of it matters became harder for them: Catholic priests were banished by a proclamation which incorporated points taken from the parliamentary recusancy petition, while common informers were allowed to bring prosecutions once again. However, Abbot realized that the recusancy laws would not be fully enforced, as this was as likely to disrupt negotiations for the French Match as the Spanish.342 Stuart Dynastic Policy and Religious Pols. 1621-5, p. 272; Stuart Royal Proclamations I: Jas. I, 591-3; Negotiations of Sir Thomas Roe, 253; Over the summer, the assizes and ecclesiastical courts resumed proceedings against Catholics, suspended since the summer of 1622, but six months later, at the French ambassador’s request, James once again suspended their proceedings, and discontinued collection of the 12d. weekly recusancy fine.343 Stuart Dynastic Policy and Religious Pols. 1621-5, pp. 344-5; Schreiber, First Carlisle, 59-77, 81-5; SP14/177/26.

One of the more surprising developments of the French Match occurred when the archbishop of Embrun, one of the French diplomats negotiating the new treaty, paid a call on Abbot in civilian dress. Another French cleric nearly provoked a riot by attempting to evangelize in London; he was saved by Abbot, who seems to have arrested him for his own safety.344 Stuart Dynastic Policy and Religious Pols. 1621-5, p. 322; CSP Ven. 1623-5, pp. 511, 547. Like many other members of the so-called patriot coalition, he was frustrated that most of the negotiations for the French Match were conducted by Buckingham. In consoling Carleton about yet another failure to obtain preferment, he observed that the favourite had such a stranglehold on court patronage, that even those who supported the duke’s diplomatic policy could expect no guarantee of influence. In November, when the favourite ordered bonfires to be lit in London on the occasion of Charles’s betrothal, Abbot tartly quipped that ‘there were now two Councils, and that of Newmarket was the higher’.345 Add. 72276, f. 131; SP14/171/59. Meanwhile, the influence of the Durham House clique continued to grow, despite the failure of the Spanish Match. Laud finally secured membership of the court of High Commission by appealing to Buckingham; and when Abbot attempted to settle a dispute over a prebend at Hereford Cathedral, Francis Godwin^*, bishop of Hereford, successfully appealed for the question to be settled by a committee on which Abbot was outnumbered by Neile, Buckeridge and Laud.346 Harl. 7000, f. 166; SP14/174/70; Works of Abp. Laud, iii. 155.

Parliaments and the Arminian challenge, 1625-6

On his deathbed in March 1625, James reportedly urged those present to tell Abbot ‘that he died a true Protestant, and of the religion that was professed in England, saying that the Romish was a dark religion which he could never relish’.347 Add. 72255, f. 170. For a different account, see CSP Ven. 1625-6, pp. 3-4. Although his successor Charles clearly disliked Abbot, and rarely solicited his advice, his accession to the throne was, in one respect, an opportunity for the archbishop, as the new king’s espousal of the patriot cause brought the prospect of an offensive war against Spain to the top of the political agenda. Moreover, Charles’s marriage to Henrietta Maria in the spring of 1625 ratified an Anglo-French military alliance capable of offering a serious challenge to Habsburg power.

However, the new regime threatened Abbot’s ecclesiastical stewardship in two important ways. First, the French Match required a suspension of proceedings against recusants, which Abbot had been quietly encouraging in defiance of James’s orders. Abbot reportedly urged Charles to continue this persecution, but the new king, while promising not to show favour to his Catholic subjects, responded ‘that he had received no harm from them, and therefore could not punish’. Abbot undoubtedly appreciated that some form of toleration was a necessary precondition of the French alliance. He was also aware that this same alliance required Charles to lend a squadron of his warships to the French, who eventually used them against the Huguenots. Indeed, this knowledge may explain why, at this time, he was anxious to keep a visit he received from a Huguenot envoy secret.348 SP14/177/26; Stuart Dynastic Policy and Religious Pols. 1621-5, pp. 344-5, 364; CSP Ven. 1625-6, pp. 52, 82; Fincham, ‘Prelacy and Pols.’, 53.

The other threat to Abbot’s position came from Charles’s preference for the churchmanship of the Durham House clique, which eroded still further his influence over ecclesiastical preferments. The archbishop found himself powerless to proceed against Richard Montagu, who, with quiet encouragement from Neile, spent the winter of 1624-5 writing a new book, entitled Appello Caesarem. Far from renouncing the views of the New Gagg, as the Commons had intended in 1624, this new work (which mischievously appealed for support to Abbot’s own polemic of 1604/5 against the Catholic Dr Thomas Hill) amplified them. However, it seems likely that Abbot remained unaware that a confrontation was looming, as Neile had arranged with King James that the text would be approved for publication by Francis White, another of the Durham House clique. Abbot was to have no sight of the text prior to publication, though Montagu privately bragged that ‘if his grace call for it, he shall have it, little to his comfort’.349 Cosin Corresp. ed. G. Ornsby (Surtees Soc. lii), 28-9, 37, 43-4, 68, 78; Tyacke, 149-51; Holland, 292-4; RICHARD MONTAGU; RICHARD NEILE.

At the general election of 1625, Buckingham nominated Henry Sandys^‡ at Sandwich in order to exclude Sir Robert Hatton, but the latter won the day, both at Sandwich and at Stafford, where Abbot had doubtless recommended him to Bishop Morton (who had lodged with Hatton during the 1621 Parliament).350 HP Commons 1604-29, ii. 372, 538; iv. 594; Staffs. RO, B/A/A/16, f. 17v. We owe the latter ref. to Ken Fincham. This was the first sign of a rift between Abbot and Buckingham since the formation of the ‘patriot’ coalition 18 months earlier, a gulf which was to widen rapidly as the Durham House group moved into the favourite’s orbit. Due to ‘a longer fit of the gout than at any time heretofore’, Abbot missed most of the brief Westminster sitting. On 23 June he made arrangements to petition the king for a national fast day, ‘in regard of the sickness by the plague, the last unseasonable weather that may bring a dearth, and the war that is intended’, but he was too ill to present it to Charles on the following day.351 Negotiations of Sir Thomas Roe, 460; Procs. 1625, pp. 43-4, 47, 238, 241, 288. He was ‘sick and upon his couch’ on 29 June, when the Commons sent a delegation to ask him what had been done about Montagu’s book since the previous Parliament. Anticipating trouble if he proceeded against Montagu without consulting High Commission or Convocation, Abbot insisted that he had, with James’s permission, summoned Montagu before him at around the beginning of the year, and advised him to revise the New Gagg:

It may be divers things have slipped you, which upon better advice you will reform. If anything be said too much, take it away; if anything be too little, add unto it; if anything be obscure, explain it; but do not wed yourself to your own opinion, and remember we must give an account of our ministry unto Christ.

The next he heard from Montagu, he insisted, was on Mayday 1625, when the latter presented him with a printed copy of the Appello, which he claimed had been approved for publication by James himself.352 Procs. 1625, pp. 72, 268, 285-8; R. Montagu, Appello Caesarem (1625), sig. A3r-v. Some MPs noted that Abbot’s admonition to Montagu, ‘though grave, was neither repressive nor directing’, while others, sympathetic to Montagu, deplored the fact that several Calvinists had rushed into print to criticize Montagu’s work. On 7 July the Commons found Montagu guilty of contempt, ordered him to attend them in August, and resolved to ask Abbot to suppress the controversial works.353 Procs. 1625, pp. 331-5, 509; Cosin Corresp. 78-9; Tyacke, 151-2. However, Montagu failed to appear when Parliament reassembled at Oxford, pleading ill health, and when the Commons attempted to summon him the king claimed parliamentary privilege, as Montagu was now one of his chaplains.354 Russell, PEP, 240.

By the time Parliament reconvened in Oxford on 1 Aug., Abbot had recovered his health; he lodged at Merton College during the brief sitting. Named to the committee for a bill to preserve crown revenues, he was urged to account for the national collection he had organized in 1624 to relieve English captives held in Algiers, which prompted him to issue a circular to the bishops to send their receipts to Lambeth.355 Procs. 1625, pp. 127, 139-40, 662; Hist. of the Church and Manor of Wigan ed. G.T.O. Bridgeman (Chetham Soc. n.s. xvi), 289-90. On 9 Aug. he reported at length from a conference on the recusancy laws, which the previous day the king had promised to enforce. The Commons had, he recalled, cited several instances of clandestine relaxation of the recusancy laws by crown officials, which Lord Keeper Williams explained had been undertaken at the behest of French diplomats. This report raised awareness of the possibility of secret clauses in the marriage treaty relating to toleration; Abbot must have known of the existence of the écrit particulier relating to this issue, and was undoubtedly happy to see the Crown come under pressure. On 10 Aug., Abbot was named to the committee for the recusancy bill, and attended a conference with the Commons at which a petition asking the king not to allow himself to be importuned by foreign ambassadors in future was drafted.356 Procs. 1625, pp. 152-4, 169-72, 174, 179-80; Russell, PEP, 239-40, 247-8.

On the evening of 11 Aug., Charles informed the Council that he intended to end the session which, having voted two subsidies, looked unlikely to provide any further support for the war against Spain. Abbot and Williams warned of the harm this might do ‘to the crown, the kingdom and all Christendom’, but no-one would contradict the king’s resolve, and the dissolution followed the next day. Rumours soon circulated that Abbot, along with Williams, Arundel and Pembroke, was to be questioned for his role in the failure of this session, but this came to nothing.357 CSP Ven. 1625-6, p. 147; HMC Mar and Kellie, ii. 233; Holland, 295. Informing Sir Thomas Roe of the failure of the Oxford sitting, Abbot was happy to lay the blame upon the Commons:

This meeting, August the first, when it was harvest time, and the sickness raged everywhere, had no happy success; for the House of Commons falling fiercely upon my lord of Buckingham, the king held it fit to break off that assembly, and so men returned home less contented than they came out.

By the time he wrote this, in November, Abbot was able to leaven these gloomy tidings with happier news of the departure of the Anglo-Dutch expedition against Spain. He also claimed that the Dunkirkers’ depredation of English shipping had been requited by the pillage of Spanish goods to the value of £200,000.358 Negotiations of Sir Thomas Roe, 459-60. His claim was exaggerated, but English privateers did make immense captures, see J.C. Appleby, ‘English Privateering during the Spanish and French Wars, 1625-30’ (Hull Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1983), vol. ii. 312-28.

Charles upheld his promise to Parliament about the recusancy laws, publicly ordering their due execution at the summer assizes, and rescinding his father’s restraint on proceedings in the ecclesiastical courts. Abbot forwarded this order to Matthew, urging that ‘presentments be duly made, and excommunications against the obstinate be issued forth’, and the tempo of recusancy proceedings picked up in many parts of the country.359 CSP Ven. 1625-6, p. 237; Add. 33207, f. 32; SP16/19/81. However, the French ambassador continued to appeal to the king to release Catholic priests. In December 1625, Abbot scoffed at his suggestion that two such prisoners were ambassadorial chaplains, but Charles obliged him to release them regardless.360 Holland, 148-9. Abbot retaliated by vetoing the queen’s proposal that she be crowned in February 1626 by her French confessor, the bishop of Mende; after further disputation, Henrietta Maria declined to be crowned at all. Williams, who should have presided as dean of Westminster at the king’s coronation, was supplanted by Laud, but Abbot officiated at the communion and the anointing, and proclaimed the new king to the congregation.361 Chamberlain Letters, ii. 627; CSP Ven. 1625-6, pp. 311, 320; HMC Buccleuch, iii. 265-6; Autobiog. of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, ii.176-7.

With a fresh Parliament in the offing, Abbot wrote to John Prideaux, then vice chancellor of Oxford, for a seat for Sir Thomas Edmondes, treasurer of the household, who, he observed, had assisted the university’s petition for a supply of crown timber to improve the navigation of the Thames. The treasurer, a prominent member of the French party at court, was also backed by Pembroke, the university chancellor, but his return was contested by a rival candidate, and overturned by the Commons on 17 Mar. 1626.362 Procs. 1626, iv. 248; HP Commons 1604-29, iv. 174. At the same election, it is possible that Abbot endorsed the candidacy of his servant Sir John Wilde at Canterbury, although this could have offended Philip Herbert^*, earl of Montgomery (and later 4th earl of Pembroke), who had nominated one of the rival candidates to the corporation.363 HP Commons 1604-29, ii. 195-6. In the Lords, Abbot held Archbishop Matthew’s proxy during the session.364 Procs. 1626, i. 22.

The unresolved issue of Montagu’s controversial publications threatened to distract Parliament from the pressing business of supply for the war with Spain, prompting manoeuvering on both sides. Shortly before Parliament met, Neile and his supporters vouched for the orthodoxy of Montagu’s doctrine (16 Jan. 1626), but the godly peer Robert Rich^*, 2nd earl of Warwick persuaded Buckingham to arrange a disputation of the issues at York House in the following month. Abbot (who was ill) and Neile both stayed away, perhaps in part to avoid a direct confrontation, and the outcome of the conference was inconclusive, leaving Montagu vulnerable to further parliamentary proceedings. In the event, these were delayed by the attempt to impeach Buckingham, and the Commons’ case against Montagu remained incomplete at the dissolution.365 Works of Abp. Laud, iii. 176-9; vi. 249; Cosin Corresp, 89; Tyacke, 153-4, 165-80. Trouble briefly flared at court in April 1626, when Godfrey Goodman^*, bishop of Gloucester, was accused of preaching heterodox opinions before the king. The sermon was referred to Abbot and three of his fiercest critics, Andrewes, Neile and Laud, who concluded (presumably to Abbot’s dismay) ‘that some things were therein spoken less cautiously, but nothing falsely’.366 Works of Abp. Laud, iii. 187.

During the 1626 Parliament Abbot was again plagued by ill health: he was present at the start of March, but did not reappear thereafter until 1 May. His appearance in March saw him involved in a flurry of activity: on 3 Mar. he reported the estate bill for the Kentish peer Henry Neville^*, 9th or 2nd Lord Abergavenny; he oversaw the committee for the bill to confirm the foundation of Sutton’s hospital at London’s Charterhouse; helped to audit the accounts of contributions raised for relief of London’s plague victims in the previous year, towards which (it emerged) his own diocese had made no contribution; and offered to provide accounts for the sums raised for the redemption of English captives in north Africa, which he had been ordered to prepare in August 1625. By the time this account was taken, on 23 Mar., he had retired to his sickbed. On the following morning, Bishop Harsnett reported that Abbot had received £2,700 and spent all but £410, which was ordered to be disbursed on ransoming captives.367 Procs. 1626, i. 84, 99-100, 106-7, 128, 200, 209-11, 314-16. On 3 Mar. Abbot was ordered to attend a conference with the Commons after Buckingham was asked to explain his detention of a French ship, the St Peter of Le Havre. This was the first substantive allegation brought against the duke by MPs bent on his impeachment, but a summons for a peer to answer the Commons was potentially an affront to the Lords’ privileges. On the following morning, Abbot reported that MPs had amended their order, leaving Buckingham to decide whether to make a reply; the king then overrode the Commons’ inquiry by claiming personal responsibility for the order detaining the ship.368 Ibid. 99, 104-5, 107-8; Russell, PEP, 279-82; C.C.G. Tite, Impeachment and Parlty. Judicature in Early Stuart Eng. 182.

Abbot’s brief foray into the Lords in March was prompted by the need to revive the Anglo-French alliance, which had faltered over the winter because of a short-lived Franco-Spanish rapprochement, and because of quarrels at the English court over the expulsion of some of the queen’s French servants.369 Russell, PEP, 263-8; Wilson, 383-4. These plans were almost disrupted on 4 Mar. by the king’s arrest of the earl of Arundel, one of Buckingham’s chief opponents, who had allowed a clandestine marriage between his son Henry Frederick Howard^† (later 22nd or 15th earl of Arundel) and Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of Esmé Stuart^*, 1st earl of March. Charles, who had intended to see his cousin married to the son of the 7th earl of Argyll [S], had the newly-weds detained at Lambeth Palace. Far from objecting, Abbot reportedly regarded the couple as excommunicate, for having married during Lent without an episcopal licence.370 Chamberlain Letters, ii. 631; CSP Ven. 1625-6, pp. 358, 361; HMC Skrine, 50; Russell, PEP, 312-14.

The Lords avoided registering any immediate complaint about this breach of their privileges. Instead, on 6 Mar. Edward Montagu^*, 1st Lord Montagu moved to debate the war with Spain, for which reason the session had convened a month earlier. Abbot was thereupon included on a committee to consider ‘the safety and defence of the kingdom’. ‘Time requires haste’, he urged the following morning, reporting the committee’s support for a fresh naval assault on Spain, and England’s allies in Germany, aims which were seconded by Pembroke. That afternoon he urged the Commons to vote supply swiftly, recalled Lord Montagu’s warning that a month had passed without action, and advised that the recent attack on Cadiz had ‘provoked and exasperated a great and vigilant enemy who will be ready to take all advantages both by sea and land’. Either they should invade Spain, ‘if there were cause’, or they defend themselves. Pembroke then followed with a detailed account of the crown’s commitments to its Continental allies, but it took the Commons almost three weeks to resolve to offer supply, conditional on the redress of grievances.371 Procs. 1626, i. 120, 122-3, 124-5; ii. 221; CSP Ven. 1625-6, p. 357; Russell, PEP, 287-8, 291.

Chief among these grievances was Buckingham, whose enemies in the Commons pursued several lines of inquiry. One of these was the case of Sir Robert Howard^‡, who had been cited into High Commission for adultery with Buckingham’s sister-in-law. Abbot and other members of the court had briefly imprisoned Howard on 5 Mar. 1625 for having refused to give evidence under the ex officio oath. Unfortunately for Abbot, the 1624 Parliament had briefly reconvened at that time for a prorogation session, which meant Howard was entitled to claim parliamentary privilege. The cause was debated in the Commons on 21 Mar. 1626, when Digges asked that the archbishop be exonerated. William Strode^‡, clearly seeking evidence of undue interference by Buckingham, moved to know who had advised Abbot to disregard Howard’s privilege claim, but John Pym urged the House to seek a conference, lest they offend the Lords by proceeding against Abbot without permission.372 Procs. 1626, ii. 328-9, 332-3; CSP Ven. 1625-6, p. 351; HP Commons 1604-29, iv. 814. No-one else expressed any interest in pursuing Abbot, and by the time the case was settled on 3 May, witnesses had testified that the archbishop had played no direct part in his court’s rejection of Howard’s privilege claim. Sir John Eliot^‡ subsequently moved that Abbot be instructed to erase the proceedings in the court’s records, but in the event the Commons passed this order directly to the court’s registrar, who was then present at the bar.373 Procs. 1626, ii. 141-5, 148-51; Kent Hist. and Lib. Cent. U269/1/CP12; HP Commons 1604-29, iv. 814-15.

In late March and April, while the Commons’ proceedings against Buckingham hung in the balance, there were suspicions that Abbot was kept away from the Lords by a case of political gout. His indisposition was clearly genuine, as on 4 May he was allowed to remain seated while speaking, but the timing of his return to the House on 1 May was suspiciously opportune, being the day when Buckingham’s most outspoken enemy, Bristol, finally appeared at the bar of the Lords, and suggested that the favourite might have had a hand in the death of King James; the archbishop did not miss a day of the session thereafter.374 T. Birch, Ct. and Times of Chas. I, i. 105; Procs. 1626, i. 352; Russell, PEP, 311. Abbot had cause to dislike the favourite, as patron of the Durham House group, but he supported the duke’s anti-Spanish policy, and, in March, he, like Pembroke, had backed Buckingham’s attempt to relaunch the Anglo-French alliance. Later in the session, he was hardly ever overtly hostile to the duke, but his punctilious interventions on procedural points were generally unhelpful to Buckingham’s cause.375 Holland, 296-7, sees Abbot as being more hostile to the duke.

On 4 May, during a debate about the king’s imprisonment of Arundel, Abbot supported several of the duke’s enemies in calling for the king’s charges against Bristol to take priority over Arundel’s release. This was clearly a tactical ploy to avoid delaying the impeachment proceedings against Bristol, which succeeded, as the charges against the earl were presently heard on 6 May.376 Procs. 1626, i. 346, 352-3. Two days later, a dispute erupted over whether the case against Bristol or Buckingham should be heard first, for if either were convicted the case against the other would be discredited. Abbot expressed no preference, but seconded Pembroke after the latter urged the House to resolve the matter itself rather than let it be settled by Charles. Like Pembroke, the archbishop also argued that the question of whether to allow Bristol counsel for his defence (not normally allowed in treason trials) should be postponed, presumably because he feared that Bristol would lose a vote. Neither point was resolved at this time.377 Ibid. 382-4; Russell, PEP, 317-18. On the following day, when it was moved to ask the judges whether the king was eligible to give evidence against Bristol, Abbot moved to send for Attorney General (Sir Robert) Heath^‡, who had previously informed the House that there was little Charles could say that had not already been covered by other witnesses.378 Procs. 1626, i. 381 (Heath’s speech), 392.

On 8 and 10 May Bristol’s case was temporarily eclipsed by the Commons’ delivery of impeachment charges against Buckingham. The most sensational allegation related to the favourite’s mistreatment of the dying King James, and was delivered by Digges, who portrayed Charles as an accessory to his own father’s murder. Along with Eliot, Digges was arrested, and questioned by the Council over whether Abbot had prompted him to make this accusation. Digges denied this suggestion, as did the archbishop himself when confronted by James Hay, 1st earl of Carlisle. On 15 May Buckingham’s enemies in the Lords insisted that Digges and Eliot had said nothing to denigrate the king’s honour. However, Abbot confined himself to uttering anodyne remarks about ‘the pious and dutiful respect of the king to his father’. The exoneration of the two MPs by so many peers helped persuade Charles to order their release.379 Ibid. 477, 484; Rushworth, i. 545; Russell, PEP, 306-7, 318.

On 16 May, the Lords debated a request by the Commons that Buckingham be incarcerated during his trial. Precedent suggested that any decision on this matter should wait until the accused had delivered his answer. However, those who opposed the duke pressed for a reply to be sent to the Commons immediately. In the ensuing vote, Abbot was the only bishop among the 13 then present to oppose the duke, whose supporters carried the day.380 Procs. 1626, i. 488-91; iv. 22. Six days later, Abbot was included on the committee ordered to examine witnesses for both sides in the crown’s impeachment of Bristol. Few depositions were taken, because, as Abbot reported on 13 June, Bristol knew nothing of the testimony of the crown’s witnesses, whereas the king’s counsel, having examined the earl’s witnesses, made full disclosure to the prosecution. The Lords assigned three masters in Chancery to take subsequent examinations, to avoid accusations of partiality to Buckingham.381 Ibid. i. 540, 615, 621.

As well as the various impeachment charges, Abbot addressed other matters during the latter part of the session. When a member of the York Convocation claimed privilege on 17 May, the archbishop reminded the House that proctors in Convocation enjoyed privilege ‘in as large and ample manner as any other Member of Parliament’, and that the Lords were required to enforce these rights. However, the case was dismissed after it was learned that the civil lawyer concerned had been released within an hour of his arrest.382 Ibid. 496. On 8 June, when Arundel resumed his seat in the Lords, Abbot seconded a motion by Dudley North^*, 3rd Lord North, to thank the king for the earl’s release and to take steps to ensure that the restraint of a peer without cause shown did not become a precedent.383 Ibid. 587. Abbot apparently continued to chair the committee for defence appointed on 6 Mar., but after it met on 12 June he reported ‘many propositions which tended to good effect, yet nothing so concluded as needs any report’. He also complained that two peers had quarrelled at the committee meeting; the House resolved not to name or punish them directly.384 Ibid. 608-10. Finally, on 15 June, when peers were informed of the king’s decision to end the session, Abbot was named to help draft a petition asking Charles to reconsider; this had no effect and the session was presently dissolved.385 Ibid. 633.

On 13 and 14 June, just before the end of the session, with proceedings against Richard Montagu stalled, the Commons gave two readings to a bill ‘for the better continuing of peace and unity in church and commonwealth’, which aimed to give the Irish Articles of 1615 the same status as the Thirty-Nine Articles. There is no evidence that Abbot had any hand in drafting or promoting this bill, but he doubtless approved of it, as it would have allowed Montagu’s works to be condemned as heterodox. Like all other legislation, however, it was lost at the dissolution. On 14 June the king responded to this bill with a proclamation forbidding clerics from raising ‘any doubts, or publish or maintain any new inventions, or opinions concerning religion’, either in print or pulpit.386 Ibid. iii. 432, 444; Stuart Royal Proclamations II: Chas. I ed. J.F. Larkin, 91-3; Tyacke, 154-5. Edited by Laud, this edict was also designed to staunch the flow of Calvinist polemic against Montagu, including seven books published during the parliamentary session, one of which was by Abbot’s erstwhile chaplain Daniel Featley. To reinforce the proclamation, on 29 June Abbot, with other members of High Commission, all of whom were noted to be of ‘a contrary opinion to Montagu’, was obliged to order the London stationers and printers to suppress the printing and sale of these seven works.387 Birch, Ct. and Times of Chas. I, i. 116; Tyacke, 155-7; Holland, 297.

‘New counsels’ and suspension, 1626-7

Abbot’s discontent at his master’s ecclesiastical policy was compounded by Charles’s recourse to ‘new counsels’ to raise fresh revenues without statutory approval in order to fund the war effort. In October 1626 the king decided to raise a Forced Loan. Abbot was required to prepare the ground for this levy by circulating a royal letter, drafted by Laud, which recalled ‘that this war which now grows full of danger was not entered upon rashly and without advice’, but underwritten by the 1624 Parliament, with ‘promises of all assistance and supply’. By the time royal instructions arrived to have the letter printed in a booklet and sent to every parish, the archbishop had already forwarded handwritten copies to most of the bishops. His private misgivings about the Loan emerged in a warning to the king which exploited Charles’s fear of popularity: ‘if they [the instructions] be so published … they will fall into the hands of ill-willers, as of those that wish well’. Laud intervened to dismiss these fears: ‘it is not possible for my lords the bishops to have the registers and under-officers write out so many hundred copies, but that some will fly abroad into the worst hands’.388 Works of Abp. Laud, iii. 195; Stuart Royal Proclamations II: Chas. I, 108, 110-12; APC, 1626, pp. 282-5; SP16/36/81, 88; Heylyn, i. 161-2; R. Cust, Forced Loan, 46-51.

Abbot was clearly disenchanted with the direction of crown policy in the aftermath of the 1626 Parliament: he almost ceased to attend meetings of the Privy Council after the end of June, being present thereafter only on 26 Sept., 15 and 17 November. It is true that during this time he was ‘dangerously ill’– he acknowledged himself ‘encumbered with gout, and afflicted with the stone’ – but the Venetian ambassador, who had regular access to Lambeth Palace, ascribed the archbishop’s absence to ‘strained relations with the duke’.389 APC, 1626, pp. 289, 367, 369, 373; Birch, Ct. and Times of Chas. I, i. 155; Rushworth, i. 438; CSP Ven. 1626-8, p. 33. In a memorandum written about a year later, Abbot recalled that Buckingham ‘could endure no man that would not depend upon him; [and] among other men had me in his eye for not stooping unto him so, as to become his vassal’. He also claimed to have affronted the duke by threatening to imprison one of the latter’s clients for contempt of court in a suit before High Commission.390Rushworth, i. 339-40.

With five bishops dying over the summer of 1626, and both Abbot and Matthew of York ailing, it was widely understood that the selection of replacements would be ‘a matter of moment, either to build or pull down that faction [the Arminians] in the Church’. In the case of three of the affected sees – Winchester, Ely and Exeter - a definitive decision was postponed so that their combined revenues of almost £5,000 a year might be diverted into the Exchequer.391 Birch, Ct. and Times of Chas. I, i. 155; Cosin Corresp. 101-2 However, with respect to the remaining two bishoprics, Abbot lamented his lack of influence, insisting he was no better informed ‘than if I had dwelt at Venice, and understood of them [preferments] but by some gazette’.392Rushworth, i. 457, cited in Oxford DNB, i. 24. There were, in fact, only a handful of promotions to senior positions in the Church between June 1626 and December 1627. Laud was translated to Bath and Wells in September, and was privately promised the reversion of Canterbury, while Montagu’s defender Francis White was appointed bishop of Carlisle. Tellingly, White was consecrated not by Abbot but by Neile, which led one anonymous libeller to ask, ‘is an Arminian now made bishop? And is a consecration translated from Lambeth to Durham House?’393 Works of Abp. Laud, iii. 196; Birch, Ct. and Times of Chas. I, i. 179.

Early in 1627, Archbishop Ussher informed Abbot of negotiations taking place between the Old English and the Dublin government for the ‘Graces’, under which agreement the Catholics would have borne much of the cost of the Irish army in return for toleration. The Irish bishops were horrified at the prospect of Catholic toleration, and mounted a preaching campaign against it. Abbot, treading very carefully as his position weakened at court, advised caution:

You shall do well to pray to God that He will bless His church; but be not too solicitous in that matter, which will fall of itself, God Almighty being able and ready to support His own cause. But of all things take heed that you project no new ways; for if they fail, you shall bear a grievous burden; if they prosper, there shall be no thanks to you.394 Ussher, xv. 366, 375; Ford, 208-10.

Meanwhile, in England, a composition scheme for recusancy fines was inaugurated in the north of England in May 1627, by John Savile^*, 1st Lord Savile, and swiftly raised more money than statutory fines ever had.395 Univ. of London Lib., Goldsmiths’ ms 195/1, f. 4; C66/2441/7; E351/2595; JOHN SAVILE. However, by this time, Abbot was in no position to complain, as his political survival had been cast into doubt.

In the autumn of 1626, Buckingham’s clients were spreading rumours that the duke was looking for a suitable pretext to have Abbot removed from office. Just such an excuse was provided in April 1627, when William Murray^‡ (later 1st earl of Dysart [S]) was sent to Lambeth to require Abbot’s licence to publish a sermon in favour of the Forced Loan by the Northamptonshire cleric Robert Sibthorpe. Even before he learned of the details of the sermon, Abbot insisted that it was not he, but his chaplains, who handled censorship. However, Murray insisted that Charles was ‘minded that no books shall be allowed, but by you and the bishop of London’ [George Montaigne^*]. After perusing the text, Abbot advised Murray that, while the king clearly hoped the sermon would ‘promote the service now in hand about the loan of money’, he doubted it would have that effect, ‘because there is neither law nor custom for it in the kingdom of England’. He also warned that Sibthorpe, in citing Calvin, invited his readers to consider the Genevan’s espousal of resistance to tyranny, which might ‘give occasion to sedition and mutiny’. Abbot showed the sermon to two friends, one ‘a learned doctor of divinity’ (perhaps his chaplain Thomas Goade), the other a long-serving MP (doubtless Digges), who agreed ‘it was an idle work of a man that understood not logic … not worth the reading’.396 Rushworth, i. 440-5; Cust, Forced Loan, 71-2; R. Sybthorpe, Apostolike Obedience (1627), 9. When Murray pressed Abbot for a third time, the archbishop offered to debate his objections with Laud, but the latter responded with a written memorandum endorsed by Neile, Buckeridge and Howson. Abbot was not allowed to take a copy of this reply which, being read to him by Murray, provoked a tart riposte: ‘I pray you tell his Majesty that I am dealt with neither manly nor scholar-like’. He refused to allow the publication of Sibthorpe’s sermon, ‘unless I may have all the quotations set down, that I may examine them, and may have that in writing, wherein I am so ill-used’.397 Rushworth, i. 444-8; Works of Abp. Laud, iii. 243.

Sibthorpe’s sermon was licensed for publication by Bishop Montaigne on 8 May. At the same time Abbot was privately advised by a friend at court that he was to be sequestered from office and confined to Canterbury. Buckingham initially demanded he should be sent away before the fleet sailed for La Rochelle, lest he resume his seat on the Council and frustrate all the duke’s plans. To avoid a confrontation, Abbot took himself to Croydon in June, a month earlier than usual. Moreover, to give the impression that it was the king rather than Buckingham who was responsible for suspending Abbot, it was also resolved to delay action against the archbishop until the favourite had departed. Abbot later penned an account of these proceedings – clearly intended for private circulation among his friends – which offered a coruscating attack on these tactics:

… if you had read books of true state government, wherewithal you are not acquainted, sweet things are personally to be acted by kings and princes, as giving of honours, and bestowing of noted benefits; and those things that are sour and distasting, are to be performed by their ministers …

The order for Abbot’s suspension was delivered to Croydon on 1 July, four days after Buckingham sailed from France. The messenger, Secretary of State Edward Conway^*, 1st Viscount Conway, was clearly embarrassed, and privately admitted that Abbot owed his sequestration to the confrontation over Sibthorpe’s sermon. Abbot agreed to go quietly, but asked permission to reside at Ford, one of his Kentish estates, rather than at Canterbury, where he was in dispute over the extent of his ecclesiastical jurisdiction within the city; his wish was granted.398 Rushworth, i. 449-55; Sybthorpe, licence inside title page.

Returning briefly to Lambeth in mid-July to gather his papers, Abbot found himself lionised by opponents of the Loan. In vain he protested that he had not only forborne to oppose the collection of the Loan, but had also hosted the first meeting of the Surrey Loan commissioners, held at Lambeth (although he added that at this meeting ‘I said nothing, for the confusion was such, that I knew not what to make of it’). The manuscript account of his suspension discussed the merits of Loan at length:

I knew not a long time what to make of it: I was not present when the advice was taken; I understood not what was the foundation whereupon the building was raised, neither did ever any of the Council acquaint me therewith. I saw on the one side the king’s necessity for money, and especially it being resolved that the war should be pursued; and on the other side I could not forget, that in the Parliament great sums were offered, if the petitions of the Commons might be hearkened unto. It ran still in my mind, that the old and usual way was best; that in kingdoms, the harmony was sweetest where the prince and the people tuned well together …

He claimed to have turned against the Loan when he discovered that refusers were to be conscripted to serve in the Danish army: ‘I began to remember Uriah that was sent in the forefront of the battle’ at the order of King David, who coveted Uriah’s wife, Bathsheba.399 Rushworth, i. 453-4, 458-9. The death of Uriah is recorded in 2 Sam. 11:14-17. Too cautious to derive any specific inference from this parallel, he nevertheless observed mournfully, ‘I thought this was somewhat a new world’.

Abbot’s fall from power was closely followed as a sign of royal intentions. The Venetian ambassador, for instance, viewed it as part of the king’s campaign against the puritans, ‘the faction most opposed to the crown’. It was from this perspective that some initial reports suggested that Abbot owed his suspension to his decision to license The Baiting of the Popes Bull, a work dedicated to the archbishops by the puritan cleric Henry Burton, and regarded as conspicuously different from the prayer book of John Cosin^† (later bishop of Durham), licensed by Montaigne, which included many forms of devotion normally regarded as Catholic.400 Birch, Ct. and Times of Chas. I, i. 229, 252; Holles Letters ed. P.R. Seddon (Thoroton Soc. rec. ser. xxxv), 353, 357-8; Rushworth, i. 457-8. However, before long the facts of the dispute over Sibthorpe’s sermon became known. Abbot was widely regarded as a Loan refuser, even though the clergy, who were still paying the three subsidies Convocation had granted in 1625, were not even rated for the Loan.401 CSP Ven. 1626-8, p. 306; Diary of Walter Yonge ed. G. Roberts (Cam. Soc. xli), 107-8.

Although his archiepiscopal functions were assigned at the start of Michaelmas term to Neile, Laud, Montaigne, Buckeridge and Howson, Abbot continued to administer his own diocese. It was in this capacity that he granted the wealthy rectory of Lydd, Kent to his ally Isaac Bargrave, dean of Canterbury, who provocatively told Bishop White in October 1627 that Buckingham’s defeat at the Île de Ré meant that ‘there must be a Parliament’, and that ‘some must be sacrificed’.402 Rushworth, i. 435-7; HMC Cowper, i. 326-7; Works of Abp. Laud, iii. 206.

Missed opportunities, 1628-9

The release of the Loan refusers on 2 Jan. 1628 raised hopes of a fresh Parliament, and Abbot’s fortunes were closely followed as a harbinger of further developments. Rumours of the archbishop’s return to Lambeth and of his impending release circulated in January. In the following month, Charles wrote to him indicating that a generous grant of clerical subsidies would be expected in the forthcoming Parliament.403 APC, 1627-8, pp. 217-18; Birch, Ct. and Times of Chas. I, i. 314; CSP Ven. 1626-8, p. 584. For Abbot, as for other opponents of the Loan, Parliament held the prospect of reconciliation with the king and the duke, and the embers of such an accord glowed fitfully until March 1629. Abbot may have been one of those who promised not to make any direct attacks on Buckingham in the 1628 session, but he had no illusions about a return to favour: when Hull’s MPs tendered his annual fee as high steward during the 1628 parliamentary session, he declined it, saying, ‘he could do the town no pleasure’.404 CSP Ven. 1626-8, p. 584; Hull Hist. Cent., Bench Bk. 5, ff. 91v, 94.

Charles retained grave doubts about the wisdom of calling another Parliament, which met in mid March. Several of the duke’s enemies, including Abbot, were initially advised to stay away from Westminster, but after the first few days of the session passed without incident, they were readmitted to the Lords as a demonstration of royal goodwill. The archbishop took his seat on 28 Mar., and was present for all but a handful of days thereafter, although plans for his exclusion meant that none of the absentee bishops, not even Matthew of York (who died on 29 Mar.) assigned their proxies to him.405 Birch, Ct. and Times of Chas. I, i. 330, 334; Holles Letters ed. P.R. Seddon (Thoroton Soc. xxxvi), 379; CSP Ven. 1628-9, p. 45; Letters from Redgrave Hall ed. D. MacCulloch (Suff. Rec. Soc. l), 121. Abbot’s conduct during the session amply justified Charles’s generosity, as he consistently strove to promote a solution to the constitutional crisis over the Forced Loan which would prove acceptable to both the government and its critics.

The opening weeks of the session passed uneventfully for the Lords, while the Commons debated the liberties of the subject. On 29 Mar. Abbot vigorously endorsed the draft petition to implement fully the recusancy laws, warning that the Catholic Church was re-establishing its institutional structures in England: Richard Smith, bishop of Chalcedon, had appointed a chapter; the Benedictine and Jesuit orders were maintaining houses in the suburbs of London; nunneries had been discovered at Knightsbridge and Highgate, Middlesex; and all of these organizations, Abbot warned, held ‘intelligence in Rome and at Spain, weekly concurrence from Paris and Antwerp’ – the powers currently at war with England. ‘Laws put soundly in execution’, he urged, ‘will return to the honour of the king, safety of the kingdom, content of every good man’.406 Lords Procs. 1628, pp. 122-5. Two days later, after Bishop Harsnett raised the case of Meredith Mady, a deprived minister who had complained to the Commons about his treatment by the High Commission, Abbot related ‘how scandalous a man this Mady was’, and recalled that James Montagu, the bishop who had instituted him to his Somerset living, had found him a ‘strange, refractory man’; Mady’s petition received short shrift in the Lords.407 Ibid. 120, 129-30; Fincham, Prelate as Pastor, 51. When Bishop Laud complained that a sprain made him unable to attend all of the fast day to be kept by both Houses (3 Apr.), Abbot, a sufferer from chronic gout, conceded that his rival should be excused for the afternoon.408 Lords Procs. 1628, p. 148. The archbishop also found time to deliver a final account of monies received for the ransom of Turkish captives, on 14 Apr., which showed that £19 remaining unspent had been delivered to Ambassador Roe in Constantinople, as ordered by the Council, to redeem an English captive.409 Ibid. 216; APC, 1626, p. 335.

On 12 Apr., the Commons having concluded their debates about liberties of the subject, the focus of attention switched to the Lords, where Attorney General Heath justified the crown’s decision to cite the royal prerogative as the cause of imprisonment of those involved in the Five Knights’ Case. His arguments failed to satisfy the Lords, who resolved to ask the judges why they had remanded the prisoners. Abbot endorsed this decision, opposing any suggestion of a conference with the Commons ‘until we agree amongst ourselves’.410 Lords Procs. 1628, pp. 205, 207. The case was again debated in the Lords on 15 Apr., when Abbot explained one of the precedents cited by the crown, namely his own detention of several Yorkshire Catholics alleged to have sheltered the Jesuit John Gerard after the Gunpowder Plot: ‘we made it known to the king [James]. His Majesty referred it to my examination. I found strong probabilities that many persons of good name were privy to that plot. Some five servants were actors, who were long imprisoned, pardoned, bails’. He insisted that his actions on that occasion had ‘no coherence with the liberty of the subject at this time’, suggesting that he had little sympathy with the imprisonment of Loan refusers.411 Ibid. 232, 235. A series of conferences were then held with the Commons. On 17 Apr. Lord Keeper Coventry (Thomas Coventry^*, shortly to be ennobled as 1st Lord Coventry), charged with reporting what had been said at these meetings, protested that it was hard to report an incomplete debate, whereupon Abbot and several other speakers assured him that a general indication of progress would suffice.412 Ibid. 257.

When the Lords debated the case for arbitrary imprisonment in grand committee on 21 Apr., Abbot called for a vote to decide whether the Commons were right to insist that Magna Carta and other medieval statutes guaranteeing freedom from arrest were still in force. However, his motion was countered, both by Secretary Conway, who thought that the Commons wished ‘to limit the king’s power and his Council’s, which I shall not assent to’, and by Buckingham, who called for a vote to decide whether the king had the power of arrest, presumably on the assumption that the Lords would then uphold the prerogative. At this Abbot was forced to refine his earlier question. He now asked: ‘whether the king and Council have power to commit … without presently showing a just cause of the commitment’, a form of words the crown’s critics would have found much easier to support.413 Ibid. 313, 315-16; J.S. Flemion, ‘A Savings to Satisfy All: the House of Lords and the Meaning of the Petition of Right’, PH, x. 33-5; GEORGE VILLIERS. However, the question was not put that morning.

Although Buckingham and his allies chafed at the slow pace of the debate, Abbot appreciated the need for consensus, both among the Lords, and between the upper and lower Houses. He amplified his views the following day, when – with Sibthorpe clearly in mind – he vilified those who justified arbitrary government:

[The] king is the fountain of the justice. Such have been the glosses and base flattery of some men that they have not been ashamed to deliver this damnable doctrine, viz. that kings and princes are not bound to do justice, because justice is among equals. They are worthy to be whipped out of the Church.

He moved that, in general, a warrant for imprisonment should show cause, ‘with exceptions for the king in some cases, and they to be well pondered’. Despite Buckingham’s plea for a swift vote, Abbot joined Harsnett and Arundel in opposing a confrontation with the Commons: ‘look what is like to be the issue if there be a rupture in this business’.414 Lords Procs. 1628, pp. 322, 327-8, 330. On the following morning, Abbot reported the grand committee’s decision to seek a conference in order to try to reach an accommodation, and led the delegation which asked the Commons for such a meeting. Included on the committee ordered to draft a form of words to resolve the constitutional crisis, he reported their five propositions on 25 April. These were delivered to the Commons later that day, at which meeting Abbot stressed the Lords’ commitment to ‘the vindicating of vital and fundamental liberties’.415 Ibid. 333-7; CD 1628, iii. 80-1. The events of 21-5 Apr. are presumably the debates outlined by the Venetian Ambassador in his dispatch of 5/15 May, when he claimed Abbot had prevented Buckingham from forcing a breach with the Commons: CSP Ven. 1628-9, pp. 84-5.

The Lords’ proposal for a compromise proved unacceptable to the Commons, which then abandoned their attempt to confirm Magna Carta by bill in favour of a Petition of Right. At Abbot’s behest, this document was twice read in the Lords on 9 May. However, when the archbishop called for the Petition to be read a third time ‘if no man except’, a long and inconclusive debate ensued. Three days later, the king wrote to the Lords undertaking not to imprison Loan refusers in future but refusing to surrender his right to imprison without showing cause. Amid general agreement that this letter should be relayed to the Commons, Abbot urged that the Commons’ clerk be allowed to take a copy for MPs to peruse. Tempers ran high, and modifications to the Petition of Right in favour of the prerogative were only carried after numerous peers had departed, believing the debate had been adjourned. When the Lords reconvened the following morning William Grey^*, 1st Lord Grey of Warke suggested that the vote on an adjournment had been rigged; Buckingham called him to order, amid angry exchanges which Abbot attempted to pacify, describing the dispute as ‘only a mistaking’.416 Lords Procs. 1628, pp. 400-2, 410-11, 415-16; GEORGE VILLIERS. Calmer counsels prevailed on 14 May, when peers debated how to reconcile the Petition with Charles’s letter, which the Commons had rejected as ‘no parliamentary way’. Abbot, trying to be even-handed, urged that the attempt be made: ‘our sense is that we all agree to an accommodation … if it succeed not, then [neither] the [king’s] proposition nor [the] Petition not [sic] be prejudiced nor relinquished’; he was included on the committee appointed to draft a ‘saving clause’ for the king.417 Lords Procs. 1628, pp. 421, 430; the version of Abbot’s speech on p. 433 has him arguing that if the attempt failed, the Petition would be left unaltered.

Abbot changed his tactics several times over the next ten days, in pursuit of a compromise which would be acceptable to king, Lords and Commons. The debate over the saving clause commenced on 15 May, when Abbot moved that ‘no man ought to be imprisoned’ without ‘a clear and direct cause ... shown, unless the very declaration of the cause will destroy the business; and in such a case, for a time, a general cause may serve’. Having thus declared himself in favour of the prerogative, he felt able to reflect on the futility of imprisoning Loan refusers: ‘I know not how it comes to pass … that many of much renown have been committed, and the king has not got 2s. by it’. At the end of this debate he was added to the committee drafting a saving clause for the Petition, despite having been included on the original committee appointed the previous day.418 Ibid. 439-41. The draft text of the saving clause was debated two days later, when the chancellor of the Exchequer, Richard Weston^*, Lord Weston (later 1st earl of Portland), offered a different form of words. This new formulation was, with Abbot’s consent, referred to the aforementioned committee, and subsequently adopted by the Lords. On 19 May, Abbot supported calls to meet presently with the Commons, ‘lest in the meantime those that are near us … suffer in matters of great consequence’, but the conference merely served to expose disagreement over the Lords’ amendments to the Petition. Commenting the next day on a proposal to alter the word “unlawful” to “illegal” or “not warrantable by the law”, Abbot suggested that this emendation be left to the Commons, ‘to avoid a rupture now we are come so near to an accommodation’.419 Ibid. 453, 461-2, 467, 477, 481; Russell, PEP, 373. The king intervened the following morning, asking whether the Lords intended to join the Commons in assenting to the Petition. Amid doubts as to whether MPs would accept any saving clause, Buckingham and his allies insisted such a proviso was necessary, but Abbot was one of those prepared to waive any amendment in order to secure an agreement: ‘the Commons have declared not to encroach upon the king’s prerogative. If the Petition does not, why should we not concur with them without a saving?’420 Lords Procs. 1628, p. 490.

MPs rejected the Lords’ saving clause at a conference on 23 May, whereupon Arundel moved for another conference, to see if some new form of words to be devised. Abbot seconded the earl marshal, warning that ‘the miseries of the countries [counties] by billeted soldiers’ – another issue addressed by the Petition – would brook no delay. However, he expressed concern ‘whether this addition be not destructive to the Petition’, and suggested that it might be accepted unaltered: ‘it is the greatest honour a Christian king can have to have the love and hearts of his subjects’. On the following morning, Arundel and Bristol moved to accept the Petition as it stood, but Abbot urged that a decision be postponed until after the weekend, and agreed with Buckingham ‘that we make some demonstrance [sic] of our saving of the king’s just prerogative’. When the Lords met on Monday 26 May, they swiftly resolved to accept the Petition without amendment or qualification; Abbot ascribed this to the fruits of the prayers offered for an accommodation on the intervening Sunday.421 Ibid. 513, 528, 534; Russell, PEP, 373-4.

After the Petition was delivered to Charles, the lord treasurer, James Ley^*, 1st earl of Marlborough, moved to have Abbot and Buckingham’s other enemies admitted to kiss the king’s hand, as a mark of favour for their role in securing its passage; at their audience, Abbot’s gout left him unable to rise from his knees, whereupon Charles rose and helped him to his feet.422 Birch, Ct. and Times of Chas. I, i. 358-9. Despite this morale-boosting piece of theatre, the king was most reluctant to accept the Petition without some form of assurance for his prerogative power, and it took almost two weeks to secure a satisfactory form of Royal Assent. The Commons vented their frustration at the king’s first answer by embarking upon a remonstrance, which chiefly catalogued Buckingham’s shortcomings; but on 6 June, when a proposal for a similar remonstrance was made in the Lords, Abbot was one of those who considered the timing inappropriate. The Lords dismissed the motion, and when Charles expressed his gratitude, they seized the opportunity to urge him to make a fresh response to the Petition, which ultimately proved acceptable to all.423 Lords Procs. 1628, pp. 591-2; Russell, PEP 377-8.

While the liberties of the subject were the focus of the Lords’ debates in 1628, Abbot was involved with some of the more routine business transacted during the session. On 18 Apr. he was included on the committee for the bill to improve navigation on the Medway, which river lay within his diocese, and reported the measure, with amendments, on 6 May. He was also included on the committee for the revived bill to confirm the foundation of the London Charterhouse, and on the committee for the Sabbath bill, which he reported eight days later. At the end of the session, he reported (from a subcommittee of the petitions committee) that Sir John Boteler^* (later 1st Lord Boteler) and other trustees of the Hertfordshire estates of Sir Francis Coningsby should have their powers revoked.424 Lords Procs. 1628, pp. 264, 382, 474, 501, 570-2, 698-9. On 14 June Abbot’s name was removed from the committee list for the bill to confirm Queen Henrietta Maria’s jointure estates, but he was presumably familiar with the committee’s proceedings, as he reported on this bill following a conference with the Commons on 23 June.425 Ibid. 643, n.8, 691-2.

Religion naturally featured on Abbot’s agenda during the 1628 session. On 28 Apr. the Commons appointed a delegation (including Digges) to ask Abbot whether Catholic schoolmasters had been removed from their posts in accordance with royal instructions following complaints in the 1625 Parliament. No report was subsequently forthcoming, which suggests that little had in fact been achieved.426 CD 1628, iii. 122. However, the archbishop efficiently piloted two items of religious legislation through the Lords in 1628. He was appointed to the committee for the recusancy bill on 12 June, and a week later reported the committee’s unanimous resolve that it be passed without amendment. On 20 June he was appointed to the committee for the bill to prevent children being sent abroad to be educated in Catholic schools and seminaries. The next day he sought permission to confer with the Commons about this measure; and on 23 June he reported that MPs had endorsed the Lords’ amendments.427 Lords Procs. 1628, pp. 627, 672-4, 678, 686, 692-4. However, he was not included on the committee for the bill ‘to enlarge the liberty of hearing the word of God preached’ on 3 June, which was presumably intended to offer some relief to sermon-gadders. Neile and Laud, who were appointed, doubtless helped to ensure that it was never reported.428 Ibid. 579. Abbot was present in the Lords on that day.

Abbot’s own prospects of rehabilitation depended less on legislation than on proceedings against his enemies within the Church, who had so far avoided parliamentary censure. The archbishop’s role in most of the attacks on members of the Durham House group can only be surmised; but even if he was not actively involved in promoting them, he doubtless approved of such efforts. One such attack was made on 28 Apr., when a complaint was presented to the Commons about Richard Burgess, vicar of Witney, Oxfordshire, who was accused of drafting a controversial catechism, and, it was claimed, ‘did usually rail against Calvin and Bèze’. After John Selden claimed that Abbot and High Commission did not have the power to censure Burgess for Arminian opinions – particularly given the archbishop’s suspension –the lower House resolved on 3 June to draft impeachment charges, which were incomplete at the dissolution.429 CD 1628, iii. 122, 342-7; iv. 60, 68, 71-2. Richard Montagu also came under attack, this time for having kicked over a bonfire lit to celebrate the king’s assent to the Petition of Right. However, the Commons did not begin its proceedings in earnest until the Petition had been passed, and no charges were settled before the prorogation. (A motion to have Montagu exempted from the general pardon was ignored).430 Ibid. iv. 238-41, 291, 308, 333, 336; RICHARD MONTAGU. Neile and Laud, leaders of ‘the factions of the Arminians’, were censured for their false doctrines in the remonstrance the Commons drafted in the closing weeks of the session, doctrines which, ‘being now generally held to be the way to preferment and promotion in the Church, many scholars do bend the course of their studies to maintain those errors’. When this document was presented to the king on 17 June, Charles pointedly ignored the lengthy catalogue of his ministers’ misdeeds.431 CD 1628, iv. 313; Works of Abp. Laud, iii. 208; Russell, PEP, 384-5. For the context of this debate, see HMC Cowper, i. 350-1, 366.

Abbot was personally responsible for delivering one significant blow against his enemies, namely the impeachment of Roger Manwaring^† (later bishop of St Davids), who had emulated Sibthorpe by publishing two sermons in favour of the Forced Loan. While there was some surprise that Sibthorpe escaped prosecution, Manwaring committed the additional provocation of restating his views in a sermon delivered to his parishioners, including several MPs, at St Giles-in-the-Fields, Westminster, on 4 May 1628.432 R. Maynwaring, Religion and Alegiance (1627); Lords Procs. 1628, pp. 614-17; H.F. Snapp, ‘Impeachment of Roger Maynwaring’, HLQ, xxx. 217-19; Holland, 305. Impeachment charges were sent up to the Lords a month later, and on being examined on 11 June, Manwaring had the effrontery to insist that the bishops alone should judge the contents of his published sermons. Abbot retorted that he was playing for time, and that he was in effect seeking ‘to answer after the Parliament were ended’. When Manwaring made his defence on 13 June, the archbishop was, most unusually, granted the opportunity to address the accused before he withdrew. He lambasted the contents of Manwaring’s published sermons, which:

… he both misliked and abhorred, and was sorry that he [Manwaring] came only to extenuate his fault. Touching the participation which Dr Manwaring gave to the king with God, his grace told him that it is very blasphemy … and touching his other assertion, that there is no justice but between equals… his grace told him it was impious and false, and that he had thereby drawn upon us an infamy of our religion, and had given occasion to the Jesuits to traduce us. And showed him that the Scriptures do plainly declare and prove a justice from God to man, from the parent to his children, and from a king to his people

Abbot concluded with the example of Anaxarchus, ‘a philosopher who, for flattering the king, was beaten by the command of the king of Cyprus [sic: King Cyrus of Persia], beaten to pieces with hammers and sledges. This was the punishment of flatterers’. The Lords, inspired by this heartfelt tirade, sentenced Manwaring to imprisonment, fined him £1,000, suspended him from the ministry for three years, and permanently banned him from holding any secular or ecclesiastical dignity.433 Lords Procs. 1628, pp. 621-3, 634, 636; Holland, 305-6.

Abbot was reinstated to his archiepiscopal functions on 24 June, two days before the 1628 session was prorogued,434 Rymer, viii. pt. 2, p. 264. but his rehabilitation came at a heavy price, as he was required to assent to a series of promotions which ensconced Neile, Laud and their supporters in many senior posts within the ecclesiastical hierarchy. In three months over the summer of 1628, Montaigne (then gravely ill) was translated to York, Laud to London, Howson to Durham, Buckeridge to Ely and Richard Montagu to Chichester; while Walter Curle^* replaced Buckeridge at Rochester, Leonard Mawe^* succeeded Laud at Bath and Wells, and Richard Corbet^* replaced Howson at Oxford. The arch-Arminian Matthew Wren^† (later bishop of Ely) was collated as dean of Windsor, while Manwaring was released from the Tower, pardoned, and restored to his living and his preaching licence.435 Birch, Ct. and Times of Chas. I, i. 371-2; Holles Letters (Thoroton Soc. rec. ser. xxxvi), 383. The triumph of the Neile-Laud axis contrasted sharply with alterations among the lay peers at court, where Buckingham reached an accommodation with his erstwhile critics among the Spanish party, most notably Arundel and Sir Thomas Wentworth* (later earl of Strafford). Buckingham’s assassination, news of which reached Abbot at Croydon, as Laud, Neile, Buckeridge and White joined him for Montagu’s consecration as bishop of Chichester, made no difference to the balance in the church, where the agenda had been set by Charles and Laud rather than the favourite.436 Works of Abp. Laud, iii. 208.

While his prospects at court dwindled to vanishing point, the impending 1629 parliamentary session offered Abbot a slim chance of retaining some influence over the Caroline Church. The king, aware that the Commons would resume hostilities against Neile, Laud and their allies, sealed pardons for Montagu, Cosin, Manwaring and Sibthorpe in advance of the new session. Montagu was additionally prevailed upon to send Abbot ‘a recantation or desertion of those [Arminian] opinions wherewith he hath been charged’, his Appello Caesarem was suppressed by proclamation, and any who persisted in debating these points was warned ‘they shall wish they had never thought upon these needless controversies’.437 CD 1629, pp. 39-40, 43-7, 125-6, 130-1, 174-7; Cosin Corresp. 154; HMC Cowper, i. 373; Birch, Ct. and Times of Chas. I, i. 449; Stuart Royal Proclamations II: Chas. I, 218-20. In December 1628, before Parliament met, Abbot made a rare foray to Whitehall, where the king extended a warm welcome and ordered him to attend the Council at least twice a week. Apparently with Charles’s encouragement, a group of bishops subsequently met at Lambeth and drafted a declaration for the ‘peace of the Church’. Issued under royal authority in the New Year, this upheld the Thirty-Nine Articles as the doctrine of the Church of England, and enjoined

… that no man hereafter shall either print or preach, to draw the Article aside any way, but shall submit to it in the plain and full meaning thereof: and shall not put his own sense or comment to be the meaning of the Article, but shall take it in the literal and grammatical sense.

No alteration was permitted to these doctrines, except by Convocation acting under letters patent, on pain of ‘our displeasure and the Church’s censure in our commission ecclesiastical, as well as any other’.438 Birch, Ct. and Times of Chas. I, i. 451; ii. 3, 5; CSP Ven. 1628-9, p. 459; Vis. Articles and Injunctions of the Early Stuart Church ed. K. Fincham (Church of Eng. Rec. Soc. v), 33-4.

It was claimed after his death that Lambeth Palace became ‘the rendezvous of all malcontents in church and state’ during the final years of Abbot’s life.439 Fuller, xi. 128, citing an unnamed author. However, there is no evidence to suggest that the archbishop offered significant encouragement to Sir John Eliot and Sir Nathaniel Rich^‡, the crown’s most outspoken critics in the Commons in 1629, who were more closely linked to the earl of Warwick. Abbot attended the Lords regularly during the opening weeks of the parliamentary session. Included on the committee for privileges at the start of the session, he was named to the committee scrutinizing the bill for improvement of clerical incomes, which he reported with amendments on 22 January. When the Commons delivered their petition for a national fast on 27 Jan., Abbot ‘made a short, grave speech, to incite us to it’, following which it was unanimously adopted.440 LJ, iv. 6a, 7b, 9a-b; HMC Buccleuch, iii. 332. At the roll-call on 9 Feb. he was listed as being ‘in town’ but ‘excused’, although the attendance register showed him to have been present that morning. He never appeared in the House again, despite being included on the committee appointed on 21 Feb. to draft a report on the kingdom’s defences.441 LJ, iv. 25b, 37b. It has been suggested that his absence can be explained by the failure of the Commons’ attempts to define the doctrine of the Church of England, but the case is unproven.442 Holland, 307.

While the Lords transacted routine business, controversy raged in the Commons over the tunnage and poundage bill. With no obvious solution to hand, John Pym^, on 27 Jan., diverted attention to the Arminian threat. Four days later, Rich moved to establish a Calvinist doctrinal consensus for the Church of England on the basis of the Thirty-Nine Articles; the catechisms and Prayer Book confirmed by Parliament; the Lambeth Articles of 1595; the Irish Articles of 1615; and the articles of the Synod of Dort. On 4 Feb., Digges, probably acting on Abbot’s instructions, moved ‘that every bishop in his diocese should suppress everyone that teacheth against the orthodox sense of those Articles’ – presumably a reference to the Thirty-Nine Articles. This motion was ignored, and attempts to establish a Calvinist consensus also foundered, as several of the doctrinal statements the Commons wished to adopt had not been formally endorsed by Convocation, let alone Parliament. John Davenant, bishop of Salisbury, even expressed private fears that Arminians might not find the proposed doctrinal standard as unpalatable as the Calvinists supposed.443 HP Commons 1604-29, iv. 80-1, 197-8; CD 1629, pp. 34-5, 119-20, 122, 124; Bodl., Tanner 72, f. 312; C. Thompson, ‘Divided Leadership of the House of Commons in 1629’, Faction and Parl. ed. K. Sharpe, 254-9. In frustration, the Commons then opted to pursue individual clerics: the pardons issued to four of Neile’s allies shortly before the session were investigated; while impeachment proceedings were begun against Neile.444 Thompson, 259-62. However, as Abbot must surely have realized, Charles was unlikely to spurn the Laudians in order to secure passage of the tunnage and poundage bill. Not surprisingly, therefore, nothing was achieved before the dissolution.

Final years, 1629-33

In the final years of his life, ill health largely confined Abbot to the environs of Lambeth Palace, which minimised his already diminished influence at court and on the Council. In April 1629 he issued a circular to the bishops to have a care of preachers who ‘do little less than seditiously divulge that re[ligion] doth totter, and the purity of the Gospel is in great hazard’, ordering ‘that in your own person you do preach obedience to the highest magistrate as to the lieutenant of God’, and urging them to exhort their clergy ‘to forbear all undutiful speech in the pulpit, as if there were like to be any innovation or alteration in religion’. Preachers were, he recommended, to ‘teach Christ crucified … and turn the edge of their sword against the papist, the ancient and common adversary, who seeketh to subvert and ruin us all’.445 SP16/140/37; Welsby, 136-7. Thereafter, Laud dominated the management of ecclesiastical policy, drafting royal instructions for government of the Church in December 1629, which ordered that Sunday afternoon sermons be replaced by catechesis, that preachers preface their sermons with a reading of the Prayer Book liturgy, and that note be taken of those who attended church only for the sermons. Abbot, when invited to comment upon orders which subverted his concept of the ministry, tactfully confined himself to expressing approval of an injunction to prevent bishops selling off episcopal timber reserves. However, his views became clear when he reinstated two lecturers his diocesan officials had suspended for breach of the 1629 instructions.446 CSP Dom. 1629-31, p. 118; Vis. Articles and Injunctions of the Early Stuart Church, 37-40; Holland, 185-8.

The king’s instructions required an annual report from each archbishop on the dioceses within their province, a task Abbot did not approach in the painstaking manner which was to become Laud’s hallmark. In October 1630 he briefly mentioned that the instructions were being well observed; while the only bishop he cited for a misdemeanour was his old enemy John Howson of Durham, who had ignored the king’s order to depart London for his diocese. Abbot’s only surviving report, of 2 Jan. 1633, claimed, improbably, that ‘of Arminian points there is no dispute’, and that divine service was read by all preachers except a handful of separatists around London, whom he proposed to correct ‘with moderation … yielding them means to confer with learned men’; this approach had been endorsed by King James in 1604-6, but Charles found it unsatisfactory. Abbot also cited the resort of Catholics to St Winifred’s well in Flintshire, and a Catholic inscription on the tomb of Edward Wotton^*, 1st Lord Wotton. He concluded with the bland assurance that ‘it may be the great comfort of your Majesty, that in so large and diffuse a multitude both of men and matters, upon strict examination, there is so little exorbitancy to be found’.447 Holland, 202-3, 309-10; CSP Dom. 1629-31, p. 368; ‘Annual Accts. of the Church of Eng. 1632-9’ ed. K. Fincham, From the Reformation to the Permissive Soc. ed. M. Barber et al. (Church of Eng. Rec. Soc. xviii), 81-3.

Abbot continued to attend High Commission (which met at Lambeth) until his death. His relationship with Laud, another stalwart of the court, was polite but sometimes frosty: in October 1631 Abbot recommended suspending a preacher who had espoused antinomian views, but Laud managed to have him degraded from the priesthood. However, many cases which fell within the court’s jurisdiction, concerning separatists, scandalous ministers and typographical errors overlooked by the king’s printers in the authorized version of the bible, incurred the censure of both bishops equally, and when Laud appealed to the court to support his campaign to exclude parishioners in London’s churches from sitting around the communion table, Abbot punctiliously backed his subordinate’s authority.448 Reps. of Cases in the Cts. of Star Chamber and High Commission ed. S.R. Gardiner (Cam. Soc. n.s. xxxix), 184, 189, 280, 302, 304-7, 309, 312-13; Holland, 199-202, 312-14. At the same time, Abbot did his best to suppress another controversy about bowing at the name of Jesus, advocated by two Laudian clerics, but vigorously opposed by William Prynne; his secretary William Baker wrote to advise one of the protagonists to avoid ‘a theme of so small necessity, and of so great heat and distemper, which will … beget bitterness and intestine contestations at home amongst ourselves’.449 LPL, ms 943, p. 97; Holland, 190-2. However, Laud was furious when one of Abbot’s chaplains licensed Prynne’s Histriomastix, which included attacks on the elaborate rituals favoured by anti-Calvinists.450 Holland, 192-3.

Abbot died at Lambeth on 4 Aug. 1633, when, according to one Catholic correspondent, he professed, ‘that he did abhor the religion of papists in his heart, and that in his conscience he did esteem this Pope [Urban VIII] to be the greatest Antichrist that ever was’. With a Jesuit relative, John Abbot, at large in England, the archbishop may have intended to quash rumours of a deathbed conversion, as had occurred after the demise of Bishop John King in 1621.451 Newsletters from the Caroline Ct. ed. M.C. Questier (Cam. Soc. 5th ser. xxvi), 196-8; Oxford DNB, i. 26-7; JOHN KING. On being informed of Abbot’s death, Charles confirmed Laud as archbishop, showing (as some considered) immoderate haste.452 HMC Buccleuch, i. 274; CSP Ven. 1632-6, p. 138; C115/105/8209. One of the few contemporaries to express any regret at Abbot’s passing was John Holles^*, 1st earl of Clare: ‘though he had too much of St Peter’s fault, was a timorous, weak man, yet was he orthodox, and hindered much ill, only the court ill was too strong for him’.453 Holles Letters (Thoroton Soc. rec. ser. xxxvi), 452.

In his will, written a year before his death, Abbot self-effacingly thanked his Creator ‘for bringing me from mean estate to a place of some note in His Church’. He hoped that, given his expenditure on the fabric of his palaces, his executors would not be sued for dilapidations, and urged that future archbishops be required to give bond for preservation of their diocesan timber resources in as good a state as he left them. Having served as the custodian of Bancroft’s library and manuscripts at Lambeth, Abbot, by the terms of his will, added his own library to the archiepiscopal collection, which he ordered to be catalogued by his secretary, William Baker. Parts of his library at Croydon were left to the chapters of Canterbury and Winchester cathedrals.454 PROB 11/116, f. 318r-v; 11/164, ff. 211v-12; A. Cox-Johnson, ‘Lambeth Palace Lib., 1610-64’, Trans. Camb. Bibliographical Soc. ii. 105-26. Abbot had also invested heavily in a charitable project for his native town of Guildford, where he built an almshouse, Holy Trinity hospital, in 1619-22. Having endowed this foundation with lands worth over £200 p.a., he stipulated in his will that a workhouse should be established for the manufacture of cloth. However, disputes with the Canterbury corporation led him to revoke a bequest for the continued maintenance of a water conduit he had previously erected there.455 PROB 11/164, ff. 212v-14; Add. 72275, f. 145; Fuller, xi. 128; Welsby, 87. His servants and relations received generous bequests, while Digges secured a sapphire ring and his coin collection. His modest portfolio of leasehold lands went to his nephew Maurice Abbot of the Inner Temple, who was appointed executor jointly with the archbishop’s brother, Sir Maurice. He ended with a prayer for the nation:

So beseeching God almighty to increase the number of his faithful, to abate more and more daily the strength of Antichrist and popery, to send peace and prosperity to this island, to bless our sovereign my most gracious lord master the king with long life and happiness, and to send him a fair and plentiful issue …

Abbot was buried on 4 Sept. 1633 at Holy Trinity church, Guildford, where a monument was erected in his memory. Administration of the will was granted to Sir Maurice Abbot on 5 Oct. 1633 by the judge of the Prerogative Court, the archbishop’s nephew by marriage, Sir Nathaniel Brent.456 PROB 11/164, ff. 211-14; Fuller, xi. 128.