BANCROFT, Richard (1544-1610)

In more ways than one, Richard Bancroft was the heir of his predecessor at Canterbury, John Whitgift^†. By the early 1580s, he had come to share Whitgift’s view that godly radicals were the chief threat to the Church of England, and he spent much of the rest of his life hounding them into conformity or exile. On Whitgift’s death in 1604, a puritan skit cruelly declared that ‘Jocky hath left dumb Dickie alone’.27 P. Collinson, Richard Bancroft and Elizabethan Anti-Puritanism; A. Bellany, ‘A Poem on the Archbishop’s Hearse’, JBS, xxxiv. 138. However, Bancroft evidently learned from his predecessor’s mistakes, particularly his handling of the subscription campaign of 1583-5, the over-enthusiastic enforcement of which had earned Whitgift a humiliating rebuke from the Privy Council. Moreover, though Bancroft was as much a disciplinarian as his predecessor, he appreciated that rigorous enforcement of conformity created as many problems as it resolved. During his tenure at Canterbury, he rarely picked a fight with the puritans unless it became necessary to uphold his own authority.

The other relationship which shaped Bancroft’s churchmanship was that with James I. The two men had broadly similar conceptions of the form and functions of the State and Church in a well-ordered polity: Bancroft warmly endorsed his king’s views on jure divino monarchy in the draft Canons of 1606, and in the prohibitions controversy of 1607-10; while the jure divino episcopacy Bancroft had controversially espoused in his Paul’s Cross sermon of February 1589 – one of the earliest public expositions of this doctrine in England – fitted with James’s aspirations to impose episcopal jurisdiction on all three of his kingdoms. However, in 1610 James found it politic to condemn the absolutist views of Bancroft’s vicar general, the civil lawyer Dr John Cowell, following complaints from the Commons, and on several other occasions Bancroft was disturbed by the prospect that the king might make concessions over the fundamentals of ecclesiastical government in return for political advantage in other areas.

Career before 1603

Bancroft came from a minor Lancashire gentry family. The chief influence in his choice of an ecclesiastical career was probably his uncle, Hugh Curwen^† who, as archbishop of Dublin, secured him a prebend at St Patrick’s Cathedral as a sinecure to support his studies at Cambridge. As an undergraduate at Christ’s College, he may have come under the influence of Laurence Chaderton, another Lancastrian some years his senior; for all his later disciplinarian tendencies, Bancroft generally strove to accommodate Chaderton’s brand of ‘moderate’ puritanism within the Church of England. In 1569 he moved to Jesus College, which had a less puritan ethos, and where his mother’s relative Thomas Ithell was master. While never elected to a fellowship, Bancroft served as a tutor – one of his pupils was Edward Cromwell^*, later 3rd Lord Cromwell – and lived in college for 17 years.28 Oxford DNB, iv. 647-8; Fasti Ecclesiae Hibernicae, ii. 152; A. Gray and F. Brittain, Hist. Jesus Coll. Camb. 54-6; J. Harington, Briefe View of the State of the Church of England (1653), 12.

Bancroft’s first patron was Richard Cox^†, bishop of Ely and Visitor of Jesus. It was presumably with the latter’s encouragement that Bancroft spent much of his time gathering evidence about the opinions, activities and contacts of the Cambridge dons who encouraged the development of presbyterian classes across East Anglia and the Midlands from the later 1570s.29 Collinson, Bancroft, 28-32. After Cox’s death, he became chaplain to Sir Christopher Hatton^‡, vice chamberlain of the household, one of the leading court critics of puritanism. Bancroft played a key role in the anti-puritan cause in July 1583, when he uncovered a conventicle at Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, led by the separatist Robert Browne. The ‘Bury stirs’ were not, of themselves, particularly noteworthy, but a furore ensued when a libel was discovered pinned to the royal arms in one of the town churches, which compared Queen Elizabeth to Jezebel. This prompted the queen to appoint as archbishop of Canterbury the authoritarian John Whitgift, who imposed a loyalty test on the clergy, the Three Articles, which required them to endorse the royal supremacy, the Book of Common Prayer and the Thirty-Nine Articles. A storm of puritan protest ensued, as a result of which Whitgift was restrained by the Privy Council, while his enemies responded by promoting a presbyterian agenda among the godly communities in the provinces, and in the parliaments of 1584 and 1586.30 P. Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 204-5, 236-316; Collinson, Bancroft, 32-8. We owe the point about the Bury stirs to Peter Lake. Bancroft was at the heart of this controversy, helping Hatton to draft parliamentary speeches, hunting the authors of the presbyterian ‘book of ecclesiastical discipline’ and the facetious Marprelate tracts, and attacking presbyterianism in a sermon delivered at Paul’s Cross at the start of the 1589 Parliament by criticizing the Scottish Kirk. This outburst provoked an angry response from the Scottish clergy, and a diplomatic rift was only narrowly avoided.31 Collinson, Puritan Movement, 314-15, 397; Collinson, Bancroft, 83-102; R. Bancroft, A Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse (1588/9); LPL, ms 2014, ff. 168-9; Eg. 2598, ff. 242-5; W. Richardson, ‘Religious Policy of the Cecils, 1588-98’ (Oxf. Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1993), 29-31, 39-43; D.G. Mullam, Episcopacy in Scotland, 1560-1637, pp. 66-71; J. Wormald, ‘Ecclesiastical Vitriol: the Kirk, the Puritans and the Future King of Eng.’, Reign of Eliz. I ed. J. Guy, 174-84. Although chastised, Bancroft’s services were indispensable to a government which intended to restrain the radicals: in legal proceedings during 1591 and tracts published in 1593 he bolstered Whitgift’s proceedings against Protestant nonconformists by tracing the radical pedigree of the ‘moderate’ puritans at the heart of the presbyterian movement.32 Richardson thesis, 58-60, 92-3; P. Lake, Anglicans and Puritans?, 113; Collinson, Bancroft, 39-62, 103-147; R. Bancroft, Daungerous Positions and Proceedings (1593); idem, A Survay of the Pretended Holy Discipline (1593).

For all his significance as investigator, controversialist and Whitgift’s factotum, Bancroft held no major ecclesiastical office before his appointment as bishop of London in 1597. Hatton and Whitgift had attempted to persuade John Aylmer^† to resign this important see into Bancroft’s hands several years earlier, but Aylmer died before the transaction could be completed, and Elizabeth chose Richard Fletcher^† instead. Fletcher’s early demise allowed Whitgift to recommend Bancroft in the strongest terms: ‘a special man of his calling … in all the stirs which had been made by the factious against the good estate of the Church … yet had he therein showed no tyrannous disposition; but with mildness and kind dealing, when it was expedient, had reclaimed divers’. Following his consecration on 8 May 1597, Bancroft energetically set about suppressing both puritans and recusants, and reforming his diocesan courts and administration, an approach he was later to urge upon the national Church.33 J. Strype, Life and Acts of John Whitgift, ii. 385-8; Recs. of the Old Archdeaconry of St Albans ed. H.R. Wilton Hall (St Albans and Herts. Architectural and Arch. Soc., 1908), 98-101, 104-12; HMC Hatfield, xi. 154-5, 157-8. His diocesan responsibilities in no way diminished his services to Whitgift, who used him to establish contacts with the Appellants – Catholic priests who had vainly approached the pope in 1599 for permission to come to some accommodation with the English government, in return for a relaxation of the recusancy laws. Bancroft used his position as one of Whitgift’s censors to authorize Appellant tracts for publication, and procured safe conducts to allow them to organize a second appeal to Rome, in 1602. This was an entirely cynical move – Bancroft regarded the Appellants as no more than ‘good instruments to serve the state’ – but it left him as fully informed about Catholic plotting as he was about the activities of the puritans.34 A. Pritchard, Catholic Loyalism in Elizabethan Eng. 68, 120-74, 226-7; Collinson, Bancroft, 173-92. Bancroft’s correspondence with the Appellants is included in LPL, mss 2006-7; Archpriest Controversy ed. T.G. Law (Cam. Soc. n.s. lvi and lviii), passim.

The accession of James VI of Scotland to the throne of England in 1603 did Bancroft’s chances of preferment no harm, as James was as opposed to presbyterianism as Bancroft, and had begun moves to re-establish episcopacy in Scotland. However, James’s views were not widely known in England, and in June 1603 Whitgift, clearly hoping to pre-empt any radical changes the new king might wish to make, issued instructions for reforming ecclesiastical court procedures, and inaugurated a survey of the state of the ministry and the number of recusants; Bancroft, keen to establish his credentials as a model diocesan, vigorously promoted this survey.35 Chamberlain Letters ed. N.E. McClure, i. 189; CSP Ven, 1603-7, p. 16; Recs. of the Old Archdeaconry of St Albans ed. Wilton Hall, 113, 119-23; Collinson, Bancroft, 193-4. In another attempt to shape the views of their new monarch, Whitgift and Bancroft filled the court preaching rota with conformists, and installed the godly academic James Montagu^* as dean of the Chapel Royal. On 22 July, Bancroft may have taken the opportunity of a royal visit to Fulham Palace to talk James out of a hastily conceived plan to assign the revenues from rectories impropriated by Oxford and Cambridge colleges to provide stipends for preachers.36 P.E. McCullough, Sermons at Ct. 106-13; S.B. Babbage, Puritanism and Richard Bancroft, 55-6; W. Craig, ‘Hampton Ct. Again’, Anglican and Episcopal Hist. lxxvii. 62-3. In fact, trouble arose in a completely different quarter that month, when William Watson, one of Bancroft’s contacts among the Appellant priests, was arrested for his part in the Bye Plot, an ill-conceived plan to kidnap the king and force him to grant toleration to Catholics. Bancroft gained some of the earliest intelligence about the plot via his Appellant contacts, and he was one of those who handled the arrest and interrogation of the conspirators.37 HMC Hatfield, xv. 153-4, 156-7, 170-2, 183-4, 187, 194-5, 200, 205, 227; CSP Dom. 1603-10, pp. 20-2, 29.

The Hampton Court Conference, 1604

James’s accession had raised hopes for reform not only among Catholics but also among the godly. On his way south, the new king had been presented with a ‘Millenary Petition’ – reported to have been signed by 1,000 ministers – urging reforms to the ministry, ecclesiastical courts, ritual and doctrine. In response to a multitude of similar petitions received over the following months, it was resolved to summon a conference of ‘divers of the bishops and other learned men’ to deal with ‘corruptions which may deserve a review and amendment’. Originally scheduled for 1 Nov. 1603, the meeting was postponed because of the plague, and eventually convened at Hampton Court on 14 Jan. 1604.38 Anglican Canons, 1529-1947 ed. G. Bray (Church of Eng. Rec. Soc. vi), 817-19; Stuart Royal Proclamations I: Jas. I ed. J.F. Larkin and P.L. Hughes 60-2; Babbage, 44-59. By then Whitgift’s health was failing, and consequently the task of defending the established order fell mainly to others, including Thomas Bilson^*, bishop of Winchester, and Bancroft, who emerged as the most outspoken and intemperate of the bishops present.

On the first day of the conference the king met representatives of the hierarchy, inviting them to discuss the shortcomings of the Prayer Book and ecclesiastical court procedures. Whitgift responded cautiously, leaving Bancroft and several others to amplify his comments. According to one report, Bancroft spoke with ‘too rough boldness’; another claimed he lost his temper with the Scotsman John Gordon, newly designated dean of Salisbury. However, the fullest account, written by William Barlow^* (later bishop of Lincoln) at Bancroft’s urging, suggested the day ended with agreement over minor changes.39 W. Barlow, The Summe and Substance of the Conference (1604), pp. 2-20; E. Cardwell, Hist. of Conferences and other proceedings, 213; Strype, iii. 402-4; Carleton to Chamberlain ed. M. Lee, 57; R.G. Usher, Reconstruction of the Eng. Church, ii. 342; HMC Hatfield, xvi. 95. Two days later, James and the Privy Council met Bancroft and Bilson (chosen by Whitgift to represent the bishops), several more junior churchmen, four of their godly critics and the Scottish minister Patrick Galloway. John Rainolds, president of Corpus Christi, Oxford, acting as spokesman for the godly,40 His agenda had been drafted by a larger group: P. Collinson, ‘The Jacobean Religious Settlement: the Hampton Court Conf.’, Before the Eng. Civil War ed. H. Tomlinson, 36-9. began by urging that some of the Calvinist doctrine cited in Whitgift’s Lambeth Articles of 1595 might be incorporated into a revised draft of the Thirty-Nine Articles. He was interrupted by Bancroft, who proposed that any member of the godly delegation who had signed the Millenary Petition (presumably all four of the English puritans) be ejected. James advised Bancroft to respect the other disputants, but he went on to dismiss Rainolds’ soteriology as ‘desperate doctrine’. The next flashpoint came over the validity of confirmation by bishops. Bancroft taunted his opponents that ‘this it was that vexed them [puritan ministers], that they had not the use thereof in their own hands’. James thereupon attempted to calm matters by insisting ‘that a bishop was not divinae ordinationis’, but Bancroft contradicted him, which clearly caused offence. Royal disapproval apparently silenced the bishop for some time, but when Rainolds requested a new translation of the bible Bancroft urged that controversial marginal glosses (such as those in the Geneva Bible favoured by many of the godly) should be banned, a view James endorsed.41 Barlow, 25-30, 32-6, 46-7; Strype, iii. 404; Collinson, Bancroft, 202-4. Rainolds then complained about clerical pluralism and non-residence, whereupon Bancroft made his own plea for ‘a praying ministry’, by which he meant that puritan preachers should say divine service before delivering their sermons, to which proposal the king offered a guarded approval.42 Barlow, 53-8; Usher, Reconstruction, ii. 346-7; Collinson, Bancroft, 205. Finally, Rainolds urged a relaxation of the rules for subscription to Whitgift’s Three Articles of 1584, a motion revived on 18 Feb. by Laurence Chaderton, who asked that ‘honest, godly and painful ministers’ in predominantly Catholic parts of Lancashire might be allowed more time to conform. James was inclined to agree, but Bancroft observed that this would merely encourage others to petition for similar licence. This was a shrewd observation, as another of the godly ministers, John Knewstubb, promptly requested similar leeway for Suffolk ministers, which was denied.43 Barlow, 99-102; Usher, Reconstruction, ii. 353; Collinson, Bancroft, 205-8.

Although James convened the Hampton Court Conference with the intention of defusing the question of ecclesiastical reform before meeting his first Parliament on 19 Mar. 1604, his efforts proved largely unsuccessful. In preparation for the session, the Privy Council drafted plans for legislation to confirm alterations to the Prayer Book rubric, ministerial stipends and ecclesiastical courts. However, these plans were disrupted by the death of Whitgift on 29 Feb. and by the failure of the king to appoint a successor until December. Matters were also not helped by the fact that Matthew Hutton^*, archbishop of York, was too old to travel to Westminster.44 SP14/6/99 (cited in HP Commons 1604-29, i. 22); Strype iii. 408-9. Bancroft, as the next most senior bishop, took over some of the managerial functions which would normally have fallen to his superiors, including the presidency of the upper House of the Canterbury Convocation but, lacking the authority of an archbishop and a privy councillor, it is unlikely that he played as full a role as Whitgift would have done in the preparation of ecclesiastical legislation in advance of the Parliament. Bancroft nevertheless drafted the proclamation of 5 Mar. announcing modifications to the Prayer Book. In outlining this first tangible fruit of the Hampton Court Conference, he clearly sought to quash puritan hopes for bringing about significant change in the forthcoming Parliament. The Church’s critics, the proclamation insisted, had backed ‘mighty and vehement informations’ about abuses with no more than ‘weak and slender proofs’; while the alterations resolved upon were ‘some small things … rather … explained than changed’. Most significantly, the ecclesiastical authorities were enjoined to punish those who refused to use the new volume, ‘according to the laws of the realm heretofore established’, a clear signal that clerical subscription was not to be relaxed.45 CSP Dom. 1603-10, p. 85; Stuart Royal Proclamations I: Jas. I, 74-7.

The 1604 parliamentary session

In the absence of any detailed reporting of the Lords’ debates during 1604-7, it is difficult to reconstruct the full extent of Bancroft’s considerable activities in the upper House. However, it seems clear that his most important function was the negative one of blocking legislation promoted by puritans in the Commons. The king’s opening speech of 22 Mar. 1604 offered little guidance on ecclesiastical policy towards puritans, merely referring to ‘my proclamations made upon that subject’. In the Commons on the following day, Sir Robert Wroth^‡ recommended a range of legislation endorsed by the Council in its pre-session planning, including a bill to confirm the new Prayer Book. Sir Edward Montagu^* (later 1st Lord Montagu) followed with detailed complaints about the abuses of ecclesiastical courts, perhaps by way of introducing another of the Council’s bills. However, he went on to criticize the requirement for subscription to Whitgift’s Three Articles, and advocated a joint commission of both Houses to discuss wholesale reform of the Canons and ecclesiastical law. In so doing, he may have been voicing the desires of godly members of the Privy Council, but his arguments for secular control of ecclesiastical reforms were precisely the kind of agenda the bishops wished to discourage.46 CJ, i. 144a, 150b-1a; N. Tyacke, ‘Wroth, Cecil and the Parlty. Session of 1604’, BIHR, l. 120-5; ‘CD 1604-7’, pp. 22, 43-4, 54-5, 93-5.

Over the next three weeks, old and new drafts of the Prayer Book were referred to committee, but neither was ever reported; while Montagu’s plan for reform of the ecclesiastical courts languished in committee. On 13 Apr. the king conceded the Commons’ right to debate ecclesiastical reform – something Elizabeth had frowned upon, but James doubtless hoped to trade for progress on the Union – by reminding the Commons of their intention to debate ‘religion and reformation of ecclesiastical discipline’.47 HP Commons 1604-29, i. 21-2. Three days later, Sir Francis Hastings^‡ offered a reformist agenda which developed Montagu’s proposals. However, this initiative was halted by Speaker Sir Edward Phelips^‡, who delivered a royal message instructing MPs to consult with members of Convocation about ecclesiastical reforms before proceeding any further. This suggests the bishops had belatedly realized that the puritans in the Commons might end up shaping the agenda, and had persuaded James to offer some degree of support for the episcopal hierarchy. The civil lawyer Sir Thomas Crompton^‡ then intervened to defend the ecclesiastical courts, during the course of which speech he confessed to having breached parliamentary privilege by discussing Montagu’s criticisms with some of the bishops. Since Crompton was to become vicar general at Canterbury a year later, it seems likely that Bancroft had a hand in his speech.48 CJ, i. 151a, 153b, 169b, 171a-b, 172b; HP Commons 1604-29, iii. 767.

As Bancroft may have anticipated, MPs declined to concede parity between Parliament and Convocation, but a compromise was arranged on 18 Apr., when the Commons agreed to confer with the bishops in the latter’s capacity as ‘lords of Parliament’. This conference was repeatedly delayed, as the focus of debate moved to Convocation: on 2 May a petition was received in Convocation, urging radical reforms to the Prayer Book and a relaxation of clerical subscription, demands that were never likely to gain a sympathetic hearing from the bishops. That same day, Bancroft tendered draft Canons which comprised a major revision of the existing ecclesiastical constitutions, offered a robust defence of the royal supremacy, the Prayer Book and ecclesiastical discipline, and incorporated Whitgift’s Three Articles for subscription (as Canon 36).49 Recs. of Convocation, viii. 5-6; Anglican Canons, 1529-1947, pp. lv-lx, 262-453 (Canon 36 on 318-21); Usher, Reconstruction, i. 343-6; Babbage, 78-80, 84-97; Collinson, Bancroft, 213-14. Bancroft’s enemies retaliated with a clumsy attempt to discredit the bishop in the Commons: on 15 May a printer submitted a petition from the puritan minister Anthony Erbury, which construed Bancroft’s role in licensing Appellant tracts for publication as treason under the 1584 Recusancy Act, and enclosed a draft bill of attainder. Speaker Phelips suppressed the petition and bill, and had the printer detained.50 CJ, i. 210b; CSP Dom. 1603-10, p. 109; SR, iv. 706-8; Babbage, 239.

The Commons did not stand idly by as Convocation attempted to take charge of the question of ecclesiastical reform: on 5 May MPs agreed a puritan agenda for their forthcoming conference: a generous relaxation of subscription; ordination for none other than university graduates; an end to clerical non-residence and pluralism; and an aspiration to raise the value of all livings to £20 per annum. In order to forestall discussion of these plans, the conference between Lords and Commons, when it finally convened on 17 May, was moved to the Council Chamber at Whitehall, where Bancroft yielded the floor to the king, who urged ‘refractory ministers’ to set down the points within the new Prayer Book to which they could not subscribe, and ordered a joint committee – on which Bancroft was included – to decide which ecclesiastical legislation should be given priority during the current session.51 HP Commons 1604-29, i. 349-50; LJ, ii. 281b, 282b, 286a, 287b, 294b, 300b, 302a; CJ, i. 199b-200a, 214a, 975a. A fresh conference on this issue was scheduled for 21 May, but this, too, was postponed several times, upon an increasingly flimsy series of excuses.52 LJ, ii. 302a, 305a-b, 309a-b, 310b, 325b. While Parliament’s oversight of ecclesiastical reform was delayed by this filibustering, scrutiny of the draft Canons continued in Convocation. However, several bishops had private misgivings about a vigorous enforcement of ecclesiastical discipline, and Anthony Rudd^*, bishop of St Davids, spoke out in Convocation on 23 May, urging ‘a mitigation of the penalty’ of deprivation for ministers whose scruples over the detail of the Prayer Book rubric kept them from conforming. Bancroft, Bilson and others countered this criticism, and Bancroft used his position as chairman to prevent Rudd from making any rejoinder.53 CSP Dom. 1603-10, p. 109; Bodl., Ashmole 1153, ff. 54-9; Collinson, Bancroft, 214; ANTHONY RUDD.

When Lords and Commons met again on 4 June, Bancroft turned the tables on his critics by persuading Convocation to issue an ‘Instrument of Inhibition’. This insisted that the Commons’ debates on ecclesiastical reform ‘prejudiced the liberties of the Church’, and demanded that the bishops desist from conferring with MPs.54 CJ, i. 234b-5a, 988b-9a; Babbage, 240-1. This blunt approach provoked a jurisdictional quarrel, but it also ensured that the lower House would be unable to question the draft Canons then before Convocation. Bancroft’s suspicions of MPs’ motives were well founded, as Hastings appears to have been attempting to persuade James to waive the enforcement of subscription in return for an immediate grant of supply; the king’s willingness to consider this puritan overture must have alarmed Bancroft.55 HP Commons 1604-29, i. 23-4, 381-2; Letters of Francis Hastings ed. C. Cross (Som. Rec. Soc. lxix), 85-6. Doubtless in order to test the waters, the Commons sent up to the Lords bills for a ‘learned and godly ministry’ and against ‘plurality of benefices with cure’, which attempted to give legislative force to two of their proposals of 5 May. Both received a first reading in the Lords on 11 June, but then went no further; it seems likely that Bancroft had a hand in their demise.56 LJ, ii. 316b, 318a; Usher, Reconstruction, i. 352-3. For all their hostility to the puritan agenda, the bishops may, briefly, have decided to indulge James’s quest for money: when Hastings reported his petition against enforcement of subscription to the Commons on 13 June, the civilian Sir John Bennett^‡, judge of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, moved ‘to publish the Book of Common Prayer without injunction of rites’ – by which he presumably meant, shorn of the rubric which pricked the consciences of puritan ministers. However, the subsidy vote provoked controversy in the Commons, and was abandoned by James on 19 June; on the following day the king licensed Bancroft to continue his work on the Canons, a move which clearly constituted a riposte to the failure of Hastings’s initiative. MPs inserted a plea against subscription into their Form of Apology and Satisfaction on 20 June, but this was never presented to the king, and Hastings’s repeated attempts to present his draft petition against subscription to the king’s chief minister, Robert Cecil^*, Lord Cecil (later 1st earl of Salisbury) also met with failure.57 HP Commons 1604-29, i. 24; CJ, i. 238a-b, 991b; CSP Dom. 1603-10, p. 122; J.R. Tanner, Constitutional Docs. of the Reign of Jas. I, 226-7; Letters of Francis Hastings, 87. The Commons were still complaining about the Instrument of Inhibition at a final conference on 30 June, when Bancroft bluntly urged that ‘there might be no more ado made of it’.58 CJ, i. 251b, 100b.

While Bancroft’s parliamentary agenda was clearly dominated by his efforts to limit the ambitions of would-be ecclesiastical reformers in the Commons, he was involved with other measures, both ecclesiastical and secular. The sole item of ecclesiastical legislation to reach the statute book in 1604 was a bill to prevent the crown forcing disadvantageous exchanges of lands upon new bishops as a condition of their appointment, a much resented revenue-raising device under Elizabeth. Bancroft was named to the bill committee on 16 Apr., though as a royal grace bill, it was managed by the lord keeper, Thomas Egerton^*, Lord Ellesmere (later 1st Viscount Brackley). Another bill, concerning episcopal leases, which was sent up from the Commons, received short shrift, securing only a single reading, on 28 June.59 LJ, ii. 279a, 280a, 332b; CJ, i. 222b-3a; SR, iv. 1019-20. His contacts with Catholic priests ensured that Bancroft was nominated to the committee for the bill to prevent the importation of ‘popish, vain and lascivious books’ on 3 May, although the measure was found wanting, and another was drafted and committed later in the month; he was also included on the committees for the recusancy bill.60 LJ, ii. 290a, 297a, 301b, 313b, 324b. Bancroft also promoted legislation relating to tithes: a bill to enforce payment of a 5 per cent tithe on wages in London received a first reading in the Commons on 19 April. It was committed on 15 May, but Bancroft’s sponsorship apparently blighted its chances, as on 14 June Sir Francis Hastings reported that it was a ‘mischievous and injurious bill’, and replaced it with a fresh draft, which was, in its turn, dashed on 23 June. The bishop also sponsored a bill for payment of all tithes in kind, which might have transformed clerical finances; but this only received a single reading in the Commons, on 20 June.61 CJ, i. 178b, 205a-b, 238b, 239a, 245a, 242b, 973a; Procs. 1610 ed. E.R. Foster, i. 221-2.

Bancroft was named to attend the conferences at which James unveiled his plans for Union, and as one of the senior bishops in the House, he was appointed a commissioner for the Union. Towards the end of May, John Thornborough^*, bishop of Bristol, offended the Commons by publishing a book which criticized MPs’ sceptical attitude to this project. Bancroft was one of those ordered to attend a conference to resolve this difference on 30 May, and a month later, when the Commons asked that Thornborough enter a written apology in the lower House, Bancroft gave an evasive answer; the prorogation, which took place a week later, prevented any further exchanges on this matter.62 LJ, ii. 277b, 282b, 284a, 296a, 309a; CJ, i. 251b, 1000b; JOHN THORNBOROUGH. He was appointed to attend two conferences with the Commons about composition for wardship, but is not known to have spoken on the subject. Finally, his responsibilities as bishop of London reached far enough to secure his inclusion on committees for the pawnbrokers’ bill, the Thames watermen’s bill and the bill for garbelling spices, which he took charge of on 27 June, securing its successful passage.63 LJ, ii. 266b, 275a, 303a; 312b, 320b, 331a; SR, iv. 1036-7.

The subscription crisis and its consequences, 1604-6

In July 1604, shortly after the prorogation of Parliament, the king threw down the gauntlet over subscription, issuing a proclamation requiring ‘ministers disobedient to the orders of the Church and to ecclesiastical authority’ to conform by 30 Nov. or face deprivation. Bancroft and Bilson scrutinized the draft before publication, which may explain why the final text interpreted both the Hampton Court Conference and the Parliament as clear-cut victories for the conformists. However, it was presumably James who insisted that the bishops were ‘to do their uttermost endeavours by conferences, arguments, persuasions and by all other ways of love and gentleness to reclaim all that be in the ministry, to the obedience of our Church laws’. In addition to this proclamation, the king obtained a ruling from the judges that, under the 1534 Act for the Submission of the Clergy, the Canons could be enforced without parliamentary approval provided they were ratified under the great seal, which was accordingly done on 6 September.64 HMC Hatfield, xvi. 172-3; CSP Dom. 1603-10, p. 133; Stuart Royal Proclamations I: Jas. I, 87-90; Anglican Canons, 1529-1947, p. lvi; HP Commons, 1604-29 i. 25.

A general subscription had not been imposed since 1583-4, and enforcement obviously required the vacancy at Canterbury to be filled. After the prorogation of Parliament, Bancroft continued to fulfil certain archiepiscopal functions – such as making the initial arrangements for the new translation of the Bible James had promised the puritans at Hampton Court – but the decision about the archbishopric was not made until September. In the meantime, Bilson and Tobie Matthew^*, bishop of Durham, were also cited as contenders for the post.65 Letters of King Jas. VI and I ed. G.P.V. Akrigg, 228-30; CSP Ven. 1603-7, pp. 138, 188; Strype, iii. 408-9; Hutton Corresp. ed. J. Raine (Surtees Soc. xvii), 195; Winwood’s Memorials ed. E. Sawyer, ii. 33. However, while his rivals were noted as models of pastoral care and preaching, Bancroft’s talent for ‘writing against the Genevizing and Scotizing ministers’ was noted. Moreover, his performance at Hampton Court and in Parliament demonstrated that he was ‘a man more exercised in affairs of the state’. Consequently it was he who was confirmed as archbishop on 10 Dec. 1604, the very same day the Privy Council ordered the deprivation of nonconformist ministers.66 Harington, 10-11; K. Fincham, Prelate as Pastor, 27; LPL, Cartae Misc. ii. 85; Chamberlain Letters, i. 199; Add. 11402, f. 97; Collinson, Bancroft, 194-8.

His reputation as a disciplinarian quickly led to claims that Bancroft had overseen mass deprivations of 300 or more ministers, although he himself insisted that the figure was no more than 60 of the most obdurate nonconformists. Modern scholarship suggests that around 80 beneficed ministers were deprived – almost all within the first two years of the subscription campaign – while an unknown number of curates and preachers had their licences revoked.67 Babbage, 147-9, 248; Fincham, 214-18, 323-6. For all his visceral hostility to the puritan agenda for ecclesiastical reform, Bancroft was aware the Church could ill afford to lose the services of godly clergy, and in November 1604 he was informed that the king did not wish to provoke a backlash by proceeding too aggressively. These considerations initially persuaded Bancroft and most of his subordinates to proceed with circumspection, as became apparent in his first official pronouncement on subscription, a circular letter of 22 Dec. 1604 to his diocesans, which forwarded the Privy Council’s instructions to proceed to the deprivation of refusers. The king, he insisted, was inclined rather ‘to heal and cure such dis-temperatures by lenity and gentleness than by severity’, but resolved that ‘men of unquiet and factious spirit should not have place’ – nor should lay patrons be allowed to nominate other refractory clergy to fill the vacancies thus created. Therefore, ministers who offered to conform to the Three Articles, but were not prepared to sign a declaration of their conformity, should be given further time to ‘frame themselves to a constant course’. On the other hand, those who refused conformity were in breach of the 1559 Act of Uniformity, and, according to Chief Justice Sir John Popham^‡ and Attorney General Sir Edward Coke^‡, liable to deprivation, so long as the bishop pronounced the sentence in person, according to Canon 122.68 HMC Hatfield, xvi. 366-7; LPL, Reg. Bancroft, ff. 127-8; Anglican Canons, 1529-1947, 423.

Despite his oft-stated intention to proceed against nonconformists with moderation, in January 1605 James became unsettled about the slow progress of the subscription campaign, and the arrival of fresh petitions from puritan ministers. A critical open letter of 18 Dec. 1604 by Archbishop Hutton raised fears that subscription might prove unenforceable, and while hunting in the East Midlands in January 1605 the king found William Chaderton^*, bishop of Lincoln, reluctant to remove any refractories because he had received no express command from Bancroft, and because the judges were said to be uncertain whether such deprivations would be legal. James chose to blame Bancroft for the lack of action, insisting ‘that he should show the way to the rest’.69 HMC Hatfield, xvi. 379-80; xvii. 15-16; Winwood’s Memorials, ii. 40; B.W. Quintrell, ‘Royal Hunt and the Puritans, 1604-5’, JEH, xxxi. 43-50. The archbishop, in London, was undoubtedly surprised by this volte-face; he had been having private conferences with ministers about subscription, and had apparently told the lecturer Stephen Egerton, one of the erstwhile promoters of the Millenary Petition, that he would not be proceeding against stipendiary preachers. Matters came to a head on 9 Feb., when Sir Edward Montagu presented the king with a petition, drafted by Sir Francis Hastings, and signed by many of the Northamptonshire gentry. The ringleaders were summoned before the Privy Council – temporarily reinforced by Bancroft – lambasted by James, and deprived of their local offices. In the light of these developments, Bancroft and his successor at London, Richard Vaughan^*, hastily assembled the City’s puritan ministers at St Paul’s, made a final appeal for subscription, and then began the process of suspension and deprivation.70 HMC Hatfield, xvii. 38; Chamberlain Letters, i. 201; SP14/12/69; Letters of Francis Hastings, 90-2; Registrum Vagum of Anthony Harison ed. T.F. Barton (Norf. Rec. Soc. xxxii), 155-6; Winwood’s Memorials, ii. 48-9; Quintrell, 50-55; CSP Ven. 1603-7, pp. 223-4.

The royal wrath stung several other bishops into action: in Peterborough, Chichester, Lincoln and Norwich dioceses, 37 nonconformists were deprived over the following year. However, James’s anger subsided almost as quickly as it had been aroused, and in Ely, London, Exeter, and Bath and Wells, bishops continued to consult and debate with their refractory clergy, before proceeding to a much smaller number of deprivations.71 Fincham, 214-17; K.C. Fincham, ‘Ramifications of the Hampton Court Conference in the Dioceses, 1603-9’, JEH, xxxvi. 208-27. Bancroft, contrary to his reputation as a disciplinarian, took pains to avoid provoking his puritan critics, and was permitted to follow a softer line by the king, who quickly switched his focus to other issues: tougher measures against recusants in March; and a report on pluralism and non-residence among the ministry in April. The articles Bancroft issued for his metropolitical visitation of ten dioceses during the summer of 1605 addressed a range of issues, but those he highlighted in a covering letter to his commissaries were preaching, catechizing, non-residence and the ecclesiastical courts, which would, he hoped, leave him ‘the better able to answer for us all in Parliament, when occasion shall be offered’.72 CSP Dom. 1603-10, p. 86; LPL, Reg. Bancroft, ff. 129v-32; Vis. Articles and Injunctions of the Early Stuart Church ed. K. Fincham (Church of Eng. Rec. Soc. i), 4-13, 24-5. In his own diocese of Canterbury, only three ministers were deprived, and he attempted to bring at least one of them, Walter Jones, to conformity, both in person and by referring Jones to his old mentor, Laurence Chaderton.73 LPL, ms 2550, ff. 1-2; Fincham, Prelate, 323. The latter had his own problems, as the king was deeply suspicious that Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where Chaderton was master, had not fully conformed. It seems likely that Bancroft interceded on behalf of his old mentor; he certainly had extensive discussions with another of the Hampton Court delegates, John Rainolds, concerning the latter’s scruples over conformity.74 HMC Hatfield, xvi. 378, 381; xvii. 422-3, 431; LPL, ms 2550, f. 176; S. Bendall, C. Brooke and P. Collinson, Hist. Emmanuel Coll. Camb. 178-85; LPL, ms 929/121.

The 1605-6 parliamentary session

Bancroft secured a permanent seat on the Privy Council at Michaelmas 1605. The delay was by no means unusual: among his Elizabethan predecessors, only Whitgift had been a councillor, and he had had to wait three years for this preferment. Bancroft’s appointment was probably a sign of royal confidence, in expectation of protests over the deprivations of puritan ministers in the forthcoming parliamentary session.

The Gunpowder Plot seems to have taken Bancroft by surprise, as it did his contacts among the Appellants; he played little role in the investigation of the conspirators. However, he promulgated the king’s instructions that prayers of thanksgiving should be said in churches every Tuesday – the day on which the Plot was discovered – as an antidote to ‘the inveterated malice of the Romish brood’.75 Chamberlain Letters, i. 209; CSP Dom. 1603-10, p. 239; HMC Hatfield, xvii. 477-8, 516; xviii. 74-5; Registrum Vagum of Anthony Harison (Norf. Rec. Soc. xxxiii), 215-16. This narrowly averted catastrophe naturally influenced the parliamentary agenda: on 21 Jan. 1606, the first day after the Christmas recess, Bancroft persuaded the Lords to establish a committee to review the recusancy laws; but by the time he was ready to report its proceedings, on 3 Feb. 1606, the Commons had started to draft new legislation. His labours were laid aside, and he was one of the Lords appointed to confer with MPs about their plans. Bancroft discussed at least one aspect of the Commons’ legislation with Sir Edwin Sandys^‡, the son of a former archbishop of York, who claimed the archbishop had approved his plan to bar Catholics from coming within 20 miles of London. However, the bill ultimately settled on a limit of 10 miles. Bancroft was named to the committees which drafted and scrutinized successive versions of the bill for attainder of the plotters, which he reported on 1 Apr., while the bill against ‘vain, popish and lascivious books’ was revived at the start of the session and committed to Bancroft’s care, but never reported.76 LJ, ii. 360b, 363a, 366a, 367a-b, 380b, 401a, 405a; Bowyer Diary, 89; SR, iv. 1078. On 29 Apr. Bancroft took charge of the two recusancy bills sent up from the Commons. At a conference on 13 May, he observed that a clause confining recusants to within five miles of their homes allowed no provision for bishops to issue summonses, ‘in which case we cannot conform or win them’. After another conference on 19 May, it was resolved that the bill should pass as it stood, to avoid delaying the prorogation, and any defects should be resolved by fresh legislation in the next session. The bill was enacted as 3 Jac. I cap. 5, but the problem of confinement was not rectified in the 1606-7 session.77 LJ, ii. 419b, 429b, 432a, 438b, 440a, 442b-3a; Bowyer Diary, 161-2; SR, iv. 843-6, 1078; HMC Hatfield, xviii. 142.

The controversies over recusancy did not divert puritan MPs from their parliamentary riposte to the bishops’ subscription campaign. A bill addressing the question of subscription – ‘to enable suspended and deprived ministers to sue and prosecute their appeals’ – received only a single reading in the Lords on 7 April. However, subscription was also one of the causes taken up by the Commons in their ecclesiastical grievances, which were first mooted by the puritan lawyer Nicholas Fuller^‡. The heads of the grievances were delivered to the Lords on 5 Apr., and Bancroft chaired the committee which drafted a provisional response to the Commons. However, in the absence of further details the upper House failed to agree an answer, and it was decided that they hear the Commons’ proposals before debating their reply. At the ensuing conference, held on 14 Apr., Bancroft apparently made some slighting remarks about nonconformist ministers, but Sir Henry Hobart^‡ avoided controversy by deciding not to report to the Commons a private opinion expressed at a conference.78 Ibid. 407b-9a, 410b, 415b; Bowyer Diary, 102-3, 127-8; Babbage, 245-7. The Lords prepared their response for a second conference on 17 Apr., when Bancroft was selected to address the thorny question of subscription. He argued that all Reformed churches required subscription from their clergy, and made light of puritan objections to kneeling, the sign of the cross and the surplice. His speech apparently impressed some of his critics, as it was commended in the Commons for ‘strength, gravity, quickness and sincerity’. The case against subscription was put by the Northamptonshire lawyer Henry Yelverton^‡, who clearly irritated the archbishop by insisting that 300 clergy had been deprived, and argued that the subscription required by the 1571 statute concerning ‘disorders touching ministers’ (13 Eliz cap. 12) did not extend to the Prayer Book. On this specious basis, some of the recent deprivations could be accounted illegal.79 LJ, ii. 416b, 418b; CJ, i. 302b; Babbage, 247-50; G.R. Elton, Parl. of Eng. 1559-1581, pp. 211-14. See also Anglican Canons, 1529-1947, pp. lvii-lix.

Yelverton scored a palpable hit at another conference on 1 May, when he revealed that a clause of the Expiring Laws Continuance Act of 1604, intended to reverse Marian legislation against married priests, had inadvertently reinstated earlier statutes requiring ecclesiastical courts to issue legal process in the name of both the bishop and the crown. Failure to observe this technicality had the potential to invalidate everything done by the ecclesiastical courts since July 1604 – including the disciplinary proceedings against nonconforming ministers. Most unusually, the Lords turned to one of their legal assistants, Attorney General Coke, who, thinking on his feet, insisted ‘that the bishop is in the king’s mercy, but the proceedings is [sic] good’. However, this omission could be construed as praemunire, which, quite naturally, ‘did much dismay the bishops’.80 CJ, i. 302b, 303b; Bowyer Diary, 145-7; SR, iv. 1052; HMC Hatfield, xviii. 128-9. The Commons finished laying out their ecclesiastical grievances at another conference on 5 May, which Bancroft duly reported, and the Lords delivered their response on 10 May, when Lord Chancellor Ellesmere took over from Bancroft as spokesman. On this latter occasion, the judges were required to provide a definitive opinion on Yelverton’s loophole, which may explain why Ellesmere, as a leading common lawyer, handled this meeting; but it may also have been considered politic that Bancroft should not be left in a position to give offence to the Commons. The Lords declined to endorse any part of the Commons’ petition, proposing instead that the bishops should resolve the points of legal procedure, while the question of the bishops’ forfeiture under a praemunire was left to the king, who quickly waived his rights; he also rejected the Commons’ ecclesiastical grievances on 16 May.81 LJ, ii. 424a, 426a, 427b-8a; Bowyer Diary, 158-9, 188-90; CSP Ven, 1603-7, p. 353.

Alongside their protests against subscription, the Commons produced a raft of other ecclesiastical legislation, most of which, having doubtless attracted Bancroft’s disapproval, received short shrift in the Lords. A measure to bar married men from residing in cathedral or university premises was rejected at its second reading on 17 Mar.; a bill against non-resident and pluralist clerics was, like its namesake from the 1604 session, dropped after only a single reading on 27 Mar.; as was another draft revived from the 1604 session, that for a ‘learned and godly ministry’, read on 7 April.82 LJ, ii. 396a, 402b, 408b. The non-residence bill reappeared in a fresh guise later in the session, as a bill ‘to repeal and alter certain clauses in divers statutes touching residence of beneficed men’, which was ignored after its first reading in the Lords on 12 May; as was a bill against ‘scandalous and unworthy ministers’, read on 6 May. The bill for ecclesiastical Canons was presumably similar to one submitted in 1610 to prevent ministers from being deprived of life, liberty or property by Canons which lacked parliamentary approval. This measure, which would have overturned the deprivations under the 1604 Canons, was sent to committee on 10 May, where, as Bancroft later claimed, the bishops joined forces to ensure its demise; it was never reported.83 Ibid. 425a, 426a, 429a, 430b; Memorials and Letters relating to the Hist. of Britain in the Reign of Jas. I ed. D. Dalrymple (1766), 22-5. Only one of the Commons’ ecclesiastical bills passed the Lords during the session, this being ‘for the more sure establishing and continuance of true religion’. Sponsored by the distinctly un-puritan Sir Edwin Sandys, the original draft of this bill provided ‘that no alterations should be of any substantial point of religion but by Parliament, with the advice and consent of the clergy in Convocation’. It is not known whether Sandys consulted Bancroft over this draft, but, if asked, the archbishop would probably have endorsed a statutory acknowledgement of the constitutional position of Convocation. However, probably because of this proviso, some MPs took exception to the bill, and the clause seems to have been dropped in committee. The bill was first read in the Lords on 27 Mar., but was not heard of again until 10 May, when it was committed, and reported by Bancroft five days later, with amendments. It returned to the Commons on 22 May, when Salisbury’s cousin Sir Robert Wingfield^‡ insisted that the Lords’ committee had subverted the bill – perhaps they had reinstated the clause about Convocation. Sandys, Fuller and Hastings led a chorus of protest, and the Commons rejected their own bill on ‘a great cry’.84 CJ, i. 273b, 311b; Bowyer Diary, 52, 178; LJ, ii. 402b, 429a, 433b; HP Commons 1604-29, i. 25. This may be the ‘bill for conformity’ described in Diary of Walter Yonge ed. G. Roberts (Cam. Soc. xli), 4.

The bishops promoted only one item of ecclesiastical legislation in the Lords during the 1605-6 session. On 1 Apr. Bancroft delivered a message from the king which urged the drafting of a bill to restrict the use of excommunication, a penalty ecclesiastical courts were widely held to impose upon trivial pretexts. The task was delegated to Bancroft, assisted by the other bishops, who tendered a draft to the House on 26 April. Committed on 19 May, it was reported by Bancroft the following morning, and sent to the Commons on 22 May. In the aftermath of the confrontation over the ecclesiastical grievances, the episcopal provenance of this bill was sufficient to ensure that it received a rough ride from MPs. Richard Martin^‡ urged ‘that the king might see it, and see that it is mere spleen’, and it was rejected at its first reading, ‘with much distaste’.85 LJ, ii. 405b, 417b, 437a-8b; CJ, i. 311b; Bowyer Diary, 178. Bancroft’s main legislative agenda lay not in Parliament, but in Convocation: the death of Archbishop Hutton allowed Bishop Thornborough to pilot the controversial 1604 Canons through the York Convocation in March 1606 without incident; while the Canterbury Convocation passed a fresh set of Canons, which robustly defended divine right kingship. Unfortunately for Bancroft, James vetoed these Canons, for fear the Spanish would use the categorical denial of resistance theory they espoused to discredit his support for the Dutch Revolt.86 Recs. of Convocation, viii. 91; xiv. 408-13; Anglican Canons 1529-1947, pp. lxi-lxii, 454-84.

As archbishop of Canterbury, Bancroft was expected to play a more prominent role in the routine business of the Lords; he hardly missed a day in the House during the 1605-6 session, and chaired more than a dozen bill committees – although four of these bills remained in his hands at the end of the session. He supported Salisbury’s opposition to the controversial bill to abolish the crown’s right to purveyance without compensation: at a conference on 4 Mar., when Salisbury bluntly informed the Commons that some form of compensation would be necessary, Bancroft cited 1 Sam. 8:11 as a justification for the crown’s feudal rights. MPs insisted on passing their bill in return for a single subsidy, and Bancroft took charge of the bill at its committee stage. However, the king decided the bill was not worth the price offered; the judges advised that it misinterpreted the law, and on 11 Apr. Bancroft informed the Commons that it was ‘unfit to be any further proceeded in’.87 LJ, ii. 407b, 444b; Bowyer Diary, 61; CJ, i. 277b; P. Croft, ‘Parl., Purveyance and the City of London’, PH, iv. 25-31; E. Lindquist, ‘King, People and House of Commons’, HJ, xxxi. 563-7. On 3 Apr. the archbishop took charge of the grace bill to repeal the clause of the 1536 Act of Union, which had enabled the crown to make law for Wales via proclamation; while on 3 May he reported the bill for free trade to France and Spain, even though he had not been named to the original committee on 25 March.88 LJ, ii. 399b, 406b, 423a. He chaired and reported committees for the bills which confirmed Salisbury’s purchase of land next to his house on the Strand, and for the estate of Sir Christopher Hatton^‡ (heir to his patron of the 1580s), whose brother Robert Hatton^‡, was a member of his household. He reported that a bill to restrict building in the London suburbs was unfit to proceed, but secured the passage of another amending the Thames Watermen’s Act he had scrutinized in the previous session. Finally, as a Cambridge man, he took charge of the bill to confirm the crown’s endowment of two divinity lectureships in his university, although this was one of the bills that remained in his hands at the end of the session.89 Ibid. 386a-b, 389a-b, 391b, 398a, 420a-2a, 423a, 444b.

Later career, 1606-9

In the autumn of 1606, shortly before the English Parliament reconvened, James’s views about the future of the Kirk were clarified during a conference with prominent Scottish presbyterians at Hampton Court. Bancroft argued the case for episcopacy with one of their leaders, Andrew Melville, and when the latter insulted Bancroft’s clerical vestments, he was gaoled for contempt; this made it much easier for James to impose bishops as permanent moderators of the Scottish provincial synods, a key step in the re-establishment of episcopacy in Scotland.90 Oxford DNB, iv. 653; W.R. Foster, Church Before the Covenants, 111-13; D.G. Mullan, Episcopacy in Scotland, 105-8.

Bancroft missed one of the first days of the parliamentary session of 1606-7 ‘for want of health’, but otherwise he attended assiduously, holding the proxies of three absentee bishops: Bilson, Chaderton and William Cotton^* of Exeter.91 LJ, ii. 449a, 451b. The session was dominated by debates on the Union with Scotland, and Bancroft was one of the large delegation of peers dispatched on 24 Nov. 1606 to urge MPs to begin consideration of the Instrument of Union. After several fractious (but ill-reported) meetings with the Lords’ delegation, the Commons reluctantly got to work, but the only item of legislation which reached the Lords was the bill to abolish hostile laws between the two kingdoms. Bancroft was named to the committee on 8 June 1607, and apparently intervened at a conference with the Commons two days later.92 Ibid. 452b, 520b; Bowyer Diary, 326-7.

The overt intimidation of the Scottish presbyterian leaders shortly before Parliament met failed to quench the spirits of English puritan MPs. Bills against clerical pluralism and non-residence, subscription and the ex officio oath were sent up from the Commons, only to be laid aside following a single reading in the Lords; and while a draft of the ecclesiastical Canons bill, doubtless similar to that of 1606, was committed on 30 Apr., Bancroft, in the chair, ensured that it was never reported.93 LJ, ii. 465b, 489a, 503a, 510a. That same day, the lord treasurer, Thomas Sackville^*, 1st earl of Dorset, secured a first reading for a bill to resolve a technical defect in the 1559 statute for an exchange of lands between the crown and the archiepiscopal estates at Canterbury, which had cost the see several hundred pounds in annual revenue. Bancroft took charge of the bill at its committal on 2 May but, several weeks later, Dorset complained that the archbishop ‘puts down the credit of the cause with generalities’. The treasurer’s complaint clearly had some foundation, as Bancroft only reported the bill on 29 June, when it was rejected in favour of a new draft. This proceeded no further than the committee stage by the time Parliament was prorogued five days later.94 Ibid. 503a, 504a, 532a-b; HMC Hatfield, xix. 140; J.I. Daeley, ‘Episcopal Admin. of Matthew Parker, Abp. of Canterbury, 1559-75’ (Univ. London Ph.D. thesis, 1967), 324-30.

During this session Bancroft handled a significant amount of legislation concerning secular interests. On 28 May he took charge of the complex bill laying down regulations for the manufacture of woollen cloth, reporting it on 27 June. This measure was enacted, but the bill to preserve woods and timber was cast aside twice under his supervision and failed to emerge from committee.95 LJ, ii. 473a-b, 514b, 523b, 528b, 531a, 534b. Bancroft took charge of two bills to restrict new building in the suburbs of London, one of which he reported as fit to pass; the other was replaced by a fresh draft. He also took possession of two successive drafts of a bill to confirm grants of concealed crown lands, neither of which completed its passage, and a measure to confirm the London livery companies’ tenure of concealed chantry lands, which he reported on 28 Mar. and which did reach the statute book.96 Ibid. 460b, 473a-b, 479a, 480a, 494a, 496b-7a. Several private bills also passed through his hands, including the estate bill for the lands of Ferdinando Stanley^†, late 5th earl of Derby (which was replaced by a fresh draft) and the bill to confirm Salisbury’s purchase of part of the lands of Durham House on the Strand, which he reported.97 Ibid. 480a, 492a, 493a, 511a, 512a, 513b. In addition, he handled the passage of a private bill for All Souls’ College, Oxford, of which he was Visitor, which confirmed the college’s title to 2,000 acres in Whadborough, Leicestershire. However, he initially reported that the measure was unfit, whereupon it was replaced with a new draft, which was duly enacted (although this statute apparently failed to resolve the controversy between the college and the rival claimant).98 Ibid. 468a, 493a; Oxf., All Souls’ Coll., Acta in Capitulis, ff. 18-20, 26v.

By 1607, the main thrust of the puritans’ campaign against the ecclesiastical hierarchy had transferred from Parliament to the law courts. In 1591, the judges had acknowledged the jurisdiction of High Commission, the most powerful ecclesiastical court, in Cawdrey’s Case, but puritan lawyers strove to limit its powers by securing writs of prohibition from common law courts. Upon his appointment as archbishop in December 1604, Bancroft had consulted crown counsel about the right of ecclesiastical courts to pronounce deprivations, and in October 1605 he had complained to the Privy Council about the indiscriminate use of prohibitions as a weapon against ecclesiastical jurisdiction. The substance of his objections was endorsed by the Canterbury Convocation and submitted in May 1606 to the king, who, at the start of the following session (21 Nov. 1606), delivered a sympathetic answer.99 Usher, High Commission, 136-40, 167-9; Recs. of Convocation, 135-6; Babbage, 262-71. Shortly after the prorogation of Parliament in July 1607, Bancroft had one of the leading exponents of prohibitions, the puritan lawyer Nicholas Fuller^‡, cited into High Commission for slandering the court during legal proceedings against two men who had refused the ex officio oath. James, aware of the implications for the prerogative, encouraged Bancroft to proceed to a conviction, while the common law judges sided with Fuller, granting him a writ of habeas corpus following his imprisonment. The quarrel had by now transcended the limits of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and Coke used his new position as chief justice of Common Pleas to issue a large number of prohibitions – to Bancroft’s loudly expressed frustration. The archbishop sought to outflank Coke by referring the dispute to the arbitration of the crown, on the grounds that ‘judges are but the delegates of the king’. However, James’s attempts to mediate over the next three years all proved unsuccessful, with the result that the issue remained unresolved at the archbishop’s death.100 E. Coke, 12th Rep. 63-4; Usher, High Commission, 171-204; Babbage, 272-85; HP Commons 1604-29, iv. 326-7.

Controversy between the ecclesiastical and common law courts notwithstanding, the campaign against nonconformist ministers subsided after 1606, leaving Bancroft with more time to devote to routine matters of churchmanship. While he did not have a formal role in the new translation of the bible, he oversaw the six teams of academics who undertook the task, and read some of their efforts in draft, although the project was not completed until after his death.101 D. Norton, King James Bible, 54-62, 85-6. He also maintained a lively interest in reclaiming converts to Rome: the wife of Sir Robert Cross received several visits from him and several of his associates in 1606; while Tobie Matthew^‡ (son and namesake of the newly appointed archbishop of York) spent several weeks at Lambeth Palace in 1607, having his beliefs tested by Bancroft and his staff.102 HMC Hatfield, xix. 45-6, 205, 446; Conversion of Sir Tobie Matthew ed. A.H. Mathew, 60-84, 111-12. When two Oxford academics questioned Calvinist theories of predestination, it was Bancroft who backed the orthodox interpretation. However, the pair later converted to Rome, which caused the hierarchy serious embarrassment; it may be that Bancroft ultimately recommended the Calvinist George Abbot^* as his successor at Canterbury as a bulwark against such theological heterodoxy.103 Fincham, Prelate, 46; C.M. Dent, Protestant Reformers in Elizabethan Oxf. 234-7. Bancroft was certainly keen to publicize Venetian anti-papal polemic produced during the Interdict controversy of 1605-6, causing a minor diplomatic stir in 1607, and he subsequently encouraged the French Huguenot Isaac Casaubon to come to England to produce similar anti-Roman polemic in support of the oath of allegiance.104 CSP Ven. 1603-7, pp. 495-6; Stowe 171, f. 264; Chamberlain Letters, i. 316-17; Ambassades de M. de la Boderie en Angleterre (1750), v. 480-1; J.P. Sommerville, ‘Jas. I and the Divine Right of Kings’, Mental World of the Jacobean Ct. ed. L.L. Peck, 61. Finally, in July 1610, as his health was failing, he shocked his fellow privy councillors at a Council meeting by arguing strongly for enforcement of the recusancy laws, telling James that he should not seek advice from the crypto-Catholics on the board – whom he named.105 Spain and the Jacobean Catholics ed. A.J. Loomie (Catholic Rec. Soc. lxiv), 157.

Bancroft was an energetic patron, although, because he had no immediate family and never married, he was not inclined to line his own pockets. On one occasion he assigned the revenues of a depopulated rectory in Kent to supported the Bodleian Library at Oxford. However, at All Souls’, Oxford, where he made regular recommendations at elections to scholarships and fellowships, he secured a series of leases of college property for friends and relations.106 Procs. 1610, i. 33; Oxf., All Souls’ Coll., Autograph Letters I/69, 73-9, 83, 85-90, 92-5, 100, 103, 108.

Bancroft intervened in the elections for several college headships. In 1607 he was asked by Salisbury, chancellor of Cambridge University, to investigate the election of the physician John Gostlin as the new master of Caius. There were some irregularities about Gostlin’s election, but it was perhaps suspicions about his Arminian sympathies which led to his replacement by the Calvinist William Branthwaite.107 HMC Hatfield, xix. 211-12, 459-60; C. Brooke, Hist. Gonville and Caius Coll. 106-7. Two years later, Bancroft also became involved in the election of a new master at his old undergraduate college, Christ’s, Cambridge, where some of the fellows were openly critical of his deprivations of 1604. Rumours that the separatist Henry Jacob was involved in canvassing on behalf of William Pemberton, who had preached in favour of silenced ministers, persuaded the king, advised by Salisbury and Bancroft, to impose upon the college the conformist Valentine Carey^*, one of Ellesmere’s chaplains (and later bishop of Exeter), who brought the college’s reputation as a haven for puritanism to an abrupt end.108 HMC Hatfield, xxi. 138-9, 142-3, 147-8; S.A. Bondos-Greene, ‘End of an Era: Camb. Puritanism and the Christ’s Coll. Election of 1609’, HJ, xxv. 201-8. Bancroft also intervened at All Souls’, Oxford in 1609-10, not for doctrinal reasons, but because the fellows were too keen to divide the profits of their considerable estates among themselves. His investigation revealed minor irregularities in the accounts of one of the bursars, John Hanmer^* (later bishop of St Asaph), who resigned. However, his hopes of securing the vacancy for a son of Bishop William Cotton^* of Exeter were frustrated.109 Oxf., All Souls’ Coll., Autograph Letters I/105-6; Acta in Capituli, f. 29; JOHN HANMER.

The 1610 parliamentary sessions

By 1610 Bancroft’s health was deteriorating: he attended little more than half the sittings in the House of Lords during the lengthy parliamentary session of that spring, although he was recorded as absent due to sickness on only six occasions. On 30 Apr. he prefaced his speech on the pluralism bill with the dramatic warning that he was ‘not very well in health’ and would speak in the manner of a deathbed testimonial.110 LJ, ii. 585a, 592b, 597b, 599a, 609b, 632a; Procs. 1610, i. 219. Nevertheless, he held the proxies of half a dozen other bishops,111 LJ, ii. 548a. and generally remained an effective speaker and manager of ecclesiastical business in the Lords. An awareness of his failing health may have encouraged him to protest about the iniquities of puritans and Catholics even more than he usually did, both in Parliament and the Privy Council.

The main priority of the session was Salisbury’s ambitious plan for fiscal reform, which came to be known as the Great Contract. Bancroft was appointed to attend the conference at which the treasurer first detailed the crown’s financial problems, and he was a member of three delegations which urged the king to give permission for the Commons to discuss terms on which a composition for wardship could be included in the draft agreement.112 Ibid. 550b, 556b, 564b, 569a. During the early stages of these negotiations, the Commons drew attention to a legal textbook by Dr John Cowell, Regius professor of Civil Law at Cambridge, and Bancroft’s vicar general at Canterbury, whose views on kingship echoed those expressed by Bancroft himself. MPs held Cowell’s definitions of terms such as “Parliament” and “prerogative” to be absolutist, which clearly embarrassed the archbishop, to whom the work was dedicated. When these complaints reached the Lords on 27 Feb., Bancroft blustered that ‘now to fall upon other matter of this nature and to follow it so earnestly before they have given a glance to the former [the Contract], I think it not fit’. On 2 Mar., during preparations for a conference about Cowell’s book, Bancroft moved, that as legal expertise would be required, Lord Chancellor Ellesmere should report back to the House, but the latter responded that a recent illness left him, like Bancroft, looking fit for his grave; four other reporters were nominated instead. A week later the king, having read the book, announced that he, too, had objections to its contents, leaving Bancroft as a lone voice defending the indefensible. He insisted that he had not seen the book until six weeks after its publication, observed that many had written on the prerogative, such as James’s former tutor, the monarchomach George Buchanan, and suggested that ‘if it shall be thought to appertain to the Parliament to examine all books written amiss, there will be work enough, though they sit seven years together. I could wish it were left to some other examination’. This duly occurred on 25 Mar., when a royal proclamation suppressed the book and ordered the destruction of all extant copies.113 Procs. 1610, i. 18-19, 29-30, 180, 184, 188; LJ, ii. 560a; Stuart Royal Proclamations I: Jas. I, 243-5; S.B. Chrimes, ‘Constitutional Ideas of Dr John Cowell’, EHR, lxiv. 461-87. This humiliation may have made Bancroft particularly keen to demonstrate his loyalty to the crown when the bill to punish regicides and their families received its second reading on 18 July: ‘we cannot make too severe a law, seeing in these later times the blood of princes hath been so shed by villains as this that killed the late king of France’.114 Procs. 1610, i. 147-8.

Most of the negotiations over the terms of the Great Contract were handled by Salisbury, who relayed the king’s views at conferences between the Lords and Commons. Although the king was persuaded to concede the commutation of wardship, he subsequently resolved not to surrender his honorific status as feudal overlord. Salisbury informed the Lords of this unhelpful development on 19 Apr., when Bancroft was one of several peers who called for a conference with the Commons. On the following morning, while preparing for this conference, Henry Howard^*, earl of Northampton, together with Bancroft, moved to ask the judges whether tenures could be separated from their profits, an inquiry which received a broadly positive response.115 Ibid. 63-5, 210-1. With this difficulty resolved, James insisted that in addition to the £200,000 annual revenue required under the Contract, he expected to be compensated for loss of revenues. It was widely assumed this would end the negotiations, and when debating how to break the news to the Commons, Bancroft moved that Salisbury act as spokesman, and that once the new terms were delivered, the Lords should not be drawn to discuss the matter further. On 4 May, the Commons offered £100,000 p.a. as composition for wardship alone, to which Salisbury seductively responded with the suggestion that the figure quoted a week earlier was negotiable. Bancroft, perhaps irritated by recent debates on the clerical pluralism bill (see below), then attacked the MPs present at the conference in a most unhelpful way: ‘I need say nothing of the king’s necessity … for instead of relieving him, you bid him pay his debts of his own’. While he acknowledged that ‘there be some wise and grave men amongst you, yet many speeches are both of spleen and from such green and young heads, as being judicially weighed, will prove to be nothing else but froth’.116 Ibid. 67-8, 80-2, 217; E.N. Lindquist, ‘Failure of the Great Contract’, JMH, lvii. 630. Though this speech had little impact, negotiations over the Contract stalled for a lengthy period, and on 26 June, when Salisbury mounted a fresh initiative, fears were raised in the Lords that failure to agree the value of the revenues which were being surrendered, or how the new annual revenue would be raised, would undermine any settlement. Bancroft, perhaps making amends for his earlier outburst, advised that the question of an annual revenue could be laid aside ‘until we see whether we shall agree of a price’; and when the MP Richard Martin^‡ voiced similar misgivings at the conference later that day, Bancroft urged him to name the value of any additional revenues the Commons proposed to include in their composition.117 Procs. 1610, i. 209-10, 115, 118; Lindquist, 633. The deadlock in the negotiations was finally resolved on 10 July, with James’s response to the Commons’ grievance petition, whereupon those who stood to lose by the Contract started clamouring for compensation. Bancroft left it far too late to obtain any concessions for the bishops’ loss of wardship revenues, as he only raised this question on the final day of the session.118 Procs. 1610, i. 164, 250; LJ, ii. 660.

While he generally tried to make himself useful over the Great Contract, Bancroft naturally took a particular interest in ecclesiastical legislation, the incidence of which was significantly higher than in the 1606-7 session, although many of the bills which came before the Lords were revived from earlier sessions. He reported the blasphemy bill on 7 July, which the committee had dismissed as ‘not … like to reform the great and grievous fault thereby justly condemned’. Five days later, he was named to the committee for the bill to allow secular courts to claim jurisdiction over scandalous ministers, which he considered superfluous, the ecclesiastical courts being perfectly able to proceed to the deprivation of such men. However, when the bill to reduce contentious suits against public officials received its second reading on 25 June, Bancroft proposed to extend its remit ‘to all ministers and officers of the spiritual courts’, a motion which was rejected. On 29 June he used his proxies to ensure that the ecclesiastical leases bill – which he held ‘to prejudice the Church and to benefit schismatics and contemptuous persons’ – was dashed by the narrow margin of four votes.119 LJ, ii. 623a, 630a, 637b, 641b; Procs. 1610, i. 121, 135-6, 242. He also took a close interest in private legislation affecting clerical incomes and rights, chairing the committee for the bill which proposed to assign the revenues of the depopulated rectory of Frome Whitfield, Dorset for the maintenance of a preacher, although he clearly disapproved of the measure: ‘I do not like it that a man should rob Peter to pay Paul. This living would serve fitter to be made a prebend for those that have but small livings’. It is hardly surprising that the measure was rejected in favour of a new bill which presumably reflected his priorities, as he was also one of the committee’s members, but while it passed both Houses, it did not receive the Royal Assent.120 LJ, ii. 563b, 567b, 596b, 614b; Procs. 1610, i. 33. He also disliked the bill to disunite the parsonage of Ashe and Deane, Buckinghamshire, believing that the combined value of the benefice, £80 a year, was ‘not a sufficient living for a preacher’. However, on 23 June he gave way, the incumbent of the larger portion of the living having undertaken to give surety to assign £30 a year for maintenance of his counterpart.121 Procs. 1610, i. 112. On 12 June, at the third reading of the bill to assure the title of Lord of Man to William Stanley^*, 6th earl of Derby, Bancroft supported the measure, but expressed surprise that tithes were included in the grant; Ellesmere explained that the priory from which the revenues derived was annexed to the lordship. The archbishop also welcomed the bill to settle Salisbury’s title to Britain’s Bourse, although he insisted that a lease of the stables of Durham House, which was included in the grant, should only be granted during the tenure of the present bishop of Durham, William James^*, so as not to prejudice the revenues of the bishopric.122 Ibid. 106; LJ, ii. 612a.

Bancroft’s chief effort during the session was focussed on the suppression of two bills which were staples of the puritan agenda: the ecclesiastical Canons bill (probably drafted by Nicholas Fuller), and the clerical pluralism bill. The former measure stipulated that no Canons passed since 1600 could deprive a man of his living unless they received parliamentary confirmation. On 12 May, shortly after the bill’s first reading in the Lords, Bancroft informed James that it had been comprehensively refuted by the bishops at its first appearance in 1606, and complained that

we must again endure a new bruit to no purpose, except your Majesty shall be pleased to prevent it; and I think it very necessary that you should so do, for the avoiding of public scandal; if your Majesty’s supremacy should now again be called in question, as of necessity it must be, if the authors of this bill do stand to the justification of it against us.

This plea went unheeded, and at the second reading on 11 June, Bancroft strongly attacked the bill. He criticized the retrospective nature of the draft, condemned it as ‘both scandalous and injurious to the king and state’, and insisted that deprivation be used only against scandalous ministers. His criticisms were seconded by Richard Neile^*, bishop of Rochester (later archbishop of York) and George Abbot, bishop of London, but the bill was committed notwithstanding.123 Memorials and Letters relating to the Hist. of Britain in the Reign of Jas. I, 22-5; Procs. 1610, i. 101-2; HP Commons, 1604-29, iv. 325. On 6 July, in preparation for a conference with the Commons, Bancroft stated ‘that the committees thought fit to move the king to have a commandment to the bishops to look to this fault’ – by which he apparently meant proceedings against scandalous ministers. He also insisted that, according to the 1534 Act for the Submission of the Clergy, ‘what Canons the king shall ratify under his great seal of England shall be as good as though they were made in Parliament’, and that the same statute also protected ‘men’s lives, liberties and goods’, rendering the bill superfluous – a view the bill’s sponsors naturally rejected. While the archbishop was appointed to report the proceedings, the House explicitly permitted him to express his own views at the conference, where several MPs questioned the role of Convocation in drafting Canons. Bancroft, who clearly made a more extensive speech than was reported, protested ‘I did not think to have heard the canon law to have been ripped up with such bitterness’. The meeting ended inconclusively, and Bancroft merely reported that ‘divers exceptions were … taken to the Canons within the space of ten years last past’, and that a second conference would be necessary. The Lords twice resolved to send to the Commons to arrange another meeting, but no message was sent, and the bill was lost.124 Procs. 1610, i. 124, 126, 248; LJ, ii. 636b; SR, iii. 460-1; HP Commons, 1604-29, i. 19.

Unlike the ecclesiastical Canons bill, the bill against clerical pluralism and non-residence was intended to tackle a universally acknowledged problem, the poverty of many clerical livings; the controversy arose from the manner in which it proposed to do so. So far as it can be reconstructed from the debates, the bill proposed to modify the 1529 Pluralities Act by requiring pluralists with two livings worth more than £8 p.a. to reside upon one of their cures, and to have a curate’s stipend deducted from the tithe of the other living by the impropriator.125 Procs. 1610, i. 75, 222, 230; S.E. Lehmberg, Reformation Parl. 1529-36, pp. 92-4. The bill was tabled in the Commons by Sir Edward Montagu, although aspects of a separate draft by Fuller may have been incorporated at the committee stage; it was sent up to the Lords with a special recommendation, and received a first reading on 6 March.126 LJ, ii. 562b; CJ, i. 392b-3b, 400b, 404a. Its second reading, on 30 Apr., was probably arranged without Bancroft’s knowledge, which clearly sharpened his animosity: ‘it showeth a contrivance of spleen against the clergy by such as make show to be thereof earnest professors of the Gospel’. He complained that the requirement that clergy should serve their cures would deprive noblemen of the services of their chaplains, diminish the crown’s income from dispensations issued by the faculty office, and reduce the bishops’ opportunity to present to livings by lapse. Furthermore, he protested, the text of the bill likened ‘the idolatrous Church of Henry VIII’s time … with this’. Laying invective aside, he then offered an incisive critique of the bill’s economic assumptions:

Had it not been fit to have made a proportion of livings, that every living might serve a sufficient minister? And we are not against one contented with one benefice, if one might be made fit for a man. I fear it is far for [sic from] the hearts of these gentlemen that commend this bill ever to yield every minister a competent living.

He commended the plans drafted after the Hampton Court Conference for legislation to make tithes payable in kind, and to put men under oath for tithes on their wages. He also deplored the poverty of livings, half of which were rated at less than £10 per annum in the Valor Ecclesiasticus: ‘not 600 benefices and vicarages able to maintain a worthy minister’. In conclusion, he moved, ‘I could be content to agree this bill should be committed, but to the pit of Hell’. His objections were seconded by four other bishops, but the bill was committed to the Whole House.127 Procs. 1610, i. 219-24; LJ, ii. 584a; Usher, Reconstruction, ii. 331-2.

This passionate speech clearly sapped Bancroft’s energy, as he missed the following day’s sitting through illness. He returned to the House for the committee stage on 3 May, when he aggressively demanded whether ‘any man will take exception to that which was spoken against the bill?’ Oliver St. John^*, 3rd Lord St. John of Bletso, politely suggested that clerical pluralism was criticized in the 1572 Canons, but Bancroft brushed him aside, observing that dispensations were allowed. Edward La Zouche^*, 11th Lord Zouche, then observed that the bill did not deprive a pluralist of his second living, it merely made provision for a decent stipend for a curate; Bancroft, however, scorned lay interference with clerical livings: ‘let the ministers first have competent livings, and then I am against pluralities’. Salisbury and Ellesmere suggested amendments to the bill, but when Thomas Knyvett^*, Lord Knyvett, moved for a conference with the Commons, Bancroft snapped, ‘when the lower House doth meddle with the Church matters, I think they are out of their element’, and he accused lay peers of preferring the advice of MPs before the bishops over ecclesiastical matters. Salisbury defused this confrontation by offering to charge his impropriations with a minimum stipend for curates, whereupon Bancroft conceded, ‘I have some projects which I will offer’; the debate ended with Bancroft and others being named to a subcommittee to discuss further reforms to clerical livings.128 LJ, ii. 585a, 587b; Procs. 1610, i. 75-9, 229-35. Five days later, Bancroft recited his complaints about this bill to King James, who was apparently unmoved by the plight of pluralist clergymen; the archbishop responded with a letter justifying his position on a bill, ‘that for above forty years, from Parliament to Parliament, hath been rejected; and that very worthily’. He complained, as he had to the Lords, about the abrogation of clerical pluralism, while lay pluralists were left untouched; he worried that the need to secure the Great Contract might persuade the king to make concessions at the expense of the Church; and he revealed his deepest fear, that the problem of clerical incomes might be resolved by ‘some attempt, either against cathedral churches, or for the diminishing of your bishops’ livings’.129 Memorials and Letters relating to the Hist. of Britain in the Reign of Jas. I, 18-22.

While Bancroft probably hoped to have seen the last of the pluralism bill, on 8 June St. John and Zouche moved for a further committee meeting; with the archbishop again absent through sickness, Salisbury had the meeting postponed for three days. The timetable for this committee was apparently delayed by the furore which followed Bancroft’s fiery speech at the reading of the ecclesiastical Canons bill (see above), and he only made his report from the subcommittee for the improvement of clerical livings on 23 June, when proceedings were further delayed by his motion to hold a conference with the Commons to discuss the various projects under consideration.130 LJ, ii. 609b, 621a; Procs. 1610, i. 99-100. The list of projects is SP14/56/57. This was the last the Lords heard of the pluralism bill, the demise of which may have been linked to a generous vote of supply by Convocation early in July. While the king was annoyed that the Commons had offered him only one subsidy and one fifteenth, the clerical subsidy was rated at 6s. in the pound – 50 per cent higher than normal – to be paid concurrently with the last of the clerical subsidies voted in 1606; Bancroft was quick to advertise to the king the clergy’s generosity.131 HMC Hatfield, xxi. 274; SR, iv. 1181-2; Memorials and Letters relating to the Hist. of Britain in the Reign of Jas. I, 26-7.

Although godly MPs failed to secure any part of their legislative agenda, their complaints received an airing in the petition which listed their ecclesiastical grievances. Unlike in 1606, the Commons made no attempt to secure support from the Lords before submitting their grievances to James, whose response, delivered on 23 July, was drafted with Bancroft’s advice, and bore the clear imprint of his views. The Commons were welcome to recommend deprived ministers who now wished to conform – but no leeway was offered for the contumacious. No action was to be taken on pluralism ‘until some further provision be made, that the benefices of this realm might be made competent livings for godly ministers and learned preachers’ – although the bishops were urged to enquire after enforcement of Canons 41 and 47, which required pluralists to maintain a preacher in their absence. Concerning ecclesiastical jurisdiction, the diocesan High Commission courts were to be abolished, and jurisdiction restricted to Canterbury and York, while complaints about fees and pursuivants were to be investigated. Four days after the prorogation, Bancroft promulgated these measures, and others for enforcement of the new recusant statute, to his diocesan bishops in a circular letter.132 HMC Hatfield, xxi. 274; LJ, ii. 658a-9b; LPL, Reg. Bancroft, ff. 172v-4.

Bancroft was granted five proxies for the autumn sitting of 1610, but he only made one appearance in the Lords (on 18 Oct.) before his health failed.133 LJ, ii. 666a; HMC Downshire, ii. 389. He drafted his will on 28 Oct., leaving the bulk of his relatively modest fortune, later reckoned at £6,000, to his nephew, Richard Bancroft of Willesden, Middlesex. His overseers were the Arminian Samuel Harsnett^*, bishop of Chichester (later archbishop of York), and the Calvinist George Abbot^*, bishop of London (subsequently archbishop of Canterbury), whom he assumed would be his successor, having presumably recommended him to the king. His library of 6,000 printed books, and several hundred volumes of medieval and contemporary manuscripts, was left to his successors as archbishop in perpetuity.134 PROB 11/116, f. 318r-v; Fuller, 57; A. Cox-Johnson, ‘Lambeth Palace Lib., 1610-64’, Trans. Camb. Bibliographical Soc. ii. 105-26. He died on 2 Nov., and was buried in the chancel at Lambeth two days later, under ‘a plain stone’. Some anonymous wit mocked his alleged parsimony in a cruel epitaph: ‘here lies his grace, in cold clay clad; who died for want of what he had’. Despite rumours of other candidates, Abbot succeeded him as archbishop. Bancroft’s books still form the core of Lambeth Palace Library.135 Oxford DNB, iv. 654; Fuller, x. 57; HMC Downshire, ii. 396, 407.