Even a cursory
examination of Jonathan Mayhew’s September 30th, 1750 sermon makes
abundantly clear that there are two sides to the effort put forth therein. One
is explicitly religious, the other unflinchingly political. And while they are
most certainly intertwined, with one flowing out of and feeding into the other,
it is nevertheless possible – and for the purpose of the present discussion,
preferable – to distinguish and explore them each in turn. To that end, and in
recognition of Mayhew's role as a minister, let us begin by discussing the
primarily religious dimension of his Discourse
Concerning Unlimited Submission.
The pastor of
Boston’s Old West Church, it here bears recalling, was a member of the
Congregationalist faith. His perspective on matters theological and moral, in
consequence, was generally defined by both an embrace of autonomy and
self-sufficiency – embodied by the independence of the individual congregation
– and a rejection of hierarchy and centralization. As Mayhew was descended from
English Puritan migrants who came to America in the 1630s seeking a reprieve
from the repressive policies of Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud, this very
much stands to reason. Though the Congregationalists of colonial Massachusetts
had arguably lost some of the rigidity of their forebears, they remained
dedicated to the notion that the multiplication of clerical offices and councils
– in the form of bishops and archbishops, synods and conferences – succeeded
only in fostering corruption and autocracy.
These tenets are
very much in evidence within the themes and motifs that Mayhew chose to
emphasize in his sermon. The commemoration of the execution of Charles I being
the subject at hand, Mayhew sough to deny the validity of the king’s status as
a martyr by giving evidence of his having done nothing to earn the esteem of
God as a consequence of his supposedly just and pious rule. Naturally, Mayhew’s
status as a Non-Conformist Protestant inclined him to conceive of a standard of
merit for God’s esteem somewhat at odds with that which was nurtured by the
supporters of King Charles the Martyr. In fairness, however, a number of his
criticisms were rather generously devised – for the perspective of the likely
celebrants of January 30th, at any rate. The support and affection
which Charles evinced during his life for Catholicism, for example, was seized
upon more than once by Mayhew as proof of the king’s unsuitability for
sainthood.
Charles had
married a Catholic princess of the royal house of France, Mayhew offered – one
Henrietta Maria (1609-1669), described by Mayhew as, “A true daughter of that true mother of harlots [,]” – and
respectfully requested dispensation from the Pope to do so. Later, during the
period that Parliament was prorogued and the king governed on his own authority,
he, “Took all opportunities to encourage the papists, and to promote them to the highest offices of honor and
trust [,]” and was otherwise so, “Well affected” towards the Catholic faith
that he would have been, “Very willing to unite Lambeth and Rome.”
Lambeth, as it happened, was the district of London in which the Archbishop of
Canterbury resided. Mayhew’s accusation, therefore, was that Charles was so
comfortable with Catholic practice and doctrine – or otherwise so fond of the
Catholics in his family and his retinue – that he would have agreed to reverse
the English Reformation and merge the Church of England back into the Catholic
fold. Building upon this fairly scurrilous accusation, Mayhew further claimed
that Charles had, “Abetted the horrid massacre in Ireland, in which two hundred thousand Protestants were butchered
by the roman catholics [,] and that he, “Assisted in the extirpating the French protestants at Rochelle [.]” While the specific
attribution of these gruesome incidents to the intention of Charles is somewhat
arguable – the Irish Protestants in question were killed by their Catholic
neighbors during a period of disorder that followed a Catholic uprising in 1641
while the Huguenots who controlled the French city of La Rochelle surrendered
to the forces of Louis XIII (1601-1643) after three failed relief expeditions
dispatched from England – Mayhew’s aim was clearly not. In presenting these
examples, he doubtless hoped his audience would begin to wonder how Charles I
could possibly have been declared a saint by the Church of England when his
actions had so injured English Protestants and offered such aid to the Catholic
faith.
Though it might
seem rather misguided now to attribute so much importance to a few gestures of
goodwill and tolerance, Mayhew was most certainly correct in assuming in 1750
that most of the people who either heard or read his sermon would feel as he
did about the apparent religious sympathies of Charles I. Throughout much of
the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, Roman
Catholicism was subject to intense suspicion and institutional persecution in
England, Scotland, and Ireland. From the time of the first schism between the
English Church and Rome – begun by Henry VIII (1491-1547) and solidified under
Elizabeth I (1533-1603) – the civil rights of Catholics were severely and
repeatedly curtailed and more than one conspiracy resulted from Catholic-led
attempts to reverse the effects of the English Reformation – i.e. the
Throckmorton Plot (1583), the Babington Plot (1587), the Gunpowder Plot (1605),
etc. By 1750 it was accordingly the height of orthodoxy in mainstream British
socio-political discourse to express disdain for Catholicism, to decry it as a
religion of slavery and autocracy, and to characterize its adherents as
plotters and heretics. This was as true among people like Mayhew and the
members of his congregation – who would themselves have been subject to many of
the same civil restrictions under British law as professed Roman Catholics – as
it was among the mainline Anglicans who recognized January 30th,
their many doctrinal differences notwithstanding.
As to why, then,
the Anglican Church would choose to canonize and venerate a man whose
sympathies had clearly aligned with people it avowed as its enemies, Mayhew had
indeed hit upon a cogent line of inquiry. Sympathetic though contemporary
Anglicans may have been, however, to his clear disdain for Catholicism, they
surely would not have been so welcoming of the explanation he provided.
On first blush,
there indeed seemed to be a number of reasons that might have otherwise
disinclined the Anglican Church from heralding Charles I as a saint and martyr.
Notwithstanding his aforementioned sympathy for Catholicism and Catholics, he
more than once either profaned some aspect of Christian worship or behaved in a
way that was unbecoming of a Christian sovereign. Of the latter, Mayhew notably
cited the fact that Charles, “Levied many taxes upon the people without the
consent of parliament [and] imprisoned great numbers of the principal merchants
and gentry for not paying them [,]” and that he, “Erected, or at least revived,
several new and arbitrary courts, in which the most unheard-of barbarities were
committed with his knowledge and approbation [.]” Non-Conformist Protestants
were not alone in suffering the consequences of these actions, particularly as
it related to unrepresentative taxation. Indeed, if Parliament was intended to
represent the whole of the people of England, then Charles had paid insult to
every one of his subjects by attempting to sideline the national legislature
and rob it of one of its fundamental prerogatives. A specific piece of evidence
Mayhew offered for this attitude came in the form of a response Charles
supposedly delivered upon complaint that he was too closely abiding the counsel
of corrupt and untrustworthy ministers. Addressing the Parliament whose
authority he had effectively sought to usurp, the king was said to reply, “In a
rough, domineering, unprincely manner that he wondered any one should be so
foolish and insolent as to think that he would part with the meanest of his
servants upon their account [.]”
Surely this was not behavior befitting of a saint? Surely a ruler who so
callously disregards the accustomed liberties of his people could not possibly
claim to have some aspect of Christ dwelling within him?
Mayhew, for his
part, did not think so. Nor did he believe that Charles’ demonstrated disregard
for the sanctity of the Sabbath spoke well of the man’s fitness for veneration.
The incident in question he accordingly cited revolved around the publication
and promotion of a document originally circulated during the reign of Charles’
father, James I (1566-1625). The so-called Declaration
of Sports (1617) was originally issued as a rebuke to early Puritan agitation
against what members of that sect perceived to be widespread disregard for one
of God’s holy commandments. Rejecting Puritan Sabbatarianism – i.e. the
practice of abstaining from all activities on Sundays other than prayer and
contemplation – James decreed that a number of activities – including archery,
dancing, and various festival
observances – were permissible upon the Sabbath once the individual in question
had attended divine service. Trivial though it might now seem – mandating, as
it did, whether or not a person could go bowling or skip off to the dancehall
after church – the gesture was intended to be one of control. James sought to undercut
Puritan claims to moral superiority and used his position as Supreme Governor
of the Church of England to do so. The reissue of the Declaration in 1633 at the hands of Charles and the aforementioned
William Laud was doubtless motivated by much the same sentiment. Indeed, the
king was so keen to encourage a rejection of Puritan censoriousness that he ordered
it read by the relevant clergymen after every Church of England service on pain
of being removed from their position. Granting that Mayhew had perhaps greater
reason to see this action in particular as a kind of personal rebuke – being a
descendant of the Puritans whom the Declaration
had originally targeted – he managed to frame the issue in terms to which
most any Christian was capable of responding. “What of saintship is there [,]”
he asked his congregation, “In encouraging people to profane the Lord’s Day?”
Once again, it seemed a fair enough counterpoint to the elevation of Charles I
that might reasonably have given pause to even some Anglicans.
It was at this
point in the progression of Mayhew’s central argument in Discourse that he cast off any semblance of sympathy for or fellow
feeling with the membership of the Anglican Church. Having demonstrated that in
spite of his plainly illiberal and impious behavior, the Church of England had
determined to canonize Charles anyway, declare him a martyr, and designate the
day of his execution an occasion for fasting and repentance, Mayhew was given
to conclude that the relevant course of action stemmed from two sources having
little at all to do with the relevant monarch’s character as a Christian ruler.
First, the national attitude at the time of both Charles’s designation as a
saint and martyr and the commemoration of his execution was marked by what
Mayhew somewhat uncharitably – if not altogether inaccurately – described as a
kind of, “Mad and hair brain’d loyalty [,]” to the
recently-restored Charles II. At that time, he wrote,
All were
desirous of making their court to him; of ingratiating themselves; and of
making him forget what had been done in opposition to his father, so as not to revenge it. To effect this, they ran into the
most extravagant professions of affection and loyalty to him […] Thus they
soothed and flattered their new king, at the expence of their liberties:–And
were ready to yield up freely to Charles II, all that enormous power,
which they had justly resisted Charles I
for usurping to himself.
The veneration of
January 30th, therefore, was in no small part a consequence of the
court politics of the 1660s, and Charles I more an instrument of flattery than
a deserving object of adoration, worship, or pious contemplation. Convincing
though this reasoning may have been, however, it addressed but half the issue.
The political climate of the Restoration explained why Charles I had been
canonized to begin with, but not why his execution continued to be a mandated
occasion for repentance and meditation a century after the thing had occurred.
It was at this point that Mayhew
made known the true object of his sermon. The issue at hand was not just the
questionable qualifications of Charles I for martyrdom – though Mayhew and his
congregation certainly had cause to find fault with the practice – but rather
what the veneration of this man said about the authority that had sanctioned
it. After first hinting somewhat snidely that the Anglican Church must have
been desperate indeed to desire the elevation of one such as Charles – “One
would be apt to suspect that that church
must be but poorly stocked with
saints and martyrs, which is forced to adopt such enormous sinners into her kalendar, in order to swell the number”
– he at last and at length described precisely the rationale that appeared to
him most convincing. “In plain english,”
he explained,
There seems
to have been an impious bargain struck up betwixt the scepter and the surplice,
for enslaving both the bodies and souls of men. The king appeared to be
willing that the clergy should do what they would,–set up a monstrous hierarchy
like that of Rome,–a monstrous
inquisition like that of Spain or Portugal,–or any thing else which their
own pride, and the devil’s malice, could prompt them to: Provided always, that the clergy would be tools to the crown; that they would make the people believe, that
kings had God’s authority for breaking God’s law; that they had a commission
from heaven to seize the estates and lives of their subjects at pleasure; and
that it was a damnable sin to resist them, even when they did such things as
deserved more than damnation.
The continued
recognition of Charles I as a saint and martyr was thus to Mayhew’s reckoning
the end result of a corrupt accord between the Crown and the Church. During the
king’s life, in return for his indulgence in matters of doctrine and observance,
the priests and prelates, “Caused many of the pulpits throughout the nation, to
ring with the divine absolute, indefeasible rights of kings [.]” And in death,
in return for services rendered, these same clerics made Charles a saint, “Not
because he was in his life, a good man,
but a good churchman; not because he
was a lover of holiness, but the hierarchy; not because he was a friend
to Christ, but the Craft.”
Brazen though the attribution may
have been of Charles I’s undeserved veneration to a kind of corrupt bargain
between the monarch in question and the Church of England, Mayhew was in truth
only hewing to the tenets and the impulses of his faith. As a Congregationalist
minister descended from Massachusetts Puritans, he was to a large extent bound
to perceive tyranny and mischief as being inherent in any hierarchy built upon
matters of faith. Furthermore, in light of the degree to which he and his
coreligionists were held in disregard by the mainstream of the Church of
England – by way, among other things, of the use of labels like Dissenter and
Non-Conformist – it was perhaps only natural that Mayhew should have likewise
projected upon ever major decision of the Anglican polity a degree of pettiness
and materialism which he believed to be fundamentally un-Christian. In point of
fact, Discourse is veritably peppered
with such affirmations either of the injustice of non-Anglican persecution or
the venality intrinsic to religious hierarchy.
Indeed, Mayhew
introduced his January 30th sermon by ruminating upon both subjects
in turn. Explaining to his congregation why it was he turned his mind to the
topic of King Charles the Martyr, he noted that the penultimate day of the
first month of the year seemed often to be an occasion during which, “The
dissenters from the established church [are] represented, not only as
schismatics, (with more of triumph than of truth, and of choler than
christianity) but also as persons of seditious, traitorous and rebellious
principles [.]” Being once such supposed “schismatic,” Mayhew was
understandably interested to explore and explain the origins of the observance
in question. And, he continued,
GOD be
thanked one may, in any part of the british dominions, speak freely (if a
decent regard be paid to those in authority) both of government and religion;
and even give some broad hints, that he is engaged on the side of Liberty, the
BIBLE and Common Sense, in opposition to Tyranny, PRIEST-CRAFT and Non-sense,
without being in danger either of the bastile or the inquisition.
It is difficult to
say to what degree Mayhew was speaking ironically when he claimed it was
possible to speak freely of government and religion without fear “in any part
of the british dominions” – whether he believed it to be true, or what he meant
precisely by the phrase “a decent regard […] to those in authority.” What is
plain, however, is the degree to which he identified the Anglican Church as his
enemy. “PRIEST-CRAFT” being in effect a euphemism for the episcopal hierarchy
of the Church of England, Mayhew thus Anglicanism as being of a kind with
tyranny and nonsense while his cause was one aligned with “Liberty, the BIBLE
and Common Sense.”
The palpable hostility Mayhew here
evinced for the Anglican Church was repeated more than once over the length his
January 30th sermon. Characterizing the species of tyranny Charles I
attempted to introduce during his reign, for example, as a veritable “drop in
the bucket” which, in time, “Like a mighty torrent, or the raging waves of the
sea […] bears down all before it, and deluges whole countries and empires [,]”
he thereafter cautioned against allowing religious authority to pursue a
similar course. To Mayhew’s thinking, it seemed, “People have no security
against being unmercifully priest-ridden, but by keeping all imperious BISHOPS,
and other CLERGYMEN who love to ‘lord it over God’s heritage,’ from getting
their foot into the stirrup at all.” Again, the use of words like “priest,”
“bishop,” and “clergymen” were intended to be pejorative references to the
hierarchy of the Church of England. Further on in the course of his harangue
against the veneration of an undeserving king, Mayhew’s sense of revulsion
became bitterer still. Positing, he acerbically claimed, a purely hypothetical
scenario – “It is no matter how far it is from any thing which has, in fact,
happened in the world” – he proceeded to lay before his audience a particularly
venomous critique of the supposed materialism and worldliness of the Anglican
priesthood.
“Suppose then,” he began, “it was
allowed, in general, that the clergy
were an useful order of men; that they ought to be esteemed very highly in love for their words sake; and to be
decently supported by those whom they serve, the labourer being worthy of his reward.” Again, recalling that
most dissenting faiths rejected episcopalianism and that Catholicism was a
political non-entity in contemporary British life, “clergy” could only be meant
to refer to the priesthood of the Church of England. “Suppose farther,” Mayhew
continued,
That a
number of Reverend and Right Reverend Drones, who worked not; who preached, perhaps, but once a year, and then, not the gospel of
Jesus Christ; but the divine rights of
tythes;–the dignity of their offices
as ambassadors of Christ, the equity of sine
cures, and a plurality of benefices;–the
excellency of the devotions in that prayer book, which some of them
hired chaplains to use for them;–or
some favourite point of church tyranny,
and antichristian usurpation; suppose
such men as these, spending their lives in effeminacy, luxury and idleness; (or
when they were not idle, doing that which is worse than idleness; suppose such
men) should, merely by the merit or ordination
and consecration, and a peculiar, odd habit, claim great respect
and reverence from those whom they civilly called the beasts of the laiety [.]
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