One way in which the mythful retelling of the events of the sixteenth century works its way out is this: after the confusion of the reign of Henry, the austerity of Edward’s and the sheer bloody eventfulness of Mary’s, once Elizabeth came to the throne, all was peace and light; we had a Queen who was also tolerant, respectful and wise:

I would not open windows into men’s souls¹

But Elizabeth was a queen who tortured heretics to death in public. What she meant by this supposed espousal of toleration is “she did not care what people understood by the formularies of the Church of England; only that they would assent to them.”²

A contribution to this turmoil and mythmaking came, bizarrely, from the vicar of Bishopsbourne, a man by the name of Richard Hooker.

Hooker was born in Devon in 1554 to a family who had changed their name from something far more embarrassing, Vowell (!). Being a bright boy he went up to study at Oxford, and was ordained priest by the Bishop of London in 1579. He had a rocky few years after his ordination but by 1584 had been appointed Preacher to St Paul’s Cross, the public pulpit on the exterior of old St Paul’s in London, and the Elizabethan equivalent of Speakers’ Corner, the Today programme, Newsnight, and the Times opinion columns. It was a place from which to get noticed, and in Hooker’s case it worked. By 1585 he had been appointed Master of the Temple Church, then as now a prestigious preaching and teaching appointment. Unhappily, Hooker was entrusted with the morning services at Temple Church: the afternoon preacher was Walter Travers, a Cambridge theologian, who espoused an extreme Puritan, Calvinistic position. Hooker’s biographer, Isaak Walton, said of this time “the forenoon sermon spake Canterbury; and the afternoon Geneva” (a not entirely accurate statement, but an important one in the developing myth of Anglican origins³).

Whatever Hooker’s opinions, they were not Genevan. All his patrons and supporters up to that point had been “high church”— anti-puritan, with a regard to the reformed, but not radical faith of the Church of England. They believed that they had merely removed the error and superstition from Romanism. For their critics, the Elizabethan Prayer Book was:

…an imperfect book, culled and picked out of the popish dunghill, the mass book, full of abomination.⁴

This was not an opinion shared by Mr Hooker. By the 1580s the (political) threat posed by Roman Catholicism had receded— the defeat of the Spanish Armada had been the last chance of imposing by military means a reunion with Rome. Instead the challenge facing the Church of England came from the radical wing of the Reformation. Small “cell churches” were springing up all over the country, “conventicles” in the parlance of the day. “Their hold on general sympathy was so strong that even the bishops were lukewarm about suppressing them and allowed their growth to increase unchecked.”⁵. The battle was between the “prelatical” and “presbyterian” parties, between those who believed the church was ruled by Bishops (under the Crown) or by individuals in individual church congregations. Dirty tricks were used in the battle: a prostitute was paid to accost Hooker and demand payment to suppress (untruthful) accusations of immorality. It was time to move from London.

In 1591 Hooker became subdean of Salisbury, and began work on his major work Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: Eight Books:

the first major work in the fields of theology, philosophy, and political thought to be written in English.⁶

In this monumental work he set out to address all the problems, queries, disturbed consciences of those who felt perturbed by the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559.

Richard Hooker’s many admirers, detractors and manipulators can agree on one thing: Hooker wrote a very big book. Everyone remembers that… a majestic and hallowed testimony to the character of Anglicanism and the via media of the Church of England. But it may give us pause to find, if we take up the formidable task of reading Hooker’s works – all seven volumes of them in the latest edition, including commentary and notes – that nowhere in any of his writings does Hooker use either the word Anglicanism or the phrase via media…⁷

Another misconception is that Hooker was the man who invented the much vaunted Anglican formula Scripture, Reason and Tradition. Hooker’s achievement was not nearly so comprehensive. In Ecclesiastical Polity he carefully sifted the different ways and occasions in which scripture might be used as an authority, the authority, in deciding questions of Christian belief and practice. Almost as importantly he set out to explore areas and reasons where and why scripture should not be used as the authority. Hooker wanted to widen the areas of indifference, adiaphora “things which do not make a difference, matters regarded as non-essential, issues about which one can disagree without dividing the Church”⁸. It was perfectly possible, according to Hooker, and to those who followed him, that there should be a large number of issues in which they might probably be a variety of norms. Where Hooker disagreed with his Puritan opponents is that he included the thorny question of church government under his heading. According to him, bishops, priests, deacons, cathedrals, prayer books and so on, were all areas under which “the criteria for making decisions were as much the weight of collective past experience and the exercise of God-given reason as the commands of scripture itself”⁹.

The book was not a success in his lifetime: it did not sell well, and it gained him no preferment. Curiously for such a learned man, and who public preaching career had begun so well, he only ever preached once at the Queen’s court. Diarmaid MacCulloch thought the Queen and Hooker should’ve got on like a house on fire. Hooker’s ideas were “uncannily close to what we can glean of the idiosyncratic private religious opinions of this very private woman”¹⁰. Even so, in 1595 Hooker accepted the living of Bishopsbourne, where he died five years later, and is buried under a stone slab which was once the medieval altar. A monument was not raised to him until 35 years after his death, and it managed to get his dates wrong.

His reputation? The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church calls him “par excellence the apologist of the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 and perhaps the most accomplished advocate that Anglicanism has ever had”. Other historians give him a more creative role: he didn’t advocate or defend Anglicanism; he invented it. More recently revisionist historians, such as MacCulloch have noted how important to Hooker’s thought was the idea of the unitary state: church and state unified under the rule of a Christian king or Queen, and in which the will of Parliament was the will of a Christian people. This idea has long disappeared. Even so:

Hooker’s intricate discussion of what constitutes authority in religious matters gives him a contemporary usefulness. The disputes which currently wrack Western Christianity are superficially about sexuality, social conduct or leadership style: at root, they are about what constitutes authority for Christians. The contest for the soul of the Church in the West rages around the question as to how a scripture claiming divine revelation relates to those other perennial sources of human revelation, personal and collective consciousness and memory; whether, indeed, there can be any relationship between the two.¹¹

1. Oral tradition only. The earliest written record of this espousal of toleration is in J. B. Black’s The Reign of Elizabeth 1558–1603 (1936), p. 19. [↩]
2. Andrew Brown, ‘Shuttered windows to the soul’, The Guardian : Comment is Free website [↩]
3. See D. MacCulloch, ‘Richard Hooker’s reputation’, English Historical Review, 117 (2002), p. 776. [↩]
4. The (First) Admonition to Parliament, 1572, written anonymously but probably by John Field and Thomas Wilcox, two London clergymen. [↩]
5. John S. Marshall in Hooker, Richard. In Encyclopædia Britannica. http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-3293 [↩]
6. A. S. McGrade, ‘Hooker, Richard (1554–1600)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 here. [↩]
7. Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘Richard Hooker’s reputation’, (2002) [↩]
8. The Lambeth Commission on Communion (The Windsor Report), 2004 [↩]
9. Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘Richard Hooker’s reputation’ (2002) [↩]
10. Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘Richard Hooker’s reputation’ (2002) [↩]
11. Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘Richard Hooker’s reputation’, (2002) [↩]