Hooker, Travers &
the Battle of the Pulpit
1585–86

RICHARD HOOKER AT THE TEMPLE: THE BATTLE OF THE PULPIT

Be of good comfort: we have to do with a merciful God, rather to make the best of that little which we hold well; and not with a captious sophister who gathers the worst out of every thing in which we err.

Richard Hooker, A learned Discourse on Justification 
compiled from (sermons preached at the Temple Church, 1586), 35

Dangerous it were for the feeble brain of man to wade far into the doings of the Most High; whom although to know be life, and joy to make mention of his name; yet our soundest knowledge is to know that we know him not as indeed he is, neither can know him: and our safest eloquence concerning him is our silence, when we confess without confession that his glory is inexplicable, his greatness above our capacity and reach1. He is above, and we upon earth; therefore it behoveth our words to be wary and few.

Richard Hooker, Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, I.2.3

Richard Hooker was appointed Master of the Temple in 1585. It is hard for us now even to re-imagine the depths of conviction and fear then dividing Protestants from Roman Catholics in this country and throughout Europe. Here is a sketch of the scene, offered, as much as anything, in thanks that we have moved so far onwards in the centuries since. But this was the setting Hooker famously argued, here in the pulpit of the Temple Church, that God was merciful to save thousands of those who in past generations had lived and died in the Roman church. England was in alarm. The threat from Catholic Europe had revived: there had been rebellion against the Queen and Settlement in 1569; in 1570 the Pope had excommunicated Elizabeth and declared her subjects free from their allegiance; Mary, Queen of Scots was linked with ever further conspiracy against her cousin; and the danger of Spanish invasion was growing. On the Continent, the Spanish armies under the Prince of Parma were seemingly invincible in the Netherlands; negotiations for a French alliance had failed. The danger was growing that Spain, with Scottish help, would invade England. The country, said Lord Burghley, had ‘no help but her own, and that but half a help’ – since so many Roman Catholics were suspected of loyalty to Mary, Queen of Scots. In 1584 thousands of Elizabeth’s Protestant subjects had, in the Bond of Association, sworn to defend the Queen and, should she be killed, to put Mary to death.

England’s radical reformers were convinced: England’s only hope of spiritual and political safety lay in the example of Calvin’s godly state, Geneva. The ‘head and neck’ of English Calvinism were Thomas Cartwright and Walter Travers. Since 1581 Travers had been the Reader (lecturer) of the Temple. In 1584 the Privy Council ordered the Inner Temple to continue his stipend ‘for his public labours and pains taken against the common adversaries, impugners of the state and the authorities under her Majesty’s gracious government.’

The Treasurer of Middle Temple at Hooker’s appointment and for the next three years was Sir John Popham; as Attorney-General Popham would appear in 1587 for the prosecution at the trial of Mary, Queen of Scots. Sir Edward Anderson of Inner Temple, who also took part in Mary’s trial, was a famously loyal advocate of Elizabeth’s policy on religion. Sir Thomas Bromley of Inner Temple presided over the Commission appointed for Mary’s trial. Bromley’s successor as Lord Chancellor was Sir Christopher Hatton of Inner Temple, who had invited the entire House of Commons in 1585 to join in a prayer for Elizabeth.     

The Temple itself was known to harbour Roman Catholics. In 1581 one of Burghley’s correspondents wrote: ‘Another inconvenience is that Papists are suffered in the Inns of Court…This I dare boldly say that amongst lawyers more Papists there are than in all Englande beside, for ye have not now almost in all England one Papist Priest which hath not been a lawyer, or else brought up amongst them.’ The most famous of the Temple’s Roman Catholics, Sir Edmund Plowden, had died in 1584 and been buried in the Temple Church. (Plowden’s monument stands now at the west end of the north aisle.) To counter their influence the Puritans were glad to have a prestigious preacher in post: Walter Travers.

Travers had some reason to hope that he would succeed to the Mastership itself. Burghley favoured him. The Archbishop of Canterbury countered, with a second candidate. But the post was given to Richard Hooker, former tutor to Edwin Sandys of Middle Temple, son of the Archbishop of York. Travers continued to lodge in the Master’s House, in the Temple itself; Hooker, it seems, lived a mile away at the house of John Churchman (a friend of the young Sandys too). In the Temple we now value Hooker as our Church’s hero. But on his arrival he was, in more ways than one, the outsider. Two theologians, pieces on opposite sides in the dangerous chess-game of England’s polity, were now serving a single, close-knit but volatile community of the country’s lawyers and politicians: the scene was set for conflict, from the start.

Richard Hooker at the Temple Church, 1586, on the Roman Catholic ancestors of his congregation and himself: ‘God, I doubt not, was merciful to save thousands of them, though they lived in popish superstitions, inasmuch as they sinned ignorantly.’

Walter Travers in the same pulpit, later on the same day: ‘Salvation belongeth to the Church of Christ. We may not think that they could be capable of it which lived in the errors held and maintained in the Church of Rome, the seat of Antichrist.’

So began ‘The Battle of the Pulpit’. The dispute between Hooker and Travers in the Temple Church extended over four Sundays in 1586. Hooker would preach on Sunday morning, Travers in the afternoon. Their differences soon became clear: ‘The pulpit,’ wrote Thomas Fuller in the 1650s, ‘spake pure Canterbury in the morning, and Geneva in the afternoon.’

It has become one of the most famous public debates of the English Reformation. Fuller evokes the scene: ‘Here might one, on Sundays, have seen almost as many writers as hearers; not only students, but even the gravest benchers were not more exact in taking notes from the mouths of their clients, than in writing notes from the mouths of their ministers.’ Hooker’s preaching was unadorned: ‘His voice was low, stature little, gesture none at all, standing stone still in the pulpit, as if the posture of his body were the emblem of his mind, immovable in his opinions. Where his eye was left fixed at the beginning, it was found fixed at the end of the sermon. …The doctrine he delivered had nothing but itself to garnish it.’ Travers, by contrast, was a natural orator.

To recover the purity of the primitive church, Travers would be rid of all that intervened and would forge the English church anew. Hooker was steeped in classical and medieval thought; saw the roots of his own (and Travers’) understanding in Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas and Calvin himself; and acknowledged –even valued – the differences to which such a rich tradition could give rise: ‘Be it that Peter has one interpretation, and Apollos has another; that Paul is of this mind, and Barnabas of that. If this offend you, the fault is yours.’ As then, so now: ‘Carry peaceable minds, and you may have comfort by this variety.’

Hooker was as certain as Travers that Rome was in error. But Rome’s doctrines were built on the ‘foundation of faith’: salvation through faith in Christ. A living and salvific faith, Hooker maintained, was therefore possible for Catholics. And Rome’s supposed errors? Hooker distinguished between the responsibility that Rome’s teachers bore for their heresy and the error into which it led their unwitting people. Hooker’s concern was acutely pastoral: to reassure those who feared for their forebears’ salvation. ‘I must confess unto you,’ said Hooker: ‘if it be an error to think that God may be merciful to save men, even when they err, my greatest comfort is my error. Were it not for the love I bear unto this “error”, I would neither wish to speak nor to live.’   

It was to disclose and offer the comfort of faith that Hooker spoke: ‘Have the sons of God a father careless whether they sink or swim?’ His Temple sermons stress the simple conditions of salvation. ‘Infidelity, extreme despair, hatred of God and all godliness, obduration in sin – cannot stand where there is the least spark of faith, hope, love or sanctity; even as cold in the lowest degree cannot be where heat in the first degree is found.’ Hooker knew how frail faith could seem. He offered an account of faith in which Travers saw too little reliance on scripture, too much on human faculties: ‘The assurance,’ said Hooker, ‘of that we believe by the word is not so certain as that we perceive by sense.’  

‘What Mr Hooker delivered in the forenoon,’ says Fuller, ‘Mr Travers confuted in the afternoon. At the building of Solomons’s Temple “neither hammer, nor axe, nor tool of iron was heard therein”; whereas, alas! in this Temple not only much knocking was heard, but (which was the worst) the nails and pins which one master-builder drave in were driven out by the other.’ This public debate was brought to an end by Archbishop Whitgift: in March 1586, at the very moment of entering the pulpit on a Sunday afternoon, Travers was forbidden to preach. He became Provost of Trinity College, Dublin; his sermon notes are still there.

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Extracts from a sermon by Hooker at the Temple Church, Spring 1586, one of three sermons collected and published (1612) as A learned Discourse of Justification:

Give me a man, of what estate or condition soever, yea, a cardinal or a pope, whom at the extreme point of his life affliction hath made to know himself; whose heart God hath touched with true sorrow for all his sins, and filled with love toward the Gospel of Christ; whose eyes are opened to see the truth, and his mouth to renounce all heresy and error any way opposite thereunto, this one opinion of merits excepted. He thinketh God will require such merits at his hands, and because he lacketh them, therefore he trembleth, and is discouraged. It may be that I, his preacher, am forgetful, or unskilful, not furnished with things new and old, as a wise and learned scribe should be, nor able to allege that unto which, if it were alleged, he doth bear a mind most willing to yield, and so to be recalled from this as well as from other errors. And shall I think, because of this only error, that such a man toucheth not so much as the hem of Christ’s garment? If he do, wherefore should not I have hope, that virtue may proceed from Christ to save him? Because his error doth by consequent overthrow his faith, shall I therefore cast him off, as one which hath utterly cast off Christ? one which holdeth not so much as by a slender thread? No; I will not be afraid to say unto a cardinal or to a pope in this plight, Be of good comfort, we have to do with a merciful God, ready to make the best of that little which we hold well, and not with a captious sophister, which gathereth the worst out of every thing wherein we err.

 ‘It is not their persons,’ you will say, ‘but the error wherein I suppose them to die, which excludeth them from hope of mercy; the opinion of merits doth take away all possibility of salvation from them.’ What, although they hold, as an error, only this? although they hold the truth soundly and sincerely in all other parts of Christian faith? although they have in some measure all the virtues and graces of the Spirit, all other tokens of God’s elect children in them? although they be far from having any proud presumptuous opinion, that they shall be saved for the worthiness of their deeds? although the only thing which troubleth and molesteth them be but a little too much dejection, somewhat too great a fear, rising from an erroneous conceit that God will require a worthiness in them, which they are grieved to find wanting in themselves? although they be not obstinate in this persuasion? although they be willing, and would be glad to forsake it, if any one reason were brought sufficient to disprove it? although the cause why their ignorance in this point is not removed, be the want of knowledge in such as should be able, and are not, to remove it? Let me die, if ever it be proved, that simply an error doth exclude a pope or a cardinal, in such a case, utterly from hope of life. Surely, I must confess unto you, if it be an error to think, that God may be merciful to save men even when they err, my greatest comfort is my error; were it not for the love I bear unto this error, I would neither wish to speak nor to live.  

[39] As for us that have handled this cause concerning the condition of our fathers, ‘Shall a wise man speak words of the wind,’ saith Eliphaz to Job; light, unconstant, unstable words? Yea, even the wisest may speak words of the wind: such is the untoward constitution of our nature, that we neither do so perfectly understand the way and knowledge of the Lord; nor so steadfastly embrace it, when it is understood; nor so graciously utter it, when it is embraced; nor so peaceably maintain it, when it is uttered; but that the best of us are overtaken sometimes through blindness, sometimes through hastiness, sometimes through impatience, sometime through other passions of the mind, whereunto (God doth know) we are too subject. We must therefore be contented both to pardon others, and to crave that others may pardon us for such things. Let no man, which speaketh as a man, think himself (while he liveth) always freed from scapes and oversights in his speech.

Of itself it is not hurtful, so neither should it be to any man scandalous and offensive, in doubtful cases, to hear the different judgment of men. Be it that St Peter hath one interpretation, and the teacher Apollos hath another; that St Paul is of this mind, and St Barnabas of that; if this offend you, the fault is yours. Carry peaceable minds, and ye may have comfort by this variety.

Now the God of peace give you peaceable minds, and turn it to your everlasting comfort.

From Justification, 36-40

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In 1591 Hooker resigned. He wrote to Whitgift: ‘My Lord, my particular contests with Mr Travers here have proved the more unpleasant to me, because I believe him to be a good man; and that belief hath occasioned me to examine mine own conscience concerning his opinions; and to satisfy that, I have consulted the scripture, and other laws both human and divine, whether the conscience of him and others of his judgment ought to be so far complied with as to alter our frame of church government, our manner of God’s worship, our praising and praying to him, and our established ceremonies…In this examination, I have not only satisfied myself, but have begun a Treatise in which I intend a justification of the Laws of our Ecclesiastical Polity; in which design God and his holy angels shall at the last great day bear me that witness which my conscience now does: that my meaning is not to provoke any, but rather to satisfy all tender consciences.’

This became Hooker’s masterpiece, Ecclesiastical Polity, the foundational – and still, perhaps, the most important – exploration of doctrine in the history of the Anglican church. Hooker elaborated a theory of law based on the ‘absolute’ fundamental of natural law: this is the expression of God’s supreme reason and governs all civil and ecclesiastical polity. ‘Of Law there can be no less acknowledged, than that her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world: all things in heaven and earth do her homage, the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her power: both angels and men and creatures of what condition soever, though each in different sort and manner, yet all with uniform consent, admiring her as the mother of their peace and joy.’

Hooker’s influence has pervaded English thought ever since. He was admired by Laud and by the puritan Baxter, extolled by the Restoration bishops, and brought once more to prominence by Keble and the Oxford Movement; he has now been rediscovered within the modern evangelical church. His reach has extended far beyond theologians. Ecclesiastical Polity was the starting-point for Clarendon’s History and seminal for Locke’s philosophy; its self-critical balance touched Andrew Marvell; and Samuel Pepys read it at the recommendation of a friend who declared it ‘the best book, and the only one that made him a Christian.’ ‘Pure Canterbury in the morning’: Fuller in the 1650s did not quite do Hooker justice. Hooker had not preached Canterbury in the 1580s; he had preached his own distinctive views. Thanks to Ecclesiastical Polity, these had by Fuller’s day become the views of ‘Canterbury’. The examination of ‘judicious Hooker’ had become the teaching of a church.

Excerpt from the epitaph on Hooker’s monument at Bishopsbourne:

Though nothing can be spoke worthy his fame,
Or the remembrance of that precious name,
Judicious Hooker; though this cost be spent
On him that hath a lasting monument
In his own books, yet ought we to express
If not his worth, yet our respectfulness.
‘The sweet and noble Hooker.’ – John Ley, Puritan, or Henry Parker, Parliamentarian, Discourse concerning Puritans, 1641.

Pope Clement VIII (1592-1605) heard a translation of Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity, Book I, after which ‘the Pope spoke to this purpose: “There is no learning that this man has not searched into, nothing too hard for his understanding; his books will gain reverence by age, for there are in them such seeds of eternity, that if the rest be like this they shall last till the last fire shall consume all learning.”’ – Izaak Walton, apologist for the Restoration and its episcopacy, The Life of Richard Hooker, 1665.